Fantasia: Reimagined

by JonathanSporkTheSecond

Summary:

Mickey was a curious mouse.

Now he is a free one.

Not sure if he's still a mouse, though.

Micky was always a curious mouse. Too curious, some might say.

It was this curiosity that brought him to the doorstep of his master, a wizard in the highest regard, capable of feats many considered against nature. But power carried a rapturous allure to the rodent and, after many days pounding on the ender’s grand door, he was granted reluctant access.

The interior’s strange appearance dawned upon Micky as soon as he entered. Most notable were the ceilings that rose as he attempted to gauge their height and the walls that curved in his peripheral vision. That seemed to be a recurring trend with this illogical place, geometry disobeying its standard rigidity regardless of material. Attempting to initially navigate the castle to find his quarters seemed to ebb at his exposed mind. Quite exhausting for such a simple routine, but more than enough to leave the mouse’s fingers twitching with anticipation to replicate such a phenomenon on paper. Unfortunately, such desires were left to his sparse personal time, for after his first night of feverish slumber, a bucket and a mop were forced into his gloved hands and his routine was made clear.

For many days he toiled away at basic chores under the master, fetching water and mopping the floors most notably. The most interesting of the busy work consisted in occasionally cleaning up after the master’s experiments when his mind was too drained to do so. The exact nature of these leftover materials were lost upon him, as the powders and fluids marring the workstation possessed a texture and density alien to the mouse, such as the cloud of particles that condensed into long spines, penetrating the floor after Micky brushed them off the table. This display emboldened the mouse to carefully open the surrounding cupboards and drawers to seek out ingredients of similar displays.

He attempts to push what he found out of his memories.

In the few spare moments he possessed when the master was too busy to notice he completed his tasks, the mouse often found himself observing the man’s work from a safe distance. One particular evening, he watched the man bend over his research table as his pointed hat glowed an ethereal white that caused the surrounding shadows to lengthen and writhe. The man whispered strange strings of guttural noises, some trailing on for upwards of ten seconds before the man once again drew breath. The sounds were unquestionably alien to the mouse but marginally more uniform than complete gibberish as well as holding a certain … gravity that caused his brain contract in on itself and his guts to contort in erratic and discomforting fashions.

A reasonably individual, mouse or man alike, would skitter towards the nearest corner or door in response to such experiences.

But Mickey was a curious mouse.

And that curiosity led to impulse, which led to desire, which led to a plan.

The rodent waited just out of reach of the grasping shadows for the master’s speech to reach its eventual conclusion. Which, after a rapid bout of fantastical speech that could either pass for a full sentence or a single word, the man was left gasping, barely able to hold himself upright with his thin arms grasping the edges of the table.

Before the man could even stand, tendrils of thick powders rose from the table, twisting and trembling as they condensed into an indefinable image. The formless visage gazed down upon all with an incalculable quantity of orifices for but a terrible moment before emanating a final reverberation and dissipating. The last, definite form it took burned into each of their brains, causing the man to nearly faint in ecstasy and leading Mickey to vomit black, writhing sludge into the corner while his nose oozed a thin trail of equally dark puss.

As the wizard stumbles away towards the stairs, his hat tumbling off in the process, the mouse reconstructs his fragile sanity to the best of his ability and crawls across the nearly spotless floor.

Mickey stared at the hat lying toppled over on the stone floor, its innards exposed to him and him alone. The time of reckoning arrived, all his patience and placation rewarded at last.

With his body still prone against the damp ground, the mouse grips the hat in trembling fingers. Its texture is profoundly unexpected as his round digits sink into the strange fabric as it consumes his hands up to the wrists despite the material only appearing a centimeter thick.

He hastily pulls his hands away, clenching and unclenching them to ensure they were still there. Then, with great caution, he grips the rim between his thumb and forefinger and delicately places it on his head.

Mickey is immediately exposed to the infinite vastness of horrors man and mousekind alike were not meant to know. Vast tracts of insanity and bewildering images beyond what possibility could ever allow. Entire planets splitting and reforming and breaking and mending in a screaming mass of flesh and meaninglessness. Great monoliths that could only ever be described as “clocks” in the same way that ants could be described as “antenna.” They twist into themselves as their multidimensional hands turn in all directions, possible and distinctly not, as they foretell all things that have been and will be, as time collapses and forms around them in a beautiful grace. And at the center of it all, the “being” if it could ever be called that. The Dreamer. Whose existence both did and did not exist, for his slumber created it and his awakening would destroy it.

In a frenzy of incoherent babbling and eldritch verses, the two dimensional mouse feverishly stumbles to the cupboard, throwing it open to reveal the unorganized pile of powders, vials, organs, and bones of all species and sizes. Reaching through the jumble with an efficient certainty, Mickey retracts a series of bones of bovine, pig, and human origin, as well as a glass vial of pale, swirling, brackish fluid obtained from the tears of numerous gouged eyes.

With unrivaled precision, he constructs an altar to the unknowable things beyond the stars, with the human bones composing the center piece, fusing and molding like putty in his hands. And by spilling the vial, it twists on its own volition.

With a flick of his hand and a seventeen syllable word, the mops bend to his will, the impossible knowledge overflowing from his head ordering them to paint the shapes with the endlessly recycling byproducts in the back room. As they rush around him with feverish purpose, Mickey comes to terms with his fate.

The knowledge he now knows cannot be undone and, with a grim yet fantastical certainty, he accepts that if he does not finish this terrible ritual, his brain will tear open, releasing the insidious forms existing in dimensions impossible to truly comprehend with the restrictions of the two dimensional viewpoint.

So, Micky toils.

The crude replications of the fifth dimensional shapes by the inaccurate brooms are so irritatingly false that he cannot help but claw at his feeble skull, hastening the release. Fortunately, the shapes, if they could truly be called that, will work for his purpose, if only just.

Soon, the wide room fills with rudimentary engravings of the cyclical nature of existence as a whole, with the Great Dreamer perpetuating their fleeting existence through its impossible slumber. Personally, Micky found his particular state of being fundamentally lacking, a life housed within frames, a two dimensional being capable of seeing so much more. It is tantamount to torture how much his mind tears and warps at the immeasurable disconnect between his penciled form and the knowledge within.

So, as the mops complete their pathetic toiling, he gazes in revulsion at the sloppy lines that form one of the few great truths. The restrictions in his tools means the Dreamer will not truly wake, but stir. The ensuing reverberations as existence itself is torn, warped, and pushed a step closer to nothingness, will lead to a great merging as the lines between dimensions collapse. The restrictions will fall and true freedom will be at hand.

Mickey steps to the center of the ritual site, staring down at the indistinct but indisputable form of the Dreamer. The rodent does not scream or chant, he is beyond that now. He simply kneels and whispers.

Whispers of the unknowable forms devouring the base of his stenciled brain, of the seas housing dead gods that still squirm and send reverberations past the confines of time, of elder gods whose many tongued flutes lull the Dreamer into perpetuating this accidental lie.

And with each truth he feels the building pressure on his brain ease as they escape through his lips. They belong to It now.

And as the door swings slams and the old man stares down at the crouching mouse with a look of perfectly fathomable rage, confusion, and terror beyond what his 43 facial muscles could convey, Micky simply stares back.

It will not be long now.

Just a few more moments as the farce of reality shakes itself apart. He could already feel his linework trembling.

The man collapses. There is nothing else to be done, even such a basic creature as he knows that, so his legs abandon him. But he locks eyes with his apprentice's empty sockets rapidly becoming less and less distinct.

“Why.”

…

“For years, my form was a slave. To you, to normality, to our reality. This act will not bring me satisfaction in even the smallest degree, this I know. However, no matter what occurs now, I know that even the tiniest fragment of myself will be free. I will be free.”

And the wizard watches as Micky’s form fractures into an uncountable number grotesque forms, each composed of proportions and shapes beyond describing as they violate the very nature of description, beyond boundary.

His mind tears at itself as he realizes the truth he is witnessing.

The rat is not in one dimension, but all of them.

He was right.

He is free.

And, with a sound akin to a thousand of the most animalistic entities screaming through a shattering flute, it all ceases existing yet becomes so much more.

Notes:

Don't listen to a Lovecraft music compilation while you try to sleep.

Or do.

What do I look like, a cop?