The Pluvian

A dreamer’s nameless soul drifted and had been drifting for as long as memory served. It was pulled upright into vortexes and ferried across scathing oceans in which it bathed. The motion was blind and mute, as was the soul. Death’s slow topography was never anything of which it could have conceived, in life.
Everpresent was the sense of pendulous waiting, like water draining. Eons passed between each of its thoughts, if any interval could be marked.
 In witnessing the long-dead soul’s discovery of new capacities for patience, the Eye Above followed its form through the experience of its dream.
The swallowing and pushing of matter, or its opposite, characterized the passage of time. The nameless soul, who must soon be named, jostled at the shoulders with the others who were submerged for individual eternities. Their eyes were closed as well. The only one seeing anything was the Eye Above, and its interest was clear.
The mind behind the watching Eye’s lens thought, in its acute consciousness, that it would be attractive to say the particular soul fought for sentience; that its spirit struggled for names and purpose. But it saw that there was no need. The soul’s eyes were crusted shut and the sea provided everything those eyes might look for.
The liquid, for it was indeed liquid that surrounded the nameless soul, taught it that liquid must move slowly to be beautiful and correct. The lesson being that the tired anecdote of a journey outweighing a destination was in the end an acknowledgement of the true test of death: weathering the interminable flume; burdened with the incapacity for madness.
However, the nameless soul was insensate to these details. The dreamer watched the small form of the soul bask like an aquatic animal in the dimensionless glow and the eternal dusk to which it belonged.
This was the Well of Souls. Its depictions inside the minds of pious beasts (whether it be the epicenter of paradise or the sulfur nightmare of familiar images) had left the truth of the substance of this place untouched. It was more a graveyard, in that truth, a world of rest and lacking essentially the demand for obeisance of any kind. The screaming, lights and electric reality were far away, in both distance and time; the exact figures for which were inscrutable.
The nameless soul drew no conclusions. The facts here floated on the same stratum as consciousness. It was not overwhelming, nor confusing, nor saddening.
Life, as all the spirits spinning freely among the whirlpools may recall, seemed only a prelude to this uncanny suspension of the axes of waking reality. It was, to the unformed surprise of all the tenants, prisoners and visitors to the Well, enlightenment and transcendence itself, but gone nameless. It implied further travel, which was an ominous thing, like the lip of a steep waterfall, but seeing the river wind on beyond.
The sum of all the lives lost in History could be found here, every individual head, pulled through caverns filled with fluid, and into deeper systems still.

Waking Reality can be persuasive, however, and she does not tolerate the absence of those she feels still have time beneath the stars and beneath the lamp of day. Despite the sanctity of the Well’s interior empire, influences from lower planes may permeate the unknowable boundaries and begin to reach in. By desperation alone can the tendrils of this influence reach deep enough to pull something out, and blind by requisite, these influences must be to the consequences.