Entering Minds

The man lay back next to the rocks and closed his eyes. He needed to find whatever it was in himself that was giving him this feeling that he could do something impossible.

He took a deep breath, let the sound of the waves around him and the sting of the sun above vanish from his perception, and in his mind, he pictured a well.

Its sides were smooth gray slate, but as the man ran his hand along the rim, he could sense that it was once filled not with water, but with endless objects and places, scents, tastes, people, friends, lovers, a whole lifetime's worth of memories. And now those were gone.

He climbed over the side of the well and fell further into his mind. His descent was controlled and slow, a graceful sinking through himself. The depth of the well had not changed, he could tell, but only the top part of it was lined with evidence and memory. It was a lush and rainy jungle, floury sand and familiar birds. Just below that, the walls were lined with bamboo, the shimmer of sunlight on fish scales, and a perfect, illusory, rain-gray draft horse. These memories were proud, full of learning and accomplishment.

The man smiled. It wasn't much. But it was him.

He continued to fall.

The familiar vanished, and he sensed he was moving toward a different sort of knowledge. The man made a note to one day study the differences in types of memory, for here the walls were textured, in one spot velvet, another leather, and in yet another, a patch of harsh-looking spines. As he passed his hand from one surface to another, he felt the vast variety of knowledge that had accumulated here from his other life—knowledge he never remembered learning but was thankful he had retained. Here was language, arithmetic, how to lace his boots, and how to brew a cup of coffee (oh, what horrible atrocities the man would commit for a cup of hot coffee). The man chuckled. There was so much information stitched into the walls, and yet, wonderfully, so much room for more.

The man fell further still, and the slate of the well gave way to thick clouds of fog.

Whatever used to be here was gone now.

But there was one part that remained.

It was there, suspended like a silver jewel, a shining light embedded in the well of his mind.

The man found the part that would allow his escape.

The part that made him him.

JACE, ALONE