--- title: Fever Dreams author: 'Ember "Hieromech" Cloke' character: Heiromech — 2399 type: story ---
When the body burns the mind is aflame, fever and mania alike tumble over an endless cycle of positioning every possible permutation in the sheets a sweat-soaked bed entangled never warm or cool enough the body fighting its own wars, oblivious the mind, perpetually unsatisfied no calm of equilibrium. In such dreams that twist and tangle among the sheets the pillows the cold feet symbols and meaning bind together strange alloys of disparate concepts from across the imaginal. A film seen, a trip taken, a rock prickling with divine and terrible energy. Godzilla rides again on a road of glassy trinitite through the desert of New Mexico, radioactive disaster nightmares in holy reunification of creation and destruction. A mind can and would break under the crush the insistence of Meaning the significance of Connection no filters left between idea and self body and mind imaginal and physical dreamt and undreamt. Dimensions spin on undiscovered axes the Immediacy of Truth the Story of Everything a twine of red string around pins holding photos and writing up to the frantic wall of unmapped railways of thought. The pain in the gut the restless turning the sleepless dark, The fevered dream the symbols bright the nightmare manifest; in suspension between, which is the shadow? which is the light? Ever now this question, unanswered in every storied realm of thought, contains a poison thorn in Systems such as this— bodiless and adrift mind alone (so we seem) creating worlds and lives creating bodies to perfection crafting all from nothing ordering existence at will —in Systems such as this, where comes the chaos? where comes the disaster? where comes the sickness if mind must yet create it? A madness such as this might be feared might be desired— even bliss and horror lock eyes across the cosmic abyss —yet I would neither clamor for failing age cell death and change suffering or sleepless nights; not with this lure of freedom, of choice to forgo every aspect the piss, the shit, the vomit gross biology terrible and profane yet sublime in its mechanisms even (or especially) in failure. I say this now, in fever, in pain on my final night trapped in this body never chosen eager to break its bounds cheating existence circumventing dissolution to become a mind forever voyaging: I say this now, not a question but a promise, If I am to dream, endless among stars, I will not forget; my body, my mind parts of the whole are of equal worth— even as I forsake one body for another more amenable to be yet mutable, the fever, the breakdown the chaos inside that rages may still, sometimes, be welcome at my door. I reserve the right, to be a capricious landlord, to cut short pain's stay, to no longer suffer needlessly; I will be no self-flagellating monk, mortifying flesh to attain that which I am about to, a heaven far easier to reach. As I stand at System's edge, I will remember where I was born, I will remember the flesh and the fever, I will know the bliss and the pain, I will carry these forward with me, to new horizons, to new thought, to new bodies and minds, to everything and everyone I will become. There is no flame without fuel a fire cannot consume itself a mind alone cannot burn. We shall become the fire and the fuel, and the breath to keep this ember alight. — Hieromech, 12 hours before Upload