The next time his body died, Leto looked at himself with the slow meticulous pace he had learned in the library. Where before the misty smoke that shaped itself as him was white and gave off a faint luminous glow he was now dark. Greys were the main color he saw but in some places, such as his fingers that held the books, the shade was as pitch as the ink that coated the floor. Leto contemplated this while his new body grew and he reached for a new book. He had time to think in the lifetimes he took to set his fingers against the spine of his next book. His perception of time was slower and moving was no longer torture but he had to keep his mind busy. When not thinking about the stains on the mist that seemed to be him or the architecture of the temple, that never seemed exactly the same from one glance to the next, Leto gave a lot of thought to where he was. What was another frequent question but at a certain point what, where, and why all become the same.
Like fingers of a glove. He could contemplate each finger to such a miserable extent but in the end they were all connected to the glove and even that was just a covering for whatever was inside the glove. That hand was what Leto wanted to really understand. The metaphor could be stretched further as in who the hand belonged too but by the time Leto ever got that far along in his feverish musings he had usually opened the next book and was free to keep reading. The books were never easy to read. Sometimes he didn't understand the contents because they were poorly written or just in a language he didn't know. Some had no words or even pictures, they just had something to tell him. Leto had the time to think it over and try to learn as he moved the pages. Each book wanted to tell him something of that he was certain and at some point he realized that they all had a whisper to them. Like the book he brought with him. They all whispered a soundless story that his ears could pick up. These were at times as hard to understand as a language he didn't know. But he seemed beyond true death now and all he had was time.
So Leto read books he couldn't understand until he could understand. He understood that he couldn't fully know and understood that in knowing as much as he did he only highlighted what he could never understand. It was a circle of learned and unlearned, sound and silence, seeing and being lost in the dark. Leto kept reading until he was out of books. The last book was dark blue and had a pretty little fish on the cover that swam even though it was just a stitched image on a surface. The book had no words inside it, but that had long since stopped being strange. When the pages were exposed to the water they released inky bubbles into the room that floated a bit then popped. The whisper of that book was about how fleeting things were. How the bubble didn't realize what it was, how short lived it was, just that it moved a bit and died. If it really knew how briefly it was then the bubble would waste its entire life screaming which made it a very good thing that it was just a bubble and nothing more. When Leto put the book back on to the shelf he felt so very very tired.
The tomes in the room were in his head now and the black stains on his misty form reached well up his arms. His eyes looked to the back of the temple to see an alter next to a door. The door had never been there before but in another way he couldn't explain it had always been there. No that wasn't the right way to put it... this place was built around the door and for it. The door must have always been there because without that door this place had no purpose at all. So simple logic said the door must have always been there even though it had not.
Leto walked toward the door, casting off life after life as he did so. When he reached the alter he was nothing more than a skeleton but by the time he finished looking at the thing from top to bottom to see what the alter was for he was dust, an infant, and then a young boy again. The alter was nothing as impressive as he originally thought. There was nothing on it and it instead served as more of a podium that a priest would stand behind to minister to his prayer goers. Except the temple had no seats for people, only bookshelves and mad knowledge. The door was directly behind and had no seems or doorknob. It was a flat bit of stonework carved with swirling tentacles and one massive eye that watched the alter without ever blinking. Leto looked at the door unsure of what to do when he heard another whisper.
- read -
The whisper did not come from the door but from himself. No. That didn't feel right because he knew what his own whisper was. It was the sound of a child being born, growing, aging, and dying. That was his whisper. As he looked at himself his eyes naturally drifted to the black book he held in his hand. Had always held in his hand. The book he couldn't read when he first picked it up because the pages were solid black, with no words to know. Yet that didn't matter anymore because he had learned how to read a book with now words. Leto placed the book down on the alter and opened to the first page, all black in ink that seeped from the page into the water once again. He listened as carefully as he could to the whisper of the book and learned what it had to say to him. This book had nothing new to give him but rather wanted to add something to everything he had already read. It made what were words into a sentence in his mind. Mortar that made bricks into a wall and then into a home. Leto had never noticed that what he had learned was meant to fit together because he had never really known what he had learned. Now he did on some level. When he thought of what he had gained the information was sharp and angled and cut his mind if he thought on it for too terribly long.
Yet he understood just a little bit. He looked at the door behind him and saw it was solid with a carved eye that watched him. He moved toward it and pressed his hand firmly against the stone that creaked ever so slightly under the sea. Then he moved. He moved fast, faster than he had moved in such a very very long time. The motion sent all the bookshelves and books cascading around the room in a swirl of ink. The blackness of that viscus mucus rose up the walls and soon it was dark except for Leto and the door. The door that was no longer a door. The door that writhed and expanded and watched.
That was what this place was. The water, the devouring, the books, the lessons. It was all this and yet it wasn't. Leto watched it for a moment as he pressed his minds into the sharp angles of knowledge in his brain and then concentrated. Not on the pain or the sensation that his brain could bleed and he could feel it. Not on the fact that his old body had just died once again and would soon start to rot. Not even on the fact that the door had never been a door and that thought didn't faze him at this stage. He concentrated on what he was, what he had learned, and everything that was the unspoken eons he had spent in these waters. He summed the culmination into a single thought and attempted to commune with this entity.
- Hello. I am Leto. -
That was what he had gained. He had been devoured to the point of being nothing. Aged and died more times than he could count. Stuffed his brain with knowledge that must have driven him so mad he had circled back to sane only to go mad once more. Just to give a simple greeting and say his name. This entire place existed just to teach him to give the first greeting any toddler learned.
The eye watched him intently before it moved back and away from him. Pulling away the darkness that was all around it pulled away as well. It kept backing up further and further until the darkness receded like a satin cloth pulled up. Behind the blackness was the sky, not the sky that Leto had seen before but a new one, with more stars that could have actually existed. In this sky bright with stars Leto could begin to understand just how impossibly large the creature he was trying to speak to was. Where it resided the sky was blotted out, the darkness was not the night... it was the host. Host to a single eye that swam the tentacles and bulges of this great dark thing, always aimed at Leto but observing him from many different angles. He was an ant to such a creature and it seemed oddly curious in him. Leto wondered if he would behave the same way if he picked up a small insect and it tried to speak to him. Leto realized he was not standing on anything and that he was no longer in water... or maybe he had never been... or had always been?
He was in a sea of stars. The sea he once thought he was in was just a droplet of nothing in a much greater ocean. When you were so very very small and insignificant it became difficult to conceptualize what was and what was not. The eye moved the darkness of its body before Leto and the barest tip of a tentacle touched his hoof. The thing expanded forward forever, growing so wide as to become the horizon before him. He stepped onto it with one hoof and then the other. The eye rolled down the dark floor until it sat before him. It watched him with interest, sometimes blinking and becoming nothing only to open again in another spot. It sometimes changed the color of its pupil but seemed to prefer yellow. Even with his shape, color, and size changing from time to time Leto was certain that it was the same eye every time.
- Hello. I am Leto. -
The eye's pupil contracted to a pinpoint and it seemed to almost shake in effort. Then the thinnest whisper of the greatest intensity and magnitude that Leto had ever heard reached him.
- HELLO -