He ran a hand across his forehead, and was alarmed to find it scalding. He sighed, climbing to his feet, and crawling over to the glass of water that he kept on the corner of his desk for just such an occasion.
He downed the entire volume in one quick motion, and gasped, and hacked, as its cooling effect fizzled out before it even reached his stomach. Not enough. He laughed, shaking his head in disbelief, before immediately wincing in pain, and clutching at his temples. He shouldn't have done that. He knew better.
He chuckled again, for it was so obvious. He had never perceived the entire outline at once, before, so it was obvious that he would be a lot more drained by the experience than ever before. He strolled trepidatiously down the long hallway, just like that night that seemed simultaneously like an eternity ago, and occurring perpetually across every moment of his waking life.
Even now, he was still only minutes away from the doorway, with one arm outstretched. Truly, he had never stopped running after her. He couldn't; for if he were ever to stop, then no one else ever would. If he ever stopped looking, she would never be found.
"Still, you'd think you could take it a little easier on me, huh?" he joked, knowing now that the figure he'd seen was so magnificent that he could hear every thought in his mind at once, present, and future. "I can't believe that I almost cooked my brains, just trying to look at them, and not even their features directly! All I did was trace a line around all their body, and that was enough."
He sighed, clutching desperately to the railing on the stairwell, like he was an old man, on legs made of graham crackers instead of bone and flesh. Each step was like a mighty barbell that he had to specifically force himself to lift, and throw a furlong away; only to look down and find that great distance was transformed retroactively into the space of a single leg span. He lifted his leg a kilometer into the air, and dropped it powerfully enough to crash through the wooden step into the closet built into the space underneath the stairs. It landed with not even a creak of the floorboards.
It was a pitiful sight, crawling miles in his head, only to have ventured two steps in the real world... but there was no one to rely on, in times like these. He was alone in his pursuit of this selfish retribution. No one else in the entire wide world could know of this terrible burden, or even attempt to approach it. He knew that the mere idea of such a presence was enough to break the spirits of a lesser man, but he would prove to be incorruptible.
God could not tempt him with the distracting pleasures of this mortal world—not of fame, nor riches, nor love—for he knew that all these things were temporary, in a fractious world made of shallow imitations of true terrifying potent reality. The love of these mortal beings never concerned him, because they paled in comparison to the thick, roiling hatred of the nameless god. It was like taking a single drop of lemon juice and diluting it within a volume as massive as an Olympic swimming pool. Could such a diluted excuse of an emotion even be considered to exist?
They could not scare him with the tales of other men who traveled a similar path before himself. The stories and legends of men detailed through all of history and fiction who studied the vacant magnitudes of unknown between our microscopic temporal thought well, and were driven to incoherent babbling dysfunction, or wandering aimlessly in foreign countries without explanation before vanishing from the face of the earth entirely, or even to take their own lives to escape the ever-present wrath of their righteous indignation. You cannot break what has already been shattered beyond recognition. His own natural madness outranked theirs.
He gritted his teeth, and found that he was gripping the railing with every ounce of strength in his arm. The veins were swelling up in the strain of the effort, and the pain was chipping off under his fingernails for how great his anger was kindled in that moment. He looked down, and saw that he had only moved a single step within the span of all that concentrated thought. He really needed that water.
Sighing, he bonelessly cast his weight forward, and threw his feet to catch himself as he tumbled toward the earth, only just barely managing to avoid collapsing entirely onto the hardwood steps, below... but he was finally there, at the end of the stairs, and it would be normally a simple task to stroll the fifteen feet from his position before the door to the kitchen, around the corner where the living room presided.
Normally, that is; and there was nothing normal about this state. His head lanced and throbbed with exertion and sweat from his brief exercise of beholding that dizzying dearth where faith goes to die, and the cruel irony of futility makes itself naked before you. As he stumbled across the chilling tiles of linoleum before the front door, he found that the room was swimming luridly about him. He splayed a sweating hand against the wall that lead into the room beyond, but it spun and twisted in his vision like he was turning a steering wheel.
His sense of touch told him it was static, but his vision and the fluid in his inner ear screamed that he was casting ass over teakettle in a whirlpool of wood and sheetrock and cheap white paint. He had to shut his eyes, and trust in the weight under his feet, and the familiar feeling of the dining room chair, as he clambered his way across the car-length chasm.
He wanted to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, because no man in their right mind would consider a challenge of what he had done so casually only a couple hours before, but tears only came to bear. He couldn't believe that he had lost so entirely his ability to carry himself, in such a short period.
It wasn't an exaggeration, it wasn't a joke, it wasn't a figment of his imagination. In every sense of the word, this was reality, to him. It only seemed ridiculous because he had memories of climbing those stairs, and of bounding acrobatically across this very table every hour of every day, for his entire life. In fact, he had thoughtlessly trod these paths only hours before, when he fetched the water, and ice, from the refrigerator in order to attempt this experiment as always!
But what if this was his entire life? What if he had lived in this perception of reality, from the time that he was born? What if he was unable to perceive the world as it was, and could only ever achieve the simplest designs, with extreme prejudice? What if this was the cost of playing with the hands of fate that designed the very rules of the cosmos? What if he would never be able to function like a normal person, ever again?
His arms trembled violently, as he tore the pitcher of water from the second shelf of the refrigerator, and delivered it into tremulous hands; inevitably spilling about twenty percent of the fluid onto the floor beneath his feet. His throttling fingertips desperately tipped the glass into his lips, and he felt that frigid water crash into the core of red hot iron burning into the base of his sternum.
Not only did it not immediately fizzle away as before, but the cooling flood overwhelmed the force of the heat within his stomach, and continued onward, spreading cooling stillness throughout his entire body. The subtle twitches and convulsions leeched out of his skin, and vanished as quickly as a shadow in the presence of the rising sun. His mind, too, stilled. The dizzying sensation ceased, and he was returned the full range of his senses in concrete reality.
Derek sighed, and shook his head. No pain, this time. He wondered if every visit from the nameless god would be so intense. It wouldn't hurt to have the water ready, tomorrow.