The tear that seemed as though it was like a rip through space and time itself, was not even a rip at all, or a tear through the dimensions and planes of reality, as the concept that we had come to know of it as would not even be formed until hundreds or perhaps even billions of years had passed, but rather it was more of an anomaly that simply 'existed.' This was the first anomaly that ever occurred in the universe. An anomalous event that never happened before.
And then the first thing to be created from the void, was...
An apple.
A single green apple fell into existence from a tear in reality. The tear seemed to be nothing more than a rip that had been made by a god, or by a deity that had been created in order for him to travel through and observe, in a state of being.
The apple fell as the air whirled around it in an odd wind that was moving counter-clockwise and seemed to be going faster and faster around the fruit as the apple continued its fall downwards, downwards, into an unknown and unknown place of the abyss below the surface of existence. By this point; The Void in Blue was no longer in existance; not as an actual thing that exists and was not just an idea or thought.
In the place of this anomaly, a tree formed, the trunk was large and its bark was brown with white stripes running across it.
One time, the tree grew a red apple.
One time, the tree grew a white apple.
One time, the tree grew a yellow and purple apple.
Sometimes they grew in all three shades, the tree that was growing in a black void had no roots at its base.
It was suspended in the dark by the sheer force of gravity which was so great it could only sustain one single dying star at its end, this star shined bright as a sun would, but only in its final hours.
The tree's limbs would sprout branches, leaves would begin to bloom. The black void in the shape of a giant apple core grew a mouth and had begun to chew on its own flesh and the bark that held it. Blood dripped out from the sides of the tree's limbs and a pool of it grew larger at its base, spilling onto the floor.
Vetro saw this in the flesh. His mind was racing, his vision blurry as the world was shifting and warping itself, changing its course and twisting the laws of reality to match the anomaly... a nature in which it shouldn't have been.
He looked to the left, his right, then his left, his right. And again. It wasn't a rapid movement, just one where the world kept spinning, in and out of focus as it was.
"P....s......."
"p.........s....."
He had spoken! he had uttered words and he spoke! Despite his condition, his eyes and body. He had uttered words.
"Pha.....s....." Vetro uttered, the words fragmented as they came in small bursts.
The universe had become a series of shapes and sizes, the sky had grown into an array of bright shades of pink and green, blue and red, orange and yellow, purple and white. It was beautiful, like a kaleidoscopic flower that bloomed in the darkness of a star that died before its time.
"Phant.....os...!" His words... No, the name he was attempting to utter to call upon her, his book. The book of a dead man, the words were not spoken, instead they were heard.
'I...am here, Vetro, I'll always be by your side.' She smiled, although not literally, rather that he felt the smile. 'I watched... I was pained, to see all that the demon had done. It... hurts, knowing the monster he is, now.'
"He's dead." He stated. And it was true. The anomaly, the void, it all was dead.
'No, he is not. Something is wrong... that is likely due to how time is behaving.' She spoke.
He was still looking in front of himself, as reality shifted and twisted into an unrecognizable amalgamate of colours. His mouth, opening slightly, he whispered; "Ready to shift reality?" and as he spoke these words his eyes rolled up to look forward into her.
"I..." She 'nodded', the rest of her sentence unspoken.
The apple fell to the ground with an echoing crack, its core falling through, breaking apart into a thousand pieces that scattered around the void, each one glowing with different shades and colours.
"I'll always be there..." A voice spoke. "Hungering, forever..."
With an inked pen that never runs out.
The ink was a mix of black and grey, an unnatural colour. Like all of existence. The pen was never running, but the words it wrote were. An empty book, as it had no words to begin with, however it was filled with knowledge. And the pen never ran, yet its ink was a deep, deep red that oozed out of it and onto a white, pure sheet that had no words at all to fill it.
The pen that Vetro possessed in the depths of his heart, the heart that held an old story. A love story. The pen was now stained in blood from the heart of his soul. The love of his life. A story that ended in a tragic end that never was. The story wasn't finished, however, the chapter that it held, that was written down with bloodied fingers was stained and stained until the pages were no longer a story.
The first chapter, Cruelty Mistress. The first ignition of a love story. In a way that never happened nor ever should've been.
The second chapter, Disgust & Hunger. The second ignition, a short, yet terrible story. It had all the right elements to be a tragedy, a true one. A revolting tragedy, yet a beautiful, terrible and horrific tale that never was, and never should've been.
The final chapter, Pseudo-Eldritch. An anomaly in a love story that never existed, it was an aberration to all that was good and holy. It was wrong, a monster and nightmare, a nightmare of the world, the universe and everything.
The story ended in tragedy, of which it had already started with, a tragedy that was never told but was always felt, an emotion of a pain and sorrow that no one ever knew existed.
Reality became a nightmare, as the love that was once beautiful, was gone, and the beauty it once had, was now twisted and perverted. Reality no longer existed as it was once, it now became the opposite of everything. Love no longer was true. Life no longer held meaning, the beauty of all that was once there was now gone.
Rewritten in his own twisted, sickening and disgusting manner of a mind, thoughts and ideas.
"Good, good, Vetro. I see the fruits of your labor." Alice smiled in the background of a chaotic world, and a void of insanity.
"What...? Alice?" His words were fragmented, incoherent, as he turned to face Alice, to find that she was in fact living, the maw in the sky following behind her in a strange manner, like it was hungry and waiting.
"You were writing a beautiful story, Vetro. A love story. Of a nightmare and a horror, that is of course, how love truly works. Reality, it's all an illusion. You know that, don't you? I love Love! The love that the world hates and hates and loves! Did I tell you... that I love someone too? Yeah! That's right! It's... Guillerme... And he loved me too... isn't it so wonderful that two people in love are willing to do anything for one another...? If you wrote a story about us two... What would it say?" Her words were in fragments as well. Perhaps because she was never truly speaking in the first place. "It wouldn't say anything, Vetro! You can not put Love and hate on the same pedestal, for love can only hate and never love! But, as you'd know, the inherent contradiction and hypocrisy of all this would only make me laugh at my own expense! So I'll let you finish your story, and maybe you'll find it to be a perfect fit. Of course, however, if you truly want it to end... just end it." She smiled, her teeth had all become eyes, her eyes had become an eye of the damned. "Love is a paradox! Love is an eternal struggle, a conflict that will continue on forever. But love will also continue on in the form of conflict, as the two lovers that have united themselves will always continue to be at conflict with one another. So long as one of them continues to live, the other can't live without. Just as the purpose of a man of war is to be fought against and killed, and the purpose of an artist is to create art, and a philosopher, to contemplate philosophy, and a politician to make politics. The purpose of love, is to keep loving and continue on being alive."
She spoke those final words, as her head twisted on her shoulders and her mouth opened, spewing blood and ichors before her head twisted back on its shoulders, her eyes turning back into an eye, and the rest of them closing. A show she had prepared.
The maw of the void had dissipated into nothing, the sky became that of the night. There was only one moon, and there were billions of stars and nebulas, the only thing missing from it was a sun. The moon had eyes covering every corner of it. They looked everywhere at once. The ground itself became a dark green with spots and splotches, with dark brown, red and black grass.
There were many, many people in this world, many were walking down the path that had become twisted, many were walking down the path that became straight. Some walked up towards the moon.
Some of the many, were walking up towards the sky and then the sun came from the ground as a green and purple beam, as it was falling upwards.
Vetro had no proper words to say in response to Alice's words, as he was still struggling with understanding what was even going on in the first place, and even though he wasn't currently thinking straight. A thought still occurred to him, he had forgotten one thing; a love story, it should be short and simple and not complicated.
So his brain told him.
Then again... He didn't write a short, simple and uncomprehending story... No. No... No. No no no. NO! NO!
His story would not have a beginning. Not one, nor two, nor even three. Nor a million or a billion, but rather it had none. He had not been writing for the past eternity nor was he writing in any way shape or form, but he was creating it. It was the story that would be forever unfinished, unstarted, and unwritten and left to be the unknown by its author.
This wasn't a story of the past. This wasn't a story of the present. This wasn't a story of the future. It was a love story between the past and present, a story in the form of a tale of love, that will not exist, and never has and never should.
He would not stop. For this story could not exist in its true form, a form of a love story of no-time, beyond conceptual limits.
The ending of the story, however, could only be known to its readers and not its writer. For that was how love works, isn't it? For the reader to be in charge of its ending. The ones who read and don't know what to do with their own life and time.
There is an old quote about time. "Time is what prevents everything to be happening all at once, and keeps us from seeing all of it at the same time."
But, Vetro, the narrator of this story, can only narrate in his state.
So he did. He narrated. He spoke. His mind was gone.
"This is a love story. Between the two lovers that loved and loved, they loved and continued loving until the day they both died." He spoke, his voice no longer inaudible, as the narration took place in this situation, it started taking on a role of its own, no longer a role that the author gave to it but that was itself. A role of its own, in its true form and in the way in which it is written. A narration that no longer followed any order, or any sort of rules of the universe and beyond. "This love, was a twisted, disgusting thing that should've never been, and is one of those many flexible rules, one of the rules in the universe in which it would always break and bend and be broken. No matter if the rule is flexible or rigid. That is the thing with Love... The rule, the concept, the idea of love, in its purest form and nature. A trepidation of a feeling and an emotion that is unbridled, that cannot be restrained and cannot be understood or explained or put in words." Vetro's speech became a whisper. "A monster, an anomaly, an abomination, an eldritch, a horror." The point kept repeating itself, but so was the nature of a story, so was the nature of all stories. After all, what made them a story? "But it's okay, because sometimes... The rules and laws break down. And so they did. In ways that we cannot comprehend." Vetro was a storyteller. A madman and a monster in his own right. "The cognitive mind does not comprehend that of love, does not comprehend such a beautiful and horrid thing." The world around him began to melt away, as Vetro spoke. "This is the part of the story where a lover does whatever it takes for its love to survive and go on forever, mangled and twisted. For the sake of being able to stay, for the sake of not vanishing to nothing and not ceasing to exist. A love that consumes everything."
The maw in the sky, following Alice in her own reality and realm, a realm in which it and the monster in the darkness had become a part of. An entity in its true form, the true form and nature that all monsters, demons, deities and monstrosities had taken on.
"Albeit, it consumes not for sustenance but to fill the emptiness that lies in-between, in its core. In its heart of hearts and minds, if such a thing could have ever existed. For the monster was nothing but a void in-between the two realities that existed in the same space."
The shards of what was once an apple had all combined and formed together again, becoming a black, rotten fruit.
A tree had grown, with rotten fruits hanging from its rotten, black, twisted and contorted limbs, as the apples hung and decayed and died, rotting in the dead of night, and yet it remained alive. Two apples among the countless thousands and thousands. One was red. A bright and bloody shade, the second being purple in a dull and dark shade. The third was not so dull nor so dark. It had a shine, it shone with a color of yellowish purple, the third had a shape, a fourth and a fifth as well. They had a form, and they shined a bit less dimly, with a little less light than their sisters.
They had shapes.
Yet they had not fallen from the tree.
An apple to keep the hunger inside.
And a love to last till death.
"And that is that, the end to my tale, my story. I've had fun, you know, writing a love story, but in the end it became more about myself and my own life and my past. I'm sorry, Alice, I never got to say. And I don't expect your forgiveness." Softly. Softly, Vetro. Don't cry, Alice won't be able to hear. "And, Alice." She turned around. "Thank...you...." He was crying, yet it sounded sincere, he spoke it with genuine intent. "For allowing me to tell my story. Thank you." Vetro's tears were flowing from his eyes now. He was holding back his tears and his sobbing and he was breaking apart. "For listening. I just want to say. I hope we meet again soon. In a future beyond this and our past." He sniffed and wiped his face on his forearm as he stopped crying and smiled, his 'eyes' aching, the back of his eyelids were dry, but his 'eyes' ached, they ached and ached, they were aching so much that his head hurt, and he could feel the throbbing that had begun in the center of his brain. He couldn't help it any longer. His mind shattered, his will breaking apart. As his mind went silent.
'Sleep for a little bit... It will all be fine when you wake.' Phantos' voice softly said, comforting and soothing as a warm hug that would slowly fade into nothing. And Vetro listened, and he did so.
A love to last till death.
An apple to keep the hunger inside.
A tree to hold them all.
And a world to keep them all.
In an apple.
That fell from a dying, dead tree.
And a girl who was hungry.