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Paradoxing Death
A concept I came up with one day. And I had a set direction to take it, and knew exactly how it would end and what paradoxes I was going to use...But I couldnt figure out how to get to point A to point B. I just dont know what to do with the story.
Paradoxing Death
“An angel of death? It doesn’t exist.”
“So then it exists in the fact that it doesn’t.”
“I thought you were just naďve, but now I can see the truth. You’ve lost your mind.”
“What we believe becomes true when it comes to reapers. You’ve believed all your life that a reaper doesn’t exist. So what takes a mans soul? Nothing. That is your reaper then. Your reaper is nothing incarnate. Where it should be existing, it isn’t. Emptiness fills the emptiness where your reaper is suppose to be.”
“Nothing sure sounds a lot like something.”
“So it seems.”
“How does nothing incarnate kill?”
“By making you nothing too.”
“So you are saying that if I want to be immortal…I have to kill ‘nothing’.”
“Exactly.”
“How?”
“You can’t.”
He sat there and thought about it for a while. “What if I believed that he was something?”
“Then he would be something, and you would kill him. And then he would become nothing again, and you would be back to where you started. With nothing still after you.”
“This is impossible!”
“Yes it is.”
“You said that if I wanted to be immortal, all I had to do was kill the reaper, but now you are saying that’s impossible! Can I be immortal or not!”
“I don’t know, can you?”
“You two faced, back stabbing ignorant little man! I can’t believe I came this far just to be duped by a dwarf!”
The dwarf merely smiled as the man paced back and forth through the dimly lit cave. The candles flickering with the wind as it came in from the moonlit outside world and then rushed back out.
“The reaper is immortal then?”
“He goes when you go.”
“But ‘nothing’ just can’t stop existing, it already doesn’t exist! So then it is immortal!”
The dwarf shrugged “It is what it is.” He paused “Or isn’t what it isn’t…or is what it isn’t…maybe isn’t what it is?”
He ignored him. “So if I want to be immortal, all I have to be is nothing! And in order to be nothing, I have to have nothing make me nothing! Death IS immortality then!”
“You are acting like nothing is still something. If you are nothing, then you are nothing. Not even a shadow or what you are. Nothing incarnate is still nothing incarnate.”
The man kicked over a small dwarf-sized chair in anger and swore out loud. “I will find a way, I swear it. I will not fear nothing!”
“Then you must fear everything, which includes nothing. Deaths game is a game of paradoxes. Even the most brilliant minds existence has ever created have not found a way to kill death. You will lose.”
“I have never lost.”
“Then death will be a shock to you.”
The man made a loud grunt through he teeth and furiously walked out of the cave onto the sandy beach. Immortality without consequences, that’s all he wanted. But the closer and closer he got to figuring it out, the farther away the goal seemed to be.
“There was a man that once slowed death. But eventually he succumbed. The paradoxes involved in his theories became too much for even him to understand.”
The man turned around and looked at the dwarf who stood at the mouth of the cave.
“How did he do it? How did he slow death?”
“He believed that he was his own reaper. But because he was his own reaper, he started devising ways to kill himself, and finding paradoxes in his own beliefs. Eventually he succumbed and drowned himself in the deep blue sea on a warm moonlit night such as this.” The dwarf closed his eyes and smiled as a warm gust of wind came from the sea and pulled at his clothes.
The man turned and stared at the moon and stroked his chin in thought. “How long did the man live?”
“Eighty years after he created his first paradox with death. So in all, one hundred and forty years about, give or take a decade. ”
“Eighty years he outsmarted death, but still he eventually succumbed. Why?”
The dwarf shrugged, “He believed that he was death, he worked through his own paradoxes even as he created them. Every time his alter ego worked through a paradox, he had exactly a day to counter it before death overtook him. Death eventually won. It always does.”
“A day?”
“It had to do with one of the paradoxes he created for himself. He was able to paradox himself to give him a day after he countered a paradox. No more, no less.”
“I need to know everything about this man.”
The dwarf suddenly got angry, “Who do you think I am? I can’t revive people from the dead, I can’t talk to spirits. The man I speak of was a recluse, a mad man, he didn’t talk to anybody from the day of his first paradox till a month before he died.” The man began to open his mouth, but the dwarf continued on his rant, “I have nothing against death! In fact I love death! It interests me, it moves me, it gives a purpose to life! I have memorials dedicated to this sole subject, mountains of skulls, didn’t you see them? It’s my life’s work! I will die someday, and my life’s work will be done on that day and none other.”
He had in fact seen the skulls. Grotesque piles of human skulls that stank as if the owner’s bodies still remained in the caves. “Death gives purpose to life, but immortality gives life to purpose. Help me, and when I learn to conquer death, you will be standing next to me, the world’s only true immortals. Your purpose in life, as you put it, will always be there for you, unchanging except for us two. You give up nothing, but gain everything.”
“Life is not everything.”
“But death is nothing.”
“The man I speak of was miserable.”
“Misery is death, and it will be conquered.”
“Death is a friend not an enemy.”
“No friend wishes to kill his friend.”
The dwarf walked past him and farther out onto the beach and stared as the tide began to rise. “He kept a journal, I know where it is.”
A smile crept across the mans face.
And even though Im not doing anything with this, Id still like to here some opinions and criqieus for future use. Its not often I post something, so when I do, I need lots of critique.
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Art is a lie that helps us see the truth
Last edited by A Vaulter's Insanity : 11-04-2008 at 12:00 AM.
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