As he turned to the next page, there were no anatomical drawings, only familiar patterns.
Countless hexagons covered the entire sheet, spilling past its edges and smearing onto the adjacent pages. Lines extending from them seemed like hazy radiance, or else writhing tendrils and webbing, filling his field of vision.
"We stood in the dark. There was a great rushing sound of water ahead of us, but as the light came on, the sound grew clearer and clearer. Then I saw that thing." The hand holding the pen trembled slightly, making the letters jump unevenly across the page.
"No, I didn't see it, but I did 'see' it. It was right below."
Countless thoughts erupted in his mind, forming strings of adjective-laden phrases, only to be crossed out and blacked over by the pageful. He had found an answer, understood something, and yet it felt as if he understood nothing at all.
A glimpse of the colossal being had utterly transformed his mind. Its image had swum up from the depths and occupied every inch of his finite mental world.
In the ghastly pale light, he felt the implant beneath his skin become a medium through which he could connect and resonate with it, transmitting pure information without the need for translation.
[Pain]
It felt as though he had been trapped for countless ages in a place as thin as a sheet of paper. A searing pain, like a fever, traveled through metal, melting his consciousness into a formless, flowing wax, then pouring it into a new Mold and shaping it into something entirely different. Just as its fragments reshaped living forms.
As his own pain resonated with that extreme, interminable agony, those who received it were also endowed with something born of that pain.
It was a fierce longing