Sunflower Horizon

Notes were played wrong in the melody set to herald his rebirthing. As opposed to an ethereal, tender orchid whose fragile dependence would please his creators, it was sunflowers that began to sprout from Mountauk's body and mind alike. Quiet, modest sunflowers. They came without meaning nor intention, and then they stayed. Montauk felt their roots worming into and displacing the contents of his mind with the swelling of their alien tide, subtle but unstoppable. He didn’t fight them, simply wandered aimlessly through this foreign purgatory searching numbly for some break in the new discordant melody. The sunflowers' dark centers, hollow and depthless, drew in everything, compressing his thoughts and identity into silence like collapsed stars. The yellow halos that encircled them flickered like dying embers, yet they burned just as brightly, entrapping his gaze.

The horizon was unreachable, receding further each time he stepped toward it until paths seemed to wind, convolute and overlap like unspooling film. Above, the sky churned in ceaseless motion, leaden clouds swelling and shifting with no resolution. The peace seemed fragile, as if they were harbingers of an oncoming storm, or perhaps the coda of a tempest already gone, indefinitely delaying the diaphanous return of sunshine. The clouds neither threatened nor reassured—they simply existed, like Montauk and the sunflowers.

A fraying, childhood blanket he carried felt distant in his hands, its softness now foreign and more and object than a relic. Memories touched and unraveled in their final departure. He walked not to escape, but because stopping seemed as futile as continuing. The sunflowers lined his path, their empty faces turned toward him in silent observation, burning holes into him in quiet apathy, a mirror of his new skin. Strength waned and Montauk's legs gave into the ground below, flowers leering over as vultures appraising their carrion. He looked to the swirling grey expanse above, feeling some ineffable, yet empty horror. In this endless quiet, his shallow, exhausted breaths simply disintegrated into stardust over the rolling wind.

This meditation inspired a digital painting of mine, click here to view on Newgrounds.