Forever Sleep

Begin Date:08-Mar-01

Finish Date:08-Mar-01

Author’s Comments:

I can’t really say how this story came about. A friend of mine, another person that works with big cats, and I were talking and he mentioned something that was pretty profound: essentially that once you work with one of these animals, you will be forever changed by that experience. There’s no going back to your “regular” life doing whatever it is you might do to pay the bills with. Sure, you’ll probably have the same job, doing the same thing, but your heart and soul will be elsewhere. Those stay back in the cages with the animals: a little piece of both with every animal you manage to become friends with.

Anyway, Shasari and I were talking one night, and he shared a dream he’d had with me. To say it affected me profoundly is putting it mildly. I could even go into all the reasons, but that would be a story unto itself. I had to think about everything carefully. There was a lot that needed to happen, and a lot that needed to be said: not with words, but with scenes and actions and images and feelings. That’s the real problem with something like this is that it’s all about feelings. With something like this story, the burden that rests on my shoulders as an author is that I have to somehow capture all those raw feelings and emotions, and feed them back to the reader, preferably without a safety pop-off valve. It’s a lot easier said than done, especially if the reader has no clue as to what you’re talking about. Of course, for the people that do, they can reach the same level of emotional overload that perhaps you might’ve gone through writing it.

Well, this one was hard. It was hard because it was personal. It was one of those things that hit just a little too close to home. But I wrote it anyway. I struggled through it. I can only hope that it did the original dream “justice”.

If it moves you, great. Let it be a motivation to you, to put whatever energy you can into whatever animal’s salvation that you hold dear. Someday, if we’re not careful, that animal too will be gone from this fragile ball in space that we call “earth”. What a sad day that will be. And then you’ll have to ask yourself a simple question: Did I do everything that I could to save them? If the answer is “yes”, then I think you probably know what Shasari and I feel everyday that we work with our cats. But if the answer is “no”... Well then, it looks like you’ve got some catching up to do, huh?

Well, enough lecture from me... Here it all is...

Original:

As posed by Shasari of TigerMUCK [19:59:57 07Mar01]

Shasari dreampt he was walking through the jungle of India when he came upon a clearing. In this clearing he saw the bodies of many tigers _ it felt in the dream as if all the tigers in the world were dead. Laying in the ground next to the tigers were people, with their arms wrapped around the tigers in a loving embrace. The people were dead also. I knew these people were people who loved tigers [as much as I do] and who couldn't stand living in a world without them. For hours I walked through this carnage, then I came upon a Siberian tiger with a person laying on the other side. I couldn't see his face, until I walked right up next to the tiger - laying there I saw myself holding onto the tiger, as both slipped from the world....

Forever Sleep

I was walking. I don’t know exactly how I got there, but I was in a jungle. It was humid, but it was in the very early hours of dawn, so it wasn’t hot or tepid or even uncomfortable. There was a strange mist that hung in the air that gave the entire scene a strangely surreal view.

The jungle underbrush was a tangle: difficult to walk through. But I forged ahead. The vines and runners and small branches sometimes formed an almost impenetrable barrier. I could see ahead, but I couldn’t pass. I’d have to turn back and travel another way.

A tightness started to slowly rise in my chest. I came to realize what it was: I was lost. I had no sense of direction: left or right, East or West, North or South. Had it not been for gravity, and that I was still standing firmly on the thick, jungle vegetation, even my awareness of up or down would have been strangely vague. And time? Wasn’t it strange that though I had been wandering for quite a while, the light of early dawn had not changed at all. The temperature had not changed. Even the mist - making vision slightly limited - had not eased or increased. It was like time had stopped. Was I trapped in a temporal bubble? A rift in reality?

The tightness very so slowly turned to tension. But still, I felt a need for motion, and yet again, I forged ahead with a strange motivation that I couldn’t begin to understand.

I cannot say whether it was a sound. As I tried to orient once again, I became aware that it was all so strangely silent. Hauntingly silent. What kind of jungle was this where no animals chattered? Where no birds made their bizarre calls? Where small creatures didn’t snap twigs of rustle underbrush?

The tension altered yet again: fright.

My pace picked up involuntarily. The silent temporal and direction-lacking world that surrounded me seemingly started to close in. The vines started reaching out for me as I trudged through them. I would break free of the restraint, only to take a step forward into another grasp. When an impenetrable barrier loomed before me, I would again shift to another direction, equally as devoid of senses, and carry on in the now quickening rush.

The pressure started building in my chest: panic. The tiny but persistent threads and tendrils wove their way around my very soul, joining with one another, squeezing, restraining almost identically to the vines that inhibited my motion. Involuntarily, I broke into a run. The vines now snapped as I hit them. The smaller ones merely twanged as they sheered. The larger’s would resist for just long enough to burn and cut slightly into my flesh. As if to add to the surrealism, there was only the briefest pricks of pain, before there was nothing.

With the tiniest moment of ponderance, a minute shift in attention, my feet snagged in the undergrowth. I pitched forward violently, out of control, my arms suddenly restrained as I tried to get them up in front of me. Then, I was falling. Shouldn’t I have just fallen forward? Shouldn’t my face and shoulders have merely impacted into the jungle floor? So it seemed, the realities that I had always known no longer existed in the realm that I was now captive. Instead, I plummeted. My fear was total. My panic absolute.

The impact was swift and sudden, but not violent. It was more like I had simply landed versus coming to a violent halt at the end of a drop. Even so, it was a long moment before I was able to move. I raised my face up out of the grass. Grass? Where had it suddenly come from? Why hadn’t I seen it before I was lying in it?

All around me was open space; the tiny, hair-like blades of the fine, green grass spread out from me in every direction. The scene had violently changed from the closed-in jungle that threatened to trap and hold and restrain me to the vast openness of infinite space that spread out forever in a blanket of green. And thought the scene had altered from one extreme to the diametrically opposed other, it was still no less frightening. In another moment, I had gotten back to my feet and was preparing to launch into another sprint. But the scene had changed again. The early-dawn light remained the same. Even the vast expanse of endless green remained. But the temperature had become suddenly frigid. I came to realize that I had been wrong about the light. It was not early dawn at all. It was pre-dusk: twilight. That mystical time just after the sun has abandoned the sky, but right before the darkness of night has achieved total reign.

I took a step forward, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. The scene altered dramatically again. I halted instantly. There amidst the green was orange. But not just orange: fire-orange. Fire orange with black stripes. Strewn out on the grass, laying inertly, were tigers. The ground was littered with them. They were everywhere. As far as I could see. Body after orange, black-striped body of tiger after tiger after tiger. I gasped.

How was it that I had not seen them until now? How was it that the grass had been so green, and now so very little of the grass was visible amidst the sea of orange fur? And I realized that I had been wrong again. It was not merely cold. It was the chill of Death. He resided here. It was Him that reigned in this bizarre and twilit realm. The chill of His very presence ran down the center of my spine.

All the tigers were dead. I was so very aware of that fact. But even so, each one’s unique story seemed to enter my mind, as if the stray thought had simply been transplanted there. How this one had been butchered for bone... How that one had met with a hunter’s bullet... How this one had been bludgeoned to death by village people... How that one had fallen to the faster claws and fangs of a rival... How this one had died captive, confined, and so horribly alone... The thousands upon thousands of deaths pattered through my mind, merely whispers in my slowly failing grip on sanity. Then, suddenly, abruptly, the whispers were silent. The millions of tigers’ voices had ceased. All at once. They were gone... For all eternity...

All my fright was gone. All my panic. Even the frigid touch of Death was nothing comparing to the totality of the sorrow that simply consumed me whole.

Every tiger that had ever lived, every tiger that had ever walked or breathed in the universe had, in but a single moment, a single sliver in time, placed their burdens upon my shoulders. The sheer weight of them all crushed me down as if they were physical. For me, they were.

I dropped to my knees and was trodden into the very fibers of the grass, tears bursting forth from my eyes as the sobs wretched from the very supreme depths of my soul.

“You have finally come.”

Amidst my sobs and madness, yet another voice carried through my head. I tried to block it out, not able to bear even a single, additional, whispered burden. But I couldn’t stop it. The voice came to me again. Gentle. Earnest. So very calm and comforting.

“Arise, Dreamer. Walk with me.”

I felt the strong but gentle hand reach under my shoulder and pry me from under the terrible weight that had been heaped upon me. But with the touch, I felt an infinite strength. That strength pulled me upright to sitting. The scene was unchanged. The entirety of hosts of tigers were still strewn for eternity about me. But as I was about to be beaten down again by my sorrow, the strong arm reached out for me again, this time taking me into almost protective embrace. With it came the voice: stronger now, more insistent.

“Rise. Do not keep your Guardian waiting.”

I couldn’t help it. I struggled against the embrace, fighting against the infinite strength. It released me without hesitation and I rotated around to view the speaker. I gasped again and the fear returned fully. Before me, next to me, surrounding me, simply by sheer size and length, was the largest of the tigers. The body was massive: half again broader than my own shoulders, probably twice my own height in length. Even the tail possessed a wider girth that my arm, and a length not significantly shorter than I was tall. The Emperor of All Tigers stood next to me.

“Guardian?”

Had I actually spoken? Was that my voice to be heard as if an echo across the infinite expanse of bodies?

“Yes,” the tiger spoke to me.

Again, The Emperor bid me to rise.

“Walk with me.”

I stood and started to walk, but I didn’t get two steps before the scene had overwhelmed me again. All the death... All the bodies... All the tigers that had died so horribly... All the weight that rested on my shoulders...

“Do not look through the eyes of sorrow,” The Emperor whispered, his calm and gentle voice resonating thru my body, merely because of his proximity to me. But sorrow held me firmly in its grasp.

“But they’re all dead...” came my meek and meager voice.

The Emperor was silent for a moment. Then his quiet voice resonated.

"Yes," growled The Emperor.

His voice was so quiet, so touched with a deep and unrelenting grief.

"All but one..."

And as his words came to me, I already knew their meaning: he was the last. I knew that so clearly. I started to stop and crumple under the burden. A growl came from The Emperor and his massive forearm and paw reached out to propel me forward again. For a moment, I was frightened again. His action had been so blindingly fast and unexpected. And yet, I was suddenly not so overburdened with sorrow. My eyes left him behind to again look out over the bodies of his brethren: his kind, his kin. Was he sire to them all? And suddenly, I could see that the scene had changed yet again. But it hadn’t. I had merely become aware of things that I had not seen before.

There were people here. Everywhere. Each of them lay next to a tiger. For every tiger, there was a human. For every human, a tiger. Pair after pair after pair. In another moment, the tears started again. For these people too whispered their thoughts to me: thoughts of love, of respect, of awestruck admiration, of the profound emptiness at each and every passing of a tiger out of the world that they had known. And I could see now that for every tiger-human pair, that they were not merely laying next to each other, but rather, the human’s arms were entwined about the neck of the huge cats, and that the cats’ massive forearms and paws held each of their humans in an equally impassioned embrace.

Each of these humans were different: short, tall, big, small, brown hair, black hair, long hair, short hair, green eyes, or blue eyes, yellow skin, or red skin, all were different. But yet they were all the same. And strangely, even as different again as I was from every one, I too was the same. We all shared the deepest and most profound love to a single creature in the universe: one that we respected and revered and admired above all others. So they were no different that I was. I no different than them.

How long did we walk among them? How long did I listen to the sentiments of the humans? Their innumerable apologies for not have done enough while they still possessed life: while the tigers still possessed life.

How long did I hear the sympathies of the tigers? Their responses back to their humans that there was no more that could have been done? And that they were so eternally grateful for what had been accomplished, thought it was all for naught.

And in the eternity of time, when had I grown comfortable in the presence of The Emperor that still walked along, totally silent beside me? Had it been hours? Or was it days? Weeks? Years? Millennia? I don’t know.

My eyes caught a shape in the distance. A huge tiger lay alone. It was noticeably larger than any I had seen in the hundreds of thousands. And it was so strangely familiar: the stripe patterns, the build. Why was this tiger alone? Why in all the millions of pairs had this one died in a solitary abyss?

I altered course and headed closer. The Emperor followed. But as I approached, I saw that the tiger was not alone after all. Another human was with him also, though obscured from view by the tiger’s sheer size. Again, it struck me odd that this tiger seemed so familiar. And the human? The torso and face were shaded from view, but the body... Yes... It too was strangely familiar.

Why was this pair the object of my curiosity? Why was this pair in the millions of others the one that caught my eye. Why had this pair demanded my attention?

I stepped closer.

A strange tension once again started to form in my chest. Who was this tiger?

Another step...

A constriction, making it almost difficult to breathe. Why couldn’t I see the human’s face?

The final step...

My breath escaped. I halted.

“Oh no...” I gasped.

The Emperor stepped up to me and stopped, his shoulder easily next to my ribs. Now, at that moment, it had become oh so very clear to me why the tiger was familiar.

“No...”

I was sobbing again.

It was The Emperor.

“Not you too...”

The Emperor took a small step forward and looked up at me. His whiskers twitched just slightly as an amused look came to his face.

“Would you think me any less mortal than them?”

I tried to speak. I couldn’t.

“Or that you would have any lesser a place than your own kind and kin?”

The shock hit me like a voltage suddenly connected. For it was then that the face of the human was no longer obscured.

Again, the breath escaped me. The face of the human was mine.

“I beckon you, Dreamer.”

The Emperor of All Tigers, the largest, the last, stepped up next to his own body. I could see him clearly now: not a beast of physical mass as I had always thought, but a shimmer of light, an only mostly opaque, shimmering apparition, a spirit of the majestic creature that lay before me. I was strangely compelled to take the last step forward and kneel next to myself on the grass.

I too had my arms stretched out to reach around the neck of The Emperor himself, to hold him in my frail, human embrace. But I could see that there was a joyous smile on my face, for in return, The Emperor’s huge forearms and paws had pulled me close, and held me captured tightly, warmly, and securely in his own loving embrace.

The apparition of The Emperor seemed to fade slightly as he stepped over himself, into himself, and first sat, then lay, all the while staring at me. All the while, the whiskers twitching in comical amusement.

“Would you make your Guardian wait yet again, Dreamer?”

It was then I saw myself. I too was merely an apparition: a shimmering, transparent, spirit-entity of the being I had been. There was a slight tingle as I rejoined with my body. I laid down next to The Emperor. My eyes locked with his. I suddenly knew every thought of his. He knew mine. Every memory that he had ever had was mine. And all of mine, from birth, to youth, to adult, to now, he was suddenly a part of. I stared into his eyes for but a moment more. Then I reached out to encircle his neck with my arms. An instant later, I was captured in his infinite strength and pulled tightly up against his chest.

And in that same instant, I was finally at peace.

There was no more sorrow. There was no more pain. There was no more anger. No more anguish. No more regret, or guilt, or fear, or loathing. And even the feeling of being alone was deceased. There was only peace. There was only serene tranquility. There was no place else in all of the universe that I would ever want to be, than held in his strong and captive embrace. I was secure. And I knew now, that I was home as well, at long last.

“Finally, we rest together, Dreamer.”

Tears streamed down my face once again. They were different this time. They were the only expression possible for the totality of joy that I felt.

“The Quest for Peace is finally concluded.”

I held him with all my strength. His massive head came down to rest on my shoulder, and he rolled slightly, as if to surround me even more by his mass. He pulled me close again and I nestled into his thick, warm fur.

And at last, I closed my eyes and let the warmth of the massive body of The Emperor envelop me, hold me, protect me.

“Forever sleep,” The Emperor said.

Peace was mine.

“Forever sleep.”

Peace...

“Forever sleep...”

Dream © 2001 Shasari

Story © 2001 Kenti