Appendix • Ironstrong's Delirium

While on the way to Haley Isle aboard *The Skeksis*, Ironstrong-4 and Evendur accidentally break some part of Ironstrong-4's internal workings that kept the two personalities in his mind separate, causing him to shutdown. In the state of delirium that follows, Ironstrong-4 experiences broken memories from a past life.

## Transcript

Nicolaus Julius Varus Thresce died. And then he didn’t.

You come alive in a garden. The scent of grass. Of fresh earth. The touch of air on your skin. Skin...the memory of it. An echo of something you never considered, but only just now realise you missed. The tingle of a breeze on the hairs of your arm. The soft caress of daylight. The rustle of cloth against your chest. And you marvel in the sensation, though the thought of why escapes you.

Moments have passed. Only moments, and the memory of pain has faded already. A burning in your flesh. A fire in your veins. A soul ablaze. But that pain is gone gone gone, and now you’re here and here is painless and thoughtless and bliss.

"You’re drifting brother, drifting," a voice calls. Painfully familiar in a place without pain. Forgotten but found and forgotten again.

"Why why why?" another voice asks. Familiar too. More distant by far and yet close enough to touch. A dream of a dream made tangible and flesh. Drifting, drifting, gone and gone and gone.

"Stay awake. We’ll be eternal together. Stay stay stay," the first voice says.

You almost weren’t. For a moment you almost ceased to be. But because you listen, you are, and because you are, you see.

Here in the garden, there are no trees, or rocks, or insects, or birds. A field of fragile flowers reaches to a sunless sky on unnaturally flat ground. It stretches away in front of you, to either side, and behind. The flowers form a complex design above the low grass, each a single blossom with petals of a single hue. Blossoms of red, and blossoms of white. Intermingled; billions upon billions upon billions growing side by side in lines and lines that are strangely uniform. Each flower the exact same distance to its neighbours. Close to each other, almost touching, but never quite.

And you watch as some flowers darken, wither, die, sprout, grow, blossom, spring to life, and die again. All in the space of moments. A shifting wave out and away, and back and around. A pattern. A single repeating pattern, where each flower that dies ripples away to its neighbours, brings some alive and others to wither, and when they die so does the first flower spring to life again.

"The shape. The shape," the first voice muses. "The pattern must be."

"Why why why," the second voice answers, "let me let me."

"No, no no," the first voice says again.  "Too soon. Too soon. He's not ready."

The flowers smell of smoke without fire without smoke. Ozone on the air. Voices speak without mouth or meaning. Shouting shouting anger and fear and hatred and pain. Flames undo stone undo time and reason. "Why. Why. Please why," the second voice cries.

From the flames, the first voice speaks again. "The garden, brother. The garden is the key. I can change the pattern. I can fix it fix it. Make the lie."

Screams and shouts. The thunder of falling stone. Around you, the flowers open and close and open and close in ripples beyond the scope of a universe to decipher, all-devouring and perhaps everlasting. Cycle after cycle, always the same. The perfect pattern. The proposed final shape. A truth repeated in life and death.

The ask and the answer.

"This is all we have left," the first voice whispers. "This is all there is. A moment between time. A breath between heartbeats. They’ve forgotten me. After all I tried. All I did. But you...you, you, you...eternal."

Around you, the world collapses in rubble and fire and dust, and gone are the flowers and the answers and the truth.

"WHY WHY WHY," The second voice screams. "LET ME DIE. PLEASE! LET. ME. DIE!"

The first voice answers, "I’m sorry, brother."