Photo by Linda Xu on Unsplash

The Prisoner

His skin was a boiling black and oily tar like ooze. It encrusted him from head to toe. He stood shackled and chained to the bottom of a vast ocean floor. His wrists and ankles strained against cuffs of wrought iron.

Molten flesh churned against heavy chains crossing his chest. He is a prisoner. Wishing to be rid of his tortured state of being he screams in agony only to be suffocated by a dark cruel ocean.

He holds in his mind a single universal truth. A truth that he wishes he did not know. That if man knew the nightmares our universe could bestow upon conscious beings he would be driven mad.

But there is hope. The divers know where he is. He is one of this reality’s lost souls. One of billions. Against all odds he is lucky enough to be chosen.

The divers swim from the warm crystal shallows on down to the cold murky depths. They fan out in all directions, splitting into innumerable groups. Then a single path forks each diver towards a chosen prisoner.

The diver’s journey from shallows to prisoner takes thousands of years and many lives. As the diver swims through life after life his trials intensify. By the time his feet reach the sandy bottoms many have succumbed. They are now lost souls of their own, marooned as prisoners at different depths. For every thousand divers only one prisoner is rescued from the deepest depth of the bottom.

The diver places his hand on the prisoner’s chest and his hand begins to boil and turns to the sickly black sludge. The diver and the prisoner are bound to each other. They journey together now, through the many lives tainted by the tarry oil. Over several generations of time the prisoner’s boiling flesh simmers and stills, while the diver perseveres from the toxic onslaught of pain and suffering.

This is the sacrifice that is required for the diver to guide the prisoner through the lessons he must learn. Only then can the prisoner finally see. He looks across his chest and realizes the chains were never locked. He opens the buckle and the chains drop to the ground. He pulls the pins and the cuffs release. He grabs the hand of the diver and together they begin their long slow journey back to the warm crystal shallows.