“It was to realize the meaning for the Second Eden.” 

You blinked, squinting, slowly parting your mouth as you experienced the sight of two individuals in the distance. Two men were sitting on a bench made with fingers, with legs of intertwining roots, and their sides pillared by arching trees where relieved faces have been etched as its trunk and branches stretched to give them shade. The light glittered as the leaves danced, bathing you in the peaceful warm air as your toes crisped by the second. But it was fine.

The other one was a young man with brown hair. You heard him sigh and rest at the back of the bench, raising his chin as he closes his eyes and faced a sky that you can’t seem to imagine. 

“I understand now.”

The old bearded man faces him, drawing a small helpless smile. “I just wanted to know something.” 

“If you’re here, then does that mean that I’ve succeeded?”

You blinked again, doubling your vision to find the world in a darker shade. Your jaws tightened. People have appeared, but none of the others seemed to notice you. All of them turned their bulging reddened eyes at the young man at the bench. Tears of blood streamed down their cheeks and trickled at the bottom of their chin, but they remained in place, devoid of neither joy nor hatred. You leaned forward, attempting to see them all, and there, you realized who they were as you tasted the smog of burning plastic in the air. You gasped... and blinked to see that everything was normal.

The young man shivered and shot his eyes open. He grins to himself, both terrified and proud, his lips quivering at the thought of what to do next. Silence drowned the space between them.

“Yes,” the old man muttered with a restrained breath. “The game was done for that matter. We were from the farthest of futures where a normal man would call himself a god. I’m quite aware that you’re about to reach it.” The man followed the birds. “It was a place where everything could exist, a place where we could be everyone else, know everything else, and be that someone else. I know that we, even the people who lived generations and generations and generations and generations before us would fight for what’s better. I wanted to understand it, you see. I want to see what a normal person who fights for their own dreams, no matter how dumb or funny it is, would do if they would get a shot at it.”

“You chose the most desperate ones,” the young man replied. “You’re not being fair to those who got dragged into that game and had to get turned into cabbages or got crushed by rocks. You’ve killed innocent people.”

“And you’re about to make the innocent suffer because you wanted to prove that you’re better than the others. This is why I needed to kill you.” 

“Well, that’s dumb.” 

“It’s obvious that killing you right here and right now would not undo all the suffering that we’ve felt, and it’s most likely that you’d get replaced by someone else, but I’ll take that shot. Our world was already doomed in the first place, so I might as well save this version of reality. I’ll do my best to let this thing transcend the dimensions as well so that this reality is one of the only things that would suffer.”

“Then, killing me would change nothing.” The young man scoffed. “If you’re gonna bawl on things that need to be done… then my life doesn’t really matter, right?”

“Well, at least you’re aware…” 

“Then—”

“I am, human, too.” The old man leaned, resting both his elbows over his thighs to prop his head. He looked at the young man. “I can be hypocritical, too, and at that point, being right or in the wrong… That doesn’t really matter. It is what it is. It makes acts such as that murder spree at the mall where everyone would feel the thrill of someone killing another, making them scream as they tore each other limb from limb enjoyable… to the heartwarming idea of self-destruction at the thought of saving the world. It matters the most to those who would share the experience and would try to understand my actions.”

“Y-you’re contradicting yourself.” 

“But that does that really matter?” The old man turned his head to face him, giving him a pure smile. “When faced with something that you had to do, or rather, what chose to do… being right or wrong comes only second. Your original intent comes first, and whether it’s right or wrong would come next to justify your decision, no?” 

The old man moved his finger and the young man’s left arm twisted and cracked itself free from the rest of his body. The young man screamed, holding onto his shoulder, his eyes trembling while tracing the blood the trickled from the bench down to the pool at the ground. It was smooth, too smooth that you’ve begun to think that it was normal for one’s arm to do so, even as it ripped itself apart and arranged its pieces from the smallest to largest like a deranged puzzle.

“There’s nothing to be explained and nothing could stop me, thus, I require no justification to what I am about to do.” The old man chuckled but kept his helpless smile. “This is what I’ve always wanted, or did you just grow so comfortable with me that this kind of thing never crossed your mind.” He looked straight into the young man’s eyes. “Please, don’t dismiss me into something as simple and as subjective as the concept of good and evil. No matter what side of the coin we take, we always take it for granted and that’s what makes us human. You can’t expect me to be good and understanding because I’m older.”

The old man twirled his finger again, twisting his left leg free this time. The young man screamed once more, gaping his mouth for air as he tried to stifle his screams. He moved like an animal trapped inside a cage. You can understand that he moved with the intent of running, but his body was holding him in place. 

“The funny thing is, that kind of singularity is easy to create. We easily tip the scales to our favor every time we’re tested, but if, somehow, one were able to create a place where the suffering and victory is the same… The people involved would coincide with a single idea to abandon itself so that the rest could survive.” The old man smiled. “It makes me believe in humanity for a bit, and I’ve come to understand what made something so vile so beautiful all the same.”

The old man straightened his back and waved his arm. At his call, Jonathan twisted his torso to the side, raising his chin to the skies to breathe as his gasps for air slowly turned into a shrill whisper as his flesh winded on itself like a drying piece of cloth. His body continued to twist until his bone began to burrow its way out of his muscles bit by bit. Shattered or not, the man waved his fingers like a conductor, commanding those pieces of bones to float and arrange themselves to form the shape of a human skeleton as the young man’s flesh slowly unfurled. 

“A heart that betrays its own for the sake of itself. The kind of machination that allows us to hate ourselves but still enables us to be prideful enough to kick others down. The kind that allows us to lie to ourselves, making us forget our choices and powers us to strive for something that we think we deserve. The kind of tick that gives us the ability to forsake others so that we could hold fast to someone else.” The old man continued before turning his head to look at you. 

The young man’s body continued to turn, draining itself with blood as the rest of its flesh branched out to turn into a small tree. 

“It’s a heart that allows a bit of you to not scream and imagine what happened to that young man because you couldn’t care less since it’s not you and would never be you. I’m sure that you would grow to understand that there’s a need to become gods and attain a world where everything is perfect that nothing is. There’s nothing wrong with a world that is a pile of trash if it allows you to appreciate the existence of a meager flower budding atop of that heap. I suppose that it’s a story for another day… a seventh, perhaps, but…”

The man, sighing, walked away from the bench, dusted himself from leaves, and approached you. You see that his body faded at his every step. It raced your heart, but the satisfied and almost peaceful look on his face calmed you down. You realized that you could never move from where you were, but he squatted and met your eyes. He faded. 

You blinked. You breathed through your nose. You blinked again. You’ve stopped imagining, and realized that you’ve been reading a block of text, although you moved on because the sentence ended here. It ends, but it began another, forming a blank image in your brain, making you remember that bench that you saw earlier… along with the words...

“Well, at least now you’re ware… but what are you going to do about it?”