Chapter 1: What I remember...

I remember being formless. Floating in the abyss between worlds it hadn’t mattered. What did matter was that I remembered a before. I know I had a before. Before the gap, before I became whatever it is I am now. I was something. I was… I think, human but I remember not fitting in, and then I fell in, and I haven’t stopped regretting that bit yet.

When I started falling, I know I had a form, though I rarely grasp a whisp of what that was like. I became nothingness while I was there. A whole lot of nothing floating around in more of nothing. The Gap is a terrible place. Since it exists between worlds, nothing can exist within it, but things seem to fall in so often that I might cry because it shouldn’t be that easy, it certainly isn’t when they try on purpose.

When something falls into the Gap, it has a form, a shape to call its own, but it never gets to keep it. Everything about that form, from what it might look like, to what it is like to own it, shifts and unravels like a great big ball of yarn, until there’s no telling what part of you is you anymore and what is some other sorry thing that found it’s way into the Gap. When you eventually get close enough to the rips in some universe or other and fall through into it, you get a form again, because form begets function, and in an existence made of relations, functionality is everything…. If you get what I’m saying. But even then, there is almost no chance at all that the form you find yourself in will in any way be like what you had before. If you were lucky and you fell out of the Gap soon after you fell in, you would not have yet forgotten what that felt like, so even if you don’t recognize the new form as you, you will still know how to use it. If you were even luckier, you were a thing before you fell in, or became a thing after you fell out, because then you don’t know anything and can’t feel anything and life is the same old, even if you don’t quite fit in with the new place because some unknown part of you remembers the universe it used to call home… anyway, if you are like me though, you spend so long in the Gap that the before becomes like a half-forgotten taste in your mouth. I was in the Gap for a long time… well time isn’t the easiest for me to tell when I’m in a universe, never mind while I was in the Gap, but as I’ve found, how much you can remember of the before, is pretty telling.

I’ve met those that can still feel their old shape, remember how they once moved and the feeling of the worlds they called home. I was in there for so long that my before is a mystery, I couldn’t actually tell you what my skin felt like or what size I was or what species or personhood I had or anything else about it really, except that it is not what I am now.

When you are stuck in the Gap for as long as I was before I fell into this new place, you forget just enough to have to relearn everything about what having a form is like, and at the same time you remember just enough of the flavour of what you were, to feel like this new one is not you, like a bad case of dysphoria.

My new form feels like I was stuffed into a box that’s both too small to hold me and too big for comfort, my new skin is not mine, just stretched over bones that I can’t recognize as me. It’s an odd existence, one I’m not sure I would have ever chosen for myself, but by now, I’ve been, this, for so long that being anything else, even somehow being what I once was, will feel wrong. A whole new breed of wrongness.

It was not until rather recently, all things considered, that I learnt that there were places from which an entity or object might cross from one realm of existence to another without so much as touching the Gap and that more often than not when they try to cross universes on purpose, people tend to piggy-back on these completely on accident. I felt like something of a cosmic joke when I heard that. Here I was, never having wanted as far as I can remember, to cross to anywhere but where I was, and these people completely bypass the hell where I was unmade, all without even knowing how lucky they have it, how much torment they’ve avoided.

…

When I first fell out of the Gap, I went from being nothing and everything at once to having a form. Humanoid, I think I am taller in this one than whatever I was before. My skin was sensitive, new, and untested. That did not get to last for very long after, in the grand scheme of things, not long at all.

I later learnt that I had tumbled out of the very sky, an accidental success, a rip in reality by a mad creature named Teklune. I was the first and only success in their attempts at gaining access to the Gap. Not that I would ever be able to understand why anyone would want to be there. Some abstract undefined sort of power, can’t possibly is worth that much suffering.

When I woke, I was within a sealed case of some sort, right out of a sci-fi movie, a human-sized specimen jar! I was not quite alone in the room but I was certainly the only thing there that needed to breathe, which wasn’t the comfort it could’ve been, given that I was pretty sure most of them had breathed once upon a time. Then I met him and I almost wished I was alone again.

My form was fluid back then. Unsettled on my bones and even where it was, it shifted, as if it couldn’t decide what it… What I was. This was, I was told, a direct side effect of the Gap on me. It’s one that hasn’t faded quite yet, and honestly, with how long I’ve been around, it might never.

The near-constant shifting was painful before I learnt to direct it, it was a matter of rolling up the yarn I was made of, into the right form for the universe I was in. I’ve since, mastered this skill, and I can’t say it hasn’t come in handy.   

As I later learnt, there is a side effect to the very act of knowing as well. Knowing of the Gap makes using it, feeling its essence bleed into any of the many realities, that much easier. I dare say if Teklune had known I would have been made a living detector for it.

I look humanoid most of the time, though I have learnt to adjust that per my momentary needs, I find the general proportions to be the least discomfiting. I am not the keenest on the concept of revisiting those days of my life, but I have found great merit in leaving records for others. Besides this reason, there is also the supposed merit of sharing one’s pain in order to lessen it. Might even entertain you.

...

I was in and out of consciousness in those earliest days. When Teklune appeared before me back then, I hardly knew what they told me. It was a blur and I wish that state had lasted for all that I need to remember sometimes. Not knowing is almost worse than remembering. I can feel the experiments. I would sleep or at any rate leave consciousness and wake strapped to a table within their laboratory, often dazed, and even more often, actively shifting forms. My bones would be induced to shift, my skin to stretch over them, he figured out how to induce it, even if neither of us could at that point control the exact dimensions or image. It wasn’t him that finally figured that bit out, it was the servant boy she kept to serve her always. He showed me an early form and learnt that specific forms could be induced by showing me something to spur my mind towards it… It was his mercy I suppose, that he never tried that in Teklune’s presence. It was one less tool in their possession to torment me.

Teklune told me, in their babbling sort of way, of their many attempts to access the Gap. He told me a great many things like that… idle chatter while he worked, me in my case, unable to be anything besides the perfect captive audience. My mind, as fresh off the energies of the Gap as it was then, was still taking a form and function, and that included my memory. I have trouble keeping things straight. In some things my memory is painfully precise, in others, I am lucky if I remember impressions and feelings.

They had posited that the Gap would be akin to an infinite wellspring of energy from whence to draw untapped potential. My shifting forms were a testament to it. Due to the nature of the Gap, anything that has been within it, for a sufficient time, may develop a sort of cheat code to most laws of ‘reality’. We formerly of the Gap, creatures and things alike, essentially spill across the fabric of reality instead of being woven in as everything else is, anchored only by our minds if we so possess them, to the original place that made us. In leaving the Gap we are remade in the image of it… Everything and nothing at once. Fluid to our own purposes, capable of bending the laws of every realm we come across. Insofar as the laws apply to us anyway.