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The Outsider takes a walk. There is air in his lungs and on his skin, there is air weaving and threading through his hair. There is air everywhere. His body has weight and every muscle and tendon stretches, tenses, pulls and is pulled as he moves, a hundred thousand tiny mechanical motions twitching in tandem. He had forgotten the endless stimulus of human life. It is easy to forget these things, watching the world unfold.
He rarely leaves the Void, and even more rarely feels a need to; one seat is like any other when your sight encompasses all things, after all. Outside of the Void he is… thin. Not diminished, never diminished, but the parts that make up his whole are separated, distant. With his feet planted firmly on the dirt- and blood-grimed street and his black eyes focused on a single reality, the hunger of the Void is distant. Farther.
He feels… different.
Moving down the street, he falls into a smooth and easy gait. People part and make way for him without a glance in his direction. It is not that they cannot see him; it is that they choose not to. A young man has no business walking the way a wolf stalks a gazelle; a young man has no business having eyes so black, black, black. Their gazes slide away and their attention focuses on other things.
Distantly, the Outsider considers talking to one. Laying a hand on their shoulder. Looking them in the eye. But he does not, because he only appears to those that interest him, and because he cannot go against his nature.
(His nature? What is the nature of the Outsider?)
He stops in the middle of the street and watches life flow around him, never touching him, never looking at him. The sight evokes some emotion that he is no longer human enough to identify. After a few minutes, he moves on.
The streets have changed since the last time he walked here, and his feet want to move in patterns that nobody alive could recognize. He does not remember where they will lead him. He opts instead to continue down the street. He passes a man selling fried hagfish (the smell assaults him and it is interesting, but he does not stop because he does not eat anymore) and a dirty young girl curled up in a corner (her eyes track him, uncaring of the blackness in his eyes) and a woman counting coins in her pocket (not enough never enough). Futures unfold from each body like wings. None of them hold his attention.
The Void tugs at him, a nagging thought from a part of his vast mind that is very far away. He ignores it. Instead, he turns down a side street and is abruptly – viciously – hit by the smell.
Freshly-baked bread. Warm in the air. He breathes it deep and the smell is golden, is brown crusts softening on the tongue, is the delight of a hot loaf against almost-burning fingers as they snatch it off a windowsill. Hunger postponed. Death postponed. One preserved moment bubbling through the ancient layers of four millennia’s worth of memory.
For a time, the Outsider freezes. For a time, everything freezes.
No. He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember.
(Then what is this?)
His mind reaches, grasps, and touches nothing. He doesn’t remember his own name.
They call him the Outsider. After a while, he calls himself that, too. And the rest fades.
(he is standing in a side street breathing in a tattered shred of a memory and he is in the void and he is, he is?)
The rings on his hands are wrong. They have always been there. (no they haven’t.)
His feet want to take paths that lead him to places which crumbled thousands of years ago.
The wind in his hair is foreign. It is the most natural thing in the world.
The smell of freshly-baked bread turns his endless mind in circles.
The Void soothes him. Forget. But he’s already forgotten.
He steals a loaf of bread (hot against his fingertips, flash of feeling) and eats it later in the Void, rolling each bite around his tongue for minutes, or perhaps centuries. There is an emotion in his chest that he is no longer human enough to identify. When the entire loaf is finished, he will still have remembered nothing. And as the years pass, even this memory will fade, until he forgets that he has forgotten.
In the end, there will only be the Void.