The Planet of Blood

"Let me show you something," said Crystalbrain.

"What're you going to show me?" I asked.

"A planet as someone once thought it to be," Crystalbrain said.

Slowly my consciousness moved to somewhere outside of my body, and I was aghast that I was staring at an ocean of blood.

"Where the hell is this?" I asked.

"This is Mars, as it appeared in the imagination of a seer from the British isles, long before writing was invented.

"You're telling me this really existed?" I asked.

"I'm not telling you one way or another, but a man who lived in a time that Neanderthals roamed the Earth claimed to his kinsmen that he had travelled in his soul to Mars, and that he witnessed it as an ocean of blood. Here, let me take you down," said Crystalbrain.

Down in the ocean there were fish that I could faintly see through blood which Crystalbrain made transparent for me, and I saw gigantic snakes with fins swimming through the depths of the blood. There were fish that were 10 feet long, and above us there was a giant green thing of some sort.

"What is that?" I asked.

"A lilypad," said Crystalbrain.

"A lilypad?" I asked.

"Come up," said Crystalbrain, and my consciousness slowly ascended to the surface of the blood-ocean.

There were giant purple frogs covered in thick veins all over thousands of lilypads, and their tongues jutted out to snap birds from the air. It was a grisly sight for sure, but it was achingly beautiful. Crystalbrain stood on a lilypad and hit his crack-pipe.

"You want to see something else?" Crystalbrain asked.

"Sure," I said.

"This is where the ruler of Mars lives," said Crystalbrain, and I was in the center of an island surrounded by symmetrically arranged rocks jutting out of the ocean arranged in the shape of some ornate pattern.

There was a cave whose mouth was painted with pictures of winged four-armed men hunting snakes, fish, and various fantastical creatures. Inside the cave was a man with four arms sitting on a bear-skin with his right hand in the air, wings folded to his back.

"This is Jarkontua, the ruler of hunters and of Mars itself. Every day winged four-armed men fly in from the eight corners of Mars, and bring him food to eat. Then, they laugh and have blood-stained orgies while eating food. Yes, eating meat, which I know your vegan ass won't abide by," said Crystalbrain rolling his eyes.

"So, Mars was imagined to be a blood-covered sphere with a guy with four arms telling people to hunt giant frogs, snakes, and fish?" I asked.

"Yes, and what if I told you that this was how Mars really was, simply because the seer imagined it this way?" asked Crystalbrain.

"I would say that you're playing a trick on me, and that you made all of this up probably while high on crack or tripping or something," I said.

"You could think that if you want, but the truth is that I'm not going to tell you the true nature of this place, whether it ever existed, whether it existed merely because some guy imagined it, or whatever the case is. I'm just not going to tell you because for people like you--you're not supposed to know these things. You're supposed to encounter them and wonder about them. You'll investigate a little, come to a few conclusions, try to gather data, but it will all fall through your fingers. Because you're not like me; you just do not know for sure the true nature of things," Crystalbrain said.

"And you do?" I asked.

"You created me, why don't you tell me?" said Crystalbrain, and then we were back in my living room and my consciousness was firmly in my brain.