Tybalt

Tye Ellis, started out as a shy and sensitive kid in a chaotic blue-collar home where neither shyness or sensitivity were rewarded. Nonetheless he spent his early years with his nose buried in books.

This all changed when, during his senior year in high school a vagrant, not much older than Tye himself, tried to rob him at knife-point. The boy lunged at him swinging the blade wildly, and Tye knew, just somehow knew, the weak point of the attack. He broke the attacker’s arm while side stepping the arc of the blade.

The event woke something deep in Tye, a burning focus that led him to enroll in a martial arts class the very next day. 6 months later, he joined a Brazilian Jujitsu Academy, and a month after that he joined a boxing gym.

Inside the ring he was known for being almost preternaturally precise in his strikes. Outside the ring he remained a polite but slightly withdrawn observer. Quiet and shy, but always eager to help, and generally liked by all.

Three years later he was prize fighting for gradually growing purses, while working various labor jobs during the day. Money was as tight, and life was hard, but that was nothing new.

He’d never felt so alive.

But his true awakening came the night of his first major bout, a mixed martial arts competition, with a hefty payout win-lose-or-draw.

Just minutes before he stepped into the ring, he received news of his mother’s passing. He still hadn’t fully processed the news when the starting bell rang and spent much of the first round in a daze and on his heels.

The second round is when he took the hit that knocked him through the fabric of the world itself. It happened so quickly at first. The lights. The sound of the crowd. A padded fist. And then…

Nothing but silence. And truth.

From behind the veil of the lie, Tybalt could see how the universe really is.

People are primordial, jelly-like blobs. Reality is spongy and wet.

Underlying all this is a pattern. When you see the world truly, things align and make sense: stars flow in one direction, trees grow in a significant way, people move in complex patterns.

Within this pattern, mathematics, magic and geometry are all one. When you see it, you see the movement of life and time.

The lie veils these truths and instead, we see comforting illusions: people seem smooth and humanoid, reality is firm and there are only three dimensions.

Information about his situation came to him in dreamlike projections.

Tybalt floated in this maddening solitude for centuries, imprisoned in the infinity, slowly piecing together what happened. He had suffered a brain hemorrhage and had died in the operating table.

Then the veil covered him, and the world became solid again.

6 days had passed.

Tye could feel the dank sponginess in and behind the air. The hospital bed felt somehow malleable.

The Doctors, his brother, his boyfriend, his trainer, all forbade him from stepping back into the ring, for any reason. Even his father, the stoic silent type if ever there was one, begged him with tears in his eyes.

Which was fine by Tye, he refocused his attention and started studying and prodding. Poking the veil, peeling back the lie in every way that he could, eventually falling in and training with the Coal-Burners.

Now 30, Tye remains soft spoken and unassuming, but his burning curiosity is focused outwards to the fallen world, and his sad smile helps to hide the constant calculations he’s making as he watches it crumble before him in grand indescribable patterns.

And within those patterns he sees the flaws in all things.