The reason for my imprisonment was dubious, but I had no ground to stand on to plead my innocence or to improve my sentencing. My past crimes had already condemned me long before my former associates even concocted the scheme that led to my framing. Anything that could result in my imprisonment or death, the deciders would use, even if its validity was questionable. A twenty-year dunk was the sentence; twenty years without light; twenty years without companionship, food, and drink. Only solitude, and only blackness.
Keeping track of time proved impossible in the aphotic place, but what I believe to be the first year of my float was the most difficult. The lack of sensation as I drifted within the fluid; the sting of the silence against my eardrums; the always deepening murk that enveloped the space. It was torturous, and I nearly lost myself to insanity in those early months— that wouldn’t happen until a few years later, though.
After the initial shock of the place, I calmed down quite quickly. I spent the next couple of years in a sort of serenity as I became accustomed to the warmness of the viscous fluid, and the blanketing of shadow that constantly bathed me. It was strange; a fleeting peace, within which I felt as though I was being swathed in a parent’s arms. The distinction between waking hours and sleeping ones became increasingly blurred as consciousness became a formality, and my mind entered a blissful emptiness. No more fears or concerns assailed me, for there was naught to fret about, because there was only blackness, and would only ever be blackness.
It started slowly; my descent to madness— a flicker at the edge of my vision that I would turn towards in the surrounding caliginosity. Nothing I could focus on for more than a moment, but little fragments of sensation out in the dark. The past calm had lowered my guard and allowed my mind to crack without me noticing. What years remained were nightmarish.
The visual hallucinations— hallucinations, I truly hope they were —increased in their frequency and vividness. Blinking colored lights out in the haze; not colors that the human brain was ever meant to see, but ones on the far reaches of the unseeable spectrum. They were beyond dazzling, and I stared, entranced, into the void of darkness; waiting through intervals of steadily decreasing time until the next burst of cosmic photons made itself available to my sight. Eventually, there was no more waiting, and they lit up the tank like fireflies would a field of grass. Strobing endlessly, and ever increasing in intensity, vibrancy, and scale, until no longer were they pleasant sparks in the shadow, but they replaced the shadow itself and became the domineering force in the chamber.
In-between the flashes of post-spectral brilliance, shapes materialized. Skidding in and out of sight were fractals of indescribable design, and objects that seemed to twist and move with consciousnesses of their own— maybe ones more sober than mine, as I laid there in a state not so unlike a brain in a jar. Those objects in motion gradually became more and more intentional in their movements until it became abundantly clear that they were alive— or hopefully, a hallucination of something alive. They bent and contorted themselves in ways that no creature of our plane feasibly could, and they swam through the shade, consuming the fractals and bursts of light alike with their mouths of spiny tendrils that could grasp particles that no physical being was meant to grasp. They glided without wings, twirling through the air without rest; always consuming, and nothing else. Around the time of these things’ appearance, was when my mind escaped me. No thought or memory exists beyond that point, and only the Emperor above knows what demonic sights I saw in that formerly dark realm, made bright by my own unstable mind and the conjurations therein.
When they fished me out of the tank when my sentence was complete, it took them a week to reduce my panicked screams and straining to a level in which I could breathe without an apparatus, or nourish myself without a drip. Far longer than that, did it take them to restore some level function to my assailed brain— still, I think I am forever changed by what I experienced in there, even by that which I can no longer remember. Most other tankers come out as husks and never regain their sentience at all; I don’t feel lucky to have escaped with mine, though. Death or full cognitive regression might have been a blessing. At night, while I sleep, I still feel the repugnant liquid about me, and unhallowed forms invade my dreams and jolt me awake. From time to time, I experience echoes of forgotten spasms and pain. Celestial pigments still mark my thoughts, and creep into sight if my guard drops as it did so long ago. When I close my eyes, I’m back in the tank, and the images of the gloom reach into my mind all over again. That wretched darkness will always be with me.