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Afterward, he doesn’t remember much.
It’s less like a fuzzy memory blurred with time, and more like the memory was surgically removed from his mind completely, leaving only remnants behind. Impressions, feelings, sensations, but no real memory of the events themselves.
He remembers what led up to it, his pleading and preaching chalked up to fantastical ramblings by everyone who heard him. Even his parents had dismissed his view–his reality. It had hurt; even now the feeling still clung to him like a sickly haze, filling in the abyss where his memory should be.
That was probably what did it. The final straw that motivated him to finally show them .
Everything in his un-memory after that point isn’t exactly pleasant. He could feel a cold heat of flames, hear crackling above the din of the screaming as reality literally broke around him–the feeling of displacement and silence when it all finally collapsed. There was fear, anger, despair, horror, and it all hurt, hurt, hurt, so horribly that he couldn’t feel anything else. Hurt so badly he didn’t think he’d feel anything else ever again.
In some ways, he was right. He could ignore it, push it to the back of his mind, but it would always be there. It wouldn’t go away–couldn’t go away, no matter how much he tried to drown it out.
He had destroyed an entire dimension. An entire reality, everything he’d ever known and loved wiped away like it had never even existed. There was nothing left of it except a few atoms–not even a speck. He took them anyway, felt his hands shake as he held the final remnant of his universe, saw the blood on his hands, felt it drench his entire body and mind–and he hurt .
He doesn’t remember how he left. He just knew that he’d escaped to this new dimension at some point, and his memory started working again.
On the rare occasion he allows himself to think back on it, he can only imagine himself as an onlooker. It doesn’t feel like it truly happened, like it was a half-remembered nightmare that his mind conjured up all on its own. He almost believed that he’d made it up sometimes, but then he’d hold those stray atoms in his hands and feel the overwhelming weight of them crush those doubts to nothing.
Some part of him believed it’d been out of his control. He didn’t mean for things to turn out like they had. Another part believed it was for the better. He was just held back by his previous world, and he’d broken free of it.
And one part–a part that had almost entirely burned away with the rest of his dimension–knew his world had been destroyed by a monster.