IV: How Dare I Be So Beautiful?

While the town celebrates, we transition back to the bloodied battlefield to find the POV quietly surveying the wake of the wreckage. A literal "mountain of human flesh" leads them to a "plateau of green grass, and green trees full of life." Its imagery is very straightforward, and I tried to keep faithful to this through my illustrations.

On this plateau, the POV find Narcissus staring at himself in a pool. He too is a survivor of the battle, drenched in blood and disillusioned with the world. As he stares, he rapidly ages so that "Social Security" needs to take care of him. Whereas before different periods of time clashed on the page but more or less were stable, here the disruption creates a pocket anomaly that unsettles the very fabric of reality (or at least the reality of the dream-state).

Narcissus fulfills his mythic fate, becoming a flower before the POV's eyes. Death gives way to life, just as the mountain of death holds a plateau of life on its summit. The cycle found earlier in the Farmer's field emerges here, expressing itself in a bright new show of color.

But just as this seems to be the epiphany the POV have been journeying for, the flower addresses the audience (you, the viewer) to confirm that indeed, he's been turned into "a flower?" Through a second of animation, this moment jars our perception and the anomaly finally collapses on itself like a black hole, sucking the POV down into the other side of the world.