A crumpled note, scrawled in red — ‘If only they knew. The show I have in store for them, oh if only they knew…
Despite the bright daylight, the city feels dark. It’s cold, and imposing, and unnatural, and it doesn’t want me here.
Everything hurts; my body feels like it’s not my own, and staring out through eyes that belong to somebody else, I see that it doesn’t look like my own, either…
It washes over me, seeping into every fibre of my being, immersing each and every atom to the point where I don’t know where I stop and it begins…
A lifetime has passed; an ocean of eternity has washed over me…
‘Drifting, floating, falling, but never moving… Time ripples around me but I can’t reach it, and I’m held here in a stasis that lasts an eternity and spans an entire universe…
‘Floating, weightless, the pressure holding me as though it were a vice. I hung in stasis for what can only have been eternity, somewhere between sleep and death…’
‘I’d been so long in this wilderness that I thought I’d never see another soul again. One by one our tiny band had fallen apart, lost along the way or through a loss of heart, until only I remained…’
‘After a time, the beauty of the garden started to fade away into something altogether more ominous. Even though we’d been trailing for hours, the same landmarks kept appearing on our horizon…’
‘We woke to the sun breaking on our faces. Squinting from the brightness, we looked around to find that the desolation we’d gone to sleep amidst had vanished.’
We felt the fire before we saw it. The heat stung our eyes, grasping at our throats, suffocating us.
We walked for days. The fleeting image had been more than a figment of our collective imagination, we knew it, and so we followed the trail of crooked lights deeper into the wilderness than any soul had dared go before us…