Esk Tales {TWWM-ARPG Writings Collection}

Up For Air {Naia}

Up For Air
{Naia}
{First Time Visiting the Conservatory}

.:+:.

There came a call from somewhere in the deep that Naia had not heard before. Something soft and whistling like wind winding through the sandy grass that littered the beaches, but still more musical. It bubbled up from the pitch black water with ease, not at all muffled nor echoing eerily like those calls from whales and dolphins she had heard so many times before. It sounded unnatural, near supernatural- and it surely felt as such when the call came with some sudden and unknown tug in her center that urged her downward.

The bright light of the sun staining the seafloor of her boundary was long since gone, what little of it that managed to pierce down through the miles of water fading to nonexistence quickly as she pushed herself further down. The cold pricked at her skin under her fur where it seldom ever did, the shadows overtaking everything to the point she could not make anything out, let alone the bottom or the flash of pink bodies that were her familiars diligently following her. All sense of direction would have been lost if there had not been that strange pull within herself, tugging at her very soul and guiding her wherever it lead, and for whatever end.

The pressure was mounting though it didn't stop her, she was used to the heaviness though this was surely farther down than she had ever dared go. She knew the ocean, it was her home and she knew there were places in it that went so deep it was unfathomable.... but as the minutes passed and she continued downward steadily, she started to wonder if she'd somehow been lured into a section of the sea that was near on to endless. It just kept going, and far longer than she could fathom. She thought of turning back, but the call ringing in the deep was insistent, and the tug at her center all the more so.

So she followed, perhaps a bit naively, and certainly blindly- down all the way into what could only have been the center of the earth. The center of the earth where she felt herself moving across some invisible border and line drawn in the heart of the ocean itself, the tug in her center jerking slightly for it as she remained in pitch black where no light could ever hope to reach.... so you can imagine her surprise when the darkness suddenly began to be tinged with red and blue.

Naia unconsciously slowed up, uncertain and all the more confused as she kept swimming downward and ahead of her the blurry image of the surface of the water came into sight. It was as if the whole world had been tipped on it's head, rendering her downward descent into a sudden motion in the opposite direction where she would break the top and come up for air.

But where? And how? The ocean surely could not remain suspended in both directions with land and sky on either end. Gravity and physics were a fickle thing when being an esk, but the earth itself did not play so fast and loose with those concepts as she herself could.

An unseen bottom to the water suddenly rose up in front of her nose, sloping gently up toward that strange in impossible surface ahead. Her webbed feet hit slick mud instead of grainy sand, or even silt- which was an altogether foreign sensation, though not as foreign and jarring as it was that the salty seawater she was wading through became instantly more murky and basic. The salt disappeared altogether, taking on a consistency much more like those puddles of rainwater she'd encountered before, fresh.

Her head broke the surface of the unnatural water, bright light dazzling her as it bounced off an abundance of a color she'd never seen in so vibrant a hue. Red painted everything, the grass and underbrush a multitude of russet, crimson, and cardinal that matched the tops of trees with trunks of a striking white, where debris and bits of the wood littering the unnaturally colored grass looked like flecks of ice. Around her the water was turquoise and green layered in the reflection of the red, brighter bursts of it in the form of leaves floating lazily along the surface that rippled only faintly as she made her way up.

Naia looked around slowly, awed and uncertain to see the landscape stretching out all around her with only that tiny pool she stood in to hint at any source of water- and certainly not the whole of the sea she had left behind, but never actually left.

She'd never been in a place like this before, the trees she'd seen around her Boundary had been spindly and waterlogged, and never in the size nor multitude as they were here. Some part of her knew this was a forest, the word echoing in the back of her mind from some place she didn't know where she'd learned it, and the same place that named it and told her all at once this forest was not normal.

No, this whole place wasn't normal.

The sky above her mimicked blue and cloud behind the red canopy, but there were lines worn into it that gave away the illusion and made it clear there seemed to be some sort of roof hatched in glass panes on high. There was also some odd humm of power and vibrancy that seemed to spark off every tree, leaf, drop of water, and swirl of air. A power reverberating deep from within this strange place and surely that same power that had made the call that tugged her into the deep and through some unknown portal to here..... but where here was, she had no clue.

A crimson-red leaf fluttered down from a nearby tree to land on the edge of the pool ahead of her, Naia following it's descent in silence while the tug in her center that had lured her here tugged again, urging her in the direction out of the water and into the not-quite-right forest beyond.

She didn't know where here was, or why it seemed to have a mind of it's own that let it manage to prod her. It was all odd... but she had a sense that there was something hidden in all the red that might lead her to understanding where it was she had found herself coming up for air.

So, she stepped from the water and headed in, her figure bright white among the vibrant red, and whiter even than the trunks of the trees. She stepped forward and let that same call lead her in further, the sound of it winding through the trees just as easily and unobstructed as it had through the ocean before now.

'Come in..... come to me.'