It's all Inside

Prologue Chapter 2

What happened?

Thoughts swirl around inside me and there isn't anything I can see for miles. White outlines of nothing in my vision, throughout the dark, there does not seem to be anything I am familiar with. The brain can pin imagery to memory in no time flat, and my thoughts don't seem to connect with a solution right now. My head softens itself and falls apart. It makes me think of knots. It makes me think of Juniper... my mom, my dad, flashes of moments when I was a kid, and then I see some I don't recognize.

I suppose you can call this a tunnel. Though any other description would mislead you, this tunnel is spinning in directions I can not place. Every time it stops for a brief moment, I see the white outlines again. I suspect this is my vision playing tricks on me, but I see people and objects this time. Like statues they don't move, only they are. It reminds me of when color on TV messes up and garbles itself, then the pixels form back together as if nothing has happened. The people in these outlines don't seem correctly formed. They move like flip books when I approach them and then garble up somewhere else around me. This unnerves me, and I begin to stand against what I think to be a wall and stare at the white outlines, so many of them, appearing and reappearing at intervals. I have to say that a few of these outlines look so familiar. I get the same feeling I get when I know a word but can't place it off the tip of my tongue when I look at them, and my head is throbbing. I want to get out of here, I want to go home. I hear something crumble and fall on my head, it makes me jump back and lose my balance, sinking me down the surface of what I was standing against. I cross my arms over my knees.

Each second I look left, then right.

After a few I look right, then left.

The tunnel is still spinning. Something is crumbling.

I think I was at school? I was in class. I went in, and stayed for class, I know there were voices, and I did attend class, but... what happened?

The box. That damn box. The metallic one with chains and was a pain in the ass to open. It was so heavy, and it was purple. It was locked up real tight. I tried to open it. It wouldn't open, so I went home. I was talking to someone and they... they? They didn't do anything? Or do I just not remember? I feel like I do though. My memory is there, it's sitting right there and I want to believe that I do.

I don't.

What I do remember is the box pulling me in. Yes, that's right. The box did open and I was there to see it. Does this mean something? Am I starting to remember? This is leaving me with more questions than answers here. I wish this wasn't so hard to understand. I wish I could be anywhere but here. I wish I could see my hands, my fingers, and I wish I was home with my mom and dad. I realize that I'm so scared and I don't even know why. I want to go home and I want to go back to school and I want these white outlines to leave me alone. I don't know these people, or things, or whatever the hell they're supposed to be.

I've been walking cautiously for a while now. I can't say how long, I don't know. I stop.

There's a beacon of hope for me.

High up, way above me, there's a tall and out of reach sliver of light, no bigger than a crack in this dark pocket of existence. There's no way I will reach that.

I notice something off about this place. There are now little cliffs to the sides of the walls that I can, oddly, see. One on each side. What surprises me and makes me paranoid is that I hadn't notice these earlier. Had these always been here? Nonetheless, it's only these low cliffs along the walls that I can spot out. It sounds a bit strange, but I think that this is my only way out of here.

It's impossible though. The column of cliffs do lead up towards the crack of light, but I can't vertically get to any of the ones above the first pair. Still, I head to these platforms through a small uphill leading to it, and given that there is an unknown source of light making this place visible, I concur that the ground I am standing on is grass. The rest of the platforms follow this.

I jump.

Now I'm dangling on the other side, arms stretched out at the edge and barely managing to pull myself up. There's a metal ladder left to the side that avoided my attention, just like these platforms. I put the ladder up to the platform above me, and with it threatening to fall down off the platform I'm on, climb up to the second platform.

I get it. My feet proceed for me, and each leap I take between platforms makes it more and more apparent to me that as I look down each time, the darkness could swallow me. I almost fall one time, nearly tripping on my running leap, and take a deep breath in, and then breathing out to try and tell myself that I have to be careful. Each ladder I climb up, I can't help but wonder who could have been here to set all this up. When I look down the platforms, the white outlines are disappearing.

The bright light is becoming closer and closer to me, each platform takes a wad of my strength to pull myself up to, but I manage. I'm starting to get fatigued, I can't seem to think about anything other than getting to the top. For starters, I don't know where I am, and I don't know where I'm going. I can't say I'm surprised about that phrase in a way, because there's a nagging feeling inside of me that I experienced this more than once on numerous occasions.

I reach one last time, at the top platform, for the surface. Grabbing to an unknown surface, it feels warm and lifting myself up makes me sweat quite a bit. This has to have been one of the hardest to reach platforms yet, because before I was able to leap from one to the other due to a small gap between them, but this is taking me my entire body weight to let myself up to. I don't know where I'm going, yet, I can hear the sound of nature, and it's at this moment in who knows how long since I ended up here, that this gets me to truly feel like what is to come, outside this crack of light shining down upon me through this manhole, will be worth it.