A gentle, shimmering noise strayed into Gillan's brain. It was a soft melody, something akin to hearing how light splits to reveal the beauty of its spectrum in a drop of water. For but a moment in her slumber she could feel what it was to be both the drop and the ray of light, and then to feel how it was to rainbow into an infinite range of colour. The girl relished in the experience, her eyes rapidly shifting beneath her enclosed eyelids.
A ray of light — the same that she dreamt of? — strolled around her nose for the better part of a second. It walked, jumped, pranced, and frolicked on the field of her forehead. Then it submerged itself in the wondrous lush of her chestnut locks, which — despite the days upon days of travelling — were now in perfect condition as if the air itself washed them with its magic.
A giant snail, no, the snail was still sound asleep. A Knight in shining armour approached the dreaming girl. Photons darted and bounced off the scales of his cuirass, at first, separating into rainbows upon rainbows upon rainbows, only then to conjoin into the monochromatically entrancing nature of white light. The Knight kneeled.
If this were a fairytale, he'd then give the girl a nonconsensual kiss. Thankfully, it's not.
Katsugi looked around every second he spent walking towards the sleeping girl. He remembered what she had told him of the Road and was especially wary of his surroundings. Had he had a choice, he wouldn't have stepped on the shining bricks. But he didn't. If someone was to get him home, it was her. He kneeled and extended his arm.
The Knight shook her arm. Nothing. He shook her some more. Nothing. He then remembered his training. One time — there was a recruit who had been cursed with walking in their sleep — without their knowledge. The person would often wake up in the camp guards' watchtower, and with no explanation for their presence there, would be hit with a stick. It was like that until the recruit's back was too shambled to be hit — then they switched to slapping them on the face. But the real ending was that time when their tent-mates found a method of awakening.
Katsugi took a few steps back. He measured the distance with his eyes and took another step. He judged it again. Enough. The Knight adjusted his sabatons, tightened the laces and scraped some bloody residue off the soles. And then he stomped.
It was a stomp like no other. A healthy one, too. He didn't stomp with his heel — he knew that was the best way to ensure irreversible damage to the limb — when he stomped he did it with his whole foot. From the tips of the toes to the last inch of his heel, his whole, armoured foot slapped the Road beneath. A sound like no other, like the fragment of a piercing cacophony of terror jabbed into the quietude of the air.
Gillan's eyes smacked wide awake. She bolted to her feet and would raise her fists into a guard or draw her sword had she developed the muscle memory for it. But she hadn't. instead, the girl opted to lower her stance, as if expecting a sweeping, horizontal blow to her face. The pre-emptive want to dodge such a strike early took over and bent her knees into a squat. It took her half a minute to realise she was in fact, safe. It took her even less than that to see she wasn't.
Her brain would lock into battle stations — the mode it always assumed whenever tragedy struck — but there was just nothing to be done. Both were on the Road. She knew it. Katsugi knew it. Worst of all, the Road knew it too. For a moment, Gillan thought she could feel the bricks moving under her feet, similarly to how one felt an eel snaking between their legs when standing in a lake.
She swallowed loudly. The Knight looked at her. Both were standing in similar positions, both their bodies expecting a sudden earthquake to break out or a wall of fire to rise between them. But nothing happened.
The Road glimmered and emitted a quaint melody. The Knight and the girl relaxed. Their jaws unclenched, tension left their muscles. All was good.
Gillan shook off the enchantment slyly slithering into her mind. She told Katsugi to do the same, though she did not know how to explain it. The man took a few deep breaths, at least that's all she saw, and that seemed to have done the trick.
They reunited and started looking for Racer. The Roadside was riddled with trees, just like before. Gillan could swear she recognised the shrubbery beside which they stopped before going to sleep. But the snail was nowhere to be found.
They were stumped. With no method of transportation outside of the Road they were as good as dead. Hell, they probably wouldn't be able to leave the Road anyway.
"What do we do now?" Katsugi asked. Though he tried to take on a comforting tone, the worry still managed to seep through. Gillan sat down.
"I don't know," she said staring blankly into the distance. There, in the distance was the Road. Only the Road. There were trees on its sides but those were but an illusion. They were real though. The illusion was that they were there for them to reach.
Gillan got up. She tried walking towards the nearest thing outside of the Road — a bush. Though the bricks themselves didn't move or shift in any way and she saw herself getting closer to the leafy structure, she could never actually get as close to it as to touch it. In Katsugi's mind too, the same happened. He looked carefully at the girl when she tried grasping the bush, but it always seemed to be just barely out of reach.
They gave up. After a few tries with other plants, they gave up. Their footsteps took the two up the Road. They walked and walked and walked. The Road showed them things of wonder on its sides — with chromatic butterflies flapping gracefully in the conjured wind — or stone beetles rolling flawless spheres of pure diamond. And then, there was a sign.
