The End of the Dream

Chapter 21

Time passed. Or not—you couldn't tell for certain in this place. A few seconds felt like eternity. But your panic gradually faded. More than anything, you didn't have the energy to keep it up forever. It softened into an ache, a quiet despair, raw and gnawing. Trapped. Afraid. Betrayed.

It was different this time, though. You slowly forced yourself back to your feet, clinging to the thought. It was different. You were different.

This wasn't the mirror, for one. It might have felt similar, and the concept and intent behind Mark casting you out may have been the same. But it was the barrier preventing access to the core that Mark had shoved you into.

Maybe you could reach it now, go further and deeper into the wormhole than anyone else ever had. After all, you had—you were—the crystal.

You refused to sit back and stay trapped. This time, you had the power to set yourself free.

Easier said than done, of course. The determination was there, you clung to it like a lifeline, but the specifics of how to get back still eluded you. You pressed your palms against the barrier. Slow breaths, feeling it out with senses that weren't quite your own.

It wasn't just a physical barrier, but an energetic one too. It was impossibly dense. As thoroughly as you explored it, nothing remained to indicate where or how you had entered through it at all, not even a hairline fracture.

If you couldn't go backwards, you would have to go forwards. To the core. Potentially.

You'd work out what to do with it then.

This interim, between-worlds void was already different to the mirror. Not that you remembered your time there, but it simply felt different. It was more solid here, somehow. Rather, it was becoming more solid. The world was growing into existence around you.

The void lightened, like the first tinge of dawn on an overcast day. Fog coiled around your ankles until you were wading through it. That thread you had felt, the pull that had led you this far, was tangible again. The quality of it felt different. But maybe that was just how it was, this side of the barrier.

The grey fog swirled like water, until you realised it was water. Or, rather, that there was water somewhere. The soft babbling of a brook, hidden beneath the low-lying cloud cover. Then plants began to rise from it. Odd, unnatural things, but not unpleasant. Just different.

There were purple heathers and crimson gorse. It began to take on the aspect of a moorland beneath the blanket of night, laid heavy with a thick mist, holding its breath as it awaited the dawn.

The core? No... it didn't feel right. It didn't feel like the core; you would have known. That of you which was the crystal would have sung in recognition.

This was a mindscape.

Even so, something pulled you deeper. Waiting for you, calling for you.

The overcast haze of the sky cleared the deeper you plunged. Behind the cover of void-cloud was another inky black sky, but one that was full of life. It was painted with swathes of deep purple and crimson, just like the plants, and vibrant with the swirls of galaxies and nebulae.

And a brighter light, on the horizon. The blue-white stood out against the deep, rich colours of the rest of the mindscape.

You passed through a small copse of trees—grey-brown barks and leaves deeper than autumn—and came to a small meadow at the edge of the world. The ground simply stopped and fell away, a sheer drop with only the expanse of space beyond. A floating island, it seemed, and you had reached the end of it.