The Life of Gaia

CHAPTER 32: The Gymnopedie Realm

The closer we got to the Gymnopedie Realm, the more I felt a feeling of deja vu growing in me. It seemed that I had already seen the shards of glass on the ground arranged that way, that Zantas had already moved through the air that way, and that I had already had those thoughts. Each step in that direction reinforced the feeling that I had already experienced everything that was happening.

I was trying to convince myself that it was a bad joke of memory, when the flying sign muttered something in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible.

°This is not possible, yet I have the feeling that I have been here before.°

I stopped suddenly to look at him confused.

"You know, me too." I paused. "Are we sure we haven't really been here?"

°Of that there is no doubt,° he sentenced. °For this reason we must keep our eyes open. It could be a trap by the King of Fireflies.°

Speaking of fireflies: those that had followed the call of the music had vanished, as if they had been sucked into the darkness around us. Indeed, it could indeed have been a trap, perhaps one into which they had fallen instead of us.

We expected that at any moment the mysterious melody would begin again, so we proceeded with eyes and ears wide open, ready to react to a possible attack. The sense of deja vu grew stronger and stronger, until it became impossible to ignore. Now that I think back on it, I was more scared than I wanted to admit to myself. In short, it was like walking through someone else's memories.

All this, until the map indicated that we had reached the new leg of the journey.

The darkness of Incubia suddenly disappeared to make way for a grayish sky and perfectly flat ground. Behind us was darkness, but in front of us there seemed to be nothing. Even the air was still. We had ended up in a kind of square from which they had erased all its characteristic marks with an eraser.

I looked around, and that's when I discovered that Zantas was not there. Gasping, I peered around and above me, but not a shadow of him.

"Zantas?"

The sound of my voice burst into that emptiness like a stone thrown into a puddle. The last syllable of his name stretched out, repeating itself a dozen times after I had already closed my mouth in a concert of echoes. Each time it was repeated, it was pitched to a different note, one higher, one lower ... and all the notes, together, formed just the melancholy melody that had attracted the fireflies. I almost had a stroke - out of surprise, I brought my hands to my mouth and held it tight for a while. What if those echoes had attracted the thing that had attracted the fireflies?

You probably have no idea what it's like to see the world around you transform before your eyes into that of your own memory, so I'll do my best to give you that feeling.

Imagine you are a shell on the beach, resting on the grains with no thoughts nagging at you, with the sound you know so well of sea waves crashing on the shoreline in the background. Here, now pretend that a child with a shovel and bucket stands next to you and starts building around it a copy of the seabed where you were born. How does he know exactly where to place one coral instead of another?

Good question: that's exactly what I was asking myself as the land around me was being shaped in seconds into a perfect copy of Deep Reality's serving-planets.

In the blink of an eye, a dozen orbs the size of small moons rose into the air carrying me up with them. Around me and under my feet formed a platform complete with a railing that I remembered very well having seen before. I didn't understand what was going on, but I had recognized the environment immediately: I was on the elevator leading from one planet to another, which was the place where I had first met Aries. A near-perfect copy, except for the colors: the red of the original planet had been replaced by Fantastracta's shades of yellow.