Tales of the Other

Universe of a Dream

Universe of a Dream
- Lolo Penguin

Even at a very young age, Nadeen already developed an acute sense of the world's irregularity, that despite the normalcy of the world they live in, something is just not right.

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I.

When she was five years old, Nadeen was running on the playground when she found herself slowly decreasing her speed on the deserted slides at the farther part of the playground. There was black mist twirling behind the leaves, with a voice speaking words that Nadeen cannot understand.

In fact, it is not a language that no one had ever heard, maybe a few old one knew what those words mean, but the girl knew nothing.

Nevertheless, she found herself responding to the "call". The voice was enticing enough, its tone unfamiliar yet attractive, like warm sheets, or the familiar drowsiness.

Nadeen walked inside the twirling mist, and it began to surround her like the eye of a tornado.

Whatever happened inside the wormhole, Nadeen cannot remember until now. She woke up covered in dry leaves, with her parents shaking her frantically.

"Are you alright, dear?" her mother asked her. "Why are you here? We've been looking for you for hours."

"Look, we searched here twice," Nadeen's father added, quite amused. "That's quite a scare, kid. How did you hide so well?"

Nadeen shook her head.
-----
II.

After an afternoon of intense Taekwondo sparring session, Nadeen went to the locker room with her friends to have a shower and change clothes. The girl removed her dobuk wet with sweat as well as the shirt and undergarments.

She placed it all inside her bag, where a book of Lovecraft's literary works nearly fell to the floor which she caught just in time. It is necessary for her to return it in the library tomorrow.

Her senior high school was a wonderful phase of Nadeen's life, albeit decorated with strange happenings here and then. She once thought that maybe ghosts are haunting her, spectres of unknown origin, but Nadeen as an intelligent woman adhered to agnosticism, much to the chagrin of her devout Catholic parents.

For a while, the haunting stopped.

Nadeen shrugged her way out of reverie and entered the shower cubicle. Warm, refreshing water came out of the shower, and she closed her eyes in relief, feeling the pain in her muscles receding.

The entire place went dark, and Nadeen cursed the irregular electric fluctuations in her school, since it includes the water system as well.

Covering herself with a towel, she exited the cubicle, barely sensing her way. It was unbelievably silent, even without the normal echoes from the outside, or the faint gossipings in the changing room.

Nadeen noticed that her feet stood on nothingness.

The white tiles faded into black mists, and the girl found herself floating in the infinite space of oblivion with nothing but towel. Her vision became accustomed to the darkness, with faint strips.of light appearing lightyears away like Aurora Borealis, outlining a series of shapes, like eyes closed. The shapes twitched every minute or so, light scattering in the black canvas.

Panic grabbed Nadeen's heart, a drowning soul in the middle of Nothing. She frantically moved her arms and legs, the unspeakable degree of loneliness slowly breaking her mental stability, and with every second the Eyes twitched.

Nadeen screamed soundlessly and she found herself back in the shower room, disoriented and curled on the cold tiles. She gathered her senses and stood groggily, hearing her friends' slightly irritated callings.

"What's taking you so long, girl?" one sparring mate asked. "We don't have all night!"

"I'll be there!"

"It's been thirty minutes!"

Thirty minutes. It felt like an eternity.

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III.

In the white and lifeless set of office cubicles, Nadeen sat and sipped her lukewarm coffee, staring at the rain-stained window. The storm was already out of the country, leaving one final downpour.

"So many stories to cover?" Reynalyn the photographer had teased her as the journalist busied herself in encoding. "Maybe you should rest in writing the news and have some hot date with the hot camera guy in the corner. Wait, I have a stolen picture here. Let me show you."

Nadeen just gave a little smile as Reynalyn showed the man's picture from her camera, but instesd of his picture, Nadeen saw the familiar Northern Light-like pair of eyes from a vision that she saw a two decades ago.

"Wait," Reynalyn stumbled and the other girl caught her. "What's the matter?"

Reynalyn stared at her with blank eyes, and she disintegrated into dark mist.

Explosions rattled Nadeen, and she opened the windows to see airplanes and helicopters falling to the ground. Cars crashed with another as well, with dark smoke coming out from the windows. Horrifief shrieks filled the air as Nadeen saw that the entire office where she stays disintegrated as well into nothingness.

The voice in her head grew stronger, making the woman's nose bleed profusely. It was speaking to Nadeen in her own native tongue, or probably the Voice is speaking in a language her mind can understand since His own language will break a man's sanity just to hear a syllable of it.

"I am waking up from my short sleep," the Voice said sluggishly. "Dreams...strange dreams..."

At once, Nadeen finally comprehended the Truth of the Universe, and her existence dissolved into the infinite soup of the Subconscious.

----

"The Roman Numerals Are Lost, For Time is Irrelevant."

The universe, a wide dark space dotted with trillions of galaxies, slowly dissolved, swallowed by the darkness. After eons, the End has come.

Across the planets, every life form saw the Eyes opening, and everyone who had the "Sense" had already foreseen its inevitable arrival.

They might not have understand it, but they managed to get a grasp of the Creature's sight to a very limited extent, since no one can understand the Creature, and trying to will render a mundane mind insane beyond cure.

It was an anticlimactic epilogue; the Universe succumbed not into a cataclysmic outburst. In the contrary, it felt like falling to sleep, while the Other awakes.

The Universe sank into the subsconscious of the one who slept, and at last, the Creature wakes from Its sleep.

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The Chronicler

No one knows what the Creature looks like. Even me, the Chronicler, knew little about the Creature's appearance; I saw It twice, and my brain felt the pain of processing the sight that cannot be processed by a lower form's intellect.
Here I am, recording what I am seeing, events beyond my comprehension, but I recorded them nevertheless. There were greater things unimaginable in its extent, and I realized that human race was nothing but insignificant microbes to Them.

I cannot remember much of my past, you see. But what I remember was that I am a product of the Creature's thoughts, and here I am, dragged into the Irrelevance of Time's Absence.

Nadeen. That name meant something, eons ago.