Luther shoved me so hard, I went cartwheeling into the darkness, tumbling fast and far and out of control. I braced myself for a nasty impact, but before I could slam into that hard looking obsidian orb, a soft but powerful force seized me. I passed through something thick and soft like an invisible gel that sapped away all my momentum. I passed from utter darkness to blinding light, decelerating and floating gently down into a patch of powdery grit so cold I mistook it for snow.
A tingle shivered through me. Something shifted and left my body. I could tell that I had become something less than what I had been.
I wiped the grit from my eyes to find a landscape as bleak and desolate as the moons of Jupiter. All was bright, yet there was no sun. A diffuse glow spread across the sky, dimming gradually towards the horizon—a weirdly ubiquitous and source-less light that cast no shadows.
A fine haze hung in the air, blending earth and sky, smudging the distant horizon and rendering it barely discernible. Pink and gray dominated the landscape, mottled and mixed into diverse patterns and intermediate tones. A strong and constant wind sucked every last bit of residual heat from my body.
The sheer biting intensity of the cold shocked me, but no more so than my ability to endure it. The cold sank deep into my flesh, but my perception of it was in the abstract. The chill registered to my senses but I felt no threat from it, no biological imperative to get warm. It had no bearing on my ability to live, because I wasn’t exactly alive anymore.
Dry ice would have shed no fog in a place like this. A puddle of liquid nitrogen wouldn’t have even bubbled. The phrase ‘cold as hell’ suddenly had a new meaning. And to think I was drawing this frigid atmosphere into my lungs, if the twin cavities in my chest could still be described as such. But I felt no compulsion to breathe or blink and only did so out of habit.
Even more disconcerting was my lack of a heartbeat. The inside of my chest was as still as a crypt. Clearly, I was no longer a living thing, but something between a spirit and a human. I had entered another, more alien plane of existence.
I got up and looked around, trying to understand the layout of this place. The indistinct horizon rose all around me like the wall of some impossibly massive crater. The intervening landscape was all rumples and wrinkles. The terrain looked squashed, as if the mountains and hills that used to be here had been ground down to nubs.
I turned to face the wind and started walking. I had no destination, but I didn’t know what else I could do. I glanced back after a few dozen paces at the shallow prints my feet had pressed into the dust. Those more than a few steps back had already been erased by the constant wind. There would be no chance of retracing my steps.
That realization made me panic. If the place I had landed was an entrance to this world, it might also be an exit. The problem was, there was nothing distinctive about it whatsoever; no landmark that would allow me to navigate back, not even any stray rocks with which I could build a cairn. I dropped to my knees and tried digging down through the dust, but only a few inches down I encountered seamless bedrock with the consistency of fire-hardened clay.
I got back on my feet, sucked it up and resumed my walkabout. Staying put was out of the question. I had come here to find souls, and there weren’t any to be found out here in these wastes, and I couldn’t very well expect anyone to come looking for me.
I told myself there was nothing special about the spot I came in; that it wasn’t so necessary that I return to that exact place. But with every step, I could feel my anxiety ramping up.
***
Hours, I must have walked. Half a day, maybe, though it was hard to tell without a clock. The unchanging sky told me nothing. Its brightness never wavered, and it never revealed a source. It was perpetually sunless and twelve o’clock noon.
