Path to the Void [Points of Light 1 - RPG fantasy]

1.01

I woke from a dream of nothing, and I saw nothing and knew nothing.

My back rested against the ground, and there was the smell of something… Plants, crushed by my body. I could feel the crushed stems poking into my back, jabbing into my arms, through my clothes. Besides the smell of the crushed plants, there was the scent of flowers hanging in the air around me.

I didn’t know any of that at the time. Being sprawled in that field, with the smell of crushed flowers strong in my nose, was the first of my memories. I remained there for hours, silent and with my eyes closed. My thoughts… They were trying to drag me down, back into the slumber I came from. Part of me knew that I had slept like that many times before.

But the stems in my back were incredibly uncomfortable; the smell of plants, the sound of rustling leaves, all foreign. I was curious. This wasn’t something I had experienced before, and I wanted to understand what it was.

And so I opened my eyes, and that’s how it all began.

Time was meaningless in that field, where the sight of flowers in the sunlight was overwhelming. It was all I could do to recognize colors, at first, with a nagging voice telling me to close my eyes again, to rest.

I moved my hand, and watched it move, and brushed it against a budding flower. There was hair in my eyes, blocking my view, and I slowly reached up to brush it away from my face. But even as overwhelmed as I was, I wanted to understand, and so I didn’t close my eyes. I reached out to one of the flowers, still learning the motions of my hand, and rubbed my fingers along the petals.

What a beautiful world.

I rolled my weight, crushing more flowers as I went, so that I was on my side. The leaves and stems were right up against my face; one of them, across my cheek, was covered in tiny, itchy hairs. I pushed myself up away from it, my weight supported on my hip and one arm, my hand in a patch of dirt between the flowers. The hair fell back across my face.

I felt… annoyed by it. A little silly to think of, now, that the first emotion I understood was being annoyed at my hair falling in my face. But I wanted to see.

I pushed it away again. A black spot – some kind of insect – flew across my vision with a buzzing noise. I instinctively swerved my head out of the way, and overbalanced, taking too much weight off the arm I was using to support myself and falling over, crushing more flowers under my back as I fell.

The black spot buzzed and landed on my chest, against a simple black shirt. Its body was small and smooth, with wide yellow stripes and tiny clear wings. I reached out to try and touch it, the way I had the flowers.

It didn’t seem to like hands. It flew-jumped onto my fingers and pressed its rear against my skin, puncturing it painfully. I yelped and shook my hand vigorously back and forth, trying to get it off – it flew away, but my hand didn’t stop hurting. There was a spot on it that was turning a color like some of the flowers around me, and that was where it hurt, so I put my mouth on it to try and relieve it a bit. It didn’t help too much.

Still, my misadventure with the flying spot had taught me something. I could make sounds, not just by moving the flowers to make them rustle, but all by myself, from my throat. I hummed as I sucked on my hand, relishing in the feeling of my throat vibrating and the sound in my ears. When the pain had abated a bit more, I pulled my hand out of my mouth to make more noises, playing with pitch on an open sound.

So distracted was I by the sound of my voice and the pain in my hand that I didn’t see that one of the shadowy spaces under the trees surrounding the flower patch had moved. I didn’t notice the shape until footsteps rustled the flowers nearest me, and the shadow was standing over my head.