Stargazer

Wake

When I opened my eyes, a green haze covered everything.

I really didn't pay too much attention to it, I never was an early riser and waking up was the worst part of sleeping. Things got weird, however, notice-worthy weird, when my wish to close my eyes and burrow into my fluffy covers was denied by a single, yet very significant fact.

I wasn't in my bed.

In fact, I was standing, gravity holding my feet glued to the ground yet unable to feel my own weight charging on them. Adrenaline-fueled-fear ran through my veins and I forced my eyes to focus on things beyond my nose and the mist.

A hysterical joke reared its head at the sight of the roofless hall I was in. There was no other way to call it, nor hallway nor entrance and much less something as undignifiedly simple as a room. Columns made of what looked like twisted obsidian rose to hold fragments of trusses made of the same material that had once held a roof that was no more. Scarier still was the fact that those fragments should have long ago been thinned by erosion and pulled down by gravity's action...

The sky above was a sickly green that brought forth thoughts of charts from ammonia control in aquariums - and more than one movie where green skies were never a good thing. A shudder wracked up my body before the intense feeling of being watched while my mind wandered came to me. My eyes lowered and met figures cut into the slightly-lighter mist, their glowy pools of denser matter in the places where eyes should have been.

I lost it, completely and utterly lost it. I ran past them, feeling talon-like fingers snagging my arm for a second, knowing scratches would be on the way.

Was this the place where all of those people who reported to being accosted by supernatural entities encountered themselves in? A place made of light-eating stone where physical laws held no sway and strange misty-thingies clawed at you while the lack of logic slowly ate away your sanity... Not that I believed in those things, but one had to wonder. My legs kept moving underneath me while I looked for a way out and my brain tried desperately to piece together how had I ended up in this conundrum. One of those things extended its hands and threw something at me the second I caught sight of a darker patch of wall that might as well be a portal.

I speed up, trying to get there before whatever that thing shot managed to hit me - but it wasn't enough.

As I crossed the lintel I felt something hit my back, cold infecting and spreading through me quickly in a way that was as surprising as it was unsettling. I guess now I understood the expression of fire spreading through one's veins... just with cold instead of heat like someone was pouring liquid nitrogen through them. The pain came later but I was expecting it and was more preoccupied for: a, getting out, and b, the feeling crawling still through my body.

Black halls were everything within my sight, with some turns and forks here and there. I kept going straight, as fast as my legs could carry me with the hope of reaching a door, all the while hearing muted shrieks at my back and feeling the coldness and pain morph into almost unbearable heat. That damned stitch on my side made its appearance when another of those misty monsters appeared ahead and I was forced to quickly turn to the only way to the side or collide. I still ended up colliding more or less against a dead-end so in hindsight perhaps I should've tried to phase my way through the thing. It occurred to me that perhaps if I tried to speak with the things they wouldn't prove out to be bad thingies, but my gut feeling said otherwise. Seemed like I would have no other option than to try and prove my 'perhaps diplomacy can handle everything' as I had trapped myself between a rock and a hard place.

Oh, how I wished for the earth or stone or whatever to open up under my feet and swallow me whole just to avoid the confrontation with those things...

And had I not yet fully formed the thought nor the pleading whine at the end of my throat when suddenly it became true: under my feet stone dissolved and I fell straight into the abyss. The screaming was deafening even to my ears, though that ended and was replaced by the roaring sound of my own blood in my veins and that of my brain giving up on this shit, closing the door and driving away.

A swirling sea of energy that ate all the visible spectrum but the aforementioned yellow, green and yellowish-green, and jaded rocky islands floating here and there as if gravity was something easily dismissed - it was now officially the weirdest dream I'd ever had, and I craved to wake in a way previously unknown to me.

The ground was getting closer, courtesy of one of the floaty rocks. Up close one could see half-crumbled structures, twisting and turning in ways that would make any Civil Engineer claw their eyes out in outrage. For those with biological inclinations, there were also trees that I couldn't recognize with figures that brought to mind pictures of nuclear wastelands. More of those misty thingies floated here and there, yet this time my gut warned me not of bad intentions but of raw, untamed power - which still meant a 'no-go' in gut-speech.

I was about to scream - cheer to the approaching ground, the hope to die in this place and wake in my warm bed ready to laugh all this off almost a raw feeling in my skin when suddenly a non-gravity took a hold of me and lowered my speed until I landed softly on solid rock

My brain came back, only to sarcastically point out that without it I couldn't even commit accidental suicide in a dream without somehow screwing up.

It took me a second to connect myself with this token body in dreamland, finding myself still high-strung with adrenaline and harsh breathing induced by fear. My insides still hurt due to whatever those monsters had shot at me, and there was some minor dull pain on the soles of my feet that I didn't expect after the gentle landing.

Feeling bold and alive and defiant and very much not safe I turned and sought the place from which I had fallen, planning to use it as a landmark and get as far away from it as possible.

A giant construct of black atop the largest of the floating rocks I had seen until then. Even from where I was, what seemed like kilometers under, I could see the bright yellow that belonged to artificial lightning on windows and as close as I was it wasn't hard to see towers and spires and roofs cut against the sickly sky. A shiver deep in my back, sweat turning cold and whatever was on my veins heating up until almost unbearable levels were enough.

I would call myself a coward for feeling paranoid on a dream later when all of this was over, but at the moment the sensation of being watched and preyed upon was raw and real. And I felt no shame at all in simply turning and following the clearest path away from the floaty city.