User Image - Blocked by "Display Image" Settings. Click to show.


5. You awaken in a place devoid of color, flat and featureless, the earth made of pebbled stones. A track is beaten through them that suggests the passage of many, many hooves, although it is utterly silent and there are no signs of life to be seen. You hear cold, mournful wind, but you do not feel it: the air is still and cool. A strange, smooth-sided tower rises in the distance and glows from within with a light like the moon. If you approach it, you find it surrounded with strange symbols, but touching it hurts--unless you are a Legendary, in which case it triggers floods of ancestral memory, not just from your own race (as expected), but from all of them. You remember snippets of lives lived by dozens of Kin of all types.

there was an emptiness
e
m
p
t
i
n
e
s
s
to this place

it is
a
v o i d
those impossible
spaces
in between
matter in between matter


When she woke up, she almost felt as if her body were gone, disappeared into the void all around that existed only as the knowledge in her mind that there were spaces and infinities between what she could touch and feel, between what she could understand. Her mind was spiraling, racing away from her body, her eyes wide and blank as she took in the immense and infinite flatness that surrounded her. She felt absolutely nothing and she wondered, idly and not for the first time, if these empty moments should terrify her, if that gentle nothingness that sometimes overtook her was something to be feared. The howling cold wind that did not touch her frame sent her awareness reeling back into her body, grounding her in this strange, empty, colorless land in a way that she had not felt since that first gasp of Swamp air out of her sac.

so she gasped
sides spreading in a heave
as if she could fill those voids
inside
with air


And she knew, she had to believe, that those moments of emptiness were gifts. They were reminders of feeling and being just like knowing the existence of anything was dependent on the concept of non-existence. The absence of matter and substance gave weight to everything that could be felt and touched and experienced. Perhaps one day the emptiness would change, would accommodate her new experiences the same way she no longer avoided the pull and gravity of connection, of feeling, of friendship. One, she had since learned, could not remain unchanged and unfettered. Life had a curious way of forcing one to change even when one wasn't looking to change.

When she looked out towards the horizon of what she could see, she found her eyes drawn to the smooth tower in the distance, the only thing that rose into the cool, still air besides herself. Though the pebbles underhoof suggested the existence of other kin and creatures, she knew deep in the marrow of her bones that she was only. There was no need to test her voice in this still in between space of existence; there would be no one but herself to hear and her thoughts were company enough inside her head. They echoed inside the confines of her skull in a way that she knew her voice would not, not here, not where everything seemed to be absorbed into nothingness.

So she began to walk, towards the tower, and against her will she began to run because there was no sound to tell her otherwise. Her hooves beat down on the pebbles but the meaning of her steps were lost to all-consuming nothingness that reached down to pluck their sound from her ears. It meant nothing at all without context until suddenly, she was before the tower, staring up its smooth side with its glowing symbols and impossible mysteries. All of this was impossible, at least within the universe that Last Night thought she knew, the reality that she had carefully explored since the first moment she was able.

She was drawn forward by curiosity, but when she touched the smooth side of the tower, she found her body filled with a searing pain. She pulled away to stare up at the tower, trying to imprint the symbols in her memory. They had to mean something, something important that was beyond her understanding. The longer she stared, the more her vision seemed to disappear into the bright glowing until she closed her eyes. She could see the symbols of dancing lights behind the darkness of her eyes. Taking in a long, deep breath, she leaned forward, pressing her cheek against the tower.

pain and longing
the unknown
tearing her apart with
its
mysteries
and telling her the the knowledge
was
unattainable
and
beyond her


She sunk into the pain, relaxed into it with acceptance and purpose until it stole even the dancing lights and she slumped into the void, this strange, colorless world stealing away even her mind for itself.