The sounds weren’t the same.
That’s the first thing I noticed.
Where before, there’d only been the calm, steady rush of waves gently breaking against the shore, there was now something new; it was uneven, and chaotic, a constant cacophony of noise in the air and the earth all around me. I thought there might’ve been a loud crash, not unlike the sound the water made when waded through in a hurry.
The wind was different, too, in more ways than just the noise it made. It twisted and danced on my skin and through my hair in every direction, utterly discordant.
The longer I focused on that feeling all around me, the clearer its image in my head became, the sharper the pain. It started as a dull ache, but as I heaved myself upwards from the depths of unconsciousness, it became the blinding sunlight behind my closed eyelids and the jagged rocks beneath my neck.
It was unnatural. It hurt to think about. There was something missing, and I couldn’t tell what. The noise was wrong, the air was wrong– nothing like the harmony and rhythm of the world I was used to. I tried to put all these things together and find some semblance of order behind them, but strings of thought collapsed and faded into the noise before I could make sense of anything. That was a feeling I couldn’t remember feeling, and it wasn’t one I felt I could tolerate for long.
Not that I had a choice, apparently.
I didn’t remember how I came to be wherever I was; nor, in fact, much of anything at all. The memories were clouded behind the pain. All I felt at first was the wind.
But there was more than just that. Slowly, slowly, I began to discern the subtle push of gravity, the arc of magnetism, the flow of hot electricity through my body. The currents of energy flowed through the air and the earth, beneath the noise, warped ever so slightly by my presence.
First there was the exchange within myself, and then there was the heat that burst forth from that gentle process, and then I could feel the heat on my skin and in the air and the delicate pull between the two. I cautiously bent the current of energy above my head, tugging and teasing as best I could, and found I was still able, thankfully. I clung to the connection between me and the air like it was all I had left in the world (and to be perfectly fair, it sort of was).
It still hurt to focus on, but that connection was there. It grounded me.
I was alive; I wasn’t sure what dying felt like, but the realization came with a rush of relief nonetheless. I was alive. Somewhere. Somehow.
Slowly, I opened my eyes, and the next thing I noticed was that I was blind.
No. No, that wasn’t right. It was dark as night, darker, but as my eyes painfully began to adjust, I could just make out the slight definition of the rough surface I was seeing. I realized I felt the coarse ground against my face. I put it all together with the weight of gravity bearing down above me: I was lying face-down.
All my senses were much, much slower than they should’ve been. My sight, my hearing, my touch, my balance. The energy I knew was all around me seemed dull and distant. Trying to visualize myself lying down like that, the image twisted by perspective and defied by the force of gravity… I thought I felt nauseous. I felt like I’d accidentally faceplanted into a rock at terminal velocity. Again. Had I done that before? It was… fuzzy. Probably not a good sign.
The gritty taste of salt and sand filled my mouth. There was just a moment of cold panic as I tried to lift myself and found my muscles giving out from beneath me, and another stab of pain flooded through my skull.
I took as deep a breath as I could, given that my face was still buried in the ground, and I braced myself to try again. Just a little bit at a time, I lifted my head, pushing aside the pain and discomfort and spitting an ocean of sand from my mouth out onto the ground around me. But I managed.
The light was piercing. I turned my head and I screwed my eyes shut, but it didn’t help much. It was going to take time to adjust; maybe it was better in the dark, further from all the noise. Blindly, I braced myself on my elbows and reached forward to find the soft ground, kneading my fingers through the sand all around. With what seemed to be more effort than I could remember ever needing, exhaling deeply at the strain, I pushed myself off the ground and rolled over to collapse onto my back. I couldn’t even bother trying to figure out how long I laid there.
Everything hurt. I took in the cold air, tinged with the hints of seawater and something else I couldn’t place. I felt the heat and light against my face. Everything was a little wrong, somehow. A little… off-kilter.
With halting trepidation, I opened my eyes.
The sunlight slowly came into focus, and then I saw the sky, the water, the expanse of sand stretching out all around, dotted with sparkling pebbles and slivers of driftwood. I blinked through the pain in my head and the tears streaming into my eyes, fighting through the sensations clashing at the forefront of my mind.
Ahead of me, the sea collided with the beach in a wall of foam and icy spray, melting into the horizon at such a distance it was impossible to tell where it ended. The cresting waves weren’t the placid, rolling swells I’d expected to see, but long, violent ridges.
I got up onto my knees, and turned to look behind me, to see if I’d somehow just gotten turned around and confused in my sleep. With some difficulty I reached out through the sea of energy in the atmosphere, and very faintly I could feel the ebb and flow of heat through each of them, just like the trees I was used to. But there were so many of them.
I’d never seen anything like this in my entire life.
The walls had fallen away while I wasn’t looking, and all that remained was the sea and the sky. And a forest I’d never seen. Come to think of it, I’d never seen any forest outside of a picture or a book. They were a distant, charcoal abstraction, never anything like this. Never.
If my home was gone, then the books were gone too. The old stories and encyclopedias I’d spent endless hours reading, the new ones I’d written from ideas that had drifted in while I slept or on the wind while I daydreamed. Drawings and journals and tedious charts which I’d read a thousand times over nonetheless. The realization froze me in my place.
For a long, long time, I sat in the sand, looking between the sea and the earth, the universal thrum of the world all but drowned out by the discordant buzzing in my head. Without thinking too hard of the implications, I visualized home, and what I knew. How I should go about analysing an unusual problem. I hadn’t had many encounters with such things before, but I could get through it. I told myself I could.
Okay. Step one. Breathe. Breathe.
Easier said than done. I remembered to breathe – I found I’d once more accidentally stopped for a while, I’d been so distracted – and felt the icy air flow. Kept myself grounded in the earth and the electricity.
Step two. Mindfully observe and identify whatever unknown phenomena were occurring. That one was easy: literally everything about this situation. But that didn’t help much.
Step three. Determine what the cause might be.
These weren’t exactly experimental conditions. Either something happened to me, or something happened to the entire world, so I decided to focus on myself for my own sanity’s sake. Before I woke up on the beach, when I heard the sounds and felt the atmosphere shifting, it was just black. A dull ache. And before that, the last thing I remembered from home was…
Searing white like sharpened sunlight. Even trying to hold it in my mind felt as painful as staring into it, so I did my best to skirt around it mentally, picking out the other details. I remembered a wrenching feeling inside me, like falling from an endless height to an unknowable below.
There was something like an explosion. Had I done that? Could I have? Everything was so wrong that I couldn’t even begin to fathom whether I’d gotten lost, or if the world had disappeared, or– I had no idea. Nothing had ever looked like this. This wasn’t something I could do.
As they usually did, unanswered questions brought me, finally, to step four. The one that was now itself the problem. Consult the library.
I took another shaky, measured breath. I didn’t think that any explosion I made could’ve destroyed everything; I knew I didn’t do it on purpose. I wouldn’t. But, no other explanations presenting themselves… if it had thrown me into another world like this, then it stood to reason that other things could have been thrown with me.
That’s what had happened, I decided. I had been thrust into another realm of existence. I had no idea what that meant, exactly, but that wasn’t something to worry about right now. Never mind the details. Don’t think about the details.
I placed a hand against the ground, twisting my fingers through the space that wasn’t quite there, feeling the energy bend around them as I gave it focus. Very carefully, I teased it apart, plucking at the strands one by one until–
It snapped. With a crack, the air beneath my palm ignited and tore itself apart, taking the sand with it. I shielded my face as the grains exploded into a geyser high into the air, raining down all around like a gritty rain of ash or drifting lightly away. Left beneath my hand was a sizeable crater in the beach, its sides already beginning to crumble.
I tried again, a few steps away. Another crater, with nothing at the bottom.
I kept trying. I don’t know why I expected to find anything by randomly blasting holes in the ground, but I couldn’t not try.
There was more to this place than a narrow crescent of shore, though.
My attention shifted outward as I brushed yet more sand from my face. The sand sloped slowly downward towards the foam at the water’s edge, which washed up and down with the waves, leaving behind tiny pebbles and driftwood and familiar tangles of seaweed.
I took care to avoid the debris as I started down the slope, my footing shifting atop the soft sand with every uncertain step. Actually stepping into the water was more of a shock.
I knew what it should have felt like, and I thought I knew what to expect, but it was so cold, even next to the stark breeze blowing in off the waves. For only a moment or two, I felt a deep shiver up my legs, before I quickly remembered to adjust my heat and got to work warming myself. The edge of my dress wavered and clung where it touched the water.
My feet sunk even further into the muddy sand as I continued, dragging against the shallow water. Scanning the horizon for any landmark I might find, I saw only clouds drifting in the distance. That couldn’t stop me from trying.
There was no way to know what I was looking for, but I felt that if anything presented itself, I’d know in a heartbeat. I kept above the roiling waves as they pushed back and forth, stronger and stronger the higher the water got around me. I looked down into the distorted seabed around me, spending some of my limited focus on searching for any stray signs of home. It was difficult work.
There weren’t any waterlogged books, no chips of familiar stone; but suddenly, though the waves were lapping nearly to my neck and the depths were increasingly dark, I thought I made out the faintest golden glimmer.
I took another step, and this time my foot didn’t find purchase.
My face hit the water, and all at once my focus was shattered. I fell like the ground had been pulled out from under me, sliding down a murky slope I hadn’t seen. My limbs flailed wildly, but there was nothing but loose sand to grasp. I tumbled, half-blinded by the stinging seawater, the light bent by the currents until I couldn’t even tell which way was up.
I screamed out, involuntarily, and instantly choked. I gasped and only drew in more seawater. I couldn’t breathe.
I didn’t need to breathe, though. I didn’t need to. I don’t need to.
I would live.
I focused on that, commanding my limbs in turn to stop wildly churning, and then my lungs, and my throat. I let myself drift into stasis, forcing my body to stop convulsing in blind panic.
Maybe I should’ve been used to disorientation, at that point, but the thought didn’t ease the terror. My senses were scattered– partly by the cold, partly by the chaotic currents buffeting my body back and forth. As I finally came to rest at the bottom of the underwater slope, I numbly let myself sink into the silt. At least I knew where the bottom was.
While forcing the rest of my body to be still, agonizingly still in a way I hadn’t done in a very long time, I lifted myself onto my knees. And I had no clue at all what I was seeing.
It was as if a second forest stretched out beneath the waves. There were winding columns of seaweed waving without care, and woven between them the spindly branches of rock-like trees in dazzling colours, and as I looked even longer I saw the fans of bright leaves and the pockmarked hills and pillars of the same material rising from the seabed in the distance, all dancing with lines of sunlight from above. There were even tiny fish, and even smaller things; it took effort, but as I reached out to feel the electric fields all around us, I felt a burst of life flowing through what I could only imagine was the entirety of the ocean.
It wasn’t even the same ocean.
The waves rolled overhead again, shifting the cascades of sunlight falling onto the forest in front of me, and I saw it. The thing I’d seen before I fell.
From a rosy branch jutting from the stone forest, drifting in the currents, hung a small golden locket on a fine golden chain, glinting and sparkling hypnotically when the light allowed. A tiny fish swam up to it as I watched, curious, before darting away again.
I didn’t know what it was, or where it came from, but I knew it was something. I reached out and pulled it from the branch, my numb fingers clinging to it like it might vanish if I dropped it; I can’t say I didn’t feel that way. I clutched the locket to my chest, heavy with water, and then I turned and began the long climb back to the surface.
I heaved brine from my lungs as soon as I could feel the air against my face. And then I coughed as soon as I reached the dry safety of shore. And then I coughed some more.
Eventually, though when I was laying on my back and staring up at the clear sky, blinking salt from my eyelashes, I could really see the locket.
My own face stared back at me in its surface, it was polished so perfectly. Undoubtedly more so than anything I remembered having. My reflection was scarred, though, by the jagged, geometric patterns etched lightly into the golden surface. It was an odd, complex figure, like a diamond with too many edges. My heart raced as I realized, in the back of my mind, that it was maybe, almost, faintly familiar, and I would’ve been too excited to handle myself at that point had it not been for the pain still clouding my memories.
But it was the only thing I’d recognized since I woke up, and I would not give it up lightly. I had to know it! Somehow, it came with me!
The fine chain run across my palm, I fumbled with the locket’s latch with trembling fingers until I heard a soft metallic click. Almost frantically, I swung its etched face open to reach the secrets it held, holding it just inches from my face.
My reflection still stared back at me.
It was empty. I’d never seen it before in my life. The fact struck me like lightning, then, as my heart fell through my chest, that it was only me. Nothing else. Nothing but a useless, empty mockery of a memory.
I threw it without looking, away from the ocean and into the treeline, where I heard its metal thud lightly against dark, gnarled bark. I didn’t know what else I could do. My eyes downcast, I stood paralyzed on the beach, staring intently at every grain of sand without knowing why.
And still, nothing changed. There was no test of patience or defiance. Maybe I really had done this to myself, somehow, but it didn’t really matter.
I groaned to myself. And then, when nobody answered, I shouted louder and louder until my cracked voice was echoing across the water. And louder still until the sound gave out entirely, and I was left rasping, rocking on my feet.
What is happening to me?
I carefully wiped the sand and water from my face with one sleeve. I closed my mouth. Nothing could hear me anyway.
It wasn’t long before I went to retrieve the locket, indignant, my face flushed. As it turned out, it wasn’t difficult to find; the golden shell, still open, glittered in the fading sunlight, hanging once again from a tree branch. Not even a scuff to be seen on its surface. For some reason, that frustrated me more than anything else.
But there was no good reason to leave it there. I gently pulled it from the narrow branch and slipped it around my neck, feeling its cold weight as I snapped it closed.
By then, the sky was smoky violet, the soft clouds starting to cast their long shadows across the water and the earth. The wind over the waves started to pick up, and I could warm myself from the inside, but its bite against my face still stung. Night would come quickly.
Some of my old stories, I remembered, detailed the journey into unknown wilds; they also assured that there was nothing to fear in the dark, which had once seemed comforting, but spending the night in the halls I’d travelled a thousand times each versus wandering through the pitch-dark woods all around were, in practice, on different levels entirely. In different galaxies.
Still, the shore held nothing for me. At least whatever was beyond would be different.
I breathed, and breathed, and then without thinking I stepped into the tall grass around the treeline and kept walking, my back turned to the sunset.
The moment the boughs closed over my head, it was different. The discordant crashing of the waves suddenly seemed so distant (though I checked over my shoulder to be sure the sea was still there). Immersed in the forest’s rhythm, I found I could hear the chirp of insects, feel the heartbeats of some small animals bounding away in the darkness, things I hadn’t noticed only moments before.
It was like stepping into an entirely different world, unfortunately, again. This place had far more weird surprises than I wanted; at least that one wasn’t all bad.
I kept walking, my direction randomly aligned to one of the ley lines in the ground, each as good as any other (at least there was some way to navigate). The sunlight rapidly dimmed, but through my fading headache, I could feel my way through without too much trouble. Fallen leaves and needles crunched in the soil beneath my feet and creaked overhead. It felt like my limbs were creaking, too, but that rapidly faded away as I stretched them again.
I let my thoughts slip into the background, dragging behind my footsteps, slipping past the trees and underbrush rising all around like raindrops. In the quiet, and the dark… everything was calm. I drifted off, my muscles working for me.
Deep and deeper in the forest, though, something snapped me out of my trance, as if I’d crossed another invisible threshold; ahead of me, somewhere, was the aura of something massive. Something hot. I could feel it long before I could see it through the branches.
With utmost caution, no idea what I was getting myself into, I found myself just behind the edge of the treeline. Beyond was the night sky, still streaked with grey, but it glowed from below with golden light. I could feel it, lighter than the breeze on my skin and in the energy flowing through the forest, and its presence was more powerful than all the trees and tiny animals combined. I could almost hear it.
My eyes must’ve been accustomed to the darkness by then, because when I looked down the gentle hill into the glade stretching out ahead, the thing at its centre was bright enough to force me to cover them. Quickly, though, I began to make out silhouettes against the sky. Rough spires and sweeping roofs and chimneys, and below them, streets, lit by golden fire in lanterns and windows. And behind those windows and through those streets, tinier silhouettes, moving. Shadows in the shapes of people.
I couldn’t accurately describe everything that ran through my head in that moment, because it was mostly nothing at all. I felt myself go blank for who-knew-how long, locked halfway through my low stride, just… staring. What was it that people – nevermind that people were entirely hypothetical and I’d never imagined seeing them, or anyone, literally ever until this exact moment, because this is sort of impossible to process – but what did they do to wake themselves up?
I pinched my arm through my sleeve and instantly recoiled, feeling the burn I inadvertently etched into myself. It was hard to remember my own strength. Snapped out of my stupor, I hissed through my teeth and shook my hand to clear the steam rising from it, but the light burn was already healing.
It definitely hurt, though, which my apparently extremely limited knowledge told me was supposed to work. And it definitely did not work.
They were actual, real, physical, living people. They looked different than I did, but– they waved their hands, they walked together, they spoke together. And they were there. Right there, right in front of me.
I couldn’t possibly have believed my eyes.
Then there was a roar like searing thunder as something huge careened over my head.
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