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+--- Thread: Scratchpad (/thread-45.html)
Scratchpad - NeverAllThere - 04-30-2020
Incomplete ideas and musings for creative works.
The skies stretched wide and sapphire blue, darting between the emerald grasses of the open fields that stretched far before me, only to be drowned in the distant golden horizon. Above, burning streaks of sunlight cut their way through the gathering clouds, casting themselves down upon the wanting creatures of the earth below. My eyes drank deeply of the glorious sights before me, their slow scan cutting across the grassy, wild, weed-pocked plains like a reaper come at harvest. Greedily, I swallowed my fill of nature, allowing primitive instincts to run rampant through my soul before bursting forth in the form of a toothy smile brimming with an energetic hunger for life.
My eyes brought themselves to a sudden stop, their joyful dance through the grasses abruptly halted by their disappearance down into the growing blackness. The void too drank in the sights, but it drank them in metaphor and reality, vanishing them into the cavernous maw of its wanting emptiness. Color stretched and skewed as it circled round and round the horrible thing, transformed from full-bodied streaks of rich hues into thin gasping fingers of hope plastered across an infinite nothing. "Roadkill," I thought, "the colors have been crushed into roadkill." The void lurched forth in a sudden fit of violence, gulping down hundreds of meters of horizon with each pulsating breath.
In an instant, all was silent. Sound, and the creatures that would make it, had fled this terrible scene. The sudden quiet permitted soft ringing to fill in for the missing sound of gentle breezes whipping across the vanishing expanse, and for the nervous pump-pump-pump of blood bursting through my temples to mingle with the slackening, panicked breaths that thundered in and out of my lungs.
Sight swallowed sound, and soon I could no longer hear my own arteries as the void ate through the remnants of my vision. I pounded my legs against the wild and well-packed dirt, willing them to carry me away from this awful thing. Again, and again I felt them thump noiselessly against the ground. I ran, abandoning all reason, until the thump-thump-thump of my heart threw me down into the soil, where I crawled and slithered like a snake on my hands and knees. Behind me, I felt the warm rays of sunlight vanish and knew that the void had swallowed them too as it climbed into the summer sky as a twisting, hateful vine. Unable to carry my aching form any further, I buried my nose deep into the damp earth.
When I regained my senses, they awoke one by one. Feelings of pain and exhaustion arrived first. Followed by the sound of rushing air. Then came the smell and taste of copper. Sight came second to last, the dim light of distant stars scattered across the inky shroud of night the only sign it had returned. After this I once more felt my sense of self, and I knew that I had survived. And that I was here. But where was "here"?
RE: Scratchpad - NeverAllThere - 05-01-2020
The world that stretched itself out before me was like the one I knew intimately, and yet it was as different as day is to night. My hands crawled their way forward through the dry and matted grasses, over the wilted wildflowers, crunching down on the dead insects that littered the surface. Unable to see more than a few inches ahead, I stood slowly and fearfully, my eyes opened wide as they would go. Looking, listening, sniffling, hoping, I awaited some sign of the familiar.
Time slipped into the future, but the moment refused to leave. The wind blowing upon me continued without pause or diminishment. The light of the stars above shone steady and uninterrupted by the passage of unseen clouds stalking through the night. The moon was nowhere to be found.
Step by plodding step, I walked in a straight line through the growing chill that pervaded this new world. My feet crunched against countless miniscule corpses of insects, and I tried not to think of why there were a few spots that felt slippery and soft. When I opened my mouth to call out for help, to cry out in pain, the wind tore through my lungs and silenced my voice. When I closed it again, it felt painfully raw and my tongue tasted the fresh rivulets of blood that ran out of my gums and cheeks.
When I stumbled over the lump, I screamed for only a second before remembering the painful lesson I had received from the still-howling wind. My legs refused to lift me up again, exhausted from what felt like days of walking without end. Instead, my hands scampered across the prone form of this new thing, seeking out clues to explain its existence. Before they finished their work, other parts of my body yelled out in shock at the sensation of hands crawling across them. Slowly, I walked my trembling fingers up the side of this unmoving thing, while feeling them march unsteadily up my back and across my spine.