Ellis was nothing and he was everything. He could not feel his body, had no sensation of place and self, and yet he had never been more certain about his existence and could feel reality in a way he had never experienced it before. There was so much sensation, so much information and yet it wasn’t confusing or overwhelming at all. It felt natural. He knew everything in this place, everything about this place and all those who shared it. He understood them all – his companions and those who were here already, waiting. They were waiting for him, he knew, but that revelation didn’t come as a revelation at all. Anything he knew in this place was as if he had always known it. He accepted it all calmly. It was right and proper and-
Suddenly a different kind of reality broke over him like a wave and he felt crushed by the unknowable weight of it. The infinite had been compressed into the confines of his flesh, a universe of knowledge and sensation narrowed to the limits of his senses. He could feel all the things he had known fleeing his mind because there was no longer any space for them all. Within seconds, only fragments remained: lonely pieces of an impossible jigsaw puzzle. And in the place of all he had understood mere moments before? Frustration!
It took him a moment to look beyond himself and his inner rage and actually see the strange world into which he had been deposited. The first thing he noticed was the light. It was greenish blue and appeared to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. He certainly couldn’t pinpoint a source and the sky above him, if it even was a sky and not some lofty ceiling, was pitch black. The strange light illuminated a city which was, in many ways, a reflection of Gihana. It had the same sense of colliding geometries and Escher-esque logic, only so much more so. If Gihana had seemed impossible, this reality seemed unimaginable. Buildings seemed to share space with other buildings, to overlap in ways both intimate and oppressive. At times they seemed to interlock like the intricate links of an endless chain. At other times they were clashing, fighting for the right to exist in a space they both shared. And all this in perfect, timeless stillness: both a still life of silent chaos and a symphony of cacophonous order.
And then his companions appeared, one by one beside him. He didn’t actually see them appear. They just went from not being there to being there as if they always had been. They each stood looking dazed and unsure, each, that is, except for Annabella, who immediately met Ellis’ gaze with a meaningful intensity before fading into a familiar frustration. She too, it seems, was forgetting.
“What in the name of the gods was that?” Nadiyya asked once she had steadied herself.
“It was so confusing,” Siren agreed. “It felt like my mind was being soaked in information and then wrung out – repeatedly!”
“Then… you didn’t understand it… any of it?” Ellis asked.
“None of it,” Siren confirmed. “Why, did you?”
“I thought I did…” Annabella added, uncertain. “I can’t remember now.”
“There are pieces of it left inside me,” Ellis agreed, “but it’s hard to piece them all together. I know one thing, however,” he added with more certainty, “the Ancients are here, somewhere and they know we’ve arrived.”
“We’d better be ready for them, then,” Siren said, lifting her sword, “who knows what they might hit us with in this… this place…”
They all needed a moment to take it all in, but Ellis started walking towards the city, following a sloping, curling path over nothing, which looked like it was going downhill, but felt like a climb. He remembered a road like that in the countryside near Larksborough, where the surrounding hills confused your sense of where the horizon was supposed to be. Only there was no horizon in this place. The confusion simply was.
He was halfway down the path before he heard Siren shout, “Hey, Ellis! Wait up!” and had the disorientating experience of looking up at her and down at her at the same time.
The others caught up to him pretty quickly, even as they adjusted to the strange sensations of navigating through this *other* space they had broken into.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Nadiyya asked once Ellis began to lead them down the path once more.
“There’s only one way to go at the moment,” he said, “but, yeah, I think I kinda do, actually.”
“I think I do as well,” added Annabella. “I think know where they’re waiting for us.”
“Are we sure we want to go there, then?” Siren asked.
“That’s what we came here for, isn’t it? To learn about the Ancients.”
“But if they’re waiting for us then… I just don’t want to walk into a trap.”
“Ii doubt we’ll have any choice either, way,” said Ellis as he stepped off the path and into the contradictory cityscape, “it looks like there’s only one way to go."
Indeed, for
all of the unhinged geometry and colliding architectural concrescence, there did only seem to be one path through the
chaos, as if the city itself was leading them on towards some preordained
destination. Ellis shrugged and began to
follow it, with the others tagging along silently behind.
They passed the doorways into buildings, where everything seemed to twist around inside itself so that a doorway on the opposite side might open out onto a world flipped over. They stepped into the shadows of leaning stairways ejected from their towers, wafted through the ghosts of other streets they could not follow, were showered with light from fountains which hung above them.
“This place is very unsettling,” Siren said into the silence, “and I feel like I’m being watched.”
“You almost certainly are,” said Annabella quite calmly. “I think they are rather fascinated by us.”
“But when are they going to show themselves!?” Nadiyya demanded, her hands twitching towards the blades on her belt.
“When we get where they want us to be,” said Ellis.
“And just where might that be? What kind of trap have they set for us?”
“That one, I imagine,” Ellis said, pointing along the narrowing path between buildings which seemed to shimmer in resonance with each other to a sort of plaza beyond – one very like the one in Gihana, full of monuments and things like the portals they had come through, only so much more so.
“They are waiting,” Annabella said, suddenly sounding impatient and refusing to stop as the others had. “We mustn’t disappoint them.” She walked through the urban crevasse and into a bright, aquamarine light somewhere beyond.
“Is she alright?” Siren asked, worried, then, glancing at Ellis, who still stood staring calmly ahead, “Are you?”
“Some of the pieces of the puzzle lie ahead,” he said. “I need them more than I thought I ever would.” And with that he began to walk the same path as Annabella, the light surging around him until he, and the plaza they had seem, were lost in it.
“I don’t like this at all,” Siren muttered.
“You and me both!”
“Glad we could agree on something, but what are we going to do about it?”
They stared in silence at the sea of blue-green light ahead of them, then Siren shrugged.
“I guess I’m going in,” she said, drawing her cutlass, “but I’ll be damned if I’m doing so unprepared.”
Nadiyya drew
her blades. “Of course,” she said and,
together, they marched into the light.
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