drabbels – ugh

Your land bursts with color.

When you were younger the games you played did not hold the key to your future. And the worlds were full of magic and ores and adventures that you could only have in the dead of night with your head tucked under the bedsheets as your parents slept in the other room.

It seems strange to you now, that the same things should exist in the game that has robbed you of that life. That that sort of magic still applies here.

Your land shines. Dim light leaks from portals and the purple speckles that line the walls of this particular tunnel. You step though a glimmering doorway and find yourself standing before a crystal lake. Its ancient, you know. A knowledge that springs from the very core of your chest. And it is more beautiful then anything you have ever seen before.

When you were younger you played games, and the games you played left you breathless and reeling from their magic.
You’re older now. And you’re still playing games. The air still rushes out past your lungs.
You know, better then anyone left alive maybe, that time changes everything.
But sometimes, you know, time changes nothing at all.

Your world is painted in orange and green.

You hold a sphere in your hands. Toss it into the air. Catch it.
Its surface is shiny and impossibly smooth, and it is lighter then you ever would have guessed.

It is empty. Staggeringly, startlingly so. There are other spheres, hundreds, thousands of them in your polished industrial land. They hang like apples from trees of foil and wire. They top off the building and sit, scattered, seemingly randomly across the far off plains.

Some are dented. Some are molten with oxidation. Many are extremely heavy and placed strategically in places that they must be moved from for you to progress on you quests.

None are quite like this.

Your thumb swipes across its surface and you imagine that you can almost feel the hum of void beneath your fingertips.
Inside this sphere there is nothing. No matter, no particles, simply void.

You disappear the orb, into a pocket that should not be big enough to hold it. Your land shimmers with golden light, but around it, around you, there settles an eerie calm of darkness.

From then on no one ever finds you when you wish to be alone.

Your land is a dizzying conglomerate are glowing portals and tightly packed mirrors. You’re underground, you think, or the gunky matter that clouds your land is just too thick to see through. Some might think it claustrophobic.

You love it.

Your land if full of paradoxes and illusions. There is a controlled kind of chaos here. It makes something burn at the back of your skull. Something like and urge. Or maybe more like an itch.

If you close your eyes you can see them. Each individual atom buzzing about wildly. And the way the atoms come together. And how they resolve themselves into clumps of matter.

You are dizzy with excitement. As if all those atoms are transferring their nervous energy to you. And you can see it now. The was you can mold them into more perfect shapes like putty in your hands.

Some may think your world cluttered. But you can see infinite universes packed into the all spaces in between.

Lord of Breath. It has a nice ring to it. Your friend had told you it was special, a master class.

You don’t feel like a master of anything now.

Your land had looked magical at first. Fat drops of dew hung like crystal balls over everything. You had thought then, that if you leaned in, if you just looked closer, then everything would become clear. You thought your path would reveal itself in the swirling milky droplets, and then things would be easy for you.

But you are not a Seer.

And your land turned against you.
You’d lean in and the platform you had been leaning against would give out under the press of your hips. You would turn down a foggy hallway to find a mirror and not an exit at the end.

You sigh, pulling brambles out of your hair from where you fell down a trapdoor.

Maybe someday your path will resolve itself, and you’ll find yourself firmly in control of you aspect, but not now.

Now you’d just like to know where your damn shoe went.

Before the game, time had seemed so untouchable to you. It passed on endlessly, and you could do nothing to stop or slow it. It cared not for your fears, nor for your excitement.

Time was. And that scared you.

Now time spreads out before your fingertips. Minutes and hours and years lay out like so many brightly colored candies for you to pluck from the rich tapestry before you and pop between your lips. You roll your tongue over the roof of your mouth, and its yesterday, and you help yourself fight of an imp. You blink and its next week, an your friend smiles back at you in their spiffy new Godtier pajamas.
They look so young.

Time wraps like around you like a shroud. It bends and bows around you. And one day, time will be your coffin.

But not now.

Time is. And that comforts you.

Its pretty, in a strange way.

Metal ruins lean like the rusting bones of better days, and nothing, not even thistles, grow in dusty earth beneath their shadows. If this world was ever anything resembling fruitful, it certainly hasn’t been for a while.

You haven’t seen any water yet, and the skies don’t tell of rain, but dark shimmering lakes dot the landscape.

Lakes of oil. On earth it would have been sad, but here, where everything else looks so dull, the swirling colors on their surface captivate you.

When you look into them your own face stares back at you warped and distorted. And as you plunge your hand in to their unknowable depths, it almost looks as if the lakes themselves are smiling back at you.

When you first arrived on your land, the plains seemed to go on forever, and you were afraid.

Long roads. Such longs roads there were. And at the end of every one of them two more, and a weeping denizen to warn you away from either path. But its not as if you could simply stop moving.

They stretched on, branching and twisting and reconnecting and then branching off again. And at every crossroad a toll. And every toll a price. You never thought about how much a tear was worth until you got here.

There are no right paths, no easy ones. Nothing, you soon learn, in this game is ever painless.

But you’re older now(although if its counted in days or disasters you cant tell). And you know better. The roads are not so crooked. The curling script on the signs becomes clearer.

There are no easy paths, but that does not mean that some wont be more fruitful than others.

Dawn had been different back on earth. Fleeting and evanescent, it had glimmered at the start of each new day.

Now it hangs, staining the sky pink and gold and silver. And the fog, like pale gauze, stretched out over the gently sloping hilltops, makes everything look dreamlike. And you can hardly believe that its real.
Maybe that’s why you don’t notice at first–that the Roses and Brambles and Juniper Bushes cling to you and tare at your legs.

Your land is beautiful, glittering in the honeyed daylight. The air is always light with the smells of flowers and dew. But you have thistles in you hair now and yours legs bloom with scarlet gardens of their own.
The sun peaks over the horizon and you have never known a longer morning than this moment in your kingdom of thorns.

You had thought it was morbid, at first. The graves.
The way they jutted out from the brittle shinning rock of your land, like so many bony fingers groping for the hollow sky, had unnerved you. And the mausoleums had seemed more foreboding than comforting in their dust and in their silence.

You miss them now, in a small way. Maybe its your blindness that makes it stand out so sharply in your mind, the way the smooth broken edges of the obsidian had glimmered in the twilight. And the way the dust motes had looked in the multicolored sunlight that streamed in through the stained-glass windows of the mausoleums.

It seems so easy now, to appreciate the small things. When the whole world is burning and you are blind, the howls of death ringing in your ears.
You hear them always, the cries of your dead friends across all the scattered timelines. But it will not go to waste. And as a knight you will watch over your friends who are alive now.

You may not be able to escape doom.
But that doesn’t mean that you cant use it.

It starts with a bubbling.

Ironic, you think, in a land that has tasted no water in so long. Where the only thing you find at the bottom of the scattered wells are yellow dust and endless puzzles that cast you out to the furthest reaches of your planet. It stirs in your gut, hot and heavy, thick as the smell of rot that clogs the air. Tucked beneath your breast, underneath your ribs and pressed tight to the side of your heart it churns. Rage.

Your land cries out for you. Parched, it howls steaming billows of Sulfur into painfully cloudless skies. And you watch. Quite but not pacified you watch your desolate land cry out to you.

You are a prince.
And this is your Princedom.
And barren as it may be you will rein over it and the hot passion of your fury will be transformed into the storms that soothe it.

You know what you must do.