The Twenty-Fifth Hour
@Polybius @Dark Light @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_VentusPrelude
"The plunge into the deep dark settled within your soul a sense of innate loss. It tore from you any semblance of direction, those literal and metaphorical, and left you agasp for air. No amount of struggling would shrug off the inky black, so down and down, deeper did you sink, until you settled upon the bottom. Your feet under you at last, the weight of the hopeless endeavor became crushing. Would you, could you escape this place? No matter what you thought in that moment, your fleeting eyes scoured the darkness in hope that you might. But there was and would clearly be nothing here. Just you and the darkness, here together. Nothing to be witnessed for a glimpse of hope."
"Yet in this wake, where dreams did live, came a fog rolling in from the seeming void far beyond thought. It crept upon silent feet, hugging low to the bed, until it too overtook you; perhaps this itself was as dreadful as the descent or a welcome reprieve from infinite depth. But with phantasmal caress did it free that voiceless inner terror and although the invisible bonds were broken, the world of this place without places was no less a prison. Still you existed in this plane which stretched beyond ken, surrounded by a shroud in the shallows. This moment of reprieve in the face of the unknown was all it took for you to regain composure, if ever briefly; the staggering, infinite loneliness was driven off for a brief time."
"So with a chord of rational thought returned, you were left to puzzle the obvious. Where were you? What led you here? Where was so much as here? Such a line of inquiry begged stranger questions still, the first of which was a primal reflection; that of the self. Some shred of it surely existed, could it not? Who were you? The thought bit back, as though it stung to sift through so many fragmented pieces as the stormed just out of reach. Yet there was nowhere else to start, at least not yet. They would need be parted through if there was to be any hope of escape, assuming there would even be."