THE FOREST HUNGERS
AND MUCH HAS BEEN TAKEN
IT IS NOT YET TIME
FOR YOU TO AWAKEN
There is a place somewhere between waking and sleeping, somewhere between dreams and nightmares, somewhere between empty and filled. In this place where a body means nothing, where existence is defined by the extent of confidence in the singular thought I exist, in that place, Ydeu awoke.
Or perhaps, awoke is the wrong word. To awaken means to have been sleeping at some point before, implies that consciousness and awareness returns to a being. Had Ydeu been sleeping? He had not. He knows this even if he cannot explain what he has woken from. Regardless, Ydeu stood in this world and as he opened his eyes, the world slowly unfolded. He was standing on a cliff. It overlooked a plain. He was staring at something, something in front of him. It was a rock. It had no distinguishing features. There were no runes carved on it. There were no offerings strewn around it. He could not even tell if the rock had always been here and had arrived here of natural causes or if it had been deliberately placed. All the rock possessed was existence and a sheet of moss that implied its age.
As he inspected the rock - it held his attention in a way beyond simple curiosity - a breeze past him. It tangled itself in his short hair and he heard laughter in the wind. ( For even if this was a land between all things, this was still a dream, still a place where logic did not apply and feelings and vague memories colored all things. And so Ydeu knew, he knew - ) The wind, for whatever reason, felt like a lover's light caress, like a hand running through too-short hair in a familiar, habitual way. The laughter, for whatever reason, felt familiar, felt warm, felt like sinking back into a sun-warmed chaise, like coming home.
Ydeu awoke to this world, a world that as familiar as it was not, and so he wondered:
From what was he awakening from?
And when he thought this, the world disappeared. First the meadows below the cliff, then the laughter, then the grass and the trees, and the moss, and finally, lingering the longest, the stone and the wind. They did not crumble; only faded, slowly, quickly, at whatever speed that time moved in this place between places. When Ydeu was standing in the darkness, he felt that there was someone's back at his back. Yet when he turned to grab them, his hands found only nothingness. Emptiness. It is not yet time Was someone there? No, no, there was no one. There was no one at all. And yet, he could not bring himself to believe that. For there was someone there - someone he could not touch or see or feel or sense - but there was a presence. it is not yet time
And there was a voice, a lilting faint thing, stretched between memory and void, words he didn't remember and yet somehow knew.
I would know you anywhere,
in peace, in war, in the farthest reaches of the abyss.
I would follow you anywhere,
to peace, to war, to the halls of death themselves.
You are the darkest hour of the night, and I,
am I not your crimson sunrise? Am I not
the *&%#$@ -
*
There is a place somewhere between waking and sleeping, somewhere between dreams and nightmares, somewhere between empty and filled.
Ydeu wakes up in the same small cramped bed in the same blasted tree in the same dark forest that he has occupied since - yesterday? Time is meaningless to him, but something feels wrong and he furrows his brow. He has lost nothing, but somehow, there's a gap in his chest. An emptiness within him that he feels as if he's just become aware of. It's the feeling of something being misplaced, something missing from its rightful place, but whose absence has just been noticed.
