Somewhere in the darkness, ambient whispers call out. They speak of names and places of my past, present and a future unforetold. As though I were lost in the plumbing of a city's sewers, I hear the trickle of water echo in the vastness of my proximity. I was to think that's where I am, someplace closed and dark without any concern for the predators of the night.
I cannot see beyond the length of my own breath, chilled to mist each time I exhale. I want to see, I want to hear beyond the voices like an insect's hive, but my senses wither without being attuned, the darkness and sounds and cold numbing everything.
Light began to stir far beyond the horizon, and I saw for the first time that I stood in a desert, which could make no real sense if the sounds had any meaning. The sand is a rust red, glorious as a sun off the beach in the morning. And all around, there are eight lines stretching beyond the point I stand, similar is symmetry as a compass. The line in the desert seem to stretch on for miles, into the vast infinity of geometric planes that a human mind could never live long enough to fathom.
The sun in all its brilliance strikes my eyes for the first time in colors that are impossible by the spectrums of Terra. The direct light was black, and for the moment I could remember before my sight was lost I swore that the horizon curved and clouds twisted concave, as though it was a vast eye that looked back, staring at me just as I briefly as I had stared at it.
On my knees, I winced and felt my eyes convulse, trying to remain shut involuntarily as I tried to force them open. Like chlorine was caught in them, they stung horribly for a moment until the pain began to gradually fade. It grew cold again, and the skies became grey as the clouds hid that horrid sun behind them.
But I was not entirely swallowed in darkness. The clouds seemed to roll through the skies like a conveyer belt, and flashes not of white, but red illuminated the sky, violently cutting into the air, and the ground seemed to hiss from the eight lines of sand. In all its directions, the lines seemed to be disappearing, like an object I could not see was flattening the lines back into the sand and heading directly for me, at the very heart of the formation.
My eyesight had returned in time to find the lines halted at various lengths from the center, the ends became acute angles. It was the old symbol, unpredicability, chaos. I stood in the center.
I hate my dreams...