5)

The world came to Nemida. It was normal again, and he was glad for that. He laughed at the normal landscape. He smiled at the firmly prosaic sky. He practically guffawed at the delightfully mundane trees. Everything was going to be okay again. There would be no more of what he saw a little earlier. He didn't have to look…beyond…ever again.

Nemida's laughter slowly faltered and eventually came to a stop. He didn't like the way it sounded. It was strained. Forced.

Nemida looked around a second time. The manic grin that had previously decorated his face remained, but only in the flesh, not in the spirit. Like the laughter, it was strained. Like the landscape.

All of it. It was forced. A farce of reality. The paint was slathered on in many layers, but the canvas had worn thin in areas. Nemida looked at the canvas. Something within him screamed at him to stop. It would do to stare in a contented stupor at the paint. Nemida didn't. He looked at the canvas, noticed the interwoven strings that made it up. He looked between the strings.

He saw…nothing.

A void. But a pregnant void. There was nothing there, but things breathed in the darkness. Nemida wanted to see the thing, despite the dim, nebulous terror it inspired within him. Giving it definite form would make it less terrifying. Then, he could see its borders, its limits. He wanted to see it and know his fear, rather than leave it as a terrifying, undefined mass of shadow. Nemida looked further, between and through the strings. He felt himself being drawn in. The fear did not abate, but rather grew. Nemida re-thought his earlier desire. Perhaps some things are better left unseen. Suddenly feeling very worried, he tried to go back between the strings, back to the world he thought he knew.

The strings were no longer there. Nemida was in the void. He turned again, feeling the acidic coils of panic tightening around his chest. He no longer had his bearings. He looked down at himself, wondering if his physical form could guide him back. There was nothing there. Nothing of Nemida in the void.

Nemida was the void.

For just a second, Nemida had the briefest glimmer of conception of what true, absolute solitude was. Nemida screamed. Nemida had no mouth to scream with. No sound disturbed the nothingness. The non-existence of Nemida searched desperately for sanity within the void, no longer having even himself for company.

There was something there. At the edges of his perception. Movement that was not quite movement, but something completely different that had only the slightest ties to the concept of movement. The void was full. But Nemida was blind and deaf to its occupants.

Perhaps it was just a matter of adjusting his perception.

Slowly, clumsily, Nemida began to allow his other senses to awaken. Ancient senses, long atrophied and ignored, yet still there, still with their power of perception. Senses that conformed to none of those that he thought he knew. Capable of receiving stimuli missed by sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Capable of detecting that which was invisible to all natural senses. Nemida began to perceive. No possible analogues could be given to any who were restricted to the five mundane senses of what Nemida not-saw. The closest comparison would be like blurred shadows, seen through frosted glass.

Even that distorted glimpse, though, threatened to be too much.

Horribly distorted and muffled, even the vaguest outlines of what populated the void, right within and around the stretched canvas of reality, what was there, around him, through him! Nemida's sanity blanched. Nemida tried to blind himself, stop his ears. But those weren't the senses that received what he now not-saw and not-heard. The line of Nemida's sanity stretched thin, threatened to break.

"A cat, three ducks and a bee,"

The voice carried in, as if from a great distance, yet close, only a few feet away. But that couldn't be right. In the void, there could be no distance, for distance was the measure between to objects, and there were no objects in the void to measure between. It was infinity and nothing at the same time.

"Stared out across the sea,"

But also, why would there be a voice in a place where there was no sound? That didn't seem at all right either.

"Waves crashed…splat!"

Nemida was so surprised by the voice that he forgot all about the other sensations he was experiencing. He wanted to go towards it, for it was sweet, and comforting, and vaguely familiar. But how could he go 'towards' something in the Void, where concepts such as 'towards' and 'away' had no meaning?

"But the horizon it was flat,"

For that is infinity."

The voice drifted to a stop, but Nemida had already determined where it had come from. He strained towards it through the void. He was everywhere and nowhere. The realization struck him, he was. He had form, and if he had form, he most certainly could not be within the void.

Like one who suddenly realizes that he's been walking steadily closer to the edge of a cliff, Nemida jumped back. His perception leaped back through the interwoven strands of the reality seen by most people. His eyes snapped open. The canvas was still there. It may be thin, and it may take naught but looking at it in the wrong angle to see past it, but it was there. Nemida looked up, and saw a form resting upon the canvas. The form was shaped like a Llewellis. She smiled, "Did you like my song?"

"It was…relaxing," Nemida said, slowly re-acquainting himself with the intricacies of controlling a physical body. Odd, he never realized what a complicated task it was until he had left it for a while.

"I'm glad you came back."

"Where had I gone?"

"Here."

"But I couldn't have been here, if I had left."

"You left, but you remained here all the same."

"It didn't look like here."

"But it was here all the same, merely seen differently."

Giggling happily, Llewellis unceremoniously dumped Nemida's head from its resting place on his lap to the cool ground and leapt to her feet, "Come on, silly, the sun will be up soon, we need to get your precious, sensitive skin under the trees!"

Nemida looked around, and noticed the four unconscious forms lying around him on the ground. One was groaning and twitching slightly. Laumas bounced back and forth, pouncing on the twitching fingers. "What happened?"

"You saw things differently," Llewellis replied lightly.

"Yeah, I know that, otherwise I would be the one on the ground right now."

"You are on the ground right now."

"But I'm conscious. What happened afterward though?"

"That was a mistake."

Nemida looked up at Llewellis. The last statement was stated with none of the light, burbliness of her normal speech. She stood by him, holding out the Staff of the Indigo Void, "Take this, and never let it go until you are ready to."

"Why?"

"You saw why, and you were lucky enough to come back after seeing it."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing at all…and everything there is."

"I'm confused."

"But you're sane, be happy for that. I am!" and thus, she skipped off into the woods.