Dreamscapes: Theron's Second World
Theron shouldered his way into the next land and paused to look once he was clear of the wall. He craned his neck backwards, looking up. Behind him, the corner of a white wall: massive blocks reaching four or five times his height into the air. The sky above was a deeper blue, like lapis, meeting the pallid limits without interruption. To his left and right the walls stretched to the horizon, and the ground beneath him was of the same solid, smooth but not polished, stone. Theron ran his hand along the surface. It felt cool, and damp, as all stone does, like marble, but radiant and energetic. This was no normal place within the world.
He walked towards his left for a while, scanning the horizon and the other wall. No doors, no change in horizon, only the occasional (and very occasional) thin seam in the stone. Above glinted a silver-white dot, a boiling sun, but unmoving, and barely searing the sky. Thin breezes blew, tangling his raven-dark hair into the collar of his long, dark coat.
Suddenly there was something on the horizon. Someone standing very still, at a slight angle, almost an alabaster pillar. Now Theron resisted the urge to run towards them, as in his walking, more became visible. They leaned inwards, to one point, at a strange angle. Slowly, away from the wall, he approached the center of the infinite courtyard, and watched in silence.
The white stone surface stopped suddenly, giving way to a cement-like square embedded deeply into the ground. He knew it was deep because a foot into the area, it ceased being flat and became a concave grey reservoir, where beings in white Grecian robes stood. They stood unmoving, and in a circle around the edge. Another staggered circle of figures made another ring, closer to the center. Theron counted seven rings of the people, the inner one having four, each at least five feet apart, evenly spaced. In the middle of these nine, at the nadir of the fixture, the grey surface was stained red, unevenly and darkly, around a dark point. This puncture in the middle of endless smooth surfaces seemed unholy. Around it centered imperfections: the red stains, and rough marks, lines in the otherwise perfect cement-stone. Theron kept his distance, content to watch the beings stand, waiting for something to happen, as the breezes ran by him in the idyllic weather of a too-unearthly vista.
Wordlessly, one of the beings tumbled forward. It fell from the third circle, but they had arranged themselves in such a manner that one could fall without hitting any other, or so it seemed. Theron wondered if that was purposeful, if it foretold anything. No one shifted or made any movement whatsoever. The fallen tumbled to the center, and with the only human motion Theron had seen yet, dug hands and knuckles into the edge of the hole. His eyes opened, and his mouth did, as if to scream as he plunged into nothingness, yet all was silent. When his head disappeared from sight into the void, only the thin red lines of blood and gap in the third circle marked any difference.
Theron waited, fascinated by the unmoved others. The remaining forty-three with heavy-lidded eyes seemed to warp in the breezes, but it was only the white fabric swaying gently. Theron sat, black haired and clothed yet still pale, a cancer in the land. Time went by, and the distant sun moved in the heavens. (Now he heard a shuffling noise, from one on the very outside. His back was towards the observer, and could not tell what expression his face converyed. But it ended like it had with the others. The pool of blood was spreading.)
Others fell to the same fate, and there was no pattern to the time or who fell next. The moon-like sun was at the edge of the walls in the distance when there was one left. She did not fall. She walked slowly, with unconsciously measured steps, to the edge of the abyssal pit. With monocolored blue eyes she looked up, into the cobalt sky, and with her naked feet she stepped forward. She was the only one who left no blood behind as a memorial to insanity.
Theron paused, not knowing quite what to do. A part of him wanted to vomit, and another wanted to scream. Instead he tried to reason the best way to the next corner. He was probably in the center of a quadrangle. Might as well walk back to that wall, back left, and then forward. Standing, Theron made his way to the corner he had predicted, with the sun sinking directly above him. With a breath he jabbed his left shoulder into the stone and disappeared.