Precious and burnished purple sat across a sky seemingly pregnant with anticipation.
The boy was, of course unfazed, he had seen this all a thousand times over, the odd sky having lost it's once new sheen in his eyes.
Instead, he focused on the uphill struggle up the ridge. The ridge itself was surrounded by three mountains, their edges ripped, and jagged were constantly getting struck by an unseen storm.
Occasionally the shine of lightning strikes on the peaks would flood the land with weird and eldritch illumination.
The boy had by long already forgotten his name, it had been so long, or at least it felt that way. It was hard to read time here, even the passing of days was a little hard to pin down.
This was on account of having three suns hanging in the sky, the resulting shine being the only way to measure time. As he continued further up the ridge he noted that from the tint of his shadow, it seemed to be somewhat after the second sunrise.
This greatly relieved him, there were events that took place after the third sunrise that he was sure no one wanted to be present for.
Pondering about this almost led to him stumbling over a divot in the path straight into a puddle of water. Barely stopping himself, he sighed in relief.
The water here was not good, not good at all, it did terrible things. The jagged scar up his forearm reminded him of that fact.
No matter how thirsty he was, he never drank from the puddles. Instead, when thirst struck him, he collected moisture from the cracks in cave walls, from the dewfall on the odd plants that bloomed after the first sunrise, and from the few times when it rained in this accursed place.
As he walked away, the puddle bubbled, the bubbles seemingly whispering "Wait.." into the air behind him. He stiffened, and started to run, he had overstayed his welcome, and if something happened to him no one would help. Not that there was anyone around to help, he was the only human in this bleak landscape.
Occasionally he wondered if this was hell, and then such thoughts would make him wonder where such a concept had appeared from, and as to why he could not remember more than this purple sky.
Finally, he reached his destination - a broad and tall rockface, that seemed too smooth to climb. All along the wall spidered many many cracks, and it was here that he got his water.
He had to be careful though, the surrounding area was sprawling with many puddles. He would have to quickly get his drink from the wall, it was almost the third sunrise and the puddles would get hungry by then, the ravenous water was no joke.
He quietly cupped handfuls of water and greedily lapped it up, this would have to do, he was lucky today.
That luck was changing, however.
Distant thunder bloomed across the landscape. The surrounding peaks seemed to resonate with a peculiar musical tonality, and something struck the peak above him with a resounding boom.
A shard of what must have been shale crashed to the ground mere feet from him, the resounding impact was startling, the piece resonated with peculiar frequencies and the puddles sang back.
It hurt his ears, and the sudden panic he felt almost caused him to freeze in his steps.
Even now the puddles nudged closer, their edges dancing to the strange tone.
His vision swam and his balance faltered and the din from the shard turned into a deafening cacophony of noise.
All around him puddles merged, some turning into deep lurid pools whose surface rippled in barely contained malice. Their whispering now a song that urged him to stay and wait.
Clapping his calloused hands over his ears, he turned his eyes skyward to watch the suns.
A third black sun was cresting over the edge of the furthermost mountain, a sense of unease rolling down the peak.
Pin pricks of light danced all along the shard, the resonance grew deafening and he found himself whimpering in agony. Around him the ground began to shake, seemingly pulling the pools towards the shard. As the water rolled over his ankles in it's hurried flight, he quickly became aware of several sharp stinging sensations that seemed to dig deep into his flesh and moved laterally in the direction of the current.
Wincing, but refusing to move for fear of the water deciding to stay longer, he waited and watched as the whispering waves seemed to seep into the shard.
And then silence, nothing made a sound, not even the air in his lungs as he exhaled. There wasn't a sound as the pools oozed into the shard, the shard seemed to glow and then dim briefly.
Behind him the path was free, nothing bound him to this spot, but still, he felt inclined to watch, almost possessed. He inched forward, keeping his eyes on the shard, his feet still oozing blood too crimson on the ground behind him, leaving a macabre trail.
Directly in front of him, a fantastical change was taking place, the shard was gently rocking, almost imperceptibly. and at the very top of it sprouted cracks, like some kind of malformed egg.
The fractures were audible, and the sound that echoed had a cadence similar to brittle bones breaking over barren rock.
From one of the cracks seeped a dark black liquid, it bubbled out of the crack as if alive and brought with it whispered words that barely hung in a nearly nonexistent breeze.
"Come." it seemed to beckon, "Come to me…". Words that seemed to softly caress his ears and carry a presence. Even behind him, like some sort of seductive lover. He found himself spinning around to face whatever was behind him, only to find nothing. But he could have sworn he felt the soft warm breath of someone at his nape...
He focused his attention back to the shard, by now it sat in a pool of that pitch-black viscous fluid, the air around buzzed, but not in the literal sense. It was his skin that tingled.
Under his gaze the form of the liquid seemed to coalesce into something more tangible, first, it crawled up the face of the shard, and then, as if defying the very laws of gravity, attempted to reach for him.
When he recoiled in repulsion, the fronds of liquid seemingly recoiled too. Returning to the base of the shard, they changed their form yet again.
This time, when they returned, they had a more tangible form. The black tendrils having formed into ebony tentacles that reached for his face whilst their form seemed to wane and ebb at random intervals.
The number of tentacles seemed to multiply and divide almost intelligently, so fast that he could barely keep up.
As he backed away, still mesmerised by the flailing appendages, he failed to notice one tentacle curl around his leg. It was slimy and cold to the touch and when it pulled, he ended up being dragged towards the shard, the sudden impact of the ground against his back knocking away his air at once.
Too dazed to do anything and gasping to breathe, he could only watch as more and more tentacles took hold of him - they held anything they could, his arms, his legs, his torso, one even coiled tightly around his neck, coils tensing as if threatening to squeeze.
He was hoisted into the air, made to face a wriggling mound of tentacles that despite having no eyes, he could swear was watching him.
The tentacle around his neck squeezed suddenly, the contraction choking him, and as he gasped for air the mound surged forward.
Tens of hundreds of tentacles rushed into his mouth, down his throat, invading even his lungs, before converging into their liquid form again.
Twinkling, glittering lights sparkled across his vision as he was slowly starved for air, his head spun and faded before his vision started to fade…
When he came to seemingly moments later, he found that not only could he breathe, but that he also seemed to be no worse for wear. There was no black tentacle, no lurid pools, no deafening sounds.
Only the blind absence that seemed to fill this new blank plateau that he seemed to be inhabiting. As he got himself off of the floor, he inspected his environment.
Here there didn't appear to be a sky, no suns either to explain the bizarre cream lighting, only a white firmament that seemed to stretch up in all directions infinitely.
In fact, he wasn't sure where here was. Even the floor was white, it didn't feel like he was in a room though, he felt like he was in some odd world where the landscape stretched unfettered forever.
He walked, no point in sitting still, he did not care as to where he was walking as long as he wasn't motionless.
Sharks that stayed still died, he wasn't sure how he knew that or even what a shark was, but it was stuck in his mind. Death was something that he was sure he didn't want to face just yet.
So he walked, and walked, and walked. Every step seemed to echo the beat of his heart, the only sound he could hear here. The landscape never changed, just a sea of unending white in all directions. Except for a spot in the distance that he was slowly becoming aware of, should he walk to it?
Now that he thought about it, it wasn't that there was no sound, it wasn't that there was sound either, after all, even silence can be deafening. Here it was more like an absence of something important, not sound, not silence, just void. Thinking about it made his head hurt.
The more he walked, the more he yearned for the mountaintop ridge, back with its peculiar yet familiar dangers.
In the distance, cresting what passed for a horizon, he finally started to see a shape to the dark spot, it looked like a shelter of some sort, vaguely reminding him of the small hut he had constructed for himself out of dry leaf fronds and seemingly abandoned sticks.
A house of some sort, maybe.
His feet carried him closer, there were a few odd details he hadn't noticed till now. As he got to it he could see that the entire build seemed to be a shade of muted grey, much like the shard that had caused this.
Muted grey was the porch, and its three rickety steps, the steps sat below a door that was as crooked as the steps were rickety. The whole house seemed to lean towards one side, and as he stepped closer he couldn't help but notice that many of the warped boards that held the house together seemed to be on the verge of falling apart.
The whole house stunk of rot and ruin, the oppressive atmosphere of the place keeping him at bay like an invisible wall.
Stopping hesitantly, he tried to peer through two windows visible beside the door, however, both his distance and the fact that the insides of the house appeared to be pitch black, obstructed his view.
Suddenly and abruptly, as if summoned, the door swung open on rusty hinges. Hinges old and in dire need of urgent oiling. The door remained as if it was an invitation, and he almost felt compelled to enter.
Almost.
Instead, he sat in front of the maw like entrance, crossed his legs, and pondered.
This day really had been like no other, or could he even still use such an arbitrary notion as time? After all, he was not even sure if time existed here, where ever here was.
He had been content with the day to day struggle of mountain life, just surviving from sunrise to the second sunrise gave his life some sort of purpose, some busy-ness.
It gave him some prominent distractions from his internal mental struggles. If he relaxed for even a second, he felt it, the whispers. Nothing unnatural of course, just questions that he didn't want answers to gnawing at his mind.
But now? Now he couldn't hold off from those thoughts, they served as a welcome distraction from the menacing gape in his personal reality that he was experiencing.
There were gaps in his memory, important large gaps. Things that he didn't remember, had he always been on the mountain? It didn't feel like it, and yet he knew nothing else.
There was constantly a sense of newness, it never made sense to him, considering that nothing here was new to him.
And then there were the concepts, things he shouldn't know but did anyway, things that didn't appear to exist here but made him feel comfortable when he did think about it. Made him feel like he didn't belong.
If he continued to think like that, he wasn't sure how he would cope.
Many a time, when the wind had gotten too cold and breezy and blew through the threadbare rags that passed for his clothes, he would think of how easy it would be to just take a step off of the steep cliff and drop into the abyss below the mountain, how close he came to just surrendering and taking a dip in one of the puddles.
He had gotten pretty close before, a foot on the edge, ready to drop off the mortal coil. And always he would back off, shuddering, suddenly cold. Not from the frigid mountain air, but from the cowardice he felt sitting on his heart like a block of ice.
And now he was here, in this place, trying not to stare at the abyssal maw in front of him or the blank void around him, once again he felt it. That pang of cowardice that told him to run and hide, only this time there was nowhere to run, no escape…
As if to remind him, the rickety frame of the door rattled against the porch as if shook by a breeze, but there was no wind here…
Rattled and clearly frightened, he made his move. Getting up, he inched closer to the door. The darkness seemed to stretch out infinitely behind the frame.
He inched forward. The door rattled in that nonexistent breeze again, almost insistently. Swallowing his fear, he took the plunge and took the step forward into the dark and across the threshold.
The second his foot cleared the last inch, the door closed behind him with a resounding click.
Turning around in a panic, he tried to shake the handle in order to open. He found none, the door was a smooth, albeit rickety, slab of wood. How had he not noticed?
He kicked the door in a panic, but now it seemed more like a seamless wall than an entryway. He could still see out of the windows set beside the door and so he attempted to besiege them, resulting in only a spidering of cracks in the glass panes that refused to shatter.
Defeated, he surveyed his surroundings. Ahead of him lay a dark corridor, it's walls were adorned with various portraits whose contents he could not make out in the dark, however, he could not help but feel watched by what he assumed were the unseen eyes in the portraits.
At the end of the corridor lay a pool of muted light that came from an of yet unseen source, this light pooled and gathered dimly at the edges of the corridor, with its only purpose seeming to be to highlight the ornate table and chair that sat in the centre.
As he walked closer he could see that the table itself seemed to be inlaid with engravings of undersea scenes around its edges, in its centre there lay a massive carving of trident engraved into the table. The legs of the table seemed to sport etched markings fashioned to resemble tentacles curling around the base.
Set into the table itself was a large and plain oval mirror. It stood at least a meter and a half tall, it's surface seemed to reflect some sort of eldritch pale light into the room.
At a loss for his next step, he took the seat and faced the mirror. On its surface, he saw his reflection for the first time in… He still did not know how long.
He saw his deep-set brown eyes, like pools of rich manuka honey, or at least they did at one point. Now they just looked cold and empty, dolls eyes.
Eyes framed on a tanned face that seemed almost worn, the continuous beatings of three suns taking its obvious toll on his skin. He had a small nose, one that if it had been on a girl or on a younger body, would most certainly have been described as 'cute and buttonlike'. This sat above a set of unremarkable lips.
Still, he thought to himself, at least his lips weren't thin. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he remembered hearing that men with thin lips were dishonest.
His reflection reminded him of easier times that he could not quite recall, he tried an easy smile in the mirror. Then a cheerful grin, a cheeky smirk…
And then his reflection winked.
He jolted back in shock, that hadn't been him, the reflection had winked of its own volition.
It grinned widely now, in no way mirroring his terrified face.
He looked behind so that he might run, but the path behind him had vanished, it would seem that only this small circle of light existed anymore.
Looking back at the mirror, he noticed his reflection pursing its lips as if struggling to swallow something, He watched in utter disgust as slimy ebony tentacles emerged from behind its lips and pulsed.
It cocked its head at him quizzically before inquiring "How now, brown cow?".
The phrase sounded alien and unnatural coming from such a facade.
He barely managed to stammer out a reply, his voice course and weak from lack of use, "W-what?... I don't understand.".
The reflection paused and seemed to consider this, although its grasp of language seemed to be tenuous at best. Suddenly it smiled as if understanding something, deep brown eyes glittering, "East, West, pass the test.".
His eyes were glittering too, but with tears instead, "Please… I don't understand..", his voice cracking and trailing off, the strain of speaking suddenly after ontold periods of silence catching up to him.
Once again the reflection paused, it seemed confused and by the scrunching of its brows, it also looked less than pleased. It reiterated it's prior phrase, slower though, as if he was stupid.
"East. West. Pass. The. Test.", this was further punctuated by the thing slamming a hand against its side of the mirror.
The surface rippled violently, although this did bring him some measure of relief, the fact that there was some sort of barrier between him and it was enough to make him feel a little braver.
A wet dull pounding brought his attention back to the creature that shared his face, it was still thudding on the barrier.
He cleared his throat, whilst it did remarkably little in way of making it easier to speak, it seemed to infuse some necessary strength back into his voice.
"Pass the test." He said this as if it was a statement, but the trembling of his voice seemed to pose it as a question. Nevertheless, his reflection seemed satisfied.
"Pass the test." It parroted back, some sort of weird mirth present inside its expression.
He nodded back.
"Gnome Rome, phone home?" It proceeded to inquire.
He hesitated for a moment in his response and thought he saw it begin to look as displeased as it did earlier. The sentence that it had presented made no sense to him and even contained concepts that he found as confusing as this situation was alien.
Assuming home meant home though… He did want to go home, yes? But where was home? It certainly wasn't this bizarre room or the bleak landscape outside the facade of a house.
If he were to hazard a gamble, the only home he had was that mountainside, with its harsh ridges and hungry water, cruel as it was, it was still the only home he had ever known.
He replied, "Phone home.".
The reflection smiled, pools of darkness residing into a spiralling abyss behind its too-wide grin that it wore on this warped perversion of his own face.
All at once, the tentacles in that mouth surged forward, unlike its form they experienced no barrier as they surged from one side of the mirror to the side he resided in.
They moved much too fast for him to react to, the appendages once more invading his orifices. Slipping down his throat, up to his nose, choking him of air and of life it would seem.
Once again his vision grew dark around the edges and sounds muted themselves against his senses, as the last of his vision escaped him he saw the reflection speaking to him, but its words were lost to his hazy mind.
And then he was gone, floating in the sea of consciousness, drifting. Compared to the cold feeling of losing the ability to breathe, floating under the warm surface of his thoughts was bliss.
Endless bliss.
The bliss however was sadly only momentary, the seas of his mind pitched and turned and writhed, violently rolling before spitting him back into the land of the living.
As he lay there, on the soft grass, he quickly grasped the fact that he was not, in fact, dead as he had thought, instead, he seemed to only have slipped into some sort of sleep. The fact that it was caused by being choked unconscious notwithstanding.
He slowly stood up, taking note that he at least seemed to be in one piece, and judging by the state of his rags he was still somewhat decent, at least he still had his dignity.
Wait… Grass?
Many things grew on the mountain, but grass was not one of them. How he knew what it was though was a secret that he could only guess at.
Shifting his gaze to the sky, he gasped in confused terror. For though the sky was cloudy and almost entirely covered, in the gaps between the clouds the sky was blue, not purple.
Hanging over the sky and shining dully through the clouds was only one sun. One yellow and bright sun that brought warmth and not fear.
Collapsing to his knees, he finally really took in his surroundings - He was sat in what appeared to be a massive field, thick and luscious grass everywhere. Judging from the clouds and the damp nature of the ground, it had recently rained. And indeed this seemed to be true, drops of water clung to the tips of blades of grass, whilst where the rain had fallen particularly hard, sported some seriously muddy puddles. These dotted the field at random.
He could feel his heart beating faster, so it was no surprise that a sudden bleating took him unawares and almost shocked him to death. Also dotting the field were bizarre creatures, their hide fluffy and stark white, mostly they clumped together and chewed the grass into cud whilst watching him with lazy eyes.
The whole field, he and these weird animals seemed to be penned in with a combination of wooden fences. As he looked over them he could see slightly worn grassy paths that led into other similarly penned fields, in the far far distance he could just about make the shape of a great big rustic house surrounded by other wooden house-like structures.
"Raymond!".
The yell broke him from his reverie, he stood up and turned in the direction of the voice.
A portly elderly man with receding silver hair was fiddling with the gate at one end of the fence, in one hand he held some sort of metal tube that was curved at the end into some sort of handle, its form seemed familiar, and in the other, he held a narrow band of metal from which jangled thin rods of metal, clenched together with it was a rope to which was affixed around the neck of another bizarre animal - This one also stood on four legs, but it wasn't fluffy and regarded him with rather sharp eyes before barking at him.
He found himself recoiling and trying to flee, the old man who was surprisingly fast and spry however caught up to him and held him fast around the shoulders.
"Raymond… It's really you...", the old man blubbered into his shoulder, all the while holding fast, he wasn't going anywhere soon.
As much as he wanted to protest that he did not know this man, he was no longer sure about that, a deluge of what he presumed to be memories flooded into his mind.
In the grips of this maybe not-stranger he felt his knees going slack as the stress of his experiences seemed to want to claim him to the sweet land of slumber yet again. He had a sense of familiarity and guessed that this was home, the thought itself brought a warm happiness to his heart.
But as his vision faded for the third time that day he could not help but be worried, for on the verges of slumber he finally remembered what his reflection had been saying when he last saw it in the mirror…
"Cross, and let us through.".