He did not recognise the stars in the night sky or the chirpings of the wildlife.
He did not pretend to be an Astronomy buff, nor was his knowledge of the taxonomy of nature particularly outstanding, but even he knew the position of Orion The Hunter.
It was, to this day, the only star system that he knew how to find with relative ease.
Its component stars shining brighter to him than almost any other. Hence his surprise and confusion on not being able to see the system made sense.
This, however, did not help him to get his bearings back.
See, the reason he was looking for Orion in the first place was to serve as a point of rudimentary reference. Something to tell him that although he was lost, that he was definitely still home.
Having wandered through the archway between the trees and ending up exiting into this seemingly alien orchard, he was beginning to doubt if this was was even still earth.
It had been a bright and sunny day when he had entered the archway, but here on the other side, it was night. Bright beams of moonlight both dazzled and lit up the world around him, fronds of massive conifers and unknown ferns lifted into the treetops and appeared to almost caress the sky.
He had tried to turn back, but the path was gone, seemingly vanished, leaving only a barren rock face behind them.
It was quite surreal.
Surreal enough to be terrifying at least.
The sound he heard in the darkened green did not sound peaceful and many among them gave him pause, enough to worry him for his own safety.
Still though, there was no point in sulking and trembling. He dusted himself off and started to walk deeper into this forest.
It was a hard thoroughfare at first, stumbling and tripping over gnarled tree roots, low hanging branches, and slipping on the many puddles of murky grey muck that seemed to litter the forest floor.
His nose constantly curled at the rank and subversive odour that seemed to emanate from almost every surface of the greenery.
There was no obvious source of the stench, however, as he walked he became aware of the fact that multiple instances of the trees seemed to be sprouting from the corpses of several unknown creatures that dotted the forest floor. Some even appeared as if they might have been bipedal at some point.
"The dead die to live to the end, and the living exist only to die. In the end, we all feed the cycle." He murmured to himself, "Maybe I should stop quoting myself."
Time seemed to a crawl the longer he walked, and the longer he walked the more rank the air.
It was roughly an hour and a half into the trek when he saw the first one.
An ombre shadow that seemed to take the vague form of a man leaning against a tree, its face in its hands, shoulders shuddering as if crying.
That was the first one.
And yet as the trees became more space, the shadows became more plentiful, and with it the smell of rot.
The sounds of fauna and wildlife seemed to peter out, giving rise to the soft sound of sobbing that now seemed to float on the barely-there wind.
There was no obvious source to this sound, it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at all.
He hurried now, faster than a jog but slower than a run, occasionally stopping to dodge shadows - the same shadows that he was pretty sure were the sources of the disembodied crying.
As he neared the clearing, several shadows started to slowly become aware of his presence.
The voices on the wind became shrill shrieks, whose cold edge seemed to leech at his very core.
He hurried even more, faster still, till he came to the banks of a great river.
It was immense, seemingly taking up the whole horizon.
In this place, there was no sun, nor did it seem that there ever had been one.
Instead, a huge bloated moon seemed to barely hang in the speckled sky, the rim of its lower curves appearing to rest on the lake.
The lake itself was a thing of macabre beauty. Its waters were obsidian black and just as reflective, mirroring the speckled sky.
At the distances such as these, it was often hard to tell where the lake ended and the sky began.
Despite the breeze, it was remarkable that the surface of the lake was even now perfectly still.
In the distance, on the far horizon, he could just about make out the crests of two mountains that seemed to encircle the lake at odd points.
Along the blank shoreline, anchored only by a single rotted rope, lay a narrow canoe, it's oars hung listlessly at its sides.
He turned around in an effort to assess his options.
But the shadows were still shrieking, their wails almost as terrifying as was the sight of them shambling slowly into the clearing.
An impassive chill seemed to follow their presence, as did the sticky sweet smell of centuries of rot.
Somehow, he got the impression that if they caught up to him, it would spell certain misfortune.
Emboldened by this new knowledge, he bounded over to the canoe, taking time to first untangle the large bundles of aged rope from around its stern.
And while he was indeed reluctant to enter the water in any way, it was quite clear to him that this was his only choice.
Never having been one to tempt fate, he started to row. His oars making odd ripples in the pitch-black water.
Or at least he thought it was water. With the current state of things, he could not be certain.
Progress was slow, but at least it would seem that the shadows could not swim. Several of them gathered now at the banks and baled mournfully after him.
He suppressed a shudder and put his back into it, making long lunging strides with his oars.
Once again, the longer he relaxed the more he became aware of, or more correctly, the more aware of his lack of awareness here.
It was the smell, he realised. Or lack thereof.
Ever since he started rowing this stupid boat, the smell had been weird, weirder than the rotting stench from earlier.
And now he realised why it was weird. There was no smell, literally no odour whatsoever.
Concentrating also brought him to the conclusion that he could not hear anything either - neither the oars nor his breathing made a single noise.
Nary a splash nor a whisper broke the speckled darkness.
Even now he wasn't sure if the night was caused by an absence of the sun, or if he had simply gone blind.
This place was either robbing him of his senses or was simply so desolate that such things barely mattered.
Still, he rowed, his arms got tired but he rowed some more, till the shore became a distant memory and even the wind seemed to have stilled. The only thing seemingly rooting him to apparent calm was the fact that he could still see the ripples of his oars in the dark water.
Still, the silence was excellent for thinking, and here in the speckled darkness, his thoughts had never been clearer.
If he was the first person to view this sky, and no - shadows do not count, maybe he could attempt to map the stars here himself.
The repetitive motion of the oars spurred his thoughts even more.
He wondered what the lake would look like under the light of the sun. Was the water always this black or was this an illusion of the night?
He didn't dare think about, for if the water was truly black during the day as it was at night, he would have to accept and come to terms with his own denial and realise that this place was neither a fever dream nor some big misunderstanding born of his own ignorance.
Regardless, the water did not seem to be particularly inviting for a swim. Even now as he rowed, he was dimly aware of his inability to swim and of how terrifying it would be to drown in the endless dark beneath his boat.
He really should have learned how to swim earlier in his life, but he had always been an awkward person and the idea of learning such a seemingly obvious skill often left him feeling as crippled as what he imagined drowning would feel like.
And at first it was fine, but eventually he got older and made friends. And teens were odd creatures that seemed to have more in common with Hippos than they did with their fellow humans, always frolicking by or in bodies of water.
The thought brought both irritation and great regret to him, he was however shaken from his reverie by an odd pulsing noise - the first in... he wasn't sure.
There, on the horizon, almost at a point between the two mountains, he saw it.
A brief glimmer, light but not light.
From it came pulses of a something he wasn't quite yet able to interpret.
It wasn't much, but it gave him something to work towards. Pumping his arms faster, he inched forwards towards the glimmer.
It was slow progress, slow and agonising, his arms burned with exertion, the sweat dripped off on to his oars and made it hard to maintain a steady grasp.
When he finally reached the glimmer, he found himself quite perplexed to see an obsidian black sphere that seemed to levitate on the equally dark lake.
The sphere didn't seem to glimmer as much as it seemed to blink in pulses to his mind like a weird black heart.
As he got closer to it, it seemed to pulse, but a bit faster, almost imperceptibly so.
Bright pulses lanced his brain and he became overwhelmed with an urge to touch the sphere, leaning precariously over the stern of the canoe, fingers inches from the sphere's surface.
Various symbols seemed to appear across it's surface in his mind, odd symbols from seemingly every language that existed and some that didn't , all the while the pulses and the flashes increased.
His fingers brushed the sphere.
The boat creaked.
His ears pulsed.
The world flashed...
... And then vanished.
Alex woke with startled fumble, nearly falling from his perch on the kitchen counter. The dream he had just had didn't make much sense, and he was already forgetting many fragments. The confusion hurt his head, and he couldn't help but feel a little irritated by that fact.
However, it did not matter, today was the day he would show Erica the tree.
Time to be productive instead of sleeping through breakfast.