Dream-Like Realities

I. A Rocky Ascent - I shot up like a rocket. The passage was jarring, almost painful, as my tethers to reality were cast off violently from my body. The chains bounding me to this reality— the rules, principles, norms— were forcibly wrenched out of my control and left behind. I didn’t even have the time to look back at them with a last lingering glance. I began to panic, I must admit. Some scared voice was telling me I needed those tethers— that without them, I would be groundless, abandoned, drifting with no connection back to who I was. But a deeper voice, an intuitive one, told me I needed to let go. That holding on to these ‘attachments’ was what was making me panic, and that, no, I did not need these tethers to stay myself. The wise voice was telling me I wouldn’t lose myself if I let go, and so I did, and like breaking the calm surface of a lake it felt like I finally came up for air, and could breathe deeply…

Vignette of a Character

“No wait, Leander!” Jovian called out. Leander spun back around to see Jovian pointing at the small hand beckoning them all inside the small shuttered gate. 

“This way! Hurry! Please!” the voice whispered urgently. Three tiny fingers trembled in the first rays of moonlight, the ring finger and pinky both missing. “Hurry if you don’t want her to get caught!”

The crew hesitated a second longer, then hurried inside the gateway.

A secondary door opened into a sparsely furnished room, bare of any real comforts save for a rough wooden table surrounded by three chairs. The floor was cold stone except for a threadbare rug placed in the center of the area. Two narrow archways led to other rooms, presumably the kitchen and sleeping quarters. 

It was apparent from the single table setting and the pitifully meager meal that their kindly savior was alone, and had been for at least a year or more. Their heroine was in fact an old, withered woman, and one who resembled more of a desert prune than a living being…