Consciousness came to me suddenly and without warning. One second there was nothing—a blank, empty void—and the next I was just… here.
Wherever here was.
My head was full of static. Trying to remember how I got here was like trying to grab smoke. I had a flash of… a glade? Rusted metal? A searing light? The memory dissolved before it could fully form, leaving behind only a vague sense of panic and exhaustion. I couldn't hold onto a thought for more than a few seconds before it just… slipped away.
I was standing. That was the first solid fact. My feet were planted on a surface, but it wasn't ground. It was… a sea. But not water. It was this impossible, shifting expanse of turquoise and lime green, like someone had mixed tropical ocean colors with neon acid. It was semi-translucent; I could see down into its depths, where the colors swirled into darker, unknowable shades. A distant, hazy bottom was visible, miles below.
And running through it were rivers of pure, liquid light. They coiled and twisted like rainbows on spilt oil, shimmering with every color I could name and a few I couldn't. They moved with a purpose, these rivers, flowing in currents I could feel more than see.
I looked up. There was no sun, no sky like I knew it. It was like looking up at a ceiling made of a veiled, gossamer cloth, with those same impossible rainbow hues filtering through from some immense light source above. It was beautiful and utterly terrifying.
Mist pooled at the edges of this… place, thick and obscuring, hiding whatever lay beyond. But it thinned the closer it got to me, like I was my own little pocket of clarity. Within about ten feet of me, the mist just vanished, as if repelled. And in that fog, at the very limits of my vision, I saw things. Shapes. Vague, humanoid shades that flickered into existence for a heartbeat—a figure reaching out, a face contorted in a silent scream, a running form—only to dissolve back into the colourful haze a second later.
"What the…" I mumbled, my voice sounding small and lost. The words didn't echo. They just got swallowed by the immense, silent weirdness of it all.
I was standing on a psychedelic ocean under a veiled rainbow sky, surrounded by ghostly glimpses in the mist, and I couldn't remember how I got here. This was, without a doubt, a new kind of problem.
Right. Okay. Standing here gawking wasn't getting me anywhere. I picked a direction at random—toward where one of those rainbow rivers seemed brightest—and started walking.
Or, I tried to.
My legs moved, my feet pressed down on the strangely firm, colorful surface, but nothing changed. The shimmering river stayed exactly the same distance away. I stopped, turned, and marched decisively in the opposite direction, toward a particularly thick bank of mist. Same thing. I could have been on a treadmill. The fog maintained its perfect, ten-foot bubble around me. The haunting figures within it flickered and danced, never getting clearer, never getting further away.
A jolt of pure, cold panic shot through me. I was trapped. Stuck in this silent, insane postcard.
But the panic didn't get a chance to take root. It was there, a lightning bolt of fear in my chest, and then… it was just gone. Snuffed out. Not like I calmed myself down. It was like an invisible hand just reached in and flipped a switch off.
The shock of that was even worse than the panic. What the hell was that? I tried to summon up the fear again, to feel anything about this terrifying situation, but it was useless. A blank, emotionless wall had slammed down inside my head. I couldn't feel anything. Not frustration, not curiosity, not dread. I was just… a camera recording this bizarre scenery, with all the emotional depth of a rock.
A weird, nagging itch of familiarity tickled the back of my mind. This feeling… this cold, absolute neutrality… I knew this. I'd felt it before. But the thought was like a fish in murky water—I could see a vague shape, but the moment I tried to focus, to grab it, it vanished into the haze clouding my memories.
So I just stood there. On a sea of impossible colors. Under a veiled, rainbow sky. In a bubble of perfect, enforced calm. Waiting for something, anything, to happen. Waiting...
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How much time passed, I didn't know, but suddenly the sea began to experience change. It could have been just a few minutes or maybe years, I couldn't tell the passage of time, and my memory was one blank tape of film. I knew I was a person, the noun of it, but my name and identity were lost.
A general sense of oppression had begun to take root in me at some point, pressing down through the mental block in my head, causing a cold and empty feeling to begin swallowing me up inside. I would have panicked, had I been allowed to, but I was stuck in detached observation mode. So, the changes in the sea were welcome, even if it meant getting devoured by some colossal fish thing.
It wasn't that, though. Instead, what I came across was...an island.
A stark, pure white against the vibrant turquoise and lime. An island. It was a bleak, minimalist thing, utterly barren, composed of a substance that looked like a cross between fine white sand and polished marble. The only features were a circle of slender, upright stones—like fingers pointing at the veiled rainbow sky—and a series of intricate, swirling symbols etched into the ground between them.
This was definitely the source. The hum was a physical pressure here, a steady pulse that resonated in my bones and pushed the water away from it.