Lost in the Foreign Realm

They didn’t want to leave us there, but they’d had to.

The locals who took us to the place weren’t evil, nor by any sorts villains, however this circumstance bore no choice for them. Even our parents seemed then to understand, implored at distance from us as the two boats drifted amiss. The black and brown tour guides were humble and commiserative, as well, each of them reaching towards with sorrowful, outstretched arms, weeping and tragic. They mourned our passing there, bid us existential farewell into the exiled land lovingly, knowing something we didn’t know, perhaps why there wasn’t alternative for us to have nor beget.

Their canoe fell away ethereally, betwixt the dilapidating waterfalls, maelstroming them onto a different path, back into the old world, thee old as well … we were borne for new straits, uncharted sight, sound and madness in the midst of some otherworldly apparition. Unto the swirling tides of the collapsing current, the sad, tear-streaked faces of the parents and foreigners, and the beseeching yet necessarily apart, rented arms fell away from view without recourse, nor mitigation to our woe.

So they had left us here.

Finally, we became entirely alone.

And we’d known that, here, we’d been delivered to remain for good.

At the brink of a wooded shore, the canoe ebbed to a standstill. The beach was rock and bone, direct on a path leading from there into gloomy forest. We walked cross the pitch. Then started through the trees.

This land, the trees, flora and setting seemed quite similar to the old, but there was a blackness in it, a deeply emotional concourse of conflict that felt haunting. Throughout the enchanted path, snowflake-esque fallout of char drifted from the sky o’er the forest, burnt up the woods and greenery all to ash, did not or couldn’t touch us. A different sense arose whilst soot soon funnelled up, took up vacated torch in the place of the prior, after its half-life diminished; percolated, reshaped the woods with pseudo-nature into exactly what it’d been before, toxic and healing … it was uncanny, must have been nightmare, but also then was a survivable and genuine reality.

Suddenly, we’re transported. Where we go, it isn’t clear at first. The end of the place is the beginning, and then shifts into the very end. We see into the construction of a theatrical set. Then we realize, though we look through an ether’s proscenium, that we are watching the scene of a past someone. The departure of a time in someone’s life, discarded from the folders of memory and universal storage.

At first, we perceive it beyond the confines of sight, amid a shared locus talisman … then each together us materialize by a window of a bungalow house, looking in on a kid asleep, tormented, bred and tantalized for torture never come … then we are within it, part of the memory that were a dream in the viewpoint of the once beholder.

This person, yet a child, is rather a young boy, herein just a little briar, afraid and alone: he were once who I was. His memory, being, were whence mine. And this tale, recurrent of one stream, less haunting, that long former held unto a depth of my soul, for what chasmic end I cannot ever understand why.

He peeks out, the covers tucked over of my head, clutches fast the dual layers of fabrics as though believing rendered they couldn’t hurt me underneath there. Hovering above in the terror, the nightmare eater, a cold villain tyrant of many sleeping hours, and the monster minion; they whispered twisted thoughts, hot stale breath pluming through the comforter and sheet, conspired together a reign lasting many moons. Until the boy was no longer afraid. Till he’d whipped off the covers, and they were gone, apparitions of fear. They’d never done any of the things claimed to intend; the boy had always managed stay hidden, concealed and discreet of direct contact …

The steel lift, joystick controlled by the whims of the mad scientist, jolted to a start, crept slow downward toward the vat of suppurating, emerald acid … thence boy shrieked, protested, helpless, until beneath the surface his cries gurgled out as the flesh melted from his bones …

We broke free, awoke where we’d been before. The place around us was same as before, something lest of familiarity, with the dullness of a sedimented land in the distance tarred and cemented, every tree and plant, beckoning us by the tantalization of necessity, forth.

‘The force doesn’t hold you there?’ Owen asked me.

‘And to that fear, thee aren’t apprehended?’ Rylee added.

‘It cannot hold sway over me,’ I told them. ‘After it, what I only remember, fields of green, the dazzling rays of day’s eternal sunshine playing off the white plane, sleepily ensnared amid trees and fauna in the peaceful fray of the untouched forests, its far free lands. We never knew if it’d brought us there, but it did not matter. We were all so happy, you see. That was what I came to feel, thereafter, and it was much stronger. So thus I was free of it hence, and am free perennially still now.’

We wandered all day and night for ours next couple centuries, futures transferred. Rylee and Owen, who were lovers, walked along passionately, intimately aside me, and they both, lest enticing oblivion, hadn’t lost yet the afear. Time drew on; the lot of us aged million years, always in youthful coils, then grew younger again. The climes here were always moderate, whether swirling with snow nor storm or arest, we always went onward uninhibited; their affect possessed no magik unto us.

On from mountainous plateau, between marks of the lands destined heart, within crevasse of all things old, we’d ambled a long way years into the lower valleys glazed green nature. In that sector of this world, the figment of a relative olden house materialized before us, glittered in dusted form, spewing ash, ember. Each of us knew the house, though Rylee more so by far; a closest familiar hadn’t obeyed ceremony for hers, not paid observation to the monotheistic masses from therein.

We knew it distressed her, but without a word, she let go of Owen’s pale, perspiring hand, walked on ahead … we awaited her distance, respectfully, paid ode herein, then followed on … the house imploded, dissolved into the breach of mirage from whence it came.

There was merely one more place for us left to conquer: we spotted it ahead, a little homely shack embraced in the opening of a dense wilderness. We knew not what waited there, lingered it its melancholy fissures, deserted and forsook over long since the inception of kind or creation. Outside was a tomb, rained slick, inapproachable, godless … leaves and mildew dampened on its filthen gloss, stone slated and dim in the wearing of irreplaceable times gone past.

We approached the threshold thereof, ventured in the rusted door, creaking and decrepit with the home. At the end of the hall inside: we hadn’t expected.

Against the collapsed door of the crumbled frame, stood granules coarse-grinded in original form, colorized and authentic otherwise lack of conversion and grained format. It in she was a woman, we all knew, and this could not be easy for the sake of ours common, contemporary brother.

The fermented figuration of lady, apart her world in spirited fraction unknowing, laid out arm in ether of encompassing aura.

The index of fingers in hand of the arm was pointed besought, implores, silently, insentiently, at Owen; his distraught rented the portal, he moved to embrace, desperate, crying, impotent.

Rylee and I reminded him, she with the lover’s romance and I in friendship, the place he must stay. Here, it was time to forego traumas past, let gap of the veil shrink and close, incise ourselves unto the realm here unknown. That, all of it, would be alright, in the end.

He recoiled, surpassed the temptation; she incinerated, furling into a thousand mothballs, blown stray in consummate drafts of wind. We had each yet succeed, but found the best of possibilities in chance circumstance of love, faith, hope.

We went out of the place, friends in arms of glory, wandered on paths that would take us ere vacuum of time and space consumed, ethereal, bountiful.

There we were, without fear, forward going.