A girl walked over glowing fields of pulsating purple, small vessels criss-crossed to form a web of vasculature that fed the world beneath, expelling a strange liquid onto the dirt. Something blue and thick as molasses. It made a thin layer of slime on the ground to annoy her toes. She was staring at a sky that was red as blood, strange ravens cut through the air and let out deranged cries that rattled the mind. There was a sun, but it didn't look like a sun. It looked like an eye superimposed over the sky, staring down at her with a slit pupil and burning sclera.

  She stared back, and somehow wasn't blinded. The eye saw her, it acknowledged her presence under its domain, and in turn she acknowledged its authority. Communication. Wasn’t that beautiful? Little mortal and cosmological entity, sharing a moment of understanding on an equal field.

  Then the eye blinked.

  Absolute darkness, for a moment that stretched on into eternity. Not like someone snuffed out the sun, not like the dark of a blind man’s eyes, but like it was given divinity to express itself in an all encompassing void.

  Then the sun was back, and she found herself somewhere else. She looked around to realize that she was surrounded by blades of grass half as tall as she was. The grass was white, pure white, and sharp enough to shear. It swayed to the tune of a whistling breeze, adding its own music to the concert. She looked in the distance, and saw a goat grazing in the distance.

  Its coat was a pure black, crunching through the composition of the strange grass for precious nutrients. It raised its head to look at her, and like the sun, they share a moment of understanding.

  The girl took a step forward, and so did the goat, until they were so close she could run her hands through its fur. It’s a rough coat, but familiar.

  The goat let out a bleat and hopped away, the girl watched impassively.

  Then she kept walking, because what else was there to do? When in a strange land you may as well explore, so explore she did. She hoped to pass by some other animals but found no such luck in the endeavour. Shame. The singing trees were almost enough to make up for it though.

  Well…it was technically the leaves that were singing, purple and veiny, like the ground. The bark wasn’t bark but some variation of clay. The tunes the leaves sang made her ears bleed, so sharp was the sound. She didn’t really understand it, but she likely wasn’t supposed to, which was fair. She didn’t understand a lot right now.

  That was okay, ignorance is bliss, or something.

  So she kept walking, and as she walked the scenery changed.

  It got stranger, where there was mimicry of the natural order before, now it became twisted. Leaves became tongues on trees that walked, grass gave her painful lashes as she crossed, and the eye/sun blinked.

  The world went dark for an instant, and then she was somewhere else.

  Laying on a colony of worms, she stared up at the fissure of a chasm. She groaned as she rose to her knees, worms falling off her form and rejoining their brethren. She looked back and found that none of them were crushed by her body. That was nice. Hopefully they didn’t mind her walking, because she could feel a tug in the distance.

  Something like impulse, except external.

  She got to her feet and started walking, where she walked the worms writhed but didn't die. She felt a kinship with the worms, so it was a pleasant discovery that her weight wasn’t enough to kill them.

  She followed the tug. One step at a time.

  Eventually she reached a wider clearing in the chasm, almost like a hall. In the distance was an apple made of flesh exuding ominous prophecy. The worms left a wide berth for the apple, but something in her soul ignored that and she approached.

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  Eat me, a whisper, almost a plea.

  She took another step forward, and her foot hit stone instead of the worms.

  Eat me, it continued. Bricks of reality seared themselves into her mind, knowledge of lost ages she couldn’t parse. Of suffering and sanctification.

  Eat me-

  And she did, hand reaching down to grab the apple. She raised it to her eye and contemplated the feeling of flesh in her palm. Then she took a bite. It was soft and tender, separating easily for her to chew. It didn’t taste like meat, more like loss.

  Loss of a limb, loss of a loved one, loss of an heirloom—

  The girl cried as she took another bite, chewing more methodically this time in reverence for the strange fruit. The impression was less intense on the second bite, but still there. She bit again, then again. Then before she could fathom it she’d finished the apple, feeling an emptiness in her heart by the lack of its presence.

  The worms encroached on her as she contemplated what to do next, she raised her head—

  There was a stairway made of a strange ochre metal, leading up and out of the chasm. Strange, was that always there?

  She shrugged and decided that it doesn’t really matter, making her way down the path of preordained purpose. What was purpose? What was purpose at all? What did it mean to have grand implications guiding every action? Was there freedom on the stairway of destiny, or was it a preordained outcome?

  She didn’t know, she didn’t know.

  All she knew was the stairs, and the climb. One step in front of the other as the soles of her feet burned when in contact with the staircase. It hurt but pain hadn’t been much of an impediment on her strange journey, so why start then? Pain was just a signal, and she was just a body. Bodies absorbed signals like a sponge.

  As she walked she listened. She could still hear the trees and the sharp song of their leaves, but there was something else, a deep rumble deeper in the chasm.

  But how could it be deeper? The only direction was up.

  She’d find out eventually, she could feel it in her bones. Almost like the call from the apple, but more of a suggestion than a pull. All in its time. So she climbed, and she climbed. She didn’t know how many steps she took, how much time passed, but she could measure her progress by the heat on her back from the eye/sun, and it was scorching. Strange, it wasn’t so hot when she was on the surface, what changed?

  Nothing, and everything.

  Okay then, that was delightfully ominous, she shrugged and kept climbing. Eventually she was in front of a wall that wasn't made of stone.Something like keratin…keratin-adjacent? It was too soft, but somehow rigid. The wall writhed at her touch, communicating a question she couldn’t decipher.

  “Hello?” she said.

  The wall pulsated at the noise, and hands began to mold out of the keratin-adjacent material, grabbing her and dragging her closer to the wall. She didn't panic, didn't feel the need to. The wall engulfed her, and she became something greater than what she was, or at the very least different. It tried to communicate, but she still didn’t understand. That was okay, because she said it was okay.

  She stayed like that for a while, something like an embryo surrounded by strange keratin, until eventually she was taken out of the wall and back onto the fields of purple. Waiting for her was a man with no eyes, dressed as a beggar and carrying himself with regal countenance. His hair was ever shifting, never settling on a style, just the same as the rest of his features.

  He was a headache to look at, and the girl let out a groan.

  The man chuckled, and settled on a form.

  Curly locks dropped down to the ground, coloured to match the sky and possessing a fiery presence. His skin was tanned, but glinted like gold in the sunlight. His arms were too long, reaching down to the grass despite his frame of eight feet. He smiled down at her with bloody teeth.

  Do you understand?

  The words invaded her mind, meaning more than just their implication. Blood poured from her eyes and ears as her brain struggled to comprehend the Words. It was so much more than a question, it was a holistic description of the need for her to know. Each Word contained an ocean's depth in meaning, and coming from the man it only seemed grander. Like divinity encapsulated in syllables, like revelation to the ignorant, like—

  He tilted his head and raised a brow at her.

  Right, he asked a question.

  The girl shuffled awkwardly in her spot. “Um, not really.”

  He blinked at her, then sighed. Good enough, for now.