Chapter Six - YtiralugniS

  I try to snatch glances of the hieroglyphic? runic? language that surrounds the elaborate depictions carved into the old standing stones as I jog behind the half sprinting butt of my excited mutt. It doesn’t take long before I am huffing trying to keep up with the silly boy, his tail sometimes all I catch as the stones around me rise up into the walls of a stone maze.

  I glance at the ground as I run, checking for Keats’ prints in the sand at each corner, but am otherwise transfixed by the story carved into the walls, which seem to depict a being from the sky descending onto an ocean world?

  I puff, breathe badly, and cough a little (I’m not sick, I just smoke too much >.<), but I manage to keep up, watching the walls pass by me faster and faster, blending the images into something like a movie as each carving makes a single frame.

  The being existed among the tentacled creatures, shining light on their dark world, teaching them how to use tools, helping them build their first city, protecting them from great disasters and worldly evils, and in the end? Even showing the people that they too could do magic, that they could shape the world, that they could be like the being of light.

  I squawk while stumbling on an awkward bit of sand, gracelessly falling to the ground, blinking hard while the world spins violently around me. I look up at the stars…

  At…

  The…

  Oh.

  A massive hole in space vibrates with ravenous hunger as it grasps at and drags the different colored clouds of nebula, bending them into shapes around the void as it devours them one by one.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I flinch at the soundless destruction of a great star hitting the edge of the black hole, watching in fascinated horror as all of its plasmic-light explodes outwards, almost as if trying to escape its doom even as its iron core is pulled past the event horizon.

  I nearly jump out of my own skin as a slobbery tongue suddenly passes over my nose and smears my glasses with spit.

  Then I giggle, glad to be free of the spell that sight had cast on me, and reach out to scratch at Keats’ neck floof, taking a moment to let the rhythmic panting of my beast center me.

  Ok…

  So, we really left reality behind…

  I glance up at the hole in space, flinching as it gobbles up the last rays of the dying star.

  This is really not how I expected this to go…

  A sharp tug of my sleeve surprises me and as I look over at Keats, who is quite insistently trying to pull me further into the maze, I can't help but feel like I just needed to follow him and everything would be ok.

  So I let the boy pull me to my feet, do what I can to brush the sand off, give up as the sand made it obvious that of the two of us, it was not going to be the one to budge, and leave my worries far behind and trying to catch up as I set off after my wild pooch.

  The tentacle people built a temple for the light, and from its guidance they prospered. The people grew, their civilization was great, they conquered their world and knew in their hearts that nothing could stand against them.

  I start to hear snippets of something bouncing off the stone around me, coming from up ahead. Sometimes it's humming, others a whistled tune… The voice sounds female… What is…

  The being speaks to the people, telling them that they have done well and grown much, so much that they can now produce their own light, and thus must now shape their own fate.

  The people begged the light not to go, they did not wish to live apart from the one that shone on their lives, they had no desire to grow away from the light, no wish to have a fate that did not include it by their sides.

  The light left.

  And the people.

  All went mad.

  A feminine laugh surrounds me as I suddenly burst out of the maze and into a circular clearing, staring at a star skinned woman sitting on a tree grown into a chair, one leg propped on the other, her foot bounding as she grins at me over a crimson clay tea cup.

  While looking warningly at Keats as he sniffs her tree, she uses her free hand and gestures to a comfy looking bean-bag style bush saying, “Welcome Mr. Emrys, it’s about time we met face to face.”