The scorching sand of the ever-growing dune of static slams mercilessly against your face as you stumble forwards into the eternal expanse.
You continue to crawl and lurch through The Aether, passing out the forgotten contents of your backpack in the interminable swarming bush of roots and sand, until eventually you make it to the top, slumping back down and collapsing onto the ground.
Sweat runs down your face, all life and energy drained from your un-being.
You feel sick. Bile building itself up within your throat as you roll onto your side your tears sizzling against your skin as it makes contact with the void-sand.
You can hear laughter just a few meters behind you. Your mind slowly succumbs to the omnipresent blackness of The Aether, the sounds of laughter slowly falling to a grinding crescendo of dejected acknowledgment.
Light begins to fade and blur around you. It begins to waver slightly as if hovering on the verge of completely fading away. The light takes form around a black hole.
You shiver as you feel them stand above you, imperfect and shifting husks daring to mock you with their presence, they try to speak to you, their voices nothing but screeching and begging sobs into the nothing.
You can feel their empty eyes glaring down upon you, unwilling to acknowledge the end, unwilling to accept what they have done. You can hear their voice screaming and their screams becoming nothing but a buzzing noise, a cacophony of sound, a manic barker trying to stifle the life within itself with their non-existing.
You turn and see them, looking down upon you, its figure crumbling and subsiding into a mess of creases and ripples. The rotting corpse of all that once was. The blackness is boiling as the tears build up and escape from your eyes in a choking tidal wave.
You are in that state now, and as you continue to behold it, you fall over the edge into the void-sand, a voice within your head just out of your hearing pleading with what is not there.
Slowly, the dream begins to dissipate.
The roar of the static becomes distant, nothing more than a faraway hum as you lay gasping, begging for breath, unable to move.
You find yourself in a car. The radio is blaring out some pop song that you don’t and will never know. The sun is shining in your eyes, rising above the pine-tree-lined countryside. You look around and it seems like everything is as you left it, but different. You feel a chill run down your spine, a memory creeping up from your subconscious.
Your eyes are bleary as you free yourself from your too-tight seat buckle as you scan the world around you, small and insignificant as if you were watching it from afar. Smoke covered everything before you, fog rolling up from the damp trees, swirling in the sky. The incandescent evening sun flowing through the branches making it look like the clearing was engulfed in flame and fire, streams of light are their constant companions as they move and interact in a dance to this seemingly unending melody.
Every other sound was silenced.
The world around you was nothing more than a mere painting of swirling, incomprehensible color, but a painting that held an unimaginable amount of meaning and hope and dream. And like most things, it too began to slowly fade before you. The sharp pain of the unconscious bile escapes your mouth as you thankfully manage to shove your head out of the window. You take in a deep breath which did nothing to console you. The acid taste burning away in your mouth would surely fade, but the images of my dream would not.
Now, here you are, staring at the smoke-stained ceiling once again, imagining what it had truly been like in the first place. The pounding in your ears, the screams, the pain, the burning sand.
You decide you would give anything to be able to feel those emotions, feel it once more.
The sun has gone down and the silence of the land seems to make this cramped beat-up vehicle a home. The shadows make shadows of each other, crawling around each other in the silence. A new moon remains still.
Barely, just barely, a bit of moonlight is reflected through the leaves, barely enough to be seen at all. The creaks and moans of the old thing echo through it all as you crawl into the back seat, curling upon it like slow whispers. The silence in the air brings up memories you would rather not acknowledge, the ringing in your ears growing louder as you close your eyes as tight as you can, trying to envision something anything but the ringing.
Nothing.
Silence.
Nothing but the echo of each creak in the darkness.
Lifeless.
Silent.
Heavy.
Almost tangible.
Something in the air wants you to hear its sounds. Echoing voices that you can't quite seem to make out. You shiver, your body involuntarily seizing against itself, a single tear rolls down your cheek as you feel it sizzle against the seat below you.
A solemn smile extends across your face, and once again, you drift back into your endless slumber that The Aether thanklessly provides. And just like that, you are gone.
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