Raised from Empty

        Something is looking at me. Slowly I become aware of the spaces around me.  I walk down white corridors, stairs, and into rooms. The rooms are filled with objects; though I do not know the purpose of the objects or how they are used I am aware that there are shadows interacting with them. The shadows I understand are communicating with each other through sounds, but I do not understand the significance of the noises they make. I only know that they understand each other, and that they understand the objects.

I become aware that time is passing based on the movements of the shadows in and out of my view. I walk through the blank hallways to pass the time.  I walk through the blank always. The shadows never fail to perform their rituals, though sometimes different shadows appear to play the parts.

At length my curiosity fades into indifference as the visibly constricted movements and sounds of the shadows fail to take on meaning. The repetitiveness is boring.

Time stretches on. My boredom and indifference slowly give way to paranoia and restlessness. I realize I am afraid of the future.


The future comes and goes and doesn't cease.



I settle back into my indifference. The familiarity of a quiet boredom evolves into an even greater sense of meaninglessness in the small white world inhabited only by shadows playing meaninglessly upon their meaningless objects speaking their meaningless language.





Time begins to escape me.






I feel myself withdrawing inward. I am falling or floating, collapsing and moving away from the box of hallways. The lights in the rooms are going out. I am leaving the world of white, and as the darkness takes over the shadows lose their form and their meaningless sounds can no longer be heard.  My awareness is discontinued and I am dead and thoughtless. The difference seems only aesthetic.







I am unaware of how much time passed in the void, but suddenly light flooded in. That bright world I had tried to escape had found me, and I could hear the shadows' language once more. Something was attacking my chest, and I began to feel something leaving me. I was vomiting, and the ground was attempting to swallow me. The horizontal plane that had constricted the shadows' movements had finally noticed me and I felt it pulling me down. I tried to fight it but I wasn't moving right, and my chest was still being attacked by some unseen force. I could see the shadows again, but they looked different; they had details and strange characteristics I didn't understand. Worst of all were their noises, for now they came from grotesque holes near the top of the shadows. The holes were filled with white gnashing things in front of fat, slapping, wet tendrils; all guarded by fleshy flabs that contorted in alien ways.
These horrible new shadows reached out for me and I tried to escape but the beast below was on their side and I felt myself falling followed by an abrupt stop and an unpleasant sensation.
Now the thing attacking my chest was beginning to cooperate with me, it's symbiotic nature became apparent when suddenly I noticed another shadow much closer to me and I tried to escape by crawling only to notice that this shadow was one with me.
One of the other shadows was holding an object; one of the things I had discounted as meaningless I now associated with terror as it crouched over me. I heard a loud noise and it stood upright as a smaller shadow entered the room and approached me. Suddenly I became calm, and I could understand this shadow's language, though it seemed no different from the one spoken by the others.

"Welcome to the world, child."