The following is a (very) short story based on some of the concepts from my novel The Dreamshift Chronicles. I hope you enjoy it.
To The Void
It's all new to me – the sights, the sounds, the smell. None of this is like anything I could ever have imagined – though I must have. I mean, I had to have seen it all before or else I could not be here now. Somewhere, in a pocket of my mind, I knew this place was real, knew it existed. And so I came.
I really had no choice.
You see, I'm driven.
My hair moves as if gently tussled by a mild spring breeze. Yet, there is no breeze. I feel nothing against the exposed portions of my skin. No scent is carried to my nostrils. I open my eyes and they are greeted by the black. It's as if I am blind, but I'm not. I can see, but I'm not exactly sure how or what I am actually seeing. In this place, seeing becomes a relative term, something that is experienced with some other sense, something heretofore unknown.
I reach out with my hands – or at least I think I do – and feel nothing. But perhaps I do. Nothing is certain here. Everything is different, alien, unreal.
Whenever I had traveled to other realities in the past, I had always transitioned through the black. It became a transition point, the blank nothingness that is seen between the channels on your television set. But the more I traveled, the more I realized I could feel the blackness as I passed through it. There was a sort of subtle viscosity to it. It was almost as if it were reaching out to me, calling me, pleading with me to stay for a while.
During my still times, when I was not overwhelmed with the daily tasks of living, I would find the black crowding in at the corners of my mind, reminding me it was out there – calling. That's when I began to wonder if this black, this blank nothingness, were perhaps a something instead of a nothing. What if this thing we all went through when we transitioned was not a nothing, but a place. I mean, that's what this i...