Fan Fiction ❯ Raven ❯ Shadowworld ( Chapter 2 )

I awoke, I don't know how much later. I felt horrible. My head ached, my stomach felt weird, and the very muscles in my body felt fatigued.

Rubbing a hand across my forehead, I looked around. The classroom no longer stood around me. In fact, I had no idea where I was. It was like nothing I had seen before. Everything around me seemed to be a shifting between blackness and the deepest of reds.

“This can't be real,” I said to myself, my eyes darting from one part of the darkness to another, trying to discern a substance within it. At the sound of my voice the shifting of colors accelerated for a moment, then slowed to almost absolute stillness as a path shimmered open. For lack of any better action to take, I began walking along it. Every now and again I would see weird, inhuman shapes fade out of the darkness only to disappear into nothing. At this point my fear truly hit me. This was not possible; it couldn't be. And if it was? What then? What could I do but continue walking though.

Along the path a doorway formed ahead of me. Inside there was only a circular room. I turned around, studying the darkened walls. After a moment I realized I had turned too far. I should have been back to the door by now. I panicked. Running up, I began pawing across the walls, looking for some vestige of the doorway that had been.

“Calm down, Susanna. There has to be a reasonable explanation,” I told myself. As this was obviously a lie and there could be no reasonable explanation, I didn't try to find one. At some point I fell asleep, lying alone in the middle of a doorless room filled only with darkness. I slept, and I remembered.

 

 

 

 

I saw it all as if I was standing in the midst of it. The first light flashing out from a single point and expanding until dozens of suns flew from it. They seemed to keep coming forever, and my eyes were filled with a thousand afterimages. Eventually they stilled their movements and found more permanent positions in the sky. It was at this point that I began to see more. As suns grew old and died, they slowly spread out to form planets and balls of debris across the cosmos. And yet, these planets were different than any in pictures that I had seen. They seemed to be dozens of colors at once, the colors not shifting like the world I had left, but seeming more to coexist in a spectrum no human could accurately view at any one time. Right now I had no body and I somehow knew that I was immune to the laws that normally governed mankind. Stones and other formations seemed to be there, yet not.

The suns began moving again, seeming to speed up as more and more time flashed by. Molten planets solidified and things seemed to slow back down. My attention was forcibly pulled through all the chaos down to a planet. It could almost have been Earth, but the landmasses were totally different. There seemed to be much less water, but the land itself was not densely packed but more evenly distributed into small packets of islands. My attention was drawn even farther in and I began noticing even more details. There were people! They looked basically humanoid, but with thicker jawbones and darker skins. They wore thin leather hides that were almost totally smooth, and I saw them enter and leave small lean-tos. Eventually they all seemed to be outside and fall to their knees as one man approached them. His steps carried him with the intense confidence of a ruler looking upon his vassals. He was gesturing widely with his hands. Suddenly my vision split and his world became two; one a lush forested mass of islands and people, the other a bluish world lacking any people, plants or animals. And he stepped through onto this other world. It was odd, one step he existed normally on a relatively normal world, the next he walked into a world of visible vapors with no other distinguishable lifeforms.

He stepped back onto his world, and time sped up again, people rose and died. The world slowed down a half dozen more times, each time showing various men, some seeming kings, others the lowest peasants, but all stepping through to these other aspects of their world. Only twice more was the double world blue. The air itself seemed to have color and texture. After an eternity of time and a plethora of places, it slowed down and faded. I had the disconcerting feeling of once more falling into darkness.