Epilogue – This World: One

“Grrelll…” I moaned. I didn’t know why.

Something felt wrong.

Something had been wrong for a long time.

The cave smelled strange. It was missing something.

My memories were vague. My thoughts were jumbled. Something was missing. Something light. Blue and yellow and red and orange. I liked the yellows the most. And the noise. Jabbering in my ear. Once… hated.

Now missed.

Where had the colors gone? Where had the sound gone?

I stepped along the same path I’d always stepped… and I wondered why.

Turning, ever so slightly, I looked up a long narrow corridor with stairs leading up. I had no idea what was up there.

It was hard. Something felt… ingrained in me. Something insisted I not do what I was doing. Insisted I continue walking. Insisted I not.. Bend my knee, just so…

I placed it on the first step and… and lifted the rest of my body with it. I teetered. I tottered.

I almost tumbled, but caught myself on the wall.

I growled, angry for some reason. At myself maybe. Where had the jabbering gone?

I missed it.

The stairs came more easily after I finished wrestling with the… instinct that seemed to want me to not be there, though a subtle pressure to get back to my cycle lingered in the back of my mind. For now though, I wanted to see.

I came upon a few more caverns that looked eerily similar to the ones I was familiar with. Still they were different. They weren’t the same.

I was enthralled.

I followed them. Tunnel. Staircase. Tunnel. I had to move my head to dodge the spiked rocks hanging from the ceiling and circle around the ones growing from the floor in brand new ways that I’d never needed before. Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was at least somewhat familiar. Maybe I had been here… once. A long time ago.

Then, I found something I had no way to categorize.

A hole leading up. Leading out. A massive entrance where great green and brown things seemed to take over everything that was normal and natural. Above it all there was blue. Endless, endless blue and no ceiling to make sure everything stayed in place.

I would’ve fled in terror. My first instinct was to do so. To go back to my cycle in the floors below and never ever come back.

But… I recognized this hole in the sky. Someone had told me about it. It was the Great-Open. And it was where the jabbering had gone.

Yes… that was right. I thought I could just remember.

As I gazed out into the light that spilled into the natural world, brightening everything in strange ways I felt joy, at finally understanding just a little of the words that were no longer there.

My own words came to me, though I couldn’t say how. Still, staring out into the Great-Open, I thought, ‘Good Morning, Gell’ and wondered what it meant.

The End of Book One