Kain’s head was feeling awful. He had never blacked out drinking, but this was the closest thing he could fathom to the morning hangover afterward, an experience he had heard many of his colleagues complain about every Monday morning. Despite his headache, Kain had no time to reminisce about his peers’ hangover grumblings because he had a more important thing to think about.

‘Where in the hell am I?’

All Kain could remember was that oppressive rain and it stopping. After that, it was just a flash of light. Kain opened his eyes to see a cave with rough walls all around. His clothes were dirty, but not torn, which was good news. He glanced to his left, then to his right and gawked at the sight in front of him. A large, red… thing was on his car. It had nestled itself into the engine of the car and tore to shreds any piece of metal or machinery that stood in its way. The red thing was shiny, and it glowed a red that made it look like crystalized blood. Kain decided to simply call it a red pillar for simplicity’s sake. Thankfully, despite the poor state of the engine, the cabin was virtually unharmed. His family’s precious ‘Dea’ and the case of weaponry was untouched.

Kain was shaken and he did not know what to do. He could either wait there for rescue, whenever or if ever it would come, or he could explore his surroundings to figure out where in the world he had ended up. Kain was many things, but willing to put his fate to something as cruel as luck was not one of them. Kain decided to explore this strange cave and look for his way out. Despite his confusion that would make many other people forget to prepare, Kain kept a level head and armed himself. He put the old hemet on and opened the case. In it he found the rifle that had to be 6 or 7 decades old at least. He then pulled it out and checked it for anything that might cause it to jam or break in an intense situation.

‘Everything seems to be in order. At least checking these older weapons is easier than checking some of the modern stuff or even the convoluted prototype stuff.’

An old battle rifle was an easy task to check for Kain. This was because he was a weapons designer who made prototype weapons. He was not in any important position in the hierarchy, but his creative mind allowed him to occupy a vital role in the team. Well his creative mind was only one thing that made him needed; the other was his meticulous attention to detail that made any task given to him come back either flawless or unfinished if it was out of his league, which was a rare event.

Kain checked the rifle and had a funny thought. ‘What if I named my equipment like my relatives named Dea?’ Therefore, after finding the rifle in pristine condition, he decided to name it ‘Grand’. It may have been unoriginal, but it fit the theming of names for weapons in his family as it was a misspelling of its actual name. Besides, he felt that everyone in his family would be proud, save for the poor kid who named the knife in the first place.

After naming Grand, he checked the pistol and decided to name it ‘Mouse’ for the same reasons as naming Grand. He looked in the case and found the ammunition of the weapon: he found five 8-round clips for Grand and two 10-round clips for Mouse. It wasn’t much, but it was much more than Kain thought he would find, as he felt that anyone with that stupid carving on their gun case would throw their ammunition away as soon as possible.

‘Oh well. Who knows? Maybe that phrase was a diversion after all.’

Kain did one final check on his weapons when he noticed another carving on the rifle near the trigger in a place no one would look. It said |M + N| with a heart around it. Kain was curious, because none of his grandparents’ names started with an ‘N’ or an ‘M’. Despite his curiosity however, Kain needed to leave and find out where he was and where he should be heading. He looked around the cave again. The cave was wide, almost 30 feet across and 20 deep. The ceiling was high, about 10 feet, yet despite that, the red pillar still dug into both the ceiling and the floor. Now that Kain looked, there was a strange dot in the center of the pillar where it was not blood red, but a foggy, shifting grey. He reached out to touch it, but found it no different than the red area surrounding it.

After confirming that there was no point in observing the pillar anymore, Kain finally looked for an exit. There was an incline that snaked around the outside wall of the room that stopped at a 5 foot ledge under a point where the roof mysteriously was indented from the inside, making it able to accommodate Kain comfortably. Kain felt the rocky wall with his hand. It was like a physical manifestation of the word ‘contradiction’. It felt hard, yet soft. It felt cool, yet hot. It even felt wet, but dry, which confused Kain to no end. Kain decided that it was not dangerous, so he slung Grand over his shoulder, put Mouse into its holster, and slid Dea into its sheath, and headed to the ledge area with his helmet on.

The ledge was small in area, only about 5 or 6 square feet, and Kain traversed it with no problems. He stood in front of an opening in the rock that seemed like the darkness of an abyss. The weird red pillar had been lighting the cave that Kain found himself in, but that red glow could only reach so far. Past that opening was a completely dark passage, one with a length unknown to Kain. He pulled out Mouse with his phone and turned on the flashlight to see into the corridor. The tunnel was long. But it was also branching. In the 50 or so feet Kain could see, there were dozens of offshoots and separate paths. Kain walked into the tunnel with careful steps, staying by the wall as he walked. As he moved forward a few feet, he found a strange thing. At about 2 feet beyond the opening to the pillar’s room, there was an odd color change in the rock in the wall. Because the room was lit with red light, Kain did not notice earlier, but the rock closer to the room was a reddish color which became most apparent when his phone’s white light was illuminating it. Past two feet, the color changed to a unique blue that looked fused with another of rock’s presumably light color. Kain was no mineralogist, but he was pretty sure that there was no place in the world where reddish rocks and bluish rocks existed in such close proximity without mixing, and being split by such a perfect line with no curves. Especially because of the fact that the contradictory texture ended where the red did.

‘Wait… what’s that?’

Kain could have sworn he saw something odd happen with the line. Between the two colors. It looked like it shifted slightly. Now that he was focusing, he felt that headache from earlier getting stronger, more oppressive. Kain was no stranger to pain, so he casually ignored it. He blinked and when he opened his eyes, he saw it again. The blue pushed into the red slightly. It was not like a wave where the opposing color also pushed back uniformly; it was ununified and unbalanced, as if the red could only hope to resist the blue where it did nor push. From what Kain saw, the blue pushed a few inches at most and stayed still at least. He stared at this anomaly for a while, but it never changed, or at least he thought it never changed. After a few more minutes, he decided to move on. Kain crept through the winding tunnels alertly and carefully, never letting his guard down. After what seemed like hours of going in circles, Kain finally saw a light. He crept his way forward, inch by inch, making sure that he was calm and rational. When he finally reached the crevice, the gash that bled light, Kain stood with his mouth agape.

The sky was not the sky in the traditional sense. It looked like a blue fog covered the sky all around Kain. Left, right, up, forward, it was all bathed in an odd blue fog that, oddly enough, Kain could see through for what seemed like hundreds of miles. Despite how odd the fog was, it did not attract Kain’s attention the same way what he stared at did. Above him, Kain saw a giant island that looked a hundred of miles long and wide hovered in midair. Actually, it did not hover, but just hung there. It looked like the island was stapled to reality itself with impossibly strong staples, like a sturdy shelf nailed and screwed to a wall. There was not just one island, but many. Some were close by, and could be seen in their entirety. Others disappeared into the fog, only letting corners of its mass be clearly seen, the rest fading into a murky sea of blue fog. In all of this, Kain’s mind went blank. For him, it did not make sense. It could not make sense for him. Kain stood there for a long time, unable to move at the sight of his entire worldview being torn apart by these silent, unmoving islands.