After a while random shapes danced in my vision. They moonwalked and pirouetted and back flipped in the air like football players. Or that was what it seemed. Whenever I approached them, they faded.

Somehow I possessed an awareness that I had slipped off into a dream. No boundary existed anymore between dream and reality.

In this way, I slept, dreamt and explored the mist all at the same time. Indistinct voices arose, as if someone was talking behind me. But it was futile to expect anything but the mist when I turned back.

A humanoid shape crept into my side vision. I was quick, and reached it. And, lo and behold, who could it be, but the zombie queen!

“Darling,” Dieana whispered, elegantly beckoning at me, even as the mist slowly consumed her, “my darling! Come back to me.”

More humanoids materialized. A Skhite and a Hornie. They began to bash each other’s noggins furiously.

“Stop it!” I yelled. “We monsters do not fight each other. Stop it! It’s an order!”

I was reminded of the siege of the Skhite village that had spanned several weeks. It seemed so long ago… wait a minute–

The mist darkened and took the form of stone. I was back in the village of the Skhites. I caressed the grainy stone wall of the tunnel I was presently in. So hard and solid.

Skhites were moving about. Some of them were wounded. The Hornies had penetrated the village. A heaviness on my pate informed me of a crown sitting on my head. The old king had died in my arms only sometime ago, passing me the responsibility of the clan.

I remembered a time when I had been in a strange place filled with mist. When was that? Was it before I had come to the village? There was either something wrong with the timeline in my head or everything I was seeing was an illusion.

“Come here!” I shouted to a two headed freak that was passing by. Not a freak, but a fused Skhite couple, happily married. Nora and Nadir. They too adorned small injuries, but were not severely hurt.

“Vicky,” they chorused, as if they had practiced. “Is there anything that we can do for you?”

“You are not real,” I said to them with conviction.

Nora and Nadir exchanged exaggeratedly confused glances.

“What are you saying Vicky?” they asked me.

“You are not real,” I repeated.

“But we are,” Nora said. The confidence in her eyes waned. Gingerly she touched her face to verify she was real. She brought a greenish hand closer to me and gently rubbed my cheek.

“See?” she said, as if determined to prove she was real.

“Why are you even asking such questions?” her conjoined husband Nadir added. “Vicky, we must focus on getting rid of the Hornies, they have made camp outside our village. We can’t go out for anything. The evilese will run out. You are the king, you must find a solution.”

Okay, those were very pressing problems. Putting a question mark on reality on the other hand seemed so trivial.

I took a sudden step back. If I let go of my reins on reality I would get lost in this fake drama.

“I said you are not real,” I barked at them. The couple gaped at my rude behavior, hurt. I jabbed at the air with my finger. “You are just inside my head. Everything is going on inside my head… inside the mist,” I bit my lip as I grasped something. “Wait a minute, the mist too is inside my head!”

I had just ‘solved’ the mist.

The image of the mist had engraved itself into my mind. Almost like if you stare at a very bright light, you keep seeing it for sometime even after the light is turned off.

The mist and all that I had been seeing after I closed my eyes was an illusion inside my head… nothing more.

With this realization, Nora and Nadir and the village of the Skhites disappeared.

I opened my eyes and was a little disappointed to find myself back in the mist. Contradictory reasoning bubbled in my mind and my earlier explanation was challenged. Did the mist really have no existence outside of my head or was I missing something?

Building a Burj Khalifa. That was my main purpose in this quest, wasn’t it?

A great dark shadow loomed a distance ahead in the mist. A massive building. Funny I noticed it only after I thought of it, not before.

This tower was poorly designed. A great shapeless mass that rose to a terrific altitude. It reminded me of my childhood when I used to pile random items on top of one another and see what height I could get to before the whole thing could ignore gravity’s call no more.

Just like my juvenile efforts the tower too seemed rather unsteady.

I wasn’t surprised when it began to tilt to one side. It was close enough to me that if it crashed and sent debris flying in my direction I could get hurt. Badly.

I fled, as the tower toppled behind me, forcing my legs to work as hard as they could. An airborne brick hit me on the back and I fell.

As I groaned in pain, I saw more debris crossing the air above me, and I covered my head with my arms, expecting more assault on my body. More bricks and stones showered on me. By the time it stopped I was just hanging on to the edge of the cliff that was life.

I moaned and I cried, writhing on the ground, underneath a mountain of debris.

A shadow fell on my face as I squirmed in my agony. I looked up meekly. It was a stone giant. It was Bono’s father, Fono.

He squatted beside me.

“Fono?” I whimpered. At this word, a small furrow came to his forehead. With the tip of his pinkie finger, he tapped me gently on the face.

“Get up,” he said to me. “Wake up!”

Wake up.

Why yes, I was quite asleep. I opened my eyes. But the scene didn’t change at all. I was still buried under the rocks and stones. Fono continued to consider me with a queer expression.

“Get up,” Fono said.

“But I can’t,” I told him. “I am injured, can’t you see? It hurts”

“You are not injured and you are not in pain,” Fono said. He attempted to pull me out of the rubble. But I let out a cry and he stopped.

“It hurts!” I said, tears welling in my eyes.

“No, it doesn’t,” Fono insisted. “Just stop thinking that it hurts and it will stop hurting.”

Huh?

“You are in the land of the mist,” Fono explained. “Things here are real only as long as you think them to be real. The moment you stop thinking them to be real, they stop being real. That tower existed because you thought it into existence. These pebbles that form a mound over you are just a product of your imagination. Same case with the pain you are experiencing.”

I was skeptical. The pain was very much real. It was as if a hundred knives were pressing into my flesh. And it was a mound of bricks, not ‘pebbles’.

“Trust me,” Fono said, meeting my eyes, his tone possessing a fatherly edge.

The village of the Skhites too had seemed very real, until I had questioned it. Would the pain disappear too like Nora and Nadir, once I recognized it to be a trick of my mind?

It was remarkable, but the moment that I put a question mark on the pain that it ebbed away, to the point that the heavy pile of rubble felt like a small child sitting on my back.

“Get up,” Fono said. To my own amazement I stood up easily. I gazed at the remains of the great tower, which were spread out in all directions. All this is just like a mirage, I thought.