The sun loomed on the horizon, painting the sky with crimson strokes as it set. All around an eerie silence waited, profound for its lack of natural sound. No crickets chirped, nor owls hoot, nor frogs croak in the threatening arrival of nightfall. Darkness spilled out of the woods, lingering in long elegant strokes across the grey grass and fields.
No color lived here. The Blasted Heath sat, a silent witness to times that come and gone. Still, none wandered here, no one visited now that the memories of what it was were long since decayed. Yet despite the lack of humanity, the wilderness did not spring up to reclaim the wooden house and its stone well.
Overhead birds soared, then cut a sudden path South, away from the barren land. I stood on the edge of its reach, nearly half a mile away from the home itself. Nearby the trees on its perimeter had grown grey and brittle, leaves dried and fallen to the ash-colored grown. Strange enigmatic colors shifted in the branches, glimmering now and then as I watched them.
Winding up the trees and marbling their fruit were bands of a color I could not describe. It pulled on my mind, sucking me into them, a crescendo off music without sound that pushed upon the senses and whispered of hunger. The impulse to reach up and touch the fruit, caress its estranged flesh and suck the strange juice from its pierced flesh pulsed inside me.
I shuddered and looked away. So it was in the Blasted Heath, as it had been in the strange days long forgotten. My eyes wandered the home, over the decrepit barn, and finally to the well that stood in the middle of it all. Trepeddation sunk into my stomach as I dared to take one step forward.
The grass crumbled beneath my feet, turning to the same strange dust that everything seemed composed of. I look at the well, caught by a hint of something on the wind I couldn’t place. Its bricks were scattered about, loose and forgotten. A pail sat decaying on the rough ground, discarded from its home within.
Stars flickered to life above, seemingly blazing compared to the hollow eeriness of where I stood. The crimson streaks of light began to fade to twilight blue and vanish as the sun dipped below the horizon.
Time had moved imperceptibly and as I turned to look at where the sun had been. I pulled in a breath realizing an hour had passed as I had stared at the well and now night had arrived, sparkling to life in the sky but leaving me alone in the dark.
My eyes glanced towards the house, then back to the well, finally seeing the strange amorphous glow that hovered above its opening. All around me the grass withered further, yet shimmered with the unearthly colors I had only heard described. Even the dying trees with their overladen fruit emitted the eerie shimmer.
I took another step forward as early night faded to deep, all hints of sunlight vanishing to only leave behind the peculiar light and the darkness of the world. The house remained untouched by the glow and so I approached it first, seeing its shape by the glow of the well upon its other side.
The door creaked under hand and I froze, as though the glow itself could hear and feel the same way I would. When it did not change, I breathed, and stepped inside, glancing behind me as I moved. The grass and trees swayed, as though there was a wind, and yet nothing moved or stirred in the clearing.
Brows knit, I closed the door behind me and looked about the decrepit space. An old couch, mouse eaten and destroyed, sat in the room. On the ground rested a pile of dark matter I could not identity, the remnants of a tablecloth cast over the top of it. Yet somehow I knew, even in that darkness, that what lay there had once been human.
The wooden floors creaked as I stepped around the remains, keeping my eyes from the shattered and collapsed, caving in on itself in estranged ways I had never seen. There was no featured face to call a human, but its angular arms and legs, the way it promised suffering, I knew.
At the table, nothing remained. The chairs were scattered and forgotten. Someone had run away, or several had. Even as I glanced around to notice the path of fleeing, I saw the wooden railing, coated in the strange dust, and grimaced. Something in me stopped, a memory of elsewhere flickering in my mind, the quiet determination of rural hands.
As I climbed the stairs, the wood around me began to glow as eerily as it had outside. Shadows flickered but nothing moved. I found myself staring out the window of the attack, fingers playing with keys as I watched the well. My body trembled, the familiar haunting of having lost time shook me to the core.
“You want me to watch you,” I said softly, touching the window pane with shaken hands. I could my body ache, like I had been standing for hours. My breath felt shallow and slow, my mind scattered. I blinked, turning away from the window, and stepped towards the door.
The key slid inside with a strange ease and I felt like I had done this before. Yet as the key turned and the door unlatched, I felt a chill go through me. Within something starred at me, body molded and broken, its indents the shape of the wooden railing below. It cried out, screeching at me in an estranged vocal range I had never heard.
My body shuddered and I fell backward as it neared, darkness and shadows unable to contain the eerie and frightful glow that came from within it. I screamed with it, feeling my mind wrap around it only to fall apart again as it dared to comprehend what I saw.
Outside, the glow from the well intensified. I stood at the window in the attic, staring out at it, fingers playing with the keys. I blinked, turning to look behind me, staring at the door that was locked. Long moments passed as the door and I watched each other, my mind turning over the feel of the key in the lock and yet rejecting the idea.
I didn’t even know where the keys had come from.
An angry force inside me threw the keys against the door, leaving them in a puddle at the bottom. I remembered briefly finding them there, sliding one into the door. A sickness rose in my gut as I turned and stumbled down the stairs, pausing at the landing to see the beams and rafters glow deeply, emanating the color from within the well all around me.
Whatever lived in the well had infested this place, pulling life from it in every way it could. I reached out, touching the beam, only to feel it crumble and sink beneath my caress. Grey ash fell onto my hands before I steppe beneath and into the kitchen once more.
Rather than stop and hesitate, I moved forward and opened the front door. The light shimmered from within the well, dancing with tiny particles, as though a million stars had descended to form in its unearthly color.
My feet stopped moving as I stood there, wide eyed. The earth vibrated as it shimmered and moved in the air, becoming wider and larger with each passing moment. I could feel the frenzied panic of things that had once lived here, of things whose bodies had decayed yet lived.
I stood suddenly at the edge of the well, looking upward. My body pulled in deep breaths as I prepared for bravery I wasn’t sure I had. I questioned my own mind, asking myself what we were doing, what was happening. A shivering fear was my only response as my hands touched the bricks that made up the well.
Above me, the entity twinkled, lingering in the sky as it expanded. Tears slid down my cheeks as I stared up at it, knowing I had not truly seen what it was that lingered in this blasted land. My fingers tightened and I sucked in one last breath before I closed my eyes and then turned my head to peer into the well.
I paused and then peened my eyes to the well below. Brilliance and eternity waited, gleaming outside and within me. My feet lifted as I fell into the blinding darkness, surrounded by colors I could never have imagined.
There was no water, nor pain, as I felt and yet never found a bottom. The color held me, pulsing against my skin and encompassing me in its being. I felt my body ache and decay, graying out as the grass and fruit had, the essence of the being eroding my skin with each moment that passed.
A cry escaped my lips as it pushed inside of me, entering without an opening, and slid into my being. Pressure and ecstasy pulsed throughout me, filling my mind with the knowledge of thousands of worlds, a million lives, all culminating in a moment of joyous creation. The entity spoke in words that had no meaning, dancing in colors that were not real, as my mind absorbed it all and fell apart.
I was drowning without there being water. It ripped apart every thought and identity I had ever had, passing a thousand years through my body in the blink of an eye. I was destroyed, unbecoming, dust in the wind before I was rebuilt and remembered, body trembling and fresh and new.
My new fingers wiggled, touching nothing and everything at once. I felt light pulse within me, casting the strange earth in shades of its unnatural color as my feet touched the land once more. Life hummed in my body, a new understanding of living born in my mouth as I spoke words I knew nad yet never would speak again, so unknowable they were.
Collapsing, I fell to the ground, back on its moist grass, now green and verdant as I peered upward at the sky. There was nothing but stars and darkness, all the strange and queer entity was held within me. And yet I was too small, too tiny to encompass its being. It pushed at every space I occupied, willing it to go beyond.
The skin did not bend and a burning pain shot through my body that pulled a moan of rapture from my lips. I quaked, shuddering and rocking against the exquisite light that began to pour from my pores, shifting out of my and erupting into the sky far above.
All around me color and life returned, my body a vessel for what had been taken, slowly leaking out that life into the world where I no longer needed it. The entity hovered above me, its profound mind releasing my own, leaving behind just a hint of a star that twinkled in my eyes.
As dawn threatened the horizon, the color from space shifted and blinked, disappearing into the sky far above and fading from this world. I lay on the ground, gasping for air, body unreal and yet too real, a humanoid prison I was suddenly acutely aware of.
I stood, looking around me at the renewed land, eyes shimmering with a new color that never had belonged to this place.
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