By G.R. Nanda
“HHmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm………” The voice seemed to surround Nickel, even though it only belonged to one person, Elder Hawk, who was just sitting, cross legged, a couple of feet away from him.
She was in the same seated position that she was in when she was on her sack bag. Except now, her legs weren’t sunk into a bag. Her legs lay on the bare orange-brown rock earth. The world above and around them was a pale yellow, against which, off in the distance, were the faint edges and bodies of winding rock canyons.
“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………….”
There was no wind. Elder Hawk was clear for the eyes to see, unobscured by dense orange fog. The earth immediately around them was barren and flat.
“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…………….” The humming not only grew in volume, but it also became distinct- almost as if it was splitting into multiple humming voices.
“Haaaaaaaiiiuummmmmmmmm!” A much higher and stronger voice joined in. It sounded younger.
Nickel was sitting cross-legged like Elder Hawk. As the voices multiplied, coalesced and grew louder, he gripped his knees tighter. Slowly, the higher pitched and stronger female voice triumphed, overtaking the other voice
A faint haze of orange gas suddenly appeared, forming around Elder Hawk and becoming thicker. She was slowly obscured.
The humming pierced Nickel’s ears, coming at a single loud volume from all angles, sounding like a swarm of bees closing in on him.
The haze formed a ball around Elder Hawk, lifting her up, raising her legs, which remained in a stiff seated position, mere inches from the earth. The gas swirled around and frayed in random directions at the edges of the rippling sphere around Elder Hawk. The movement of gas in the concentrated space changed the transparency and caused an eerie whistling.
Nickel’s chest and throat tightened with frustration. His face felt hot.
“Why does everything have to be hazy and confusing?” he thought.
“Why?” he shouted with exasperation. He jumped up in fury.
Elder Hawk frowned. She opened her mouth, but her entire body began to lose shape. It became as free-moving as the gas itself. The sphere moved backwards and Nickel followed by getting on his knees and scuttling.
“Why?” said Elder Hawk from the gas, “Why is this happening, is not as useful of a question as how?— how to act— how to cope— how to deal with destiny and fate.”
The gas seemed to recede inwards and then spit itself back out. When it exploded outwards, releasing rippling tendrils that extended from the outline of the sphere, there was no Elder Hawk inside. Instead, there was a tall and slim woman clad in flowing yellow cloth. She was much younger than Elder Hawk. Instead of being dry and wrinkled, her skin was smooth and shimmering. Her long hair flowed above her head like writhing snakes. Her eyes were pale and glowing.
“You cannot control your destiny,” she said in many reverberating voices that came from the same array of angles around them as the humming had. “You cannot control fate!” The woman and her aura of ray-shooting gas bobbed up and down in the air, before flying up and away from Nickel. He recognized her voice. She had sung the song in his first acht-chi dream— she was the singing sorceress!
“Wait,” said Nickel. He got to his feet and feebly walked after her. “Come back!”
She spread out her arms across her. A thick curtain of orange fog enveloped around them, materializing out of thin air.
Nickel’s heart sank. He growled and balled his hands into fists that he shook at the ground.
“Arrgh! Come on!” he exclaimed. “I’m sick of the fog! Why the glibb do I have to suffer like this because some people screwed up an energy plant before I was even born?!”
The sorceress turned into a dust that swirled amidst the morphing gas. The murky substance shaped itself into a narrow, standing figure. The figure lowered itself while staying in mid-air. When the figure solidified, her features became distinguishable through the fog. Her pulled-back black hair topped a soft and round face, one that seemed softer and less wrinkled than it was the last time he’d seen her. Because of how soft her face was, her small black mole stood out more. Below, she was concealed as her petite, narrow body was covered in a fleece jacket held at the waists by a large leather belt, a dark satin skirt that fluttered, dark leggings and black silver buckled dress shoes that were poised downwards, not touching the ground which was many feet away.
“M-m-om?” Nickel said feebly. His voice was high-pitched and quavering.
“Yes, pumpkin, it’s me,” his mother said. Nickel gave a hoarse chuckle at hearing his mother in the most unexpected of all places speaking in a nonchalant manner, addressing him by an informal name. And all the while, she was hovering in midair after having taken the form of Elder Hawk and the singing sorceress.
It didn’t sit right with Nickel. The circumstance and Mom’s form itself were too eerie for Nickel to regard Mom and interact with Mom as if she actually was Mom. Yet he was gravitating towards her presence because it assured familiarity and intimacy. He also felt a foreboding sense of loyalty and dependence on a person whom until now, he hadn’t seen for close to a year.
Nonetheless, it was eerie and despite the stunning accuracy with which hovering Mom’s features were the exact as Mom from memory (Mom wore leggings, silver buckled dress shoes and long satin skirts in public often), the hovering apparition of Mom felt just as that: a hovering apparition. The insecurity resulted in a dread that caught his breath and tightened his chest.
“Now………..,” drawled Mom, “……..what do we do when we can’t control things around us?”
“You’re not real!” exclaimed Nickel. He walked towards her and pointed his right finger at her in accusation. “I know…….” His voice faltered for a bit before he could say you’re not. Should he trust what he sees in this world? Should he trust this world? Should he trust dreamworld?
“I am real,” said Mom. “I’m very real because I’m a part of you. I come from your mind and I have shaped you. I’m a part of you whether you like it or not, pumpkin.” She smiled her wide smile that showed her pearly white teeth and stretched across her face.
Nickel sighed and scoffed.
“Why do you still need to call me that s-.” He stopped before stupid. “-name.” Even if he wasn’t seeing Mom in physical reality, he was still seeing her— or a version of her from his mind (if she was right about where she claimed to be from), after having not seen Mom at all for a very long time. He hadn’t gotten to give a satisfactory goodbye, so he wasn’t ready to diss her even in the slightest, despite her unreal disposition.
“I’m sorry, Nickel,” she said. “You liked it when you were a little boy………..and I do wish you still were a little boy sometimes.”
Nickel looked down at the ground. He realized how much he missed Mom.
A year ago, he hated her coddling, but now it felt like a fond reminiscence. However, he didn’t feel like a pumpkin anymore— he wasn’t so small and innocent anymore.
The name felt empty. He’d been through too much— he’d done too much to still be an innocent, inanimate pumpkin. He wasn’t innocent. He had agency. He had to help Steve and Farrul and get them to Hedonim.
As if she was reading Nickel’s mind, Mom spoke:
“But I’m not here to see you because I want you to be a little boy for me. It’s too late for that. My little boy’s potential is in you. That hasn’t gone away. You have to do hard things and make hard decisions now. No pumpkin can do that.”
“I want you to keep a part of pumpkin— keep his wonder, love and energy. I don’t want you to become spiteful and cruel because of everything you can’t control. Whether it’s something in the here and now or from the past, you can’t control what you can’t control. And you definitely can’t control the past.”
“But you have to let a part of yourself go. Your situation is too dire for you to be a complete pumpkin and you and I both know that you’re too old to be a complete pumpkin. You have to grow up to be a man and if you haven’t already started, you need to start NOW!”
The earth began to rumble underneath Nickel’s feet. The edges of Mom’s body began to stretch into a flowing and incongruous substance.
The earth moved past him faster and faster. The clumps of rock and dirt sped past him like ripples— like waves in an ocean. The earth directly beneath him retained itself. The placement of grains of dirt and rocks stayed exactly the same. Everything beyond a two foot circumference of Nickel moved around him, rushing away. Amidst a moving current of earth, the ground underneath Nickel’s feet stayed put like a lifesaver floating in an ocean.
Mom’s frame was frozen.
“NOW!…………………..NOW!…………………..NOW!…………………..NOW!”
The word echoed, though Mom had stopped speaking. Not a muscle or limb moved. Not even a twitch. Her eyes were frozen— stuck boring into Nickel. Her body became faint and misty. Her outline was slowly dissolving and blowing away to the left and its color faded.
The fast motion of everything speeding past himself caused vertigo and dizziness in Nickel. He wobbled and then doubled over, falling on his elbows. Mom was still hovering at the same height and distance from Nickel while she dissolved away. Her eyes were still stuck in the same position, staring above Nickel where his head once was.
Her last word still echoed, resounding through the clamor of the shifting earth and the screaming wind.
“NOW!…………………..NOW!…………………..NOW!…………………..NOW!”
Nickel squatted, placing his legs evenly apart and stared down, trying not to notice the shifting earth. He tensed his legs, kept his hands on his knees and shot up, releasing his hands.
He stood tall with his arms held out to the side and fists balled tightly. He gritted his teeth and frowned, squinting against the blast of wind. His hair fluttered backwards.
“NOW!…………………..NOW!…………………..NOW!…………………..NOW!”
Mom was now looking like an aura of light, glowing brighter the more she dissolved.
“I’m ready!” Nickel found himself thinking. Ready for what exactly, he didn’t know. But he was ready. “Am I though?” he thought.
“Yes! Shut up! I am! I AM ready!” he shouted in his head.
“NOW!…………………..NOW!…………………..NOW!…………………..NOW!” his mother’s voice echoed.
“I’m ready now!” said Nickel.
The earth sped quicker than ever, zooming past and losing definition, becoming a blur. The wind came in a roaring torrent, ripping past Nickel. Yet, he remained standing. He just squinted harder.
Mom completely disappeared into a flowing dissolution of sparkling yellow light. The light moved like a shooting star; it was a strong orb of brightness trailed by streaks of light, fading at the ends. It moved to the left and coursed upwards and then far off into the distance. Mom’s echoing disappeared.
The light became a small pinprick far away. Suddenly, it exploded into a cascade of bright blue radiance washing over the earth a hemisphere. The hemisphere zoomed towards Nickel and at the same time materialized as a hub of metallic plates. Where the pinprick had been was now an array of rovers and aerial ports stretching across. They all flashed bright lights.
“Hedonim,” Nickel whispered in awe and fear.
The earth ruptured even louder than before. It sounded like the harsh roar of a massive and monstrous beast lying underneath his feet.
Ridges and walls of craggy, looming rock ruptured from the ground. To Nickel’s sides, banks of rock stretched upwards, curving like oncoming waves that were about to crash onto him.
As he whizzed forward, a jagged rock feature with protruding spires sloped off from the far left. The tall edge just passed within inches of him.
Nickel’s feet skidded across deserted highways and through closed terminals, passing underneath its roofs and the many dark hovercrafts and automobiles displaced throughout.
He eventually passed into the hub of Hedonim and was bombarded by the ghostly apparitions of holographic avatars, dancing, sliding, congregating and mingling across tall, smooth and gleaming apparatuses and buildings.
He lost his balance and stumbled forward. He didn’t fall. Instead, he flew through many different scenes: lush coral reefs stabbing into a sandy shore underneath a bright blue sky, star-ships bombarding enemy starships of an opposite color in a starry black expanse of space, Japanese dojos with roofs slanting upwardly at the edges on a hill jutting out of a dense patch of woodland, more half-naked dancing females, medieval castles of majestic scale protruding into foggy skies from small islands amidst steamy waters. Nickel no longer felt tethered. He was coursing through an endless vortex of architecture and nature that juxtaposed the bleak and craggy world that he had always known.
The light that had been Mom remained as a pinprick that made its way into every single scene Nickel wound up in. As the scenes morphed, the pinprick moved with a trail of light behind and morphed into some other facet of each new environment Nickel found himself in. It would go from being a sun to a firefly to a flaming torch to a……………..
Suddenly, when the aura of light was an electric globe atop a tall skyscraper looming below in a cityscape Nickel was falling into, he moved directly toward the globe, consumed by the radiance. The cityscape blurred away as the light grew ever stronger.
When he reached a mere meter’s distance from the globe, it turned into a halo with fraying rays of radiance coming off the edges.
The halo receded into a golden room; the roof, the floor and the walls were all plated in shimmering sheets of gold.
Nickel found himself seated comfortably in a long sofa inlaid with ivory at the edges. Before him was a tall, shimmering woman wearing a narrow red loincloth, a skimpy red bra and various metal bracelets and body chains that all did very little to conceal her shiny golden-hued skin, smooth muscles and salaciously curving body. Her long shock of silver hair swirled and fluttered in a wind which could not be felt.
Nickel’s insides churned with overwhelming lust. The woman dandled towards him. She planted her long legs before him and her hands on the sides of the sofa beside his legs. Her chest was directly in front of him. Her lips were moist and slightly open. Her eyes closed and in a sweeping motion, she turned her neck and titled her face, bringing herself down and kissing Nickel.
Nickel welcomed the embrace, caressing her mass of hair and moving down, slid his fingers through her silver strands to touch her neck. He closed his eyes.
The kiss lasted for a few minutes. Towards the end, the woman’s lips became warm and metallic. It slowly became unbearably hot. Nickel gasped and opened his eyes, releasing himself from her. The woman had turned into an aura of glowing yellow effulgence. The only distinguishable features on her frame were her eyes and her lips, all of which were a darker shade.
Nickel suddenly felt a searing heat course through his mouth and his throat. He slammed his head against the back of the sofa and sputtered.
The woman lost her womanly semblance and figure. Her eyes and lips eventually melted away in a sphere of electricity that pulsated as it moved backwards. While moving to the back of the room, the parts of the room it passed began to glow in their golden sheen and become fainter. The room was losing its totality, becoming less than metal.
“The land of lust and pleasure,” emanated the voice of the singing sorceress from the ball of glowing electricity,
“Corrupted by the engineers of leisure,
Will beguile you,
Its enchantment can
Imprison you,
Curse you with endless whims,
BEWARE OF HEDONIM!”
“Uh oh………,” thought Nickel. “Is that who I kissed?” A voice in his head told him it was not.
The room disappeared as the ball of electricity reached the far end. Large blue plates enveloped them in a large hemisphere. Plates hovered between large gaps where plates stopped reaching into the sky. The spaces inbetween were dark and filled with billowing orange gas. The further up the hemisphere, the larger the spaces and the smaller the plates. While the plates glowed, the looming spires and apparatuses inside the hemisphere were dark and cloaked in orange gas.
The pulsating ball of electricity was morphing above Nickel. Its tendrils formed flat pieces of blinding white cloth, flowing in the wind. Slowly, the light dimmed and wavered until it receded into the shockingly bright yellow body of the singing sorceress, clothed in her flowing white robes. She did not look like the woman who had just kissed Nickel. She was slightly smaller than that woman and had a face that was narrower.
The singing sorceress looked down at Nickel with her glowing white eyes. Her snake-like hair clustered behind her as if it were swimming. She opened her mouth and began to sing:
“For to it you must go!
Through…..it you must go,
Do not entrap yourself in
My………..Hedonim!”
The sorceress looked up and spread her arms. She quickly rose towards the ceiling of the artificial hemisphere. The fog thickened around her until she was too obscured to see. The winds quickened. The plates groaned and shuddered under the pressure of the gusts until they tumbled out of their invisible structure and scaffolding. They crashed onto the dark structures below, around Nickel. Some spires and apparatuses crumbled. Some cracked. Others were dented or split, so the plates tumbled down their surfaces. The plates’ collisions caused the blue lights to flicker before going out.
Nickel cowered as things fell apart, crashed and drifted around him. The winds overtook everything, including Nickel. He was suddenly pushed and lifted until he was soaring through the air. The gusts screamed. Nickel opened and closed his eyes, bracing against the force of the air. From somewhere, the sorceress sang:
“The fog shall not disperse
Deep within you must converse
The canyons rise in glory.”
Nickel’s stomach was pummeled by a bank of orange rock rising from the ground. He gave a cry and his eyes watered. As he reeled from the impact flaring throughout his body, winding hills and cliffs of rock canyons erupted from the ground in a loud grating noise.
“Can you climb them and rise, can you surely?”
The craggy rock face below Nickel extended past his body and stretched over and around him.
“Will you brace the bullets?”
Blurring bullets whizzed past Nickel.
“Soldiers wait to pierce your gullet!”
Bullets pierced his body, adding to the pain of rock having slammed into him. He was bombarded by bullets and rays of hot fire. His nerves were aflame with pain. His body flopped and shuddered with each impact. Out of the corners of his eyes, Nickel could see large metallic boots stepping closer to him. Their metal sheen flashed brightly with every gunfire.
“Yaaah!” yelled a female voice. There was a loud thud, immediately followed by an
“Ooomph!”
“Rraah!” shouted another deeper female voice. There were more thuds, grunts and plenty of heavy breathing. From the corners of his eyes, Nickel saw two lithe bodies attacking the armored soldiers. He took less gunfire, which was now focused on whomever the swift dancing limbs before him belonged to. He could see their legs, clad in layers of cloth and a pair of thick strapped boots at the bottom.
Nickel saw the pairs of metal boots belonging to the soldiers secede, moving far away into the gas until they disappeared.
“Reinforcements!” shouted a male soldier.
The two girls defending Nickel paused in a poised position, breathing heavily while the metal boots clacked away, running away after reinforcements.
The girl to the right turned around and walked towards Nickel. She paused suddenly when her skinny boots got within an inch of his face. She stood there, unmoving.
Nickel winced. Now that he wasn’t observing the action unraveling before him, the pain throughout his body came more into focus. He could now seethe in the reality of his burning body. He even heard it sizzle.
“This is only a dream,” thought Nickel. “You know that.” He also knew that in real life, any pain he was feeling now would be at least 10 times worse. In fact, now that he came to think of it, he would be dead in real life.
The boots slightly shifted. The pair of knees above his head cracked. The other girl ahead of them relaxed out of her pose and turned to look at her accomplice. A large metal rod in the hand of the girl standing over Nickel came into focus. It disappeared as the girl reached above and placed it behind her. The bottom of the rod was now seen hanging from her back.
She squatted towards Nickel, her knees slightly above his head. She reached out a hand clad in leather straps that wrapped around her palm. Her fingers were long, narrow and rough.
Nickel quivered. He focused on reaching out for her hand. He gasped with the effort of edging his right arm forward and when he finally mustered enough strength, he shot it up, seeing it was charred black and streaked red with blood. He slapped down on the girl’s hand. They both firmly clasped each other. At contact, Nickel felt relief and a soothing sensation wash through him, starting at his clasped hand. He slowly stopped shaking and he felt his skin and his nerves all over tighten and cool down. He stopped bleeding. The burning sensations were replaced by dull aches.
“Uuugh,” Nickel said stupidly. He gave a soft chuckle at the miraculousness. The girl’s hand tightened. Other than his physical healing, Nickel also felt more secure with a hand to hold on to and trust. He felt stronger and more secure. It was how he felt when he found solace and unity with Steve and Farrul.
The hand gave a tug and Nickel started to move up with the pull, moving up on his knees and then standing up on his feet. He straightened his back and found that he stood slightly taller than the girl although, as he peered at her, he found no clear facial features other than two glinting almond shaped eyes to look into. From the chest up, she was shadowed. He looked to the side and up, but he found nothing to create a shadow. He squinted at her and she let go of his hand. A murky dark substance— a shadow was cast over her. Her hair and fluttering pony tail were as pitch black as the shadow.
Her face was small and aquiline. She was narrow and slim. Her layers of brown cloth were wrapped around her and hooked at her chest by a leather belt. She leaned in towards Nickel. He had a premonition that she would kiss him. Instead, she cupped her hands next to his ears and whispered in them,
“Trust in Great Father Hawk.” As she moved away, Nickel’s eyes widened in surprise. In proximity, her pursed lips were visible for mere seconds before disappearing amidst shadow.
She’s from the Atlantic Tribe.
She stood shorter than the other girl, who was not taller, but slightly broader. The bigger girl had two axe-shaped devices hanging criss-crossed across her back.
There were oncoming clunks of metal boots storming upwards from below the rockface. The smaller girl moved to the right of Nickel so that he was between them and she poised. She pulled at the rod and unsheathed a long dagger from what Nickel could now see was a scabbard hanging at her back.
The girl to his left turned to him and took out an axe-like device by reaching over at the end. The rod had a smooth stone surface and was gently curving down. The middle was the thickest and the closer to the ends it got, the narrower it was.
The girl who handed it to him pointed to the bottom of the device. Nickel felt the bottom and landed on a knob on the opposite side. He turned the weapon over and discovered a metal clasp sticking out of the knob up towards the body. He fingered the clasp and felt it slightly wriggle in a small hole in the knob. He pressed down on the clasp. When the clasp disappeared into the knob, a short arrowhead-shaped blade slid out of the bottom of the axe.
“Huh,” Nickel whispered in awe. He fingered the top of the clasp from the hole in the knob and pulled up. The blade slid back up. “How do you use this against guns?” thought Nickel. The bulky visored helmets, armors and guns of soldiers appeared out of the fog below, marching up the rock slope. “Guess we’ll find out.”
Nickel hoisted the weapon, holding it with both hands and pointing the blade end upwards. He growled and lunged forward at the first soldier up the slope. There was a flash of gunfire from the soldier, but his gun was fired awry at the sky to Nickel’s left because Nickel had driven a blade into the soldier’s metal plated chest.
Nickel teetered forward while he held onto the handle. The soldier staggered. His fingers loosened around his gun, letting it drop. His knees began to buckle. Nickel let go of the handle and backed away.
The soldiers who were behind the one who just got impaled disappeared. Blood seeped out of the cut in the armor, slowly dripping around the wedged blade. He continued to stagger, walking towards Nickel, who promptly jumped back. Suddenly, the soldier leaned backwards and his knees gave out completely, causing him to collapse completely.
There was no sound of movement or action of any kind except for the eerie howling of the wind.
Nickel was both amazed by his initiative and horrified by its consequence. He whirled around to see the girls’ reactions. They were completely still. Their bodies and clothes began to glow, taking on a golden hue. Much like Mom, their outlines dissolved away. Once their essence had completely dissolved, the light coalesced above.
Slowly, the singing sorceress appeared, staring at Nickel with her glowing white eyes, while her hair and her clothes flowed around her.
“Should I have done that?” Nickel asked in a wavering voice. His stomach roiled with anxiety and dread about her answer.
“What would Elder Hawk say?” bellowed the singing sorceress in her echoing, reverberating voice.
Nickel sighed and looked at his feet.
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “Probably something about Great Father Hawk’s laws or something…………..” He sighed again.
“Great Father Hawk allows the Atlantic Tribe to hunt hawks, doesn’t he?” the sorceress asked.
“Yeeeeeaaaaahh,” said Nickel in an expectant and obvious manner. He frowned. “So………” He looked up at Elder Hawk, awaiting an answer. When he didn’t get one, he lowered his gaze, deep in thought. “…….if Father Hawk allows them to hunt hawks for sustenance, then he would surely let me kill out of self-defense.”
“In hunting hawk, we send the essence of hawk to the cosmos where it came from, allowing its soul to live on in us,” came the raspy voice of Elder Hawk. Nickel looked up in alarm. Where the sorceress had been hovering, now there was Elder Hawk, floating in the same seated position.
“Any soul that would take up the role of a soldier antagonizing innocent people in the name of controlling territory is a soul corrupted. Great Father Hawk would be pleased to have such a soul and its essence sent back to the cosmos to wash away the corruption in rebirth. However, he would not want us to feast on his soul, preventing it from reaching the cosmos for rehabilitation.”
Nickel scoffed and frowned at his feet again.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I still don’t feel so sure about what I did.”
“What did you say before Elder Hawk spoke?” asked the sorceress, her voice booming, echoing and surrounding again. Looking up, it was indeed the singing sorceress, reappearing.
“I said if Great Father Hawk had allowed hunting, he’d allow killing for self-defense,” said Nickel. “I said that was what Elder Hawk would say, you know-.”
“That was YOU,” said the sorceress. “You thought that and you said that out loud.”
“That was not me. And that was not Elder Hawk speaking. It-was-YOU!” At the last word, an independent gust seemed to blow from the sorceress, pushing straight against Nickel and quelling the force of the wind and gas blowing from the side.
Nickel looked at the sorceress unhappily..
“But,” he started, “I still don’t know if I can trust that. Even if I was the one who said it— and thought it, I don’t know how I feel about killing. This is a dream, but I know I’m going to have to do this if I continue on my journey.” After a pause, he looked longingly at the sorceress and asked, “Don’t you have an answer? Please! Shouldn’t you know how to deal with this?”
“You must search within yourself and the advice given to you, to make decisions and judgments because only YOU can make them,” said the sorceress.
“Self-defense or cold-blooded killer, in the end it’s your call, your say— your decision.”
The sorceress became obscured in the fog. She began to sing:
“Oceans long gone,
Waves crashed subterranean lawns
Leaves the world in a withered mess
A dying mess
Nature’s delivered
The fish are too dead to quiver.”
Something crunched underneath Nickel’s left foot. He lifted it, and of course, the fog lifted to reveal a pile of withered fish skeletons underneath.
“A mess left for the rest
Of you children forsaken,
By luck,
Your lot’s stuck in a muck
The world’s a foggy canyon
Too thick for ascension……………
The dried hermits are waiting
With wisdom
To see if you can make it on top.”
Then returning to her normal tone, the sorceress said,
“Can you tame and shape your arid soul amidst this arid rock, as the waters once tamed and shaped these rock walls?”
There was a roaring sound that added to the sound of the howling wind. There was a slight tremor underneath Nickel’s feet, not unlike the sensation of rock canyons erupting from the earth.
A consistent trickling and gurgling noise appeared, becoming louder and louder. Behind the curtain of fog, there was a rippling force that darkened the curtain. It moved close enough to be seen as an oncoming vortex of water.
Suddenly, breaking through, the flood overtook Nickel sweeping him away and compressing him under a vista of dark murky water.
The pain was enough to wake him up. He opened his eyes, finding himself to still be seated. However, he was now breathing heavily and he was drenched in sweat.
G.R. Nanda 