The sun rose on a grey world. Even the pink and orange glow of the horizon couldn't bring color to the cool morning. She awoke by the water, beneath a jagged tree, dripping with grey-green leaves. The chill from the air was wet, soaking through to her soul, barely pausing at her pale skin. Consciousness came slowly, like molasses from a carton, as the dreams swirled and mixed with reality, dancing a dark tango through her mind. Slowly, she raised herself to her knees, surveying the landscape before her. This waking world was as strange to her as the realm of her dreams. The lapping of the water on the shore seemed ominous and threatening, though soft and slow as a babbling brook. The lake was no bigger than a pond, and likely not much deeper than her knee. But something about this quiet, gloomy world seemed to conceal the truth, like a house of mirrors conceals the hallways of the maze.
Behind her rolled miles upon miles of yellow grass, extending to the end of the earth, or at least far enough to assume it must. Here and there another jagged, dripping tree dotted the horizon, but never more that one or two at a time. And none so big as the one she currently resided under. She turned her gaze to the tree, trying to determine where the tree ended and the sky began, and it seemed to her that the height was never-ending. The tree seemed to extend as far into the sky as the flat land stretched behind her.
A strange feeling overcame her as she stared at the tree mixing with the sky, but the reasoning escaped her. Something was not quite right in this place, both beautiful and mysterious, calm and foreboding. She stayed like this, eyes reaching to the sky, mind contemplating the knowledge just barely out of reach, for what seemed like hours, but was probably mere minutes. There was no measurement of time here, no memento of it passing.
Suddenly, like a crack of lightening, she realized there were no birds. No sounds besides the water on the shore, no movement among the grass and trees surrounding her. The lake's slow ripples continued, uninterrupted by fish or insects. The sky remained blank and grey, with only the faint pink and orange outline of the rising sun.
But the sun wasn't rising either. The glow remained as it had when she first began pulling the sleep from her mind, blinking open her eyes to this scene she examined now. She looked toward the horizon again, this time observing what she had merely assumed was the rising sun, to discover the glow was unmoving, and seemed to have no source. The colors danced on the horizon all around her, no longer suggesting the east as the sun awoke, or the west as it settled into slumber. Fear swelled inside her, as she began to understand this was like no other place she had ever seen or experienced, a place where the sun rose from all around you, or never rose at all. She spun around in panic, searching, searching for something, anything, but not knowing what that may be. Suddenly the lake seemed dark to her, inching closer with each run at the shore. The tree seemed to be reaching for her, it's branches yawning open toward her, intent on swallowing her up, absorbing her into it's trunk, making her forever a part of this place, trapped in a darkness of roots and bark and soil.
