Strange

Strange. The world wasn’t always this way.

When I was little, the world was full of rolling hills and mossy-dark forests. It had clear skies, sometimes blue, sometimes purple, and the animals and trees would speak and whisper of stories long gone and unfinished.

I walk the world now, and I know it has changed.

As I grew, learned and read, the world became weirder than it had ever been before.

When I dive now past the bottom of the iceberg, past the Underhouse and past the clouds, the world has become a pattern of fragments and stories and oddities.

The sky is full of planets and stars, and it is sometimes blue, sometimes yellow, sometimes red and green. Three moons float above by night, one purple, one orange, and one white.

By day, the sun is sometimes blocked out by the dreamer. He roams the heavens and forges the future as he sleeps, a floating, giant manta ray of dark violet and sparkling blue, and were he to ever wake, he would crash down on the earth and bring about the end of days.

No one really worries about that. If you asked the fish in the river Now and or the Mansquid who sorts the past, they’d tell you it was a lullaby to only be sung once, unique and unmatchable, and that it shall last forevermore.

Few ever get to speak to them. One must to be a wanderer to survive in the Between’s sea, to cope with the chaos where streams of musings and currents of maybes meet, to not go mad.

I am the only wanderer these days. I walk along the white shores that have no name and the borders of the green planes with their bumbling farmers and the Capital of Mirrors. I roam the far yellow planes, intercept with lakes people think to be gods, and I walk between the shadows of the deepest, darkest forest there ever was, where I speak to the soldiers of wars long lost and listen to the melancholic song of its tiny red birds, before reason ushers me onwards lest I get lost in their voice.

It leads me to the mountains by the shores of glass sometimes, this forest, and when it does, I’m happy to climb up the jagged rock until I find the village of my past. Mountain folk lives here, strong-jawed and with blood red wings, slow to trust but sharp and loyal when they do.

My brother was banished from this place. He was an angel when I made him, kind and strong, and a reminder to keep me on whichever track he thought right. He’s a madman now, screaming curses in my ear when I don’t do as he says, shoulders so stiff he cracks when he moves.

I hated him, before. I don’t now. I learned that he needs me to listen as much as I need him to be quiet.

I’m sure we’ll get along, eventually. We still have much to learn from one another, and much road left to travel side by side.

There were others too, once, others with me on the road. There was Ember the fire-breathing weasel, Griffin the Wise, and Blood, the stoic wolf. They wander the wilds now, their story long past the climax, safe and sound in the epilogue.

As for me, I don’t know where I stand. My tale could end tomorrow, with a crash and a bang. I am the dreamer’s blind spot, and it’s up to me to fill the pages devoted to my name.

I am a wanderer. I am a sailor, explorer, adventurer and storyteller.

I take things. I make things. And then I move on, as the ground under my feet changes, and the dreamer once again rewrites the course of fate.

Strange. The world wasn’t always this way.

But I think I like what it’s become.