Emerald Sands

Down, down, down.

The ground below wasn’t stone or earth but a plane of shifting glass, reflecting skies that churned like liquid metal. Above, a fractured moon floated in silence, shards suspended around it like teeth in a broken jaw. The air was thick, a pressure that made Lucius’s lungs ache as though he were breathing water.

“Hey! Where am I?! Hey! HEY!” he screeched.

The glass beneath him cracked and split, each fracture spilling black smoke that curled upward in tendrils. Hands emerged from it, pale at first, then dissolving into shadow as they reached for him. They touched without weight, yet with every brush of their fingers his body felt heavier, more and more submerged.

Around him, towers rose and fell, columns twisting into themselves, stairs leading nowhere. Light bled from unseen sources, red one moment, sickly green the next, illuminating vast symbols etched across the horizon, pulsing faintly.

Figures appeared at the edges of the shifting landscape, each a silhouette filled with stars, their eyes small burning suns. Their voices layered together into a single sound, a vibration that made the glass plain shudder beneath him.

“You are so small, Lucius, so weak. Fragile, like a baby bird. But we can unmake you, put you together as something new, something reborn from the dirt. Solve et coagula. Forever eternal.”

The landscape twisted with their words. The horizon folded inward like paper, revealing an abyss beneath, a whirlpool of light and shadow spiraling endlessly downward. From its depths, great shapes stirred, vast wings unfolded, bodies without form pressed against the edges of reality like prisoners against steel bars.

The voices sharpened, worming into his thoughts.

“Say the word, Lucius. Just one word. All of it is waiting for you at the edges of your soul. You can have her again. Her smile, the way she laughed. Oh, how precious. We know you want to see her again. You can have your parents back, all your mistakes washed away. You won’t be alone anymore, they will all be with you by your side, until the end of time. Let us in, and it can all be yours.”

Black oil began filling up the folds between his brain, smothering him like a seagull covered in tar. Lucius felt his own reflection staring up at him from the fractured glass. Eyes glowing like molten metal. His double raised a hand toward him, urging him forward, down into the abyss that pulsed with promise.

“All you must do is let go. Say it. And we will crown you. Only we can strip you of your sins, only we can cleanse you of the rot. You are filthy, ridden with diseases that have spread like a cancer to those you care for. You must do this for them, you must do this for her. Say it, and be reborn.”

The glass gave way beneath his feet. He was falling now, past ribbons of light, past drifting shapes, their outlines vanishing into infinity. The abyss yawned wider, the voices swelling until they weren’t whispers but thunder, surrounding him, filling him. The word trembled at the back of his throat, desperate to escape, while the darkness waited, hungry and patient.

And then the air shifted.

A current tore through the void, cutting clean through the chorus of voices. The smoke recoiled.

From the gale, she appeared.

A woman wrought of wind and sky, her form translucent, her hair streaming into the storm around her. Where her feet touched, the abyss stilled, where her hands reached, the grasping shadows dissolved into mist. Her eyes glimmered with the calm light of a dawn not yet born.

She wrapped around him like a breath, lifting him, pulling him from the clutching dark. The voices screamed as they faded, their promises scattering into nothing. The abyss collapsed behind them, swallowed by her storm.

Lucius rose, weightless in her arms, as though carried not by flesh but by the will of the wind. The wind whispered, not coercive, but gentle, a thread of clarity through the deafening noise.

“Break open your heart, Lucius, come from below. Rise unto the heights, scour the darkness away.”

The storm around him dissolved at her word.

The fractured glass beneath him softened into rich soil and sand, and from it spread meadows alive with green, rolling outward in endless waves of emerald.

He stood now in a garden more vast than he could comprehend. Hills stretched toward a horizon of soft light, clothed in tall grass that shimmered with dew. Groves of trees swayed gently in the breeze, their leaves glowing gold at the edges where the sun touched them. A river wound lazily through the fields, its surface catching the light in shifting diamonds, the sound of water blending with birdsong in the branches above.

The woman of wind lingered just ahead, her form woven into the breeze that threaded through the trees. Her silken hair streamed into the sky as though it belonged to it, her eyes calm as a dawn that had always been waiting for him.

“Am I…dead? Is this…heaven?” Lucius asked the wind.

Her spirit twirled in front of him, as though she found great amusement in his question.

“A lost heaven, I suppose. But not lost for much longer.”

A single tree sapling swayed far off in the distance, its gray branches home to only one blossomed flower.

“Why do I keep being shown these horrible things? These memories never leave me, they keep coming again and again and again and again. Is there just no peace for me?”

The wind bristled subtly, a soft tilt of the twirling figure. “Sometimes, to protect one thing you have to let go of another. Turn your back on everything else, focus only on what is important. You are not weak, you have the power to break these chains of grief. Do not submit, Lucius, do not become corrupted.”

Lucius wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, but his voice came out barely louder than a whisper. “But how? How do I do it? What do I use to stop being afraid?”

Blades of grass began to slow their movements, the rustling tunes blowing through the trees simmering down into a peaceful stillness.

“Our time is up, you must head back now. Return and follow the light Lucius, it is the only path that leads to salvation. Follow it and you will never be lost.”

The reversal began as a soft pull at the edge of his vision, brightening with every heartbeat. The garden blurred, its colours washed in brilliance, until grass, trees, sky, and even the wind herself were swallowed in radiance. The glow covered everything, pure and blinding, warm as it wrapped around him.

Lucius felt the ground slip away, the dreamscape dissolved, and the light pulled him upward, brighter and brighter, until all he could do was open his eyes.