What Lies Beyond

After we left, through what I realized must be how Rowan came in through the wall earlier this morning, I had a sudden thought.

"I feel like I should've asked this earlier, but how exactly do you plan on getting us out of these fields? Especially considering the sitaution we have here." I asked.

This couldn't be a simple case of us simply leaving, after all. I was carrying Rowan, which made my traveling difficult. Serric and Gloria were both in their early 60s based on their appearances, which is hardly the right age for running from insane killers. And to top it off, we were inside these fields, which according to Serric, were nearly endless in all directions.

I recieved the answer to my third point rather quickly.

"You're up, Gloria." Serric said.

The old woman who hadn't spoken a word since I arrived nodded. Then, she raised her arms in front of her chest, in a praying position.

In that instant, the entire world seemed to collapse around us.

The fields, the sky, the surrounding space itself seemed to fracture and compress infinitely—an extroardinarily disorienting sight—until in a single moment, reality was sucked into a small crystal cross within Gloria's hands, and everything around us had changed. 

We were no longer standing in a field of flowers. Under our feet was nothing but plain old sand.

I glanced behind us. There stood the cottage, just a few feet away. To our right, the river still flowed, within a bed of rocks.

But what was truly monumental was what surrounded us. 

I hadn't seen anything since I came to this world except for endless fields of flowers. To be fair, they were really pretty, but got quite boring after a while. But this was a rather stark contrast.

In front of us, roughly a few miles ahead, was a massive body of water. It was large enough so that I couldn't make out anything beyond it, except for those indistinct mountains that I had long since dismissed as an accurate judge of distance. The water itself was clear blue. However it sparkled with shades of every color imagineable. Although all the action this morning had ruined my sense of time, when I thought about it, I realized hardly an hour had passed since I woke up this morning. Maybe even less. Because of that, the sun was still low in the sky off to our right, and the way it reflected on the water in so many colors was something I knew I would remember for a very long time.

The sand we were on continued out to the water, forming a beach which continued all around the edge of the lake as far as I could see. I assumed it was a large lake, since I could see the land curving around it to the left and right, although i couldn't see how far it went in those directions either. It looked like a great place to swim in the summer. If summer existed here, that is.

To our left, roughly the same distance as to the lake, was a bizarre forest. "Bizarre" because the trees were growing, well, upside down. It was hard to make out details, but the tree branches and leaves were most definitely on the ground, and the trunks shot up into the sky like spikes. If a giant fell from the sky, it wouldn't have a comfortable landing.

Behind us, past the cottage, was a desert that stretched as far as the eye could see. The sand was a reddish orange color, and I could see that far out into the distance, there were mountains looming beyond it as well; these ones, however, seemed far more tangible than the others, and i suspected that they were much closer than the mountains I saw in the fields and past the lake, even though they looked farther away.

It appeared that the cottage was right at the boundary of the desert, as just about 100 feet away from us on the left and right, the sand changed to grass, as well as behind the beaches on the coast. In front of us was simply a long path of sand connecting the beach and desert.

I was distracted from this fact, though, by what lay on our right.

To our right was perhaps the most strange sight of all.

 Although it was far in the distance, it wasn't difficult to see in the slightest. A large crater, at least a mile wide, dominated the view. Within the crater at ground level were hundreds of clouds, floating around calmly. And in the center of the crater,  a massive red eye stared up into the sky.

I assumed that under normal circumstances I might have been terrified, but the scale and unbelievability of the situation rendered me rather calm. Fear tends to accompany things that we don't understand, but it also requires at least some degree of familiarity, and in this case, I was rather far out of familiar grounds. It was simply too much to process. Of course I knew that it wouldn't be long before my shock wore off, so I figured I might as well start trying to distract myself.

"So uh, how did you do that?" I asked Gloria.

This was naturally the first question on my mind before I was interupted by my new surroundings. I hadn't forgotten that I was only seeing these things because this woman just absorbed an endless field into her necklace.

Gloria didn't answer. Instead, she looked at Serric and simply nodded.

Serric turned to me.

"Gloria is one of the greatest users of spacial magic in the world. Certainly the greatest human user. She's actually the one who created that field, and naturally, was able to take it right back down for us. In fact, I have her to thank for keeping me and Rowan safe all these years."

I was rather impressed. I had no idea this quiet woman was such a big deal.

"What else can you do?" I asked excitedly.

She just shook her head and turned away.

I was rather disappointed, wondering if I had offended her somehow.

Serric sighed.

"Long ago, Gloria accepted a deal with a demon. Power in exchange for her voice. Because of it, even I don't know all she can do. I only met her after it."

When I heard that, I knew that I should be sympathetic. Or scared.

But what scared me the most was that I wasn't scared at all.

Instead, I felt a disconcerting sense of joy.

Because as soon as Gloria opened the curtains to the world beyond the little cottage and fields I had seen, I was hooked.

I thought I might enjoy this world.

Because what I had seen and heard so far was more interesting than my entire life had been.

A giant eye in the earth? Magic? Unique abilities? Fantasy races? Deals with demons? Dangerous organizations?

I wanted to stay here.

I wanted to adventure and experience this world.

It was then that I realized that the feeling building in my chest when I saw that giant eye wasn't fear. It was elation.

And now that my brief period of shock had worn off, I was feeling it in full force.

I had already been interested, ever since the moment I set foot in Reverie.

Serric's discussions of magic and the world had left me more interested.

But sometimes seeing is believing. It's hard to be excited at a fantasy world, no matter how much you hear about it, when all you've seen are fields and a house. Sure, I saw some cool stuff, like Rowan's technique, or that Radical. But it wasn't enough. Now, though, I was surrounded by novel experiences on all sides. And it was like all my shackles were shattered.

In that moment, I thought I never wanted to go back to the real world.

Why would I, when the real world is waiting right here for me?