Over the sunken realm

First chapter of a new "choose-your-adventure" with a twist!

Stormseeker - Unsplash

The salted air fills your gasping mouth, burns across your aching throat; it rushes into your lungs, and you feel your chest abruptly swell with life, so much that you almost fear your rib-cage will shatter.

The noise around you is unbearable: the wind screams into your ears. You cannot open your eyes yet: the light is so much brighter here! But you can already see the sun through your reddened eyelids: it is there, dazzling far above you.

You take in another breath, more slowly this time, and then another… And every time, it is as if pure joy were flowing into your body, reanimating it, healing it from some sickness you never knew you had. Nerves you did not remember you had wake once more across your face.

But you start falling again. Your body sinks back into the ice-cold, oily depths you just emerged from. You find nothing to hold on to. Sea-water prickles its way into your nostrils and beats down against your ear-drums, muffling all sounds again as you drop helplessly. The darkness, even deeper than you remembered it, swallows you.

Your fingers claw the waters above you, grasping at the liquid edge of a world you could not even have a chance to see. You shake your head, flail your arms, kick your legs in desperation… until you realize that the more you move, the slower you fall.

Before you know it, age-old reflexes take command: your feet point downward, your knees relax while you kick with your calves and hips. Wild courage swells your heart, and with burning lungs and mouth shut, you kick your legs again, and again.

Soon, you stop falling altogether, and little by little, kick by kick, with your arms whipping the water above, you slowly glide your way back up. The darkness around you takes a warmer shade of purplish deep-blue, and as you raise your head, you see the waters above glistening with shades of sapphire and emerald under the sun.

The world comes alive with sound and light once again, and your eager lungs drink deep gulps of air mixed with drops of salted water. The slight pain in your eardrums as you come up does not distract you from the pleasure of feeling that long-forgotten wind on you face again.

You kick your way up consistently, arms stretched out, to stay afloat as long as you can. You are not going down there again without a fight!

Seconds melt into minutes as you bask in the wonder of the surface world. The free gusts of wind, the ever-lapping waves, and the vivid light of the sun tickle some barely-touched memories somewhere in your brain: but when you try to focus on them, they slip away, like a phantom scratch. Soon you discard it as you find yourself synchronizing your breath with your leg-kicks.

Sunlight blinds you less now, even when you can see it through your closed eyelids. Finally, you risk it: at first you only see patches of colour from your open right eye, a blue-green, white-etched vastness crowned with a wall of electric blue. Soon enough, they take the shifting shape of an ocean stretching out as far as you can see to the edge of the sky.

You open your left eye, and quickly see everything take shape around you. You turn around and see it all: waves of blue and green rise and fall slothfully all around you, swallowing up the entire horizon.

For the first time today, you become conscious of a quiet apprehension that has been building up in your mind: you never expected it to be so lonely up there. Where are all the others?

How many had left the Safety Pod before you, to find out "what was out there"?

Well, they were never that many of them, but you can remember their faces…

Or maybe their names…

With a shock, you realize how little memory you have of your time Below. You remember floating weightlessly, and pressing your hands and face on a hard, transparent surface. You remember being fed, but not how your food tasted. You remember talking with people, but you cannot visualize their appearance.

All your imagination can summon is hazy, murky, like you're looking through a cloud of oily smoke… Questions rush into your head, turning your apprehension to dread: if you talked with them, why can't you remember what their voices sounded like? Were they even real? Was any of it real?

Water splashes into your face, right into your open eyes: the sting of salt turns your mind back to the now, and you laugh: why should it matter what lies Below? Are you not alive now? Is not all of this far more real than any memory?

You jerk your head back, kick your feet up, and lie on your back with outstretched arms, floating along as the waves caress you from all sides. And suddenly, you realize why you've been feeling off, like something was missing: the sharp ache that circled your head for longer than you can remember, is now gone.

A sense of peaceful abandon traverses your entire body, and you let yourself bask in it.

Your eyes open again: the azure dome of the sky above looks like the inside of an egg. For some reason, you feel like it should be bigger, more beautiful…

Somehow you realize you do remember a few things from Down Below: impressions, images, not from your senses but from your imagination. There, in your mind, lies a boundless sky, studded with crystals of living light that wheel round and round in an endless dance…

Where did that idea come from? You cannot say for certain. Perhaps you spoke of it with the others. Perhaps it has always existed within you, waiting for some concrete reality to compare itself to.

Other ideas pop into your head now: it's like some block has been dislodged from your subconscious, letting these images flow freely in your conscious mind.

There is a great expanse of land: it isn't flat and cold like from Down Below but bumpier, thicker, dryer, and covered with row after row of some golden vegetable, swaying under a warm, fragrant wind.

There is an enormous pile of jagged rocks climbing up to the heavens and piercing through white blots of white in the sky - visualizing it sends delightful shivers of awe across your spine.

There is even a boundless ocean of waves of every shade of blue, dancing this way and that, wild and untamed.

Other impressions rush into your mind, taking over your senses: warm, fresh and wild smells bring you back to a childhood you never had. Sights beyond sights twist your sense of direction, making you dizzy. Your fingers twitch, longing for touching something cold or hot, sharp or dull, soft or hard…

Even when you shut your eyes out and focus on what you are hearing - the blowing wind, the splashing waves - other sounds ring on inside your mind, from a place you don’t remember yet have always known: a warm voice humming, the clapping of hands, cries and laughter, strange noises that blend together into waning echoes of another world. Tears well up in your eyes, and you don't know why.

All you know is that now, without ever having heard it, you know what music sounds like - if "music" is a real word, and not just something you've imagined from your time Down Below.

But that feeling quickly vanishes, leaving room for anxiety: you know you are meant for more than just drifting away over the waters. There is a world out there that you were made for - but does that world really exist? Should you not have found it by now? Why would something you so obviously need be unavailable to you when you desire it so much?

Then it hits you – a spark lights up inside your mind. Never before had you ever thought you were made for something, instead of the other way around. For a brief, too brief instant, your thoughts seem to pass beyond a barrier you had never sensed before. It’s like stepping outside of yourself, and seeing yourself for the first time – or like walking out of a dark place, and looking back, seeing the cage that had contained you. It does not seem unreal, like a dream, but only too real, almost unbearably so. Made for something…

Only now do you remember something from your life Down Below: they are merely impressions, too vague to visualize, but clear enough to fill you with disgust. You remember base appetites satisfied before they even took shape; your senses put to sleep as soon as discomfort arose; bright colours and blaring sounds washing over your apathetic mind in a frenzied flurry; and years upon uncounted years of half-slumber.

You have not truly lived, until now.

You were made for something more.

A splash brings you crashing down back to the present moment. Salt burns into your nostrils, and you choke up on seawater. When you recover your breath, the thought has drifted away as quickly as it had sparked. And as you claw helplessly at your memory to squeeze that single thought out of it, you find that it has already vanished, dissolving into forgetfulness right through your clutched fingers.

Anguish and anger build up in your chest. Despair clenches your teeth. You breathe in spurts, in a wild panic. What was it that illuminated your mind just now? Will it ever come back? Or was it only a daydream, a shadowy trick of your subconscious? No, it must have been more than that… It must have been. And even if it were just a dream, in that moment, you would trade your entire existence up to now for another taste of it.

Suddenly you realize how tired you are: your muscles unacquainted with effort are straining, and you start to have trouble breathing. Your head and eyes ache furiously. Staying in the sun so long has taken its toll over you. You can hear something buzzing in your ear. Pain pulsates through your body: it’s like your body is burning. But only on the upper side…

Down Below, there is water. Cool, dark, soothing water to relax away your pain. Without a thought, you let yourself sink back under.

For an instant, your aches vanish. Even the buzzing in your ear is gone, drowned out by the water. Beams of sunlight are so much more beautiful here, like shafts of sapphire dancing their way to the ocean depths... You close your eyes, and bask in the sweet, fresh respite from the pains of the upper world.

Yet, all too soon, you need to take another breath. Your eyes open on the dark turquoise of the deeper sea. You did not even realize that you had started to sink!

In a fit of desperate, animal fear of death, you lash out wildly with arms and legs; you succeed in slowing down your descent. With your emptied lungs about to burst, you throw your arms over in a desperate try to swim up.

It all lasted seconds, but to your panicked mind, it feels like hours of struggle against oblivion. But the sea becomes clearer again: you are moving up once more. Soon enough, you are close to the surface. A strange shadow hovers over the waters up there… Something to grab on to!

With stifled exhilaration, you kick your feet again… The water seems thick, almost solid to your weakened legs. You stretch out your arms again, but find you have no strength left in them. Your fingers grasp at the strange object right above you, but to no avail. All becomes blurry. Your chest heaves as your instinct orders you to breathe in, even if it means breathing in water…

Something plunges into the water above you: it’s a hand.

Do you grab it, or do you sink down?

The votes are in! Check out Part 2 here: