We marched in silence towards the purple horizon.
Levinbolts streaked across the sky with an obstinate rhythm, a staccato that seemed to contradict our gait no matter how we adjusted it. The land was flat, mostly, but craterous and rugged— and from those craters bubbles routinely spewed out, precipitate of our own fears and insecurities. We saw those things reflected in their surface, picture perfect, but if we stayed too long to gawk at them, we would surely be eaten alive by the environment.
It’s for that reason that we marched forward in silence, with our heads up and our mouths shut. The four of us bickered incessantly on the way here, and we learned quickly and painfully just how terrible of an idea it was to allow our emotions to have free rein on these accursed plains.
Although we didn’t speak, our experiences were easily communicated between us—
I found myself tormented by visions of abandonment, and death in obscurity. Disappointing the woman who called herself my mother, alienating the closest thing I ever had to a father, and losing my beloved partner over petty nonsense. I couldn’t help but question what was truly important to me, and how to banish the thoughts that hurt the people and the things I cared about. The mist surrounding us somehow suggested feelings of asymmetry and unevenness to me, and the shaking of the ground beneathe made it feel like my body was slowly being separated into two.
Olessandr saw visions of his wife dying while he was far away from home, travelling with us. He cursed her barren womb and resented the fact that she couldn’t give him the family that he always wanted, and cursed himself for being so petty as to care. The land made him feel old and feeble, more so than he already was. Although he was the most practised of the four of us, his step would often falter and he’d have to pause to collect himself.
Dcheisie became preoccupied with the good old days, when he was still happily married and had no worries in life. He skipped along with joy, as if the experience had made 200 years younger. The rest of us quickly realised that when we finally made it through he would be inconsolable.
Jean saw himself wandering alone, chasing after the phantom of his family. Like Jacques, he worried about his priorities in life, and questioned whether or not he felt comfortable dragging the rest of the party along with him on a wild goose chase— or if this constituted a wild goose chase in the first place. More so than anything else, he wanted to settle down, and for the comfortable days of journeying with the rest of the party to continue forever, and the thought of anything changing that terrified him.
And so the four of us continued to march in silence, each of us preoccupied with our own delusions and struggling against the environment, until finally it appeared that we were approaching the end of the plains, and our destination was near.
I saw Eos peeking through the distance, and opened my mouth “look, the blue hour is upon us!” This was apparently to great effect, as the other three were startled by the sudden speech.