I got Lost

I know all the trails outside of Treemont that are knowable. But somehow I found one unknowable. It was a nice day, birds chirping, the sun shinning, and all that. I got out of the car, looked at the sky, nice and blue. I walked a trail I had walked a hundred times. I’m not sure how long I had walked when I got “lost”. It looked overcast but I didn’t see any clouds in the sky, and the news said it would be clear for the next week. I figured it was the stress of the week and kept going.

Even though I had memorized every trail in this aria, the trail I was on seemed unfamiliar. I figured I must have somehow wandered off trail with out realizing it. Then I looked around and everything was wrong. I thought I was going crazy but I realized it was all real.

The trees had eyes, the birds perched on the trees each had three eyes, and it was paradoxically bight and dark. In panic I looked around for something, anything familiar. A root grabbed my leg. I fell, looked at my leg, at the root. I grabbed a rock, hit the root, it let go, went back into the earth. I stood up. The rock was a tooth, the earth where I grabbed bleed. Before me a mound of earthen tentacles, eyes, and fangs rose. Though it spoke in a language was utterly alien I understood it. “Abomination!” It said.

I ran, trying to find something, anything familiar, trying to find a way back. I tripped, hit the ground face first. A three eyed crow landed in front of me. It had long spiked tongue, and three legs, it raised its wings reveling four more eyes, two on each wing. It spoke: “Begone abomination! Go back to where you come from!”

“I’m the abomination?” I replied.

“Yes! Ape, thinking animal that creates unnatural magics. Begone from this world!”

“I don’t know how to leave, I don’t know how I got here.”

“Leave the way you came, the way you move anywhere.”

“The way I move? Walking?” At this point I was utterly confused and frightened.

“You will your legs to move, you willed yourself here, will yourself back. Cease contaminating this world and return to yours.”

“I don’t understand.” I cried.

“Will yourself back as you willed yourself here.”

I still didn’t understand but I tried. I stood up, closed my eyes, and though of the Earth, of home. I focused all my thoughts on it. When I opened my eyes I found myself back on the trail. For a moment I thought I imagined it all but I felt the tooth in my hand, the fang I pulled from the living earth, fresh blood still on it.