The Far Shore

There are lands of endless green there, and gardens that go on forever.

There's always a little settlement just above the horizon, always in the distance, they seem to linger in the periphery of your vision, but they're more like a backdrop, rather than a place where people live. Just something to add flavour.

You could try to go towards them, but somehow you always seem to lose your feet on the grass and the little village in the distance slips back into the edge of your vision, always there, but never here.

And the grass?

It's such a strange, unearthly shade of green that it's almost blue, in some unaccountable way. You know it's grass, and that it ought to be green, but it just isn't quite green.

The sky is blue though, without a cloud to mar it, just endless blue, as far as you can see, clear and murky with the eternal day light of the Far Shore, but you never seem to see the sun, yet it must be there, somewhere.

You walk for a while, over this samey landscape, a bit like a cartoon version of the Great Plains. You don't feel comfortable, exactly, because this is a strange land with strange laws, you feel untethered, oddly even more so than you did when crossing the ocean. See, unlike the ocean, this place feels familiar, and yet it isn't, it should feel like walking through the plains of your homeland, but it doesn't. You can't help but feel that the land itself hides something from you, something important, and that maybe you're not welcome here.

But after you've walked for quite a while and you're starting to feel like maybe youry stuck in a loop, you meet the man that everyone meets when they first get here, the man just sitting on a rock, the only rock you've seen on the plains, and he's just reclining in the light that's, somehow, not coming from any sun.

He's dressed all in black and he has this smile on his face, like he's unaccountably pleased with himself, like he's a big shot in these parts, like he's just as easy sitting in the only rock for miles around as he would be giving a TED Talk.

He's waiting for, and he isn't, not really, he's just waiting for anyone, because as you get closer to him then you start to see it.

Behind the smug, smiling man something rises up over the horizon, all black, just like the man on the rock.

A tower.

It seems to you to be made of black glass, and the closer you get to the man on the rock, and you can get closer, in fact there's no way you can go that doesn't get closer to him, the closer you get the more the tower penetrates the horizon and the muddy blue sky.

The tower is jagged, seeming not like something that was built, but something that was grown from black crystal. It somehow manages to shimmer in the light which comes from nowhere, and it's every jagged spire looks like it ends in a point so fine that it could be a needle, that it'd prick you if you only glanced it with you skin, or that it'd glide though leather like it was made of butter.

And as you get even closer then you start to see, properly, what you're really looking at.

This isn't some humble, black, tower just squatting in a picturesque landscape; as it grows taller and taller you see that this thing, if you could get right up to it, would dwarf skyscrapers, and it grows so impossibly wide as you get closer to it that you can only meekly try to fathom how wide the base should be. It's colossal. It should be a mountain of black glass, but it isn't, somehow, somehow it's a tower, a spire of needles, but you can't even see the base of it, somehow that's always over the horizon.

But as you crane you neck upwards, to try to keep the tower somewhat in your view, you start to feel a deep sense of unease, like this isn't even something that you're supposed to see, that it isn't something that should even be able to exist.

You feel sick to your stomach, and your body feels like it wants to fight it, your feet feel heavy, your arms tense and untense, almost in spasms, and you just can't, no matter how you try, escape the feeling that the tower has gravity.

You feel like you should be sucked towards it, like how you can be drawn into a room in a dream. You feel like the whole of this land should crumble and fold and fall into this tower, like it were a black hole, and, well, you're half right, if you look at it the other way round.

The land.

The tower.

The reason the land isn't sucked into the tower is the same reason that a black hole isn't sucked into itself.

They're the same thing.

To be in this land is to be in the Tower.

The Tower is everything.

And, as you get closer and closer to the epicenter of the world, you suddenly look down

and there's the man,

sitting on a rock,

quite pleased with himself,

the avatar of the Tower,

the Sourcerer.