My chest hurts. The stinging pain of whips striking me from the inside out. My lungs burn for air and my skin crawls. It feels like these tongues of fire will never stop. Even as the worst of it has passed, I can’t help but feel that something else will take its place.
I feel the threat of possibility. I felt my mind bending. I felt the grass beneath me turn to dust. I watch the sun dance across the sky and the landscape flicker like a faulty light socket. Mixing like paint.
So it strobed, a battery of brushstrokes shaping the world around me. I could feel in the back of my head that the forest was still in arms reach. The paintings collided with one another. One detail after another lagged behind until they formed shapes that held.
The background still shifted. The air still tasted like it was changing. The trees looked like they were rough copies of one another. But it set in and that became normal.
I rolled over onto my back and gave a sigh of relief, “What a nightmare.”
I furrowed my brow. That tugging was back.
My breath was rising. Hurling toward the skies. I felt it billowing out and forming limbs. I balled my hands into fists yet they morphed under the pressure until that too set in.
I was flying. The trees and my body drifting out of reach, into the distance. They spun wildly, and then my view lurched away. I felt like a mountain or star might be the death of me.
It stopped suddenly. My incredible speed turned down at the ground. I watched as my face came within spitting distance of solid ground, and then felt it tugged away from me again. I tried to cover my eyes, but every twitch of my body seemed to spell disarray. I spun like a top and flailed blindly. When I came to, there was a skyscraper in my path.
I wove a curse under my breath.
That turbulence wove and spun through the city. Glancing before tar, plowing through openings. At every turn I tried to latch onto something. Anything that would give me much needed leverage. I saw too much, and asked so little.
I brought my hands together and began to pray. Draw strength from the wind. I felt something burrowing into the earth, and a canvas ripping away. A tornado of force that withdrew from all that chaos.
My body shivered, and I heard that curse echo from my lips.
