"Ashtam, it's not your time yet."

I heard a soft male voice vibrating within my ribcage, reminding me of that time my parents took me to a movie hall. As a little child, the sound reverberating inside my body was a huge source of discomfort back then. But now, it left a warm and pleasant tugging sensation within my stomach as if a long lost friend was giving me some advice.

"I'm Dhruva, not someone named Ashtam. You might be mistaken..." I said, perplexed. Ashtam usually meant eighth, but the way the voice called to me made me feel like it was truly my name for some reason.

'I thought I was asleep.' I wondered, looking around at the vast expanse of mountain ranges sprawled in front of my eyes. The snowclad peaks far away were almost at the same height as my eyes and two lakes adorned the earth below, connected to each other by a small stream looking like the ground was wearing spectacles. 'And I'm sure I was not in the Himalayas before I went to sleep.' For a split second I felt excitement born from a minute possibility that I might've been abducted by aliens and standing right now in front of some hidden base of a mountain. The occult and conspiracy theories often peaked my interest and I would often find myself rereading books filled with stories of alien encounters and abductions. 'I wonder since when or what made me interested in those.'

"You'll soon be given a choice. Make sure to imagine the consequences carefully. The world is not what you think it is, you'll find out soon enough..." A different voice cut in. This one was rude. I imagined a fussy middle aged man to be the owner. Just like the uncle who lived across the playground, notorious for seizing cricket balls and complaining to our parents.

"How soon is soon? A few days, months or years...?" I tried to interrupt, thinking 'Imagining consequences? What a weird expression' at the back of my mind.

"Shut up and listen, ughhh... why are we even doing this? This piece of..." The voice sounded annoyed and the vibrations now scratched my intestines. "Continue, we don't have much time. We need to make sure this doesn't happen again..." another voice followed. This one was a bit raspy as if words were coming out of a throat that had long gone out of service. 'Should he even be talking?' I thought.

"Don't be greedy, you'll need as much help as..." The voice suddenly cutoff as if someone pulled out the plug powering a speaker. My vision of the mountain with two lakes at its foot at the front, clouds wrapping around the peaks of those situated far beyond, all became a spiral of water colors combining to become a dark red wasteland filled with deformed corpses and protruding bones of some whale...was it even a whale? Looked like the ribcage of some gigantic snake. I knew enough biology to guess that it was not something of this world.

"Damn geezers!" I heard a male voice resounding all across the scene as my head whipped up to the top of a rib bone of the prehistoric animal as if pulled by an intangible force. A lean male stood there with torn clothes fluttering in the wind. 'Has to be a genocidal murderer' I 'imagined' taking the useful advice from the unknown voices reminiscing the story of a guy who murdered his whole family to save some Village.

"Say what you have to fast, looking at you I think you'll get angrier if I ask who you are at this point." I shouted back at the figure expecting him to get cut off soon.

"Heh!" He snorted. "Funny as always...Don't believe anybody, only you can..." And, he got cutoff as expected, with the view changing. 'Cliche' I mumbled for only myself to hear as I came to stand in front of a huge waterfall  in a green valley surrounded by mountains.

"So, who's next?" I was excited at these funny set of events. I presented myself a medal for having such a vivid and strange yet detailed imagination.

"It'll be me." another voice stated as if he expected this question from me. "This is good practice. The edge of the world has started unraveling and repetition is the only way to train your eye." His whisper appeared right beside my left ear as I felt a sensation of touch over my left eye. It was the eye I had almost lost, being unable to see for whole three months,just because of a small fight between friends. A small push and my scrawny ass lost balance planting my eye right at the edge of a table. After running around in hospitals and two metropolitan cities I finally recovered, leaving me with a lifetime regret of not being able to stay by my grandma's side in her final days. By the time my therapy finished in a different state, hundreds of kilometres away from home, she had long left this world.

I looked around the place and took in its breathtaking beauty. A huge waterfall that split in the middle seemed to float away into the wind before even reaching the earth. The sky was covered in gray clouds without a hint of sunshine as huts lay sprawled around the green meadow I was standing on. There were people too, walking around or napping under trees. They all seemed a little older than my 12 year old self.

"This looks like a cozy place." I said looking around, "If only there was wifi around here..." My voice trailed off thinking about the logistics that required to have an internet connection in such a remote place.

"We have something even better!" The voice said with a hint of excitement. I imagined him smiling as he said so. "On a different note, things have never worked out following the path others have set for you. Whenever you're confused, just go with the flow." he finished.

"Finally a piece of sound advice." I answered back still looking around. There were only males in this place. Was this some kind of a monastery where they have to practice celibacy or something?

Finally I realized that my dream was over, and reaching such a state of acceptance, my eyes opened greeting the sunlight that traced through the gaps of the window beside my bed. Little dust particles floated in the ray of light as it kissed my face.

"It's time..." I sat up whispering to myself. I have decided to move forward and stop regretting my previous situation. I will honour my grandma by fulfilling her final wishes of attending a school that made it compulsory for the students to stay inside campus. I will only be able to come back home for two months and  fifteen days every year from now on.

The test was difficult and I had to put efforts for the past year. But somehow I knew I would make it. As a man, you got to keep a promise you've made I guess.

After one and a half years of my grandma's return to the cycle, I was finally going to the place she wanted me to for all these years. I left my home, my friends in the neighborhood and at school, and my crushes, for a place that was totally new to me. I'll still hopefully meet them once or twice a year, I kept thinking. I remembered I couldn't even say goodbye properly to anybody other than one of my friends who stayed near me. He was tasked with notifying others that I won't be returning to my old school.

Maybe in future when we are allowed to have phones can we connect again. But deep down I knew these bonds were unlikely to stay intact.

"It is what it is" I said and took the first step towards my primary school life. Dreams of dawn are usually a precedent of what's about to come, I kept thinking. Maybe everything I saw was just an idealized version of what I am about to experience there?