Chapter 20: Inner World I - The Broken World

Annabelle opened her eyes, and immediately, two things keyed her in to the fact that something was wrong. 

The first was that her arms were empty. The teddy bear that Belevere had given her for her seventeenth birthday, the one she had hugged to sleep, was nowhere to be found. Her warm covers and soft mattress she went shopping with Belevere for were gone too. Instead, she was laying on cold, hard stone, crudely tiled in squares.

The second was that instead of the soothing darkness of her room, or a warm white beam of sunlight filtering into her room through the curtains, what she instead saw was a blood red sky.

Alarm, Annabelle scrambled to her feet, falling naturally into a fighting pose that she’d honed over years of repetition, raising both of her fists in front of her as she swept her gaze around her. 

What she saw shocked her and her arms fell limply to her sides, unable to move for her awe.

She found herself in a broken world. Dark, stormy clouds filled the maroon sky above her. 

A black vortex twisted with a silent howl above her, endlessly devouring the dark clouds, yet hungered for more, showing no signs of dissipating.

Across the infinitely expansive skies, the dark red painted the heavens in all directions. From afar, the dark clouds came rolling in, merging as they touched, but growing no larger in size. They sped up as they neared Annabelle’s position before both the clouds and the skies it drifted on were swallowed up by the vortex. 

Yet despite how near she was to the black funnel, she felt nothing from it. It didn’t try to suck her in, even though it was capable of affecting clouds across such vast distances.

Even stranger still, there was another vortex below her. But instead of black, this one was pure white. The sky it rested on was sky blue, the color of the clearest of sunny days. Instead of the dense stormy clouds above her, the blue skies below her were speckled with white clouds that looked as soft as cotton candy.

The fluffy white clouds were endlessly being spewed from the white vortex. It mirrored what Annabelle saw above her, but with time flowing backwards and the colors inverted.

The clouds drifted off into the distances. Every now and then, they would split, so clouds evenly covered the sky, stretching so far they disappeared into the horizon that acted as the border between the red and blue skies..

It was like the world was split in two, between light and dark, with the light a force of creation and the dark a force of destruction.

“What’s going on? Where am I?” Annabelle muttered. “Am I dreaming? There’s no way this could be real.”

More examples of the sheer impossibility of her current situation floated around her. Chunks of rocks filled the air. Each of them were tiled like they were once part of a polished whole, but now they've been destroyed and scattered in a cloud of debris, suspended by a mysterious force. 

Upon closer look, the tiles looked the exact same as the ones on the chunk Annabelle stood on. The platform she stood one was just one of many floating rocks in the field.

Despite having nothing supporting it, it was unnaturally stable as if it had frozen in something solid, not moving even when Annabelle shifted her balance.  

Aside from the little pieces of rock, Annabelle also spotted something much larger. A floating island floated at the edge of the field, but it had been cracked into many large chunks. 

“What is that?” Annabelle wondered. “This is such a weird dream to be having. It feels so real...”

She pinched herself on the arm to check, but it was painful. Wincing, she stopped. “Okay, no, not a dream then. Then again, I’m pretty sure that dreaming doesn’t mean you can’t feel pain, so I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

For better or worse, she wasn’t in her pajamas anymore. Instead, she wore her academy uniform. Perhaps it was because she was most used to this appearance, so it became her default appearance in this dream.

As she paced around the tiny slab of what used to be a floor, she considered her options.

“It could be a lucid dream, I guess.”

With that thought in mind, Annabelle tried to imagine that the world was something different and change, bending it to her will. She started with something easy to focus on and easy to verify.

The darker vortex was pretty depressing. The world would be much more pleasant with it gone. She glared up at it. “Disappear,” she commanded. “Vanish!”

Yet, despite her repeated orders and efforts at thinking away the vortex, the black hole stubbornly remained in existence, still quietly swallowing in the clouds. In fact, as Annabelle studied it a bit more, it even started to look cute after she determined that it was harmless.

The way it worked so hard to suck in the clouds, how it’s just there silently eating. It was the same with the white vortex, just the other way around.

In the end, Annabelle sighed, defeated. “Okay, so that didn’t work. Maybe I’m just bad at lucid dreaming then.” She turned her attention over to the floating island.

Despite it having been broken up into different pieces, she could still put together the individual chunks in her mind and picture what the island would have been. It was beautiful.

It would have been a floating island with a small mountain and surrounded by a verdant forest. She thought she could even see the ruins of a temple complex hidden deep within the trees. An infinite river ran through the forest before running off the side, disappearing into the vortex before being spat out as clouds.

She shook her head at the loss. Her attempts at repairing the island through controlling her lucid dream didn’t work either.

“Oh well. Let’s just go over there for now and see what it’s like. But how?”

There were a lot of little pieces of rock, but despite how dense the field was, many pieces were still separated by great distances, especially as far away from the island as she was. The field got denser as it neared the island—it was clear that the field of debris used to be part of the flooring of something on the island.

Annabelle crept to the edge of her rock and stared apprehensively over. The vortex suddenly looked awfully intimidating. She didn’t want to imagine what would happen to her if she missed a jump.

What happened if she fell into the vortex? What if she missed the vortex and fell into the sky? The sheer absurdity of the question highlighted the insanity of her situation, but it was valid. Would she keep on falling forever, or would she eventually reverse direction and fall back toward the field?

No matter what the outcome would be, Annabelle had already decided to take the risk. She couldn't just sit tight and wait for herself to wake up, could she?

She was never that kind of passive girl.

After she found an appropriately large chunk of rock within her jumping range, she backed up until she reached the edge of her platform and started running. She picked up as much speed as she could with the short distance she had to work with and jumped.

Halfway through her jump a strange sensation washed her. A weird feeling. But before she could make sense of it, the sensation disappeared and she landed.

“What? Was that just my imagination?” Annabelle wondered. “I’m sure I felt it.”

She quickly found another rock and jumped, and once again, the feeling came again. This time she was sure that it happened, and to some extent, she could even identify it. It was a kind of weightlessness different from the kind felt at the apex of a jump.

It only happened once she was a certain distance away from the rocks. But did it have to? Annabelle still stubbornly clung to her belief that she was in a lucid dream she had control over.

“Fly!”

“Float!” she shouted. But it didn’t work.

Fine. She gritted her teeth and launched herself off the edge of her rock without even aiming for anything. For a moment, she free fell. Her heart jumped up to her throat along with a suffocating fear. 

“Wait, that was too impulsive. What if I was wrong?”

Before she had the chance to regret her action, the sense of weightlessness came again. The fear of falling stopped her cold, leaving her suspended midair.

“I-it worked!” Annabelle gasped. She could scarcely believe her stupid idea actually worked. Now all that was left was to control her flight. Moving her limbs did nothing, but after a bit of experimentation, she found that locomotion was actually really easy. All she had to do was think of a direction or destination and she automatically flew there. 

She initially avoided the floating rocks, afraid that the proximity to the rocks would take away her ability to fly. An accident quickly proved her fears wrong. 

She found that as long as she didn’t imagine gravity affecting her again, she could even swoop down over the surface of the floating rocks, even touching the tiles, without falling.

Better still, now that she knew how to fly, she could even take off from a standstill, simply by imagining that gravity no longer held sway over her. She will then be filled with the now familiar feeling of weightlessness, and from there she could fly again.

“Hahaha!” Annabelle cheered as she flew between two rocks floating close together, just narrowly avoiding both of them as squeezed through the gap.

She was flying! Flying on her own power instead of aided by a machine!

Here, she was in total control. She didn’t have to worry about vector thrust, where the ground was. No friction, no fuel. Just pure freedom and the ability to go anywhere at a thought.

Her laughter filled the air, and in a moment of courage, she climbed upwards toward the black vortex. Yet, no matter how long she flew, the vortex remained the same size. When she looked back, the floating island and the debris were still close by.

Distances did not matter in this imaginary world.

At the sight of the floating island again, she sobered. “Ah, that’s right. I was going to go investigate the floating island. I got sidetracked.”

She sighed. “I wish Belevere could come too.”

Laughing a bit disparagingly at her own delusional thoughts, Annabelle flew toward the island, landing close to the edge. The moment she touched down, something dark popped up in her face and she nearly fell off the side as she stumbled back.