Every night, an array of people and their dreams spread before Caspian, a surreal selection of love and absurdity and nightmare, all for him.
Tonight felt different, though. Gravity had shifted somewhere in this forbidden place. He decided to find the source.
Caspian caught the wind and bounded from dream to dream with all the ease of every night, and he found the dreamers as he usually did, engrossed in some task or scenario generated by their subconscious.
Sometimes, he studied them. Other times, he interfered. But this night was different. A different kind of entertainment awaited.
Time shifted beneath his feet, noticeable in the jumps and jitters of the dreamers’ movements, forward and backward, faster and slower.
Farther, he ventured, too far, he knew, and his grip on the astral plane wavered. His movements slowed, bogged down by this undiscovered territory.
He lost his footing and tumbled through time, screaming until he landed hard on a new patch of ground. A not-quite-mirror version of himself awaited there, staring curiously at him.
And he fell again, only to find another, slightly more twisted reflection. Were these years? Days? Hours? He descended into a nightmare of his own, where he became a monster in terrifying progression.
His back hunched. His arms and fingers elongated grotesquely, and talons sprouted, and by the end, the final iteration, his body was a mess of deformity, and his eyes bulged into veiny, black orbs. It was a warning from the forbidden, his future if he didn’t stop traveling.
But would he stop? Could he reject this gift?
No.
And in a voice that echoed into the void, he said, “I accept.”
___
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