Loading

A black void was all that met Jirard's eyes as he opened them. He didn't know how long he had been out, or where he was, or where he had been. The space around him was cold, and he desperately wanted to reach out and try and find some solidity to hold on to, but a distant memory in the back of his mind told him to sit still and be patient.

White faded in from the upper left of his vision first, but not fluidly. It came like blocks, appearing suddenly, dropping in one at a time, and as another one appeared, the ones before it became brighter. As they reached half way across his vision, he realized that he could see vague shapes in the mixture of light and shadow, but the blocks were too large and unrefined to make out what they were supposed to be.

In the blink of an eye, the blocks gained color, all at once. Various blues from above, greens and reds and yellows before him, thrown around seemingly at random, still too large and square to mean anything. It was a long moment that Jirard waited in this world, waiting for the next step that would allow him to see more clearly. The moment lasted just long enough for him to wonder if this was as far as it went.

The blocks broke apart, shattering cleanly from the inside, and moments after the newly divided blocks reevaluated their colors, shading becoming more defined, and shapes becoming more apparent. He could see now that he was surrounded by trees, and presumably bushes and flowers, but the shapes were still undefined enough that he could not tell what kind, and he had no sense of depth, so he didn't know just how far away anything was from him.

And still he did not move, afraid of the consequences of doing so, not knowing what they might be or if there even were consequences. Divisions repeated before him, shapes became more defined, more real, but the light on the trees and flowers as they appeared was still flat. As they became clearly defined, the light on them seemed to be bend and fracture, trying to understand how to fall upon the world, and what it meant to hit a solid object. Slowly shadows began to form, and as they did, Jirard began to understand the distance around himself.

He was leaning against a tree, standing upright in a forest meadow. He wasn't sure how he had gotten there. But he briefly wondered what would have happened if he had moved his arm inside of the tree before it had... formed.

He decided not to think about it.