A voice I recognized penetrated my awareness, come from everywhere and nowhere inside that strange chamber of the Dome and filling my head with strange phrases. Though the voice was just as familiar as the feeling I had gotten outside in the halls, the feeling of knowing something that was unrecognizable had left me: I knew this voice. It was distinct, stand-out. All the same, I could not quite put a face or name to the voice.

That was starting to get me annoyed. If only because I was good with matching faces to voices, I felt as if this person was tricking me somehow or, at the very least, manipulating me, and I had no tolerance for either. I could feel the awe vanish from me, and with it went the sensation of warmth, the welcoming breeze. Even the colors in the room seemed to dim slightly, becoming a less vivid green and gathering more basic earth tones. The forest looked normal, ordinary. It looked natural, even if it was cramped beneath the roof of this insane school.

The cracking, breaking, snapping sound off to my felt sent me immediately onto my guard. The palm of my hand clasped my sword by its circular guard and pulled it out, a ringing hiss of metal against the leather scabbard. Whatever it was, it was getting closer. I could tell by the increasing volume of the now-recognizable sound of trees being broken.

My eyes sought the treetops, roving up ... up ... up ... and by the time I had craned my neck all the way up and back and I was practically leaning back against the door, I still had not glimpsed what I could call the canopy, much less the tops of these monstrously tall trees. The surprise I felt should have been larger, but I found myself taking everything that happened in this place with an easy stride. Even the sound of snapping trees was something I could take.

Or so I thought, until the sound ceased to be. Silence descended heavily upon the room, oppressive in its ominous lack of ring. What I had not noticed before, I noticed now: birds, insects, small forest animals. They had been singing, chirping, moving and scrabbling and rustling the leaves nearby and all around. It had become as dead and quiet as a mortuary. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and stayed their, warning me that the animals were definitely not the only creatures placed into danger by the presence of whatever it was.

"Find the cottage."

The command rang through my thoughts and pushed me into action. Whatever this thing was, I was fairly certain that it was not the person who had addressed me or anything I had ever met or wanted to meet. I took a few hasty steps into the forest, testing it. Nothing lashed out to bite me, no one jumped from behind trees to gag me and drag me into a foul dungeon, the sound of crushed trees did not renew. For all intents and purposes, the forest appeared just as harmless as it had just a few moments prior.

Except that it was still silent as the grave.

I paced through the forest with a paranoia complex to keep me company, my gaze shifting gradually as I took in my surroundings with every sense. The further I walked, the more I understood that my initial reaction had been no fluke. There was something watching me and now I was sure of it. There were sounds now, dim and unfocused, much like viewing a beam of light through a window covered with paper. It was unclear, rustling, almost like ...

My footsteps slowed, stopped. My breathing stilled, my body temperature lowering and changing as I forced my pulse to calm and still with my breathing. There was some kind of serpent watching me. A lizard or—gods forbid—dragon would never have been stupid enough to make such loud account of themselves, unless they were some kind of pet and had lost their hunting instincts. That left one thing: a snake. There was an exceptionally large snake observing me. More than anything else, it was the implication of size that bothered me. Even a poisonous snake, or millions upon millions of poisonous snakes, would have been preferable to a single large snake. I had come face to face with large snakes, and they were frightening creatures.

An average python, which is only about twenty feet long, squeezes a person so tightly and firmly that not a single bone in their body so much as fractures. Rather, the snake squeezes until the point at which the prey can no longer be squeezed, keeping them alive all the while, after which it promptly begins to swallow the crushed animal or person. It is the instant release, rather than the compression, that kills. Every internal organ, every blood vessel, ruptures at the same moment.

It was an unpleasant death. I had no interest in such a death. That was why I found the prospect of a large snake to be frightening. That was why, when I took my next step, my breathing was so slow that it could easily have been mistaken for someone in a coma, my heartbeat so negligible that only a very sensitive person would have been able to sense my pulse. It made walking more difficult, but it also put me out of the sensory feedback of my scaly foe.

Off to my left, it moved. I suspected then that I had confused it, because it began thrashing about, leveling at least five trees before it settled down again. I froze. It saw me. I was absolutely certain. It would not have stopped otherwise. My left hand, unmoving at my side, gripped the circular guard of my sword comfortably, ready to switch it over and prepare for a face-to-face with this abominable creature. More trees snapped. I could see it now, out of my peripheral vision.

The breathing I had stilled to almost stopping completely halted, catching in my throat when I took in the beast hunting me. It was huge, at least twenty feet around, with an enormous, scaly head and blood-red eyes. It was an albino. Every inch of scales was milk white.

Its tongue twitched out, and simultaneously my arms moved. The tip of my blade embedded itself into the nose of the beast, catching it just seconds before it had the change to open the mouth which, I am sure, would have been an awning as large as most cave mouths. The impact threw me back as the snake moved forward, undeterred by the small infraction against it, and my sword buried up to the hilt just below its nostril. The creature batted its head aside, as if trying to rid itself of a pesky insect, and lost sight of me in the process. The gape of its jaw, sudden and unexpected, forced me to swing myself up onto the scaly face.

Of all the disturbing things I had done and seen done in my wanderings, straddling the head of snake the size of a tree was by far the most inordinately terrifying of all. It reared up suddenly, pulling me with it since I still refused to loose my grip on the sword. Wooden claws raked across my back s the branches and leaves of the forest became weapons against me. Frenzied squawks ensued from the eruption of the serpentine body, renewing the clamor within the forest. All manner of frenzied animals let loose their own cries and, just before the massive head pushed into open sky, I saw a pure white monkey sitting carelessly on a branch and watching me with an expression something akin to amused cruelty.

I wanted to kill it.

The fresh air high above the tree tops was welcome, but it rang with the sounds of animals and was tainted by my current seating arrangement. By now I was thoroughly impressed by the size, strength, and raw majesty of this albino wonder. I was also thoroughly pissed off that I was going to die.

Being in a state of near-death insanity, I did the only thing that I should not have done: I killed my mount. The sword flashed out of its nose in an instant, flashing in an arc of metallic blur before it crashed down again, this time directly through the top of the bestial head. I realized too late that, although I had won in a technical sense, I still had to survive the free-fall back to the forest floor. It was then, when I was no longer threatened by an outside force, that I decided to think rationally.

In the two long, teetering seconds it took for the body of the beast to realize that it no longer had a brain to control it, I formulated a plan: I would leap into a tree and slowly but steadily climb my way back down. A simple fix to a large problem. This plan was completely demolished when the massive snake began its death throes, leveling every tree nearby and flinging me into a serious of wide loops that connected me with no trees. It was almost a miracle. I will not take the time to explain the feeling or after-effects of being flung about by a dead snake, far above a dangerous forest floor, with nothing to hold onto but the hilt of a sword that is, conveniently, imbedded in the skull of the dying snake.

It was unpleasant. Every part of my body snapped, popped, or stretched numerous times. My breakfast may have been left somewhere above the forest in order that it may find its own way down.

By the time I stood up, a swathe of land a few miles wide and perhaps a hundred feet wide had been carved into the forest. I was sore, tired, and my eyes were so wide and unblinking that I had begun to think that I would never sleep again, for lack of the ability to close them. The only good thing to come from my ill-fated meeting with the snake was that it had given me directions.

At some point during the rampage, it had decided that it was a good idea to smash up against some kind of invisible wall, after which it had flailed me onto the ground and proceeded to shudder violently for a long time. Behind that invisible wall was a small, nondescript cottage. In the doorway there was a green-haired man. My soreness dwindled to a memory, replaced by the clear realization of who this strange person was.

"Zorlo?"

__________________
[Graphics by Me.]

[The signature links to Aleksandr Sokoll.]
["I believe in sleeping." ~ Bruce Lee]