Cirin glided through an infinite ocean. His conscious mind was distant. He took in the sights around him as one does a dream. Light filtered down from the sky, mixing with the azure gelatin around him, creating a shade of hazy violet. As the slime went deeper it took on more of its natural blue color. No land was within his obscured perception. Not even a bottom to the endless darkness of the ocean.
He felt the sensation of movement, a tugging that pushed against him in a viscerally satisfying way. He was moving fast. Faster than even the racing boats from home. Faster than he was able to comprehend. His mind hazed further, resisting conscious thought. He faded.
======
He woke up. This was to say, he was woken up. A large, colorful bird, with curved beak and curious eyes stared at his prone form from atop his shaggy black hair. It pecked at his collarbone. Again. He sat up, head a groggy mess, shooing the creature away. His fingers felt grass underneath him. Dragging his eyes away from the bird he took in his surroundings. He stood, woozily and shaky.
A massive beach stretched before him, extending out of his line of sight. It bordered on the slimy ocean that had evidently ferried him here. He lay at the very edge of the sand near a bristling treeline. A trailing line lay carved in the beach. It led directly to where he had woken. Had he been dragged?
Numbly, he stared for a long moment.
Gobsmacked. Well and truly shocked. These were accurate things that could describe his face at the moment his higher reasoning abilities woke back up. No longer muddled, his mind worked furiously for any kind of explanation. Impossible.
He couldn't be here. It wasn’t right. He didn’t know how, or why, but it was impossible.
He began to breath very fast, hyperventilating after just a few moments. His hands curled into fists as panic began to overwhelm him. His injured finger had jabbed into his palm. His breath caught and he yelped in pain. He held the stinging appendage in a shaky hand and sank into a squat. Tears stung his eyes. He bitterly bit back a sob. Blood began to leak from the newly opened laceration, staining the pristine white bandage.
He was overwhelmed. Panicking. The pain in his finger scatched at his perception.
Waiting for the agony to subside, he closed his eyes as he concentrated on steadying his breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.
He began to calm slightly.
His finger still burned, but he put the pain… no, the distraction, into a bubble in his mind, and pushed it away.
He took deeper breaths now, in through his nose, out through his mouth. Slow, measured.
Several minutes passed.
He rose, fully back in control.
“Now then. Back to work.”
=====
He took stock. Ignoring the baffling scenery around him, he methodically searched his person. He still had his backpack. Inside was his knife, some towels, a change of clothing, and a canteen, half full. He quickly pulled it out and took a grateful drag.
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Ice still rattled inside of it. The cold water helped bring him back into focus.
“Heh. Good investment.”
He tucked his things into the backpack, including some coins that had been rattling in his pocket, and his chef’s coat. He hadn't had time to change before… Before what? He searched, but memory eluded him. He knew his name, Cirin DeLaney. He knew he was 22. He was able to recall his extensive technical ability, recipes and tricks flowing to the front of his mind at a whim.
But no clear memory of his life came to him. Names and faces blurred indistinctly, memories a jumble. He shook his head. It hurt.
A caw snapped him out of his reverie. The bird from earlier was still staring, this time from the vantage of a branch of a nearby tree. It cawed again, louder. It flew to another branch behind its current tree. It looked at him, then at the ground under it. It looked at him again, then back at the ground.
It cawed.
“I... suppose I’ll follow you then.”
======
Ira was despondent. She lay submerged in a pile of pillows and blankets in the corner of her spacious bedroom.
She had killed her brother.
Probably.
The moment he slipped on the ring, he had begun to turn into slime. From the finger the ring was on to his panicked face, he had very quickly morphed into a perfect blue facsimile of her brother. He then proceeded to slop into a puddle, quickly melting a hole in their courtyard.
She had looked down the hole, through a thousand feet of dirt and stone. At the bottom lay the slime ocean. Their island sat atop it. If he was indeed now made of slime for some reason, he was forever lost to them. Mixed inseparably with an infinite pool of identical material.
Her pale blue eyes drooped as she once again relived it. She had killed him.
It was wrong. The ring wasn’t supposed to function like that. It was supposed to quickly teleport you from your current location (So long as it was in range) to the teleport pad next to Manastone Keep, the academy/fortress that housed the Skyguard and their teaching facilities.
She covered her head with a thick blanket.
She wanted to stop thinking.
She could not.
======
Cirin walked along with the bird, lazily gliding above and ahead as he trekked through the landscape. And what a landscape it was! His eyes could barely pick a single spot to look at before being dragged away to something equally fascinating.
He stood on an expansive green plain, ankle high grass flowing gently with the breeze. His steps drove insects of every type from the grass. Graceful packs of quadruped animals that grazed on the tall grass stood in the distance, some raising their heads to track him warily. The thicket of trees he had passed through from the beach stood behind him, some ways away. The trees were massive things. Each one thicker than he could wrap his arms around, and so closely spaced that the canopy they formed made the floor of the forest cool and shaded.
In the distance, stretching up from the rolling green plains, stood monstrous mountains. They reached up past the zenith of his sight, into pale violet clouds. Past the clouds they stood. Almost close enough to touch the sky.
A river bisected the plains. It was quite large, spanning more than he could throw a stone across. Fish passed by the sandy banks in pairs and groups, each one alien to him. No fish remained in the small ponds and lakes of his home island, each long since emptied of anything edible.
Flowers of every shade painted the field, as if someone had taken a green canvas and thrown drops of paint on every other inch of space. They were of types both familiar and foreign to Cirin.
Then there was the dungeon. Past the river, backed by the titanic mountains.
Cirin was vaguely aware of what a dungeon was. Massive facilities from ages past. Each one was ancient, and extended deep underground. He knew that at least one had been conquered, but specific memories continued to elude him. He also knew that they were dangerous. Somehow. Probably. The sight of it still amazed him.
It was a pyramid. Dull silver, it had four sides, each stretching from the apex to form a gentle slope. It was also the single largest structure he had ever seen, surpassing even Manastone Island’s fantastical city hall. The tip was hundreds of feet up, dwarfing the craggy hills around it.
In the center of the wall facing towards him was a massive gateway. It jutted straight up from the wall, forming a square corridor that went a third of the way up the walls. Stretching out away from the dungeon in every direction was a sea of dead grass. The withered stems began at the walls of the dungeon and shifted to a gradient of fractured green and brown about a bowshot away from the pockmarked walls. From there the grass regained it’s full green luster.
The long-beaked bird from before flew squarely towards it. He trekked after it. Danger or no, he wanted to see it up close.
======
It was all her fault, wasn’t it?
Ira hid. It was all she could consider doing. The thought of leaving her room barely registered, her blankets and pillows too comforting to consider leaving. She had killed him. He was dead