One... Two... Three...

Jasper opened his eyes to the cerulean sky. Clouds sluggishly drifted by. Birds chirped. Leaves rustled from the branches extending towards the zenith in the right of his peripheral vision. The world didn't wait but had gone ahead of him. Of course, it did. He had no one waiting for him. No one caring for him. Not even his master. He was always hungry. Famished, with a pit in his stomach. His master didn't like him eating the berries he was meant to pick in his field. When he was caught, he was summoned to the courtyard. He was told to take off his shirt and turn around. The potent crackle of a whip shattered his trepidation. A twinge of numbness slammed into his back. Then, it registered. Pain.

So much pain. So much pain he had to be sold off again, should he be thrown into the carriage. And when he was, he tried to run away. He didn't know why he was shot. He thought he had done the right thing. He wanted to find and reunite with his mama with the few precious recollections he held of her. The longing for her warm embrace, her arms tightly wrapped around his back. His hands would find refuge wrapped around her shoulders, around her neck.

Jasper sobbed.

Just a nightmare...

"Oh my, what's a human child doing here near the wilderness?" The mellow voice of a woman said as a pair of footsteps slowly approached him. Jasper continued crying, hiccups clogging his throat. His vision blurred from all the tears, making it hard to identify the woman's features, her face sticking in from above. He was frightened.

No... no.

"There, there..."

A pair of arms wrapped around Jasper's back before he could thrash and scream, and he was carried from being lifted into their bosom to viewing the forest over their shoulder. Frail, blanched barks encased the thin trunks of the countless trees interspersed everywhere he looked, the unerring silence calling for unfathomable horrors beyond the horizon. Jasper stopped crying. He held his breath. His arms, hanging lax over the woman's shoulders, invigorated into treasuring the back of her neck. He felt warmth. Warmth clung to his clammy skin and inundated the gelid trails trickling down his cheeks. Mama? He felt the woman's chin delicately rest on the crown of his head, the soothing clicks of her tongue and her gentle voice comforting and sentimental.

"It's OK. Everything is going to be OK."

Jasper blankly stared ahead as the woman holding him paced around. His mind drifted around. His world swayed like a cradle. He felt sleepy. His eyes narrowed as his eyelids lowered. He thought of his master and his life wasting away in the fields. No. The nightmare had come to an end. No more lashings, no more suffering, no more hunger, hopefully. He was free.

I’m tired.

"Let's get you somewhere home, my strawberry mochi."

Home.

A place to call home.

Jasper smiled. His arms tightened around her neck.

And his world closed dark.

_____________________

Black.

Everything around Jasper was black. Sitting on his knees, he found himself staring at the floorless void. The void rolled its inconceivable eye back at him. One. T-Two. Shivers snarled on his spine. He yelped as he leapt backwards, his cry echoing off the walls of the intangible chamber. His heart frantically pounded in his ears as his palms felt around the rigid, substanceless floor. Dark, cold and scary. He took several deep breaths, curled himself into a foetal position and closed his eyes.

O-One. Two…

Three.

A monster didn't eat him... yet.

One by one, he lifted his eyelids cautiously. His breath became shallow. Amid the endless darkness and silence tuning in the background, his gaze regained focus only to discover his new outfit. It caught his breath. No longer was he wearing the unbearable rags tossed at him to shout that he was a worthless slave. His fingers lingered on the warm, soft texture of his white wool fabric shirt. His eyes carefully followed his fingers as they smoothly travelled down to his thighs and breeches, their snugness caressing his fingertips. Jasper blinked several times. He felt his eyes water for a second. Then he lifted a brow into his forehead, confused.

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Where am I?

He wiped his moist eyes with his warm sleeves and sniffled. He placed his palms on the floor to lift himself up. Sitting back, he caught a wisp of a golden glow as he raised his head, radiantly piercing through the darkness. He slowly traced it backwards towards the origin of the glow with dilated pupils, his gaze curving along the outline of a gigantic, lustrous yellow petal, faintly roving back and forth in place, albeit the petal befitting of a flower was a bit too enormous and... oddly familiar.

Jasper shielded his eyes with his hand and assiduously pored around the petal. He found more of those petals next to it homogenous, with more on the other side all curling inwardly around a stamen, leaning in an angle of inclination, facing him.

He scratched his head.

It looked like the flower where he ate one of its petals in his nightmare. Um, it looked the same, actually. His taste buds salivated as he recalled the bitter taste of the petal and its feasibility in clambering down his throat. It felt nice. Soothing. Though he wasn't hungry anymore, and besides, it was kind of disgusting.

Jasper shrugged his shoulders. He propped himself up and approached the colossal, shiny lotus before standing there in awe. His nose tickled as a strong trail of fragrance softly brushed against his nostrils and beckoned him closer towards the flower. He sniffed before being bombarded by that fresh, sweet, sweet scent. He recalled the lulling voice of a flower.

"Um, Mrs Flower?" he said.

A black square abruptly appeared behind the stamen, engulfing it whole.

"KNEEL."

An implacable force wrapped Jasper from head to toe. Slammed his knees down and cranked his head and arms down to grovel. He tried to say something, but his lips opened to a long-winded drag of gibberish. The synapses in his head tirelessly fired off in a fruitless attempt to comprehend the distorted, staticky voice scraping against his eardrums. The endless chant of inscrutable whispers in his mind. The headaches and horrifying memories of his last dying breath struck him like a train. It was never a nightmare. All of it was real.

Why?

Drool dripped from his mouth and immediately frothed upon touching the ground. His pupils lagged behind uncontrollably as his eyes threatened to roll to their whites.

"Jasper?" Mrs Flower said. Her voice had returned to that gentle tone when she scolded him for eating one of her petals.

"I'm sowwy for w-witting you, I'm sowwy, I'm sowwy," Jasper said. He exasperatedly coughed out the gastric juices that clogged his throat and let out violent bursts of hiccups. The scary, mean force no longer constricted his limbs. The harsh, inscrutable whispers had abated, and his trembling pupils remained fixed, gazing beyond the abyssal below him. No more. He didn't want to look at that thing anymore. He swore to never eat a petal of a flower ever again.

"I-I'm sowwy for eating you, Mrs Flower…"

Mrs Flower cackled. The layers of her voice combined conjured a jarring symphony of high and low pitches.

"Sorry?" she said. "Don't be. I should have waited a bit longer to feast on your blood."

Jasper started crying.

Mrs Flower harrumphed.

"How amusing. If only you'd stayed motionless and succumbed to your mortal wounds," Mrs Flower paused a beat, "Only a path of suffering awaits you now."

"I'm sowwy... I'm s-sowwy..." Jasper croaked as he clawed at nothing

I want to wake up. Please wake up. I want to wake up.

He clutched his hair, brought his knees together and cried to himself in a turtle position.

Mrs Flower looked down at him. Looked down at him with pity, derision, and schadenfreude. Said,

"I kNOW eveRYthing abOUT you, JASPer. But YOU don't. FiND yourSELF IN the vestiges of TIME, and YOU shall be truly FREED."

wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup

_____________________

Jasper opened his eyes. He faced a dull, unfamiliar ceiling, shadows dancing at the corners as strips of sunlight weaved and dimmed in between. Sweat covered him from head to toe. He inhaled deeply through his nose to calm his boiling nerves. He sat up from a bed, letting the blanket fall to his lap. He looked at his drenched clothes and scanned his vicinity left and right to only find sparse furniture hugging the interior walls, the room clean and tidy. He sighed in relief.

"J-Just a nightmare..."

Knock, knock... knock.