Day six began just like every other day; I got up and did some final proofreading for an assignment I needed to hand in - I distinctly remember it was something to do with the Roman Empire and how one of their emperors was trying to fortify the border or something along those lines - which took a considerable chunk of the day to complete.

Throughout the day, whether I was in my room, the lounge or out walking around town, I had this intense feeling that something was watching me, a sense of impending trouble or a looming disaster that I could not shake or ignore. This feeling persisted from midday to around ten in the evening, which would be roughly the time I decided to call it for the night and go to bed.

While lying in bed, I feel a cold breeze blow over me; I shift around to check the singular large window my room had, which was both closed and locked in place upon inspection. Somewhat unnerved from the previous nights' events, I climbed out of bed, donned my dressing gown and entered the kitchen to make myself a hot mug of coffee, after which I returned to my room and stayed up for another two hours watching random videos on youtube until I was physically incapable of remaining awake.

I finally managed to get to sleep and, without anything weird or unexplained happening while I lay in bed, a success.

Alas, my celebration was short-lived as I found myself waking up once more within the walls of that all too familiar bleached white room, only this time, the table and chair were absent, and the door had disappeared in its entirety...

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I walk hastily towards the now vacant door frame and exit the structure, I wouldn’t exactly say I was getting cocky or confident in regards to this small plot of land, but I had been here enough times by now that I wasn’t expecting anything too out of the ordinary; well, out of the ordinary by the standards of this mysterious place.

I could hear the sounds of… Birds?

No bird song that I could recall from the real world, but there was the distant chirping and singing of some kind of avian creature. Its call sounded like a weird cross between a whistle and a pipe organ; it had a thick reverb that I could feel vibrating through my feet. Unfortunately, the bird was nowhere in sight, perhaps beneath the island or somewhere in those strange clouds?

Exiting the structure, I look to my right and see that the island, at least to my right side, had remained unchanged by the events that transpired the night before. Fair enough, then I looked to my left.

Looking to my left, I was immediately greeted with the sight of a massive rocky cliff face that stretched for quite a distance to either side; in this featureless void, it was difficult to tell where precisely something’s sheer scale reached its end. In the distance, I could hear what sounded like flowing water crashing and surging like an untamed and savage waterfall, but I would need to walk around the structure to investigate the source of the noise.

Walking around the smooth stone structure, I came upon a remarkable discovery. Behind the structure once stood a tall stone tower that appeared to have been constructed from the same blocky material that comprised the building I woke up within, though, unlike that structure, something had destroyed the tower. However, its destruction had presented me with an opportunity; the hodgepodge of fallen masonry had created a primitive climbing bridge of sorts that connected this floating island with the much larger, newer landmass suspended in the void.

A bizarre purple haze illuminated the edges of the gently drifting rubble; perhaps some kind of magical energy held them aloft?

Whatever was holding the rubble aloft ultimately didn’t matter; I wanted to learn more about this strange island and the world I was in, which would mean I would need to traverse the coincidental bridge, whether I’d like to or not.

I climbed and clambered up along the rubble bridge, barely able to climb up a few sections due to the sheer size of the masonry chunks and the angle of their suspension. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that the masonry was made from the same material as the structure behind me. However, rather than using large iron reinforcement pins, the tower seemed to use wooden rafters and poles instead; the wood had a strange colour looking like a mixture of red and violet.

It was deeply worrying, no, outright terrifying, to clamber up the ruins of the tower, most of the suspended material had large enough gaps between them that one could easily fall through if they slipped; some required me to jump to reach them; not exactly something I wanted to do due to the void below and my slight vertigo. Worse yet, a gentle breeze had begun while I was around halfway up, something that I hoped against hope would not transform into a violent gale at a moment's notice.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

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It took around five minutes to work my way up to the larger island; reaching the edge of the cliff, I stretched my arms up and clambered onto the densely grassed land above me, thankful the ground was solid enough that I could pull myself up without it giving way. The grass here was so deep that my ankles entirely disappeared from view once I stood up, but that paled in comparison to the rest of this island; the sight that greeted me was truly magnificent.

There were dozens of amazingly divergent plants growing all around; judging by how the plants were bunched together and the presence of a stone slab path, I concluded that this was some kind of park or garden space; everything was far too pristine and too well looked after for this to be entirely natural and wild. The sweet smell of roses and orchids filled the air while a thin haze of fog close to the thickets of grass flooded my surroundings with moisture and warmth; the fog itself appeared to adhere slightly to whatever it came close to as if it was a giant albeit translucent cobweb.

There were geometric bushes all around, many of which bore vibrant, almost neon flowers that swayed in the wind, gently flickering and glowing with the same colour of light that comprised their petal’s pigments which illuminated their jagged and chiselled leaves. Some of the larger bushes bore fruits and berries; one, in particular, had what looked like grapes that pulsed and twitched with life, a large dark shadow within denoting a cluster of seeds in the form of needles buried in the fruit's flesh.

Past the thick carpet of grass and into the garden's flower beds were densely packed groupings of flowers, their petals arranged like those of roses or orchids. Similarly to the flowers and berry bushes, they flickered and glowed faintly, their delicate stems letting them bob and weave in the gentle breeze that now whistled, whispering through the branches and rustling through the leaves.

Dotted around were trees with an unnatural similarity to one another; while the colour of their bark and the patterns thereon varied dramatically, they all appeared to share the same shape roughly; they all noticeably had stretched out bark lines which twisted around the trunk, which suggested they could twist slightly. The vast majority of them had long chunky branches, and most were raised high above the trunk while a gathering of smaller branches weaved between the branches and trunk-like rigging. They supported broad, fat and fibrous leaves which acted like sails in the wind that billowed and flapped above me. While I couldn't feel or prove it, I had the impression that the trees were actively moving the island, just observing them alone was enough for me to ponder...

Part of me wondered if these trees were some kind of evolutionary or bio-engineered propulsion system for this island, whereby the trees themselves “sailed” the landmass around this void unassisted by sapient or sentient means. Though what exact purpose this kind of engineering or evolutionary quirk would have served was beyond my understanding or reasoning at the time.

Some of the older trees, presumably due to their sheer size, had a few branches broken off not far from the tree trunk, possibly broken away naturally. Still, due to the lack of debris around their stem and by how cleanly they had been broken away, I suspected that someone, or something, had removed said branches manually and removed any evidence they could meticulously.

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I then heard something buzz past me, a high-pitched buzzing sound as something small and round moved with purpose away from me. I didn’t get a good look at it, but it had the shape of a bee or possibly a wasp but the texture and colouring of porcelain or stoneware.

Its wings were impossibly thin but far larger than the wings of a normal wasp or bee, easily my entire palm of the surface area on either side of a translucent yellow substance flapped at an impossibly high speed, clicking and clacking with each flap of its wings. In contrast, the “bee” drifted away to one of the aforementioned bushes. It landed gracefully on a flower and appeared to collect the pollen; it was so weird and out of place to see something so “normal” happening, a pollinating insect doing pollinating insect things whilst surrounded by this iridescent void like hellscape.

Beyond the trees and bushes, I could see that there were intricately trimmed hedgerows that stood easily at twice my height; they screened this segment of the garden entirely, wrapping all the way around to the edges of the land. Stepping towards the hedges, I could see that the leaves were entirely geometric in their shape and layout, creating near-perfect concealment for anything behind them; even in motion, One could spy nought but an occasional glimpse of the branches behind. I ran my hand along some of the leaves; the edges were cut and trimmed so precisely that the very leaves appeared to be bearing bevels rather than flat edges. I withdrew my hand, not entirely confident in the knowledge that I ran the risk of cutting myself on such a plant in this unknown place.

It occurred to me that I would need to find a way through, pass or over the hedges if I wish to continue exploring this strange place.

Looking around, I eventually stumbled upon an archway built into the hedge; it appeared to be the entrance to a pergola of sorts. The arch was built from a fibrous wood I failed to identify though it appeared to be similar to the wood in the ruined tower; judging by how smooth the wood was and the lack of any obvious tool marks, I suspected that it might have been grown into this shape, rather than carved, chiselled, sanded and whittled. I could see more arches along the pergola path, but foliage had long since grown over the arched path, causing an ominous shade to descend upon the pathway. The arches appeared at a glance to be identical to the one adjacent to me, bereft of any sign of being crafted constructs.

I could see that the pergola path further ahead reached a split where it diverged into two different paths; I could barely make out faint rays of light at the ends of both the paths. Considering how close they were, I guessed that both routes lead to the same general area unless another hedge split them down the middle.

With nowhere else to go other than through the archway, I grit my teeth and enter the pergola, my fingers twitched, and my arms were unsteady as I walked along the shady path; in all honestly, I was expecting something to lunge out from the hedge and attack me at a moments notice.