He was laying on his back looking up at a blue sky. A warm breeze passed over him and across the red flowers that crowded against him.
He sat up. The flowers rolled in waves all around him, a sea of red made luminous by the sun. He watched them dance for a while. They were round and bright and clean looking.
Poppies, he realized. Beautiful.
He sat for a while and watched the flowers dance under the wind. He watched them until his gaze drifted out toward the horizon. Then he sat for a while longer and enjoyed looking at that infinitely distant line where the sky met the earth. He liked the contrast between the unending blue of the sky and red of the flowers. He liked thinking about the way the blue of the sky was an unbroken substance, invisible but whole and unified, while the sea of flowers below was an infinite collection of little flowers that only looked whole and undifferentiated when the plain approached the horizon. Closer, above him and around him, the sky remained a depthless, perfect blue, while the ruby plain broke apart into individual flowers that were not only red, but also green with little bits of black at their centers.
It was a pleasant nothing to think about, to let a corner of his mind ruminate on texture and color while the rest of him enjoyed the warmth of the sun and the wind on his skin. The wind on his back, his face, his feet, his thighs, his–
He looked down at himself. He was naked.
Odd. Why am I naked?
He looked around. The flowers extended in an unbroken plain in every direction.
And why am I naked here?
He couldn’t remember.
He stood up slowly, trying not to crush any more flowers than he already had, then he looked out over the plain. As the air swept past him to press the flowers into ever shifting patterns, he scanned the plain, starting where he stood and progressing to the horizon where the endless plain of red met the sky. There was nothing else to see. No path across that emptiness, no flowers broken or disturbed to indicate how he had gotten to that spot.
How did I get here? Where did I come from?
The question turned slowly in his head as he stood watching the flowers. No answer came to him. He wondered if that should concern him. It should, he decided, and then immediately it did.
Unnerved, he shielded his face from the sun with one hand and searched the horizon again for some feature he might have missed. A clue of any kind that would remind him of his purpose.
He had just begun to turn in place when a heavy wind slammed against his back. As he took a step to find his balance, bracing against the wind, he heard a sonorous groan. It boomed from behind him, a vast sound, and with it came a putrid stench like rot drifting off a swamp. He spun, falling into a crouch with his hands half-raised before him.
It took him a long, terrified moment to register that the gaping mouth in front of him hadn't just erupted out of the plain to swallow him whole. It wasn’t even a creature, he realized, just a statue. It was twice his height and almost as wide, and most of it was a mouth that opened to reveal a dark, yawning pit. Cautiously, he lowered his hands as the wind from the mouth died and the wretched smell faded. He waited, but when the wind didn’t come again he straightened. He considered the statue.
It was made of small gray interlocking blocks etched with whorls and geometric designs. It had two baleful, reptilian eyes above a lipless mouth fringed with the sword-like teeth of some predatory fish. He didn’t like the cavern behind the teeth, but the strange blackness of that void, so different from the bright blue and red all around, drew him closer.
Who put this thing here? Why?
He took another step closer.
How deep was the hole in its mouth? Where did that wind come from?
He took another few steps forward.
Maybe the pit, this mouth, was actually a doorway. Maybe, he realized with a twinge of fear, he needed to climb past those teeth and into the lightless space beyond. Maybe then he would know where he needed to go.
Or had he actually come out of that mouth?
He leapt past that possibility to the next logical question: where was I before I woke up here?
His mind shuddered to a halt when he encountered…nothing.
Staring into the pit behind that fanged maw, he tried to trace backward…tried to recall…tried to…
But his mind was as empty and trackless as the plain all around him. There were no shreds of half remembered history. No nagging partial recollections he could combine to start piecing together a reason for being out on a plain of red wildflowers. He knew that should be impossible. He knew that even forgotten things left a trace. They left a sense of loss, if nothing else. But he had less than that. He had nothing. Just a growing sense of wrongness.
A second blast of rotting wind howled out of the great stone mouth in front of him and the force of it nearly blew him onto his back. He raised both arms in front of his face, but he couldn't shield himself from the smell. Then a moan burst out of the statue’s mouth. It started low, but quickly rose to become a bellow.
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As he fought to stay on his feet, gagging on the smell, another sensation crowded in on him and he realized that he was no longer alone.
The sky above remained a brilliant, unblemished blue, but up beyond the howling stone beast he could sense a great host as they turned to regard him. He could feel their attention gathering on him, one by one, like a great weight, slowly accumulating. They were expectant, curious–amused.
The stone beast broke off its moaning and began to speak.
How are you called?
The percussive blast of each word struck him before rolling out over the plain. No one else appeared. No one else spoke. A trickle of dread rose up in him.
Slowly, he straightened. His name. That he could remember.
“Max,” he said.
Yes.
Max frowned, confused by the beast’s tone.
Approval?
From whence have you come?
Am I being tested?
Max glanced down at the flowers all around him, undisturbed except where he had been laying. He looked at one of the statue's protruding reptilian eyes and squared his shoulders.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Can you tell me?”
No.
Above the stone beast, the invisible host still watched.
A cloud of tiny, brilliant specs winked into life inside the creature's dark maw. They shone in clusters and strands like stars in the night sky. As Max watched, each spark began to streak inward, elongating into strands of rainbow light and converging on a central point. Slowly they all slid inward until a tiny sun bloomed at the back of the creature’s throat.
Max took a step back. He didn't like that light. He didn't like that it was getting too bright to look at. But just as he decided to turn and run, the white sun in the monster's mouth condensed rapidly to a tiny point, then leapt at him. It struck him in the chest like a bolt of lightning and lifted him off his feet. Below him the poppies blurred into a sheet of red and the stone beast receded into the distance. It became a pebble, then a speck, then it was gone. But its voice followed him.
You will find answers in Orliat, City of Shards.
Max began to tumble as he hurtled backward. The sea of poppies shifted under him, rotating to become the sky. As he tumbled again, he saw a smudge appear on the horizon. He struggled to make sense of what he was seeing as it grew closer. The part of the smudge directly in his path was a light brown and there was an uneven, reddish brown fringe on top of it. To one side of the brown smudge was a flat, white block. To the other side was a much smaller, lower lump of brown. It was covered in blue green dots. Behind them all stood a circular gray column.
As he flew closer, Max realized that the brown smudge directly in front of him was a cliff that rose abruptly out of the plain and the red fringe on top was actually a series of buildings with red roofs. The squat lump of brown to its side was a separate, rocky looking mound covered in white buildings with blue green domes.
Oh, Max thought. A city. "Orliat."
Max couldn't make sense of the white block on the other side of the cliff, but he ignored it as he flew closer to the city. It was the column at the center of the city that demanded all of his attention.
It was a great circular edifice that grew out of the center of the city and it dwarfed everything around it, like the trunk of an ancient oak among saplings. But there was something wrong with it. At first he thought it was another cliff rising out of the plain, but its sides were too even, too regular. As he flew closer he saw that it was a single, gargantuan structure. But it didn't look anything like the red-roofed buildings on the cliff or the white buildings with the domes. Where it should have had a roof, a spire or some other crowning embellishment, it simply stopped.
No, not stopped, he saw as he flew even closer, it faded. The upper levels of gray stone grew increasingly transparent and simply disappeared up into nothingness.
He didn't understand how that was possible or who could have built something so massive, but he forgot all about the strangeness of the building when he saw that he wasn’t slowing down as the city rushed forward to meet him.
Panicked, confused, he began flailing his arms and legs, trying to swim against the velocity driving him forward. He tumbled more and more quickly, and the city passed in and out of view. Soon the vast gray column dominated his blurred vision and he knew that his trajectory would smash him against the side of the half-vanished tower. Just as a scream began to bubble up in Max’s throat, the booming voice of the statue came to him again.
Pass now into the Tower of Rebirth.
The city vanished. Instead of the Tower's massive wall and the plain of ruby red flowers, Max saw a green, leafy jungle canopy stretching below him in every direction. Before he could appreciate the vastness of the landscape reaching up to meet him, or the hot, humid air rushing over his skin, he struck the canopy in an explosion of leaves and branches and plunged down through a kaleidoscope of colors and textures. Only later, remembering his fall, did Max understand that the force of his flight had driven him through an upper canopy, a lower canopy, down into the jungle floor, then carried him bouncing and tumbling along the forest floor in a violent confusion of limbs. He only came to a stop when he struck the trunk of a gnarled brown tree and rolled on to his back at its base with his legs draped over one its roots.
Max lay gasping, sluggishly trying to understand what had just happened to him. Leaves fell from the tree to settle on him and he raised one arm to brush them away. He paused when he saw that a soft golden glow hugged his bare skin. Slowly fading, it vanished by the time the last of the leaves had fallen to the ground. When it was gone his skin was clean and unblemished.
Max climbed to his feet cautiously, testing arms, legs, feet and fingers. No pain, no bruises, no breaks. His body remained whole.
Whole–and still naked.
He wondered how many eyes had watched his flight over the city. Had they done this to him? Had they been the watchers who'd found him out on the plain. Was it them he could feel even then, watching him with amusement?
The air beside him began to shimmer and the voice of the statue rumbled through his mind again.
Seek the Emerald Gate.
The shimmering air coalesced into an image of a hemispherical stone arch nearly thirty feet wide at the base. The image shimmered again, and the space within the arch filled with green fire. When it cleared, Max saw the strange skyline of the city he'd just fallen toward.
Win passage through the Emerald Gate and seek Orliat, City of Shards. There you may find yourself.
The image vanished. Max waited, but the voice did not come again. He could still feel the attention of the great host in the sky over the sea of poppies, but their amusement had crested as he lay dazed. Now their attention fractured, turned elsewhere, and was gone.
He was alone again.
He was alone, he was naked, and as sweat began to prickle all over his body under the humid jungle air, he realized he was hungry.