Beneath a darkened sky, he opened his eyes and knew himself alive. He sat up, blinking slowly, and looked toward the one horizon that displayed a trace of illumination, a faint sepia glow. He rose at once and set off walking, the ground neither cold nor hard nor damp beneath his bare feet. He did not expect that it be anything, so this did not strike him as strange.
He traveled for a time. A short time or a long time wasn’t clear. Time wasn’t meaningless: there had been Before and now it was Now. Before, he had not been and now he was. Now was vast, however, as blank and limitless as the dark through which he journeyed. He walked anyway, not thinking, feeling only that the way he walked was the way he ought to be walking. The distant brightness never grew closer, but he kept on regardless.
Finally, he came to something new: a sudden slope. The surface beneath his feet rose gently for five paces, ten. He lurched to a halt. Ahead of him, the surface fell away, not in a line like a cliff, an ending of things, but into a hole. Its diameter was so slight he could have stepped across it, its depth hinting at infinity. As best he could judge in the darkness, the surface ringed the area evenly like pursed lips before dropping into this profound pit.
It wasn’t why he’d stopped.
Between him and the hole lay a creature. A shimmer of light came off his wings, he realized, illuminating the creature in a way it didn’t the land around him. It had four limbs; two of them longer, ending in flat appendages, two of them shorter, tapering into graceful digits that pillowed its cheek upon the ground. Its flesh was brown and smooth. It had a patch of dark down in the place where its long limbs met, a tongue hanging limp in its midst.
He looked down at himself and up again.
A cap of fur covered the top of its head. One hand rose to pat his own head, palpating the silk that fell from the crown of his skull to brush his shoulders. He paced a circle around it, confirming that no wings sprouted from its back. The creature’s eyes were closed, its breathing slow and steady. It looked very vulnerable lying here by its lonesome.
Not really considering the decision, he sat down beside it.
Several times, it twitched and cried out softly. When it did, he would speak to it until it calmed. Eventually, it stirred. Its eyes opened and he saw that they looked like the sky in the direction he had been walking, and more: like what that sky might become. Luminous. Golden.
Its eyes had already found him as it sat up. “Who are you?” it asked.
“I am Beloshi.”
“Who am I?” it asked.
He glanced down at himself again, then up. “You are Another.”
“What is this place?” it asked.
“It is where we are,” he replied, “and it is ours.”
“Why are we here?” it asked.
“I thought you would tell me,” he admitted.
The creature bowed its head, casting its eyes down.
“No matter,” he said quickly, hoping the creature would look at him again with its horizon-eyes. “Will you walk with me?”
He stood; it stood, too. “Walk?”
“I was walking toward the light when I found you.” He gestured toward that distant glow. “I want to know what’s there.”
The creature looked toward the horizon, eyes thoughtful. Then it turned back to him. “There is nothing there.”
“Nothing? It looks as if there is something there. Something bright.”
His companion dropped its head again, but said with certainty, “Nothing. An illusion.”
“It’s right there. I can see it.”
“The eyes see, but it is the mind that gives meaning. What do you see? A promise.”
“What do you see?”
Its eyes tightened as it studied the horizon. “I see the same: a promise. That this nothing might be something.”
“Nothing?”
“Here.” It gestured around them. “This is nowhere. There is nothing here.”
“I have been walking toward that light, through this place, for some time now.”
It turned back to regard him. “How long?”
“All of time.”
“Yes. All of time.” It described a circle with one finger.
“I have walked a long way, at least.”
“How far is the distance between nothing and nowhere? Forever.”
He didn’t understand this. He wanted to talk about something he did understand. He wanted what he understood to be true. “There must be something real somewhere. We’re real.”
His companion thought about this for a long time or possibly no time at all. Its golden eyes were intent on his face. At last, it said, “Yes.”
He nodded, glad they had agreed on something. He liked agreeing and reminded it, “We are real. We both see promise on the horizon.”
“Yes,” the creature said again.
“If we can’t walk there, how can we reach it?”
It subjected this question to the same solemn contemplation. “We are real. We see promise on the horizon. There is no horizon. This must mean the promise is here.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. How can we get from nowhere to our golden horizon when the only path is our desire and it leads in a circle?”
Already his companion seemed hopeless. He liked this even less than he liked not understanding. Decisive, he sat. Then he pointed at the ground before him. Another sat down, legs folded beneath it. They stared at each other.
“Something is missing,” he told it. “Something we need to get from here to there. If you say the promise is here, here is where we’ll look.”
Author’s note: This wasn’t meant to be a short story, but the prologue to a novel-length work of fantasy fiction I’ve since written but not published. I put it up here because someone was asking whatever became of that weird little teaser; I hope it entertained you too. I’ll post the ‘sequel’ tomorrow, which is actually the prologue to what would be the subsequent novel if I ever finished writing it!
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