Snippet #8556

Shen felt a horrible sensation. As Daishen looked at him a whole world was changing around him, or in him. It was the same regret he felt when he had truly done something wrong, when he felt he'd done something unforgivable.

The words were lost into silence, it was some horrible silence, the sort that echoed, so reverberated with its own nothingness that everything else was simply swallowed whole. It was nothing taking everything and yielding nothing.

And then he was gone? He was gone like the river water. You never step in the same river twice. That intangible moment where you touch the first drop is only a split second, but that's all it takes to pull you under the river's flow, caught impossibly in its refreshing but frightening depths.

And just as soon a great spire of earth tore from the soft ground, it catapulted Shen over a great distance, he crashed through overhanging branches, landing on the river bed, the sand around moving about as if to cushion him, and again he was sent into the air by a suddenly present pillar of stone.

He crashed out of the forest branches, hitting the grass and rolling miserably down the sandy shores, his eyes were stung with the stuff, but he stood up, looking around.

Daishen? It was all simply too strange to explain, Shen wasn't acting out of courtesy or some deeper moral code, he wasn't even acting out of curiosity, he was just acting...