Snippet #1478652

“I am!” Chris said, the words erupting from his mouth even before he was consciously aware of wanting to say them, or how desperate and relieved they were going to sound. The people talking might not be those he had first approached, indeed he hadn’t up until that point actually noticed them in the thinning crowd, but their clear assertion to be from the same world as he was more than enough to earn the declaration.

Somewhere in his mind there had been a serious worry of it’s own, one he hadn’t even dared to let swell to the forefront where it might bring a crippling despondence of it’s own, that these people with their strange nearly-familiar accents and close-enough clothing might not have been from earth, just another similar place to it. That in fact they would be as alien to the world he knew as the creature that had walked by him earlier with whole eyes the colour of arterial blood and fingers that seemed a joint too long.

Looking at the folks in question though that fear came swinging back all the stronger for its repression, the man-speaker normal enough, and perhaps even a little familiar for some reason, but the woman by his side another matter entirely, something just simply wrong about the way she was walking, even about the way she was watching around them...

And some sort of sound, some form of singing, something that drew his eyes to her in a way that was simply not natural, and immediately began to pick out those other details that simply shouldn’t have been, a smoothness to the skin, a uniformity of her hair colour, a stillness in the face...

And still the song, the opening chords of a symphony that demanded completion. It took long moments to place the feeling, and even then that answer brought no real closure, for the song was part of the abstract he had used to get past his alexia, it was parcelled with the same devices that had taught him to read again once that faculty had been torn away. Something about this not-quite real woman was speaking in the language he had needed to learn when he had lost the visual access to his own.

Then as she turned her head to watch the passing of a wind-borne leaf, he saw it, a letter, a glyph, a purest symbol, an etching that seemed to stab a shard of itself into his heart; “Life” it said, in a way that no simple collection of Romano-european letters ever had; simply and utterly true in a mode that Plato would have wept for when trying to define his philosophies.

Suddenly aware he was staring Chris tore his gaze away, ripped it from that vision and fought down the thunderous charge of his suddenly rushing heart. But the moment it was gone he already knew he needed it again, needed to read it, needed to understand it, to trace it..

To carve it himself.

A sharp spike of pain in his hand brought him back to the present, only to find his bundle discarded to the street and the pommel of the mystery burin fast in one hand, as he had begun to carve the point through the skin of the palm in the other.

Well if he had wanted further proof this was no dream, that blaze of real hurt provided some, and the sharp scent of his own welling blood more. There was no arguing now that this was simply a product of late night cheese-toasties, to feel, to scent, to read so clearly, at the very least this was a full on delusion.

One that might even be worth it if he could just remember that symbol, that rune as they shoved the paddles to his cranium and zapped him back to some sort of awareness...

“My name is Chris” he offered to the lot of them, “I was sleeping in my flat in Bromley” he supplied, “I fell and..” what else could he say, ‘woke up in fairy land without the fairies?’

"This lady helped me with some clothes" he supplied, waving his now clenched together hands past his shirt and breeches, down to the fallen shoes and hose, "but before that I was in my shorts too" he said