Walking Amongst the White Walls

A blurry vision of leaves, twigs and large oak columns surrounding Lyra jogged her of what she had experienced. Her waking up was felt with the looming uneasiness of the dark and slightly foggy atmosphere that covered her. She got up slowly, her shoulder still numb from whatever the man hit her with.

With a proper stretch, she finally decided move about and noticed herself encapsulated with large and uneven walls of stone, almost as if boulders were stacked atop each other. A twinge of moss growing along the surface of the wall, looming over her with gapes resembling the stares of a wild animal.

Lyra, grasping the situation as a dead end, turned to look behind her. A metal gate wrapped in chains, seemingly locking up what felt like a big city.

"Maybe calling it a city would be an overstatement," Lyra thought, looking over the grim region that spread beyond the gate.

The city was only but a path leading up to other diverging paths, all surrounded and confined within bleak lime buildings of different shapes and sizes. Lyra had figured out that she had to get inside the city as there was no other way to go; the large brick walls to her sides appeared to surround the city, making it impossible to go anywhere but forward.

So she did. And as Lyra untangled the metallic mess that was the chain on the gate and opened it, she realized that it was not actually locked but chained up; almost like how a box would be to prevent outsiders from peering inside it.

Lyra stepped inside the city and instantaneously noticed an intrusive detail - this entire place was quiet; eerily quiet. Upon observation, not a single person was seen roaming about these foreboding and desolate lands. Even the absence of winds blowing, trees themselves and birds chirping was pin-point was noticeable.

There was something else too, a large and tall tower north-east of her at a substantial distance. From the hazy view Lyra got, it simply looked like a giant pillar with a round, circular base that went around it in the middle of the pillar. A look at this tower brought her attention to the murky layer above her, devoid of clouds and any sort of life.

In fact, was it still nighttime? Lyra could not tell in the midst of this gray coating that probably was the sky, which was deficient of the sun.

Her steps of the pavement was the only sound being made as she walked up to a junction where three more paths deviated; paths that seemed older and more broken than the one she walked across.

"I don't feel a difference in these paths," she thought as she took a right turn.

She was right. The right path made no change. Everything was the same - two distorted lanes of lime hued houses and in the middle, a grey and cracked river of concrete. And so she walked on, unaware and oblivious to where exactly, but something was there; something vastly gravitating. Besides, where else could she have gone?

Anxious as she already was, periodically blinking as she walked, her attention finally turned to one of the buildings. A cube with no distinctive features but its pale vermillion shade. The house she turned to had two windows on the side, both shattered; and in fact, so was the door. The roof was of the same material as the house itself - bricks but this time, they were red. It also had a chimney, although one would barely notice from the cobwebs that had it blend with the dreary ambiance of everything else. All the buildings were the same too, cluing as if everything was simply props on a set.

Despite her wanting to do so, she refrained from entering the house; her skin whitening at the thought of wanting to. With that, she kept walking, one shaky leg at a time.

Each sound of her step starting to get more and more muffled as she went along the fractured concrete beneath her. An ethereal-like white gas started seeping around her surroundings when she heard a crack, seemingly stepped on a brown withered leaf that somehow retained its green color through its lamina. At this point, any essence of color stood out like a sore thumb in her vast expanse; an indifferent atmosphere that was just boxes and shafts of feeble lime, getting more and more faint as the gas covered her.

Soon enough, those grim buildings were hidden within the white gas. For a place that seemed absolutely silent, now felt even more silent if that was possible. Maybe the one sound remaining was the occasion beat of her pulse. She felt that pulse increase in the amount of beats. Slowly and steadily until it overcame her mind. Lyra breathed a gush of air to calm herself and immediately coughed it out. She starting feeling "tipsy" at the time that her very hand merged with the white fog.

On top of everything, she felt wind rushing behind her for a split second. A sharp slash at her back. She would have turned to look around but she kept her from doing so, something at her back because the wind would not stop immediately after a piercing blow like that, unless it was something else. Lyra fought against her fear and turned to see-

"Are you, perhaps, lost?" said a man while walking towards her, in white robes and a cane.