Chapter 1: The Search for Water and Resolve

The light penetrated through the transparent window and burned through my eyelids. For a moment, it was almost like an alarm just enough at a distance where you couldn't shut it off but rather experience the hellish discomfort to your eyes.

How long has it been? The days have been turning away from the state of distinctiveness and dissolved into an amalgamation of moments not worthy of occupying a space in mind. Still, with enough effort, I decided three weeks had passed. Perfection was a lost cause in this state.

There were days when I would not even step out of the small egg-like chamber, and there were days when I would not enter it, thinking the chamber was rotting my mind, whispering into my ears, the secret of escaping. They inspired me, then ridiculed me, loved me, and despised me. The voices, I thought, were asking me to leap off the cliff, to end it all. But then they laughed at that same thought.

I gently opened my eyes and mere specks of tears grew at the corners of my eyes like weeds, initially slow, but they outgrew my expectations very soon. The lush expanse of the plane seemed inviting enough already. The small pond felt like a siren singing a melody for my dry throat to hear.

I looked over the piles of water bottles from my emergency package. Among them, only one was half full; the rest were empty, some even with lost caps.

With utmost will, I tried to resist it. Drinking this stagnant water would open up pages of problems that might arise for me: puking, itchy pores, diarrhea, and, if I was lucky, death.

Was it futile? Expecting them to come? Do they even want to come? For now, I tried not to focus on those questions, but rather on the twisting knot of pain in my bladder.

Pushing the button, the glass window lifted and I was opened again to the prehistoric world. One day I dreamed of the button malfunctioning and being forever trapped in that small place where it wasn't even big enough to spread my legs and sleep lying down; rather, I had to sit and roll down into slumber.

The cold air attacked me. I felt a sudden chill run from my face to my gut and then back to my chest. I guess this is what the world was like before global warming. To be honest, I don't even know this earth's age since the monitors were the first thing to break down. Still, I decided for my sanity that it was prehistoric.

I walked away from the machine and progressed towards the humongous trees, which were covered by moss on all of their sides. Since my arrival, this place has turned into my relief center. Almost as I was about to finish, there was a rustling that waved at the back of my ear, from the place of the machine. I turned and for a moment the sound was dead, almost making me believe that it was a play of my imagination.

While I was walking towards the machine, the sounds began again, but this time they were louder, more distinct. Either I had accidentally consumed something I shouldn't have, or that thing was real.

It revealed itself. Like drowned in a sea of tar, its whole skin was pitch black apart from its eyes that shone a yellow reflection. Apart from the birds and insects, I hadn't seen anything else yet. I might have been ready for things, but what I saw didn't ring any bell of recognition. Shoulders slender and face resembling the apex of a predator, something was fundamentally different from it.

It circled around the machine, inspecting with wide-open eyes, trying to make sense of this strange reflective skin with one part being a transparent shield of glass.

I stepped back, with utmost precision and at a speed neither too slow for it to notice me nor too fast to catch its attention in its peripheral vision.

I would just step back and hide behind the huge tree until I was sure it had left this space, and once it was gone... What would I do? It might come back for another inspection.

Before I came up with a solution, something over my head shrieked so loudly that I almost fell on my back. Looking up, in the thick branches stood a huge bird with orange and black stripes along its neck that ended in a beak, which was another piece too big to handle for its mouth.

A growl vibrated through the humid air, and I felt it on my skin. The animal turned towards me, with eyes as sharp as a blade and a stance that reflected there was no way it was going to let me out of here.

When you run opposite to something you consider fatal, you never know if it is keeping pace with you or just on the verge of catching you. You just hope, hope it is behind you and the bushes and lush of the forest have succeeded in hiding you in their embrace. Hope was what I was coursing through my mind when I made a run.

Either the noise of the wind crashing into my ears or the exploding heartbeats were at my disposal whenever I tried to focus on the noise my pursuer was making. However, the frequent growl was a sign enough that it had abandoned its pursuit.

The leaves and the thorns stung my skin, but somehow I just felt their presence but not their effect, and ran through the jungle like a madman.

When I slipped my foot into the knot of the vines, my body turned in a strange way, and I thought, death had claimed me. In my defeat, as I was closing my eyes, I saw it leap at me, but its jump was a bit over the bar. It seemed it was aiming for my head.

I ducked my head and tried to fall and turn faster, maybe, just maybe, I might be able to escape this. It fell just short of claiming my head, but its claws dug deep into my left forearm.

The animal landed on the moss-covered rock, lost its balance, and drifted into a bush. I didn't look back at it and tried to gain a head start myself. After some minutes, the fatigue finally caught up to me, but the fear along with its claw marks had been engraved in my heart.

I saw light breaking between the trunks. I am saved. I get to return to my machine, the most hideous machine that caused me to get trapped now seemed most appealing.

Somewhere along the small cracks of my mind, there was a small voice shouting, what was it about? I didn't try to find out. That was my mistake. Soon I was off the land. There wasn't enough space to reduce my momentum.

Powerful winds broke through my ears and I saw the cliff I fell off from growing smaller. Everything up to that point had been going so fast that this particular moment felt like a second stretched to a minute.

'Wake up sleepy head or you'll miss the trip.'

Her voice felt gentler than the sunlight. Even in sleep, I recognized the voice.

"Just five more minutes." I replied with a coarse morning voice.

"Today's a big day for you."

I didn't reply. This didn't stop her; instead, she took the silence as a reply herself.

"I admit it's not what you expected, but hey, I heard there are a million places to visit there." It was easy to recognize her voice had turned a little muffled by the door.

I sat up. "Yeah, but it's not like you'll be able to travel to those places."

This time she turned silent, but this was rather a pause.

"But you'll be able to enjoy them, right? If you are satisfied, I am too."

I stood, ran, and opened the door to face her. She appeared paler than last night, and the bandana appeared loose like her head was shrinking.

"I don't want to stay with dad."

All she could offer was a sympathetic gaze. "But I can't take care of you, can I?"

"But I can," I claimed, "I really can. Maybe for a few nights I have to get my food delivered, but I'll learn to cook on my own. I'll manage, ma, really. I never liked his food anyway."

She came close and gave me a hug. "This is not about the food, is it?"

Then for two months, I didn't see her face. Only after those periods, once a week, would I be able to meet her. Each week the condition turned worse. Our meetings were never different; we just met, she asked about me, I asked about her, she told me the doctors were trying their best, and we would then resume watching movies I picked out for her.

"Wait, this is my favorite, did you ask him about this?"

"No." That was a lie. I did ask him about it. "Why would you even assume it?"

"Because it's as old as your great-grandfather, there's no way you could have just got this out of sheer guess."

We both laughed about it for some time and we played it. It was an overall nice movie. A small prince who was made a beggar after his father's sudden disappearance by his uncles. He died on the streets waiting on someone's kindness to save him. However, he was reincarnated as the son of a landlord and was able to woo the princess of a different nation and then attacked his uncles who usurped the throne.

Though some parts were clichéd and made me yawn, in the end, it succeeded in raising some feelings in my heart when he finally paid homage to his late father.

"You know," she said, while her eyes were on the screen displaying the credits on the black background. "Your great-grandfather was an avid collector of old books. I always found those stories childish. Every story seemed like an iteration of its previous self with just the names changed. But the way he narrated them, he could make a believer out of an atheist."

"Sounds like fun."

Along with a smile, a tear also formed in the corner of her eye.

"After hearing all the stories… maybe not all, his spirit had more energy than his body. Anyway, after all those stories, I realized something: the stories of old rarely ever ended in tragedy. If they did, our grandfather said, it was just the first segment of the story, and the ending doesn't come now—it comes when everything has turned out fine."

The tear was now a full drop that traced the curve of her cheek.

"Maybe he was right; maybe our stories rarely end in tragedy."

I opened my eyes. My limbs were tangled in the vines that clung to the branches of big trees, suspended a few feet above the ground. It took me a few moments to register that I was alive and not dead, crashed into the ground. Though alive, I felt far from healthy.

I could feel the cuts and bruises on my back from absorbing the impact on the branches. They could heal, and that was enough.

For now, though, my throat felt like the dry desert air, and even the production of saliva was minimal. The ground wasn't far below where I was hanging, and the skin tied by the vines was throbbing.

With considerable difficulty, I tried to cut off the vines latching onto my left arm. Biting through the vine was the easy part; what was harder was stretching my neck to reach that vine. After my arm was released, freeing my left leg was a breeze. That's how I fell down onto my back.

As I scanned the base of the mountain and the ever-densening forest in front of me, I tried to think of what to do next. It might be better to go back to the machine. Hah! As if. Walking back to the elevation point of the cliff would take days, assuming nature would be gracious enough to provide the nutrients for the journey, and then retracing the path which I surely didn't know back to the hellhole machine.

Now there was one thing I hadn't paid any attention to since I regained consciousness: the static noise that was ringing throughout the forest like a mumbling whisper of thousands of fairies simultaneously. It was something I recognized.

Passing through the jungle's mossy trees and vines that roped them like prisoners was becoming monotonous, but the ever-hiding dangers that might lurk under the voluminous grass kept me on my toes.

With my ears as a compass and intuition as a talisman, I walked down the untrodden path, which was growing darker, though the sound was increasing.

Just like before, I saw light making the outlines of the trunks glow. I passed through the glowing trees to see the reflection of the sun playing like children on its surface. Only then did I realize that my throat was completely dry, and this sight only increased my thirst.

I walked down its bank and sat. I cupped my hands and tried to catch some of the water to drink, but when I felt the coldness on my skin, I jumped straight into it. On the sides, the currents were smaller, and after a deep dive, I rose to the surface and took a huge sip. That sip was the sweetest I had ever tasted in my life.

It is true, I thought. River is truly the sustainer of breaths.