Dreamscape Sketches #1- The Boy In Chains.

The rotting sides of the crooked corridor were bathed in the stale, moth-eaten velvet light of a solitary bulb. It hung feebly from the sickly ceiling, by the ends of a failing cable--it faltered upon delivering the living river of electricity unto its wheezing orb of light. This was light which flickered and coughed as if its end was imminent.
And yet it persisted.
The walls, half-naked and miserable, groaned under their own weight and that of the ceiling's. Silken cobwebs caressed their corners, but in uniform with the corridor, even those were forsaken. Clots of dust resided within their fine threads, mingling with moieties of wings--wings belonging to flies whom even Earth has forgotten. Their arachnid tenants have long since rotted away.
Constellations of stained, cracked tiles blanketed the floor. They had almost forgotten the feeling of feet upon them, but their carcass-temperature surfaces remembered longing all too well. They shifted with soft clicks of protest under my feet.
The corridor, it seemed, was perpetual. But the ashen breath of the wall and the prophecy of the ceiling's collapse roused an anxiety from within my bosom that reigned my numbing fingers with a tremor.
Claustrophobia, was it? Yes, claustrophobia.
There were doors--indeed, there were, but they were doors which offered not escape and solace but further anxiety of whatwhywhenwherehowwho hid wherever the wan, craven light did not sweep. They were doors which opened the locks to vaults found only in the hollow of one's rib cage--doors which closed in on one, doors which coaxed foreboding, like the shadow of an old, forgotten adversary's face. Familiar--oh, so very familiar--but foreign in every way.
My body walked.
Where, I did not know--and I did not aspire to. Perhaps somewhere the doors did not watch, or where the ceiling did not loom over, or where the dust-cloaked cobwebs did not festoon. The tiles could not decide whether or not they wanted me there--they shifted and clicked and, once, cracked, but became warmer with each step my feet took.
Still no end came to the corridor save for inky blackness that faded outwards, creeping forward like spilled liquid on paper.
But still my body walked.
It walked and walked and walked and did not stop. Exhaustion took me, but my body moved further still into the corridor that was perpetual--nearing the abyss that was imminent but eternally out of reach. My body ran, but so did the darkness. I faltered, but it did not. I fell to my knees and screamed. What, I do not know at the moment. But in the Dreamscape, I speak in languages I never knew I understood. I screamed.
At once the darkness lunged at me, embracing every sense, infiltrating every pore, filling every void that my body allowed. Every aspect of the corridor was consumed by the heft and absolution of the darkness that so boldly dominated my being. I was a mote that had roved too far from the stream of light and fell into oblivion. I was a photon away from the rest. I was energy lost in transport.
I don't know. I guess I was whatever that darkness made me to be.
*
Usually, after the dark engulfed me, I would awaken. My skin would be cold and clammy but I would feel as if my insides were made of hot coal. My hands would shake, and I would either laugh or cry--or both at once. The corridor would be emblazoned in my mind--it would be branded into the insides of my skull in which it resounded perpetually. It went on for roughly a month, and I drove myself to madness in attempt to either forget the dreams or see what was at the end of the corridor. On a particularly hot Tuesday night, however, Darkness did not propel me back into consciousness.
*
The flow of my being was not unlike that of a mote's. I roved in the dark for a while, until I found another stream of light. I was completely and utterly senseless for an eternity.
When, at last, sense returned to me, what I beheld then took me aback.
I stood in a room. I cannot say for sure what exactly the room was like--it flickered fitfully between two extremes. One was stark, clinical white--vast and lofty and... empty...? The other was narrow--it was crooked and rotting and stale and a perfect, perfect counterpart of the Corridor.
However, the periphery of the room in which I stood was not of my concern at the moment. It was what--or rather who--resided within that enraptured me.
He could not have been very old. His presence was constant, but his constancy was a candle flame. I would, with all my heart, love to describe his features to you, but there is another matter of importance as of now. Chains. He was in chains. Heavy, rusting manacles hung from his bony wrists and ankles alike, trailing a set of thick, sturdy interlinked metal rings--forming chains. The same chains hung from a thick metal collar that his neck donned. His skin was chafed and bleeding where the manacles rubbed excessively, and blood from those chafe-wounds mixed with sweat and ichor that oozed out of his skin and multitudinous wounds of flesh. His hair was a tangle of long, blood-shocked strands that clung to his face, neck, and shoulders. He curled, crumpled on the ground, head bowed submissively. His whole form shimmered, almost as if he was a mirage. I stared at him in awe.
"Why are you in chains?" I inquired. My heart hammered wildly against my sternum with the force of Mjolnir, faster than a jackrabbit's own. Silence was his only answer. I stood. I stared. I stepped closer. "Who put you in chains?"
Again, no response. I asked again and again, repeatedly, excessively, madly, and he still gave no response. I could not see his face as of yet. I paced closer to him so that his bowed head was only two feet away from my knees. A myriad questions I flung at him, and a myriad silent breaths were his reply. An infinitesimal rocking began moving his form. At last, in a blazing column of frustration, I screamed--a hoarse, anguished screech rose from regions of my chest and stomach I never knew I had. I screamed until I could not feel my head. I fell silent. No, rather, I fell into silence.
"What's your name?" I asked, after an eternity. His frame expanded, breathed, came to life before my eyes. His hair shimmered and shifted from one color to another as he moved. He moved to rise--his shoulder blades protruded, like a cat's. As he got onto his knees I saw that he was naked, but no form of tension or awkwardness whatsoever was present within the atmosphere. His skin constantly shifted colors. He stood. In one moment, he looked like a Bedouin--skin dark like the finest rosewood, an angel of the desert; and the next, he was an ivory sculpture of the Norse god Freyr. He was not all bones as I had expected--rather, his form was one that came close to that of Apollo's own. I looked up. His eyes were as iridescent as the rest of his being--shifting and dancing across and within a vast spectrum of colors. And yet all this inconsistency mixed into one solitary unfathomable hue of wholeness and perfection--of course, discounting the blood. He bore his manacles, bore his collar, bore his chains with pride and strength that I have, in all my life, never encountered. Inhale; exhale.
"What's your name?" I asked again. A smile formed on his chapped lips and he breathed in deep before releasing it again. His lips parted.
"My name..." he began. His voice was like sandpaper, hoarse and strange, as if he hadn't spoken in centuries. Even so, he had a timbre of deep, elegiac melody and I felt that his voice alone was the definition of music. "Is Freedom."