The sky was a vibrant blue. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere in sight. It was well lit, as if someone was holding a flashlight up to a piece of tissue paper. You could look up into it and swear you were staring straight at a painting. To go along with the picturesque sky was some of the best weather that Cardium had seen in many years; a constant 67 degree temperature keeping you cool but not chilled, and a slight breeze of warm air coming by at what always seemed the perfect time. Yet it's only witness had no wonder or awe about it.
Cardium wandered along the cliffs, adrift in a thoughtless state. Nothing crossed his mind, nor had anything for what he felt to be quite a while. Not the near-perfect weather which had persisted for days, nor how the sun never seemed to budge even an inch in the sky. Not even the grass below his pacing feet, which was all a deep crimson as though it had been bathed in blood. Cardium might have been intrigued by these things when he first arrived, but has since become numb to them.
He glanced to his right. The grass ended not far from where he walked, revealing a cold, gray stone which soon sharply dropped off and became obscured by a dense fog not far down. Cardium didn’t know what was down there and had no desire to find out. He had tossed a few pebbles down previously to gauge the drop’s height. He couldn’t come up with any figures. To his left laid a forest. Cedars packed together tighter than he had ever thought possible. They created a wall that stretched for what Cardium had surmised to be forever. The mighty defense cast a solid shadow toward Cardium with no gaps of sunlight to be found, almost as if it were grasping at him, trying to drag him in. Not that he could go in whether he wanted to or not, the trees grew so close that he couldn’t find any opening which he would be able to squeeze himself through. And much like the forest’s dark offering on the ground, all that Cardium could see inside was pitch black.
And so he wandered. He thought it to be fruitless to remain in one place, impossible to venture into the forest, and suicidal to dive into the thick fog below the cliff. He had no clue where he was. He tried to figure out something about his location on the first day, but quickly gave up when he discovered that the first day is technically the only day, with the sun not setting and all. He managed to fall asleep in bright, uncompromised sunlight and awoke feeling the worst that he had felt in years. He did not dream.
Cardium had stopped caring about all the oddities and fallacies that surrounded him fairly quickly. He had slept four times since finding himself wherever he was, although he didn’t take it as any indicator of how long he’d been there. He simply wandered until his legs no longer could, and then rested until he could walk again. All he did was walk along the cliff, hoping he’d eventually reach something. Something or somewhere where he could figure out why he was here and how to get away from it. He’s had no luck in his venture.
A pang of pain rang through his body like someone peeling a bell in his core, sending a simple, instinctive thought flashing through his head.
Food.
Cardium hadn’t eaten anything since he’d arrived at the crimson colored cliffs, and it was getting to him. He had tried some of the needles off the cedars, but they were prickly going down, with the earthy, wooden taste not helping. He had even gathered the nerve to try the unearthly grass. To his surprise it seemed to share the exact qualities of any other grass he had encountered before, with the exception of it’s deep red hue. Still, he deemed it to not be enough to live off of and gave up on it too.
Cardium was actually able to get some water from some dew which had formed on the edge of the stone before the drop from the misty fog below. It was enough to keep him moving but nothing more. The rock on which he forced himself to lick the dew off of was surprisingly smooth, even to his tongue. It wasn’t polished levels of smooth, not even close, but it was slick enough to where he could’ve mistaken it for wood if he didn’t know that it was the edge of a cliff that he was sliding his tongue across.
He tried to suppress his impulse to eat something, knowing that there was nothing for him to actually consume. His feet stumbled beneath him. He tripped forward, managing to stabilise himself while making a conscious effort to steer his body away from the steep drop into nothingness. He decided to walk a little closer to the dark forest on his left. Cardium guessed that there was about 20 feet of clearance for him between the wall and the bottomless pit.
His vision was starting to fade, much sooner than he would have guessed it would. The sights around him had started to blur into blobs of color. The blue of the sky, white of the fog, red of the grass, and the muddled black and green of the forest; all slowly becoming featureless the longer he was near them. He occasionally refocused his eyes and was able to regain the details again. But they always started to blur again eventually. Like every other strange thing in the purgatory that he found himself in, he was growing used to this too.
He paused and tilted his head toward the sky, not looking for anything in particular. Pure blue all the way across. A bright sun in the exact same spot that it was an eternity ago. Cardium closed his eyes and gave out a resigned sigh. He lowered his head, opened his eyes, and carried on walking.
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