127 Cem-Elle In Twiligh (1/2)

It initially started off as nothing more than a whisper in the wind. The murmuring echo of an incomplete thought was all it had been in the beginning.

Sometimes it'd catch his attention, if only for a second. He'd turn his head and mistakenly look around in confusion, thinking that someone had called out to him.

That was how it began — rather innocently.

It was a curious thing, but it was not something that deserved too much attention. He'd witnessed stranger things happen before, as well. Not a single day went by without him being reminded that he lived in a mysterious world filled with… anomalous phenomena.

There other, more pressing concerns he had to attend to anyway, such as the goddamned forest that'd taken up residence in his bedroom, for instance. It'd cost him a very pretty penny to have the towering blossom trees that'd shot out of his roof removed.

In the span a single night, he'd lost over three hundred thousand credits.

The refurbished hovercraft we'd bought for the trip to Mardeimus cost us a hundred and forty thousand credits for fuck's sake!!

And that wasn't even a high-end model from this year, goddammit! We bought a mid-range older model and it still cost over a hundred grand!

Two hovercrafts worth of property damages in a single night!!

Peculiar, fleeting hallucinations were the least of his worries as far as he was concerned… until his life started getting stranger.

Some at the back of his head was telling him that something was wrong.

That he needed to wake up. Now.

What began as little more than an oddity had become something that he could no longer ignore.

Another day passed without his knowledge and everything returned to normal.

...The refurbished hovercraft we'd bought for the trip to Mardeimus cost us a hundred and forty thousand credits for fuck's sake!!

…And that wasn't even a high-end model from this year, goddammit! We bought a mid-range older model and it still cost over a hundred thousand credits!

…Two hovercrafts worth of property damages in a single night!!

Had he noticed it sooner, he might've been able to stop it. Probably. But it was too late now. What had begun could no longer be stopped.

He had seen something on what'd been a relatively normal day — an untruth that should not have fooled him.

The moment he laid his eyes on it, everything changed.

It had happened so casually, out of the blue, that it'd caught him completely off guard.

He'd been working the front of the bakery, putting pastries the Lu'um had made on their display racks when it had happened. Out of the corner of his eyes, he spotted…

A tall, beautiful woman stroll past the bakery. Her long, golden-brown hair shone like autumn fields at sunset. She looked no different than when he had last seen her. Same as that day, when she…

Like an innocent fool, he set off the moment he realized what he'd seen in hot pursuit.

That how it had begun — the Blur.

He couldn't remember when it first started, but he was certain that it had not happened whilst in a dream. Everything else was up in the air, though. Day and night had blurred into a single thing and so had He.

Ever since that day, Cem-Elle had transformed into something else.

Was it sunrise or sunset? The sun had not moved an inch since then, either upward or downward.

The people, too, had changed along with the twilight sky. They'd all become languid, unambitious and seemingly content with the world around them. It was as if everyone had given up on hope on living.

They were alive now only in the strictest sense of the word. It was a disheartening thing to witness. A town filled with walking husks lived only to continue living another day and nothing more.

An unknown amount of time had passed until he finally broke out of the spell himself. When he did, he nearly lost it. His suffering had begun that day… and never ended since then.

I can't tell how much time has passed anymore… Nothing works the way it's supposed to in this godforsaken place.

Days? Weeks? Months? Years...? He couldn't tell and no one would give him an answer. Every time he asked someone, they'd just shrug their shoulders and say, \”What's the point? We're already out of time, anyway…\”

Why do they always stare at the sun whenever I ask them? What's the point of this depressing, hopeless world?

He wasn't sure if it was a dream or not, since there was no way to really tell the difference. If Reed slept, he'd always find himself back in bed at home, repeating the beginning of the same day, unaware of what'd happened until...