Quest Failed Successfully

What had come first, I can not say for certain. Maybe the stillness of my heart beneath the pressure upon my chest. The prickling sensation down my spine, ringing each vertebrae like a tuning fork, was alarmingly present as well. I stirred against a deep paralysis undertaking me, as if I laid at the bottom of the deepest ocean. Crushed beneath a force I could not fully perceive.

“Wake up, idiot.” The voice was familiar in the way it revealed it’s age. An elderly voice, marked with raspy impatience. “I said get up, thrall!”

My gaze is greeted by an ancient man in a wide brimmed hat. By ancient, I don’t mean old. I mean he had to of been - leastwise - one hundred years young. His skin had the texture of beef jerky, two beady yellow eyes sunk within hallow sockets.

I propped myself up against the table, now discerning how my limbs had been sewn together. The color of life evacuated; my skin a deadened, grayish-blue tone. I open my mouth to speak, but only manage an unintelligible mumble.

“Not my best work,” he says, pulling a string on my wrist. My hand snapped back into place before I could notice it was falling off. “Deliver this package, thrall, and you may return to your eternal slumber.” There’s that word again. “Fail me, and I’ll curse you to walk this plane as an undead idiot, forever.”

He swings around to grab a small brown package, carefully wrapped in twine with a neat bow, and drops it in my hands. Wide eyed, I slowly come to the realization that I had been resurrected by some curmudgeonly necromancer. It wasn’t the dark robes that deceived him, but the hobbit hole he resided in, with skulls and bones of creatures both of known and unknown origins lining the walls, or hanging around like morbid decorations.

Ah, shit.

“Follow the Star of the Seducer until you reach Hag’s Hall,” he orders without any explanation of what the fuck any of that is. I try to question him, but my throat only produces a gurgling whine. “Not even an undead twat like you could miss it.” Actually, maybe he does understand me.

However, I wasn’t prepared for what this strange new world had to offer. As I wandered out along the path, I perceived sights beyond my imagination. Trees had grown as tall as skyscrapers, so massive they held unique ecosystems within their myriad of branches. Long waves of purple grass clamoring around a shimmering creek, spotted with colorful stones and glowing fungus along its shore. A two headed rabbit peeked from behind a flowering bush, studying me with nervous fervor.

I look at the package cradled in my arms, then again upon the dreamlike world beyond me. I toss it in the water without a second thought, uncaring of the curse now upon me, because I knew that in this place… anything was possible.

I’m not going back to sleep, asshole.