“Forget me not...”

The man sat on his ancient bed within his dilapidated house as the void of ghostly nothingness around him seemed to reach out for him, devouring more and more of his existence until nothing but a shred of his existence remained. Each and every day, he felt emptier, more hopeless than he had the previous day. He could barely cling onto the little bits of his past self as they were violently torn apart from his soul; day by day, one by one, no longer to be felt nor observed by either himself nor those around him. Each and every single moment of his waking thoughts soon became a nightmare that was infinitely worse in comparison to the world around it.

Bags formed under his eyes; his breathing was constantly heavy; his knees were always weak; his back was slouched; his mind was fogged.

He lay on his back and closed his eyes...

However, instead of the dark and dreary abyss that he was used to, he found himself on an old and dreary road that looked like it had been worn out by hundreds of years of use. Around him, the path was filled with an infinitely disorienting swarm of images as a constantly shifting cacophony of sounds played from unseen orchestras. Each step that he took shifted the image, sometimes slightly and sometimes beyond the boundaries of his comprehension. From a dragon's den, with bright orange sparks flying all about to a swirling burst of starlight and nebulae to the twisting fabric of time, space and non-existent concepts- there seemed to be no end to it all.

Eventually, he came to the end of the road, and instead of a bright and golden door or a messenger from the heavens to congratulate him on finishing his journey, the man saw something odd. A child sat on the middle of the path with a few crayons on his hand, scribbling onto a small sketchbook that he held on his hand. Every single time he finished a stroke, the landscape shifted, making the nauseating discomfort a bit worse for the man. The man took a step forward to get a better look at the child, whose face seemed obscured by absolutely nothing, In fact, it seemed to shift along with the background, but it always held an unearthly sense of nostalgia- like an old portrait of his father, or rather, himself.

"Why am I here?" the man spoke, his words barely above a whisper "Why did you bring me here?"

The child stopped and stared directly at the man as a blank expression rested on his face, seeming to look both at and through him at the same time.

"To remind you; of me, of who you were, of what you were... of what we were. Look around, the worlds that you'd made, the sounds that were the orchestration of your sublime thoughts. They are still here, like a treasury of untapped infinity. Waiting for your call- for you to seek it." The child took a deep and haggled breath that didn't belong to a person of that age- it sounded far older, far wiser than it had any right to be. "So, please... don't forget why... don't forget me..."

The man woke up in his bed. The situation around him hadn't changed, but he had. The strength to resist was far stronger now. His fervor was renewed, and thus his eyes lit up with a burning desire to work harder- the hopes of a time far past now rang far louder than ever.

He took a deep breath and stepped out to meet headfirst the world that had caused him so much agony.