Skye is the Limit by Phenomenal Pen (best time to read books txt) 📕

He shut his eyes completely and still his body continued to grow heavy, so much so that he worried the bed would break in half. He thought he should warn the attendants about that but he was already far too drowsy and the matter felt trivial enough.

In the end, the bed had transformed into a cushiony rubber doughnut on gently rocking water. He felt his backside slip through the middle of the doughnut and then he fell right into the water.  

****

Zacharie blinked once, twice. His eyes were bleary. He thought they were full of gunk so he kept rubbing them. This usually happened when his face was oily while he slept and he didn’t get enough sleep.

He cracked his eyelids open. He squinted. Then his eyes widened.

He was in another land.

At first he thought he was in the Basque country with its rolling hills and lush countryside. Perhaps one of the valleys of Lower Navarre in the foothills of the Pyrenees, which sometimes appeared shamrock green. But he had trekked both the GR10 and GR11 hiking trails and he couldn’t find the familiar hedges and villages that should punctuate the view. It was as though the vista, though breathtakingly beautiful, was devoid of life. There wasn’t even a sign of shepherds tending their flocks.    

His best guess was New Zealand. And yet a nagging doubt in the back of his mind pointed out the feel of enhanced sharpness. He waved his hand under his eyes and its movements were perfectly fluid. No shocker there. Still, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that the vision in front of him was somehow hyper-realistic and hyper-immersive.

The human eye didn’t pay attention to every small thing but now he wanted to soak in color, texture and depth. It was like seeing the world through a new pair of glasses after living with myopia for a long time. Zacharie couldn’t put his finger on it but the place reminded him of a movie that was being projected at a high frame rate. Although the human eye could certainly perceive more, the human brain would be consciously aware of only about forty moments per second. This scenery screamed at him: Look at me. Look at me. Don’t I look so real?

He heard a groan behind him. A voice asked tremulously: “Where am I?” 

 Even the voice sounded crisp and isolated. As with the high-FPS movies that he hated, the sound reminded Zacharie of a really good Home Theater System owned by a suit. It was surround sound but there was something off about it because nature wasn’t a vacuum and there was always some kind of ambient noise interfering with fidelity. Right now, the place was as quiet as a graveyard and the only ambient sound he could hear had a degree of theatricality to it, like birds chirping and bees buzzing. Zacharie thought if he concentrated hard enough, he could hear the cotton-candy clouds swimming across the sapphire sky.   

He swung his gaze back down to earth. His eyes grew even wider. He was looking at what appeared to be a Neanderthal: a tall and well-built man dressed in pelts. Zacharie was reminded of a wax model he saw when he was a child in the Prehistoric Museum of the Verdon Gorge. The only difference was, whoever this trick-o-treater was had mixed up his research. He was wearing a Viking’s horned helmet as popularized by the nineteenth century Swedish painter August Malmstrom. And because of the bear-pelt cape on his back and his bare chest, which was the proverbial barrel, he actually looked like a berserker. He was a walking cliché, all brawn and no brains.

Though the guy was massive, he let out a whimper as his eyes took in Zacharie. Zacharie couldn’t imagine what about him could inspire terror in the warrior, but he followed the eyes and looked down his own body. To his surprise, he was wearing leather boots, leggings made of wool and layers of clothing: a fur-lined sleeveless cape, a quilted vest that extended to his thighs and was padded and laced in places with metal plates, and underneath that a brown tunic. He was horrified by the fact that animals had been killed to make his clothes.

What in blazes is going on here? he thought to himself.

As he clutched at his medieval ranger costume, something registered in his peripheral vision and he lifted his right hand to inspect it.

It was a glowing three-dimensional projection of a lion. It was steadily spinning above his forearm in the sejant attitude of a crest.     

****

“Welcome, Dreamwalkers,” said a strange old man wearing a hooded gray robe and carrying a walking staff. “You have made it to the first stage of your journey.”

“Journey? What journey? And where on earth are we?” asked a woman with pointed ears, ebony skin and bright violet eyes.

She was clad in a feminine and stylish pink armor with carapace-like segments. She had long, curly hair and looked stunning – that is, if elves were your thing.

“We are all inside an installation of SKYE,” the old man answered.

“Sky? As in the sky above our heads?” the warrior asked, his voice husky but full of anxiety. “Don’t you mean earth? It’s strange because it feels slightly like I’m dreaming but I know I’m not.”