[IC] Lost in Dreams (Daniel Landvik)

[ericthered]

Daniel Landvik dreamed strangely that night. He dreamed of a tall, green, verdant range of mountains that clouds hung around, watering a lush rainforest full of rivers and lakes. He dreamed of colorful birds, agile leopards, and monkeys bounding from tree to tree. But that wasn't what was strange.

He dreamed of several small colorful villages in the mountains. Extremely colorful. The houses were all sorts of bright colors: bright reds, deep blues, Ivory whites, pitch blacks, and every other imaginable color -- and those were the simple ones: The more elaborate ones had murals in bas-relief. Sometimes the effect looked plastic. Sometimes it looked glazed. Sometimes it looked stately. Sometimes it looked ridiculous. The material the houses was built out was strange: Seemless but rarely perfectly smooth.

The pattern persisted throughout the village and the people: Their humble farm tools where coloured and patterned, their clothes were as vibrant as any cosmopolitan city, and their draft animals (which seemed to be some variation on a two humped camel) had their fur and even their faces coloured. The skins and hair of the people were coloured: The base color was usually a rich dark brown, but ranged the full spectrum of human colors and including even pitch black and bone white. Patterns covered their bodies: as clean and fresh as henna lines. Usually the patterns matched the clothing. Hair was almost exclusively black with a secondary color providing highlights, though many were bald.

As evening fell, the people gathered together and ate a meal of what looked like rice, yams, and tomatoes (normal colors) off of colorful plates and bowls, and then many of them went to sleep-- but many of the young men stayed up, walking around the edge of the village.

As night fell, by different fields, a different village woke up. Small dark people, shorter than the other villagers, began streaming out of a hole in the ground. They were black in all their features, and moved quickly through the dark. The sky was overcast, with no moon, and the people carried no lights of any kind, but they seemed to be able to see every branch and every rock anyway. They then began to work their fields in the night. As the sun began to rise, they filed back into the whole, except for a few who stayed above ground, laying low under bushes with what looked like swords.

Dave woke up on a hard cold slab of --- stone? It was certainly smooth, glossy, and cold. Opening his eyes revealed a great deal of color. He was resting on a flat stone, lying at an angle, smooth as glass. He could hear animals calling in the forest. He and his stone seemed dry for the moment, but the air was wet. Looking around, he saw that he was in some overgrown building with brightly coloured glass walls. It was covered in murals, from the collapsed ceiling to the worn down walls to the floor broken and slanted by tree roots. the murals were in bright colors, and presented varying degrees of fantastic elements.

The place had lots of vines growing all over it, and the morning sun was not visible through the overhead canopy, though the sky did peek through. Birds called loudly above.