The bitter wind had a bone to pick… several bones to pick. Merciless fingers of calcified minerals began to tease and tear tender flesh from your prone bones.

Blissfully unaware, trapped in a world of swirling cavorting hallucinations, where the edges painted lazily by unskilled hands. Every night you died, relived, and died again before returning to the lucid realms.

You remembered your dream clearly. It was one that spiralled out of control. One that slipped from your grasp, like sands through time. Never to be controlled. Free to dance amongst the twisting, dancing Luna winds.

Enraptured by the skirts of iridescent green, a green that could not be named for the many sides it showed, your soul begged to join the dance. So you danced. You danced, and danced, until your feet grew sore and then you danced once more. Never had self-abandonment felt this free, you didn’t care who saw you stitching together the twinkling orbs of burning white with strands of sweet silver light.

Suddenly balanced on the pinnacle of madness you freeze. Teetering dangerously, you hold your breath and wait. You give yourself to the hands of fate, let them decide whether you plummet into the seething abyss or carried on up into the promised lands. The promised lands are full of fiction and fantasy, you knew there was nothing there only icy stillness and unforgiving nothingness.

You fall.

Balls of pent-up anger pummel you as you descend. Hurling you around like a ragdoll. Unloved. Uncaring. Detached.

Then the dreaded landing. A landing that never seems to arrive. Your back is cushioned by soft pillows, your head is caught by velvet pad. It becomes all to apparent that you had simply awoken from a blissful conjuring of the night. Above you a ceiling of obsidian, you go to reach out to feel the coldness glide beneath your fingertips, but something stops you.

You command your arms to extend and flex… nothing. Again, there is no response beside a strap that binds your limbs firmly to your sides. It seems your legs are bound in a similar fashion. Gradually, your icy eyes adjust to the new shade of gloom. Shifting left and then right. Right and then left. You realise you’re in a box of some kind. Tall sides lean in, eager to hear the secret thumps of your morse code machine; the same machine that allows for you to live. The obese ceiling lowers itself until it is barely hovering above your nose.

A creeping sense of unease rolls through every cell, bringing in a wave of nausea. Breath. Just breath. Trust your automatic bellows to draw in precious oxygen and chase away the toxic remains. Yet in all the years of living simply breathing had never felt so tough. Each stuttering choking gasp inflicted another flood of panic upon your already fried mind.

The terrified silence was shattered. Like a glass that breaks into a thousand pieces on the floors cold shoulder. You felt the fragments leap, skitter, and flee, as the rumbling timber of a furious voice. Muted undertones caused the pillars of your coffin to quiver, jarring the remains of your internal structure with painful consequences.

An unplacatable beast that carried you forward, roaring and growling out its displeasure. Jolting violently as it paused in its beratement only to launch off on a tangent once more. There was nothing you could do, except await your fate.

Were you to live or die?

‘You can kidnap my body, but you can never take my imagination,’ you thought spitefully in the face of danger.

Somewhere nearby a latch clicks, the venomous hiss of gas struts and tiny bits of gravel being ground down under societal pressures. A layer of darkness peeled away leaving a lighter shade of tourmaline. You realised with cautious hope that the beast had been slain. Could this be your saviour? Could this be your doom?

Ever so slowly your coffin was lifted. You felt yourself be bought back into the sky. A sky that held wonders and dreams. It was the sky where you felt alive… once more you drop, your heart leaps into your mouth. Except this time there was no continuous plunge, you swing to a halt. Held in place by your biting bonds you’re suspended horizontally.

Moved forth by a force that is incomparable, you begin to wonder what waits for you. Do the lanterns still gleam? Still strung together by fine gossamer thread? Do the hands still decide?

In this moment there are countless possibilities.

Deeply rooted at your core in a feeling that you are far from home. Heavy rolling vowels spilled from the lips of the invisible figure- you knew that voice. Your heart stilled in hope. Doors swished and banged clearing a path for the one holding you tight. One final dizzying flip and you were rested against something hard.

Carefully, by increments the lid to your coffin opened. Well oiled hinges barely murmuring a whine in complaint. You knew your features would be petrified by the streaming luminescence in which motes of dust impressed audiences of piercing unseeing eyes.

The last thing you felt was the tender caress across your cheek by hands sculpted by the years of hard labour.

They stepped upon the stage, to a flurry of applause. Burning lamps of furious heat bore down, drawing beads of pearls from their brow. Limbs knocked together softly, as they took a bow. Only then under skilled hands of the master puppeteer did you get to bob, sway, tap, and twirl. Regaling the delighted childish minds of the enchanted crowd, you trusted them not to let you fall.