Remember

Chapter Six (edited)

Colette had forgotten how much Madeline tended to ramble on and on for hours about every single thing that was going on in her apparent busy life. There was no sparing of details with her. She was just glad Madeline didn't talk about her sex life -- if that existed there was no telling what Colette would hear if she decided to share that information.

At least the long and seemingly never ending conversation kept her mind off of the man and the barrier. She was grateful for the short moment of peace it gave her mind. She didn't know how she would ever figure any of it out. Colette felt she may never figure out what on earth this barrier she was supposed to break could be. It could be that was the barrier wasn't even on earth. At this point the idea did not even surprise her. Nothing was really surprising to her anymore.

There was something Colette had to be missing, and that would not surprise her one bit. If the nightmare was her problem then it should have the answers she needed, right? Instead of trying to find the answers in the real world she should continue focusing on the nightmare in her head. She had already tried drawing and writing everything down she could remember when she woke up and that was not working. Maybe she needed to figure out how to control the nightmare like a lucid dream. Hopefully, that would be easier than it sounded.

She had long since left her best friends house, choosing to search around Raritate instead of listening to Madeline any longer. She loved her best friend but her life wasn't as interesting as she tried to make it seem. The stories about new attractive guys coming to the library or her newest discovery about the planet were only interesting the first few times. Colette had more pressing matters to tend to like saving the world.

Her long black hair had been thrown up into a bun as Colette walked beneath the bright and burning afternoon sun with no destination in mind. Her only goal was to find the prairie from her nightmare. Just because there was no evidence on the internet didn't mean that it didn't exist at all. There were many things that had not been discovered yet. Besides, people who wanted to keep things secret would go to any length to do so. As far as Colette could tell, Paradisium was full of secrets.

Paradisium was much larger than most people would think. Looking at it from the view of the skyway between the circles made Tenebris seem so small in comparison. Watching as the land beneath the clear glass of the carts zoomed by at incredible speeds, it made a person feel like they were so tiny and irrelevant. If not for this impending barrier mission Colette had been assigned to, she would feel the same.

The world was truly amazing. People could walk for miles and not an inch of it would be untouched by some wonder. The world was filled with so many small wonders that made up the beautiful things that surrounded Paradisium on all sides. The ocean that covered half of Elementum, the river Perpetua that ran around most of the circles, and the mountain range. They were all small miracles of life. Humans were merely lucky to be surrounded by such wonders.

The world was meant for other things, humans merely took it from them.

Colette stopped right by River Perpetua. It was the only thing that stood between Raritate and Augendae. She had not realized how far she had walked until she could hear the roar of the river on front of her and feel its light mist on her tanned skin.

She sat down on a slightly damp rock, the exhaustion finally setting into her tired bones. A noise sounded from her back pocket as if she had sat down on something crunchy but she did not remember seeing anything on the rock before she sat down. Colette reached behind her and into her back pocket, pulling out a piece of yellow paper.

Meet at earth's end, 6pm, I think I can help you.

The note was written in Madeline's hand writing. Her perfectly looped cursive could be spotted from a mile away. Colette could not understand why Madie could not have told her whatever it was when they were sitting together in their room. Let alone why she would want to meet at Earth's End.

Earth's End was the gigantic cliff at the very edge of Paradisium. There was no bottom and nothing beyond it - nothing that anyone could see. Many believed that there was something at the end of the cliff, something beyond the nothingness. People were said to have explored down the edge for miles but none were able to reach a bottom. For all anyone knew, beyond the cliff was an endless expanse of sky.

The earth just seemed to stop.

The cliff had yet to take anyone's life. No broken ropes leading to adventurers deaths, no one had fallen over the edge, tripping or slipping into a never ending fall to their doom. In fact, not many dared to go near it.Those who didn't believe that there was something beyond the cliff believed it to be a symbol of death, a symbol that - even in such a perfect world - unexplainable ends still existed.

Colette didn't know what to believe. There was no way that the earth could just disappear and not continue on in anyway but then again, there was nothing to prove that there was anything. The whole thing was too confusing to her and made her head spin when she thought about it too much. So she decided not to think about it at all.
It's not like she could do anything about it anyways. She could not control the world, there was no point in trying to figure out how.
At this point Colette was tired of walking. Her feet hurt, her head was pounding, and she felt like if she took another step she might pass out before her foot hit the earth beneath her. The only thing that kept her going was her thirst for answers. She needed them before the questions in her head drove her to insanity. She hoped the answers Madeline would give her could help.
She pushed through the end of the walk, plopping down right at the edge of the earth. She let her legs dangle dangerously over the never ending ledge and peered down into the nothingness. The fog seemed to be gathering up, hiding whatever was below the cliff. The wind whistled around her, blowing the stray strands of hair around her face.
Her silent protector.
Colette smiled as the wind seemed to dance around her. It snaked around her legs and made her shirt billow around her. The wind was comforting. Almost as comforting as the caress of the darkness in her nightmares.
Suddenly, she heard a loud screech. It was identical to the sound the tendrils of darkness made in her nightmare. The wind had disappeared at the sound and the darkness took over and Colette found herself falling.
And falling.
And falling.