The Pilgrimage – Part 4

“You sleep perchance to dream?”

The voice reached across a hazy void to reach him. He felt it pulling him, physically from a place within his chest, back into reality.

“Hehe.” A child of 10. Dressed in a colourful midsummer’s dress, standing before him. “You are sleeping, silly.”

He stirred. But the tree was comfortable. The sun was still out, somewhere beyond the thick canopy above. The shade was almost too cool. A branch had fallen down, dewless, yet thick with heavy leaves. He pulled it towards him, covering his bare feet.

“It’s okay. You can keep sleeping if you like. We love visitors.”

Her voice was sweet. Innocent. And, just as it had pulled him out of his slumberland, her last words began to tuck him back in. Her acceptance made the grass more comfortable, and the breeze a little warmer.

“Stay as long as you like.”

He dreamt he was a butterfly. A beautiful yellow butterfly fluttering about a giant cement tower. He was free, flying and floating at his leisure. All the fatigue of a terrible journey was somewhere else, it was a different world. Here was where he had always, truly, lived. Here, with happiness on his wings, was the real world.

He shared this world with other beings. Things with pink skin and two legs. Things that had delusions of grandeur about owning a world. They laboured day in and day out to turn the land into cement, with cement ground and strange moving metal. It was perverse. It was the silly construction of silly little beings. He had flown by them countless times, laughing under his butterfly breath. One time, he even flew all the way up the glass tower, just to see what they did in there all day, walking on the sky.

Turns out they were even more boring there than they were on the ground.

Whenever he decided to care, he pitied them. But most of the time he didn’t bother with concerning himself with them. He was busy swimming in clouds and dancing on flowers. Eternity passed within a few days, and every moment was vibrant.

One day, he decided to see how far he could fly, just for fun. Turns out, he could fly forever. And forever was an ocean, with horses galloping in the waves. In and out, in and out, the horses galloped always, for as far as he could fly. The beach was endless. Their ceaseless, powerful stride was perfect against the white sands. He flew with them always.

When one of them slept, as even ethereal things do, it transformed into a beautiful flower. Some of them were daises, others lilacs. And the finest, proudest, waves formed roses along the banks. A forest of flowers rejoiced in the music of a world at peace.

When he had spent a thousand years, and a thousand more, he came to rest upon a little green leaf. There, he gradually fell into a slumber of his own, drowsily.

“Lester, don’t.”

The majesty of paradise wrapped his little butterfly wings in a blanket of colours and sounds never before felt, but that he had always known.

“LESTER. DON’T!”

And then, as another rosebush sprouted into being, he was being transported into an entirely different world. He was ripped him from his gentle process of subtle transcendence by a sharp pain in his arm. He had arms again.

He regained focus to see his toes poke over a fallen branch in the moonlight. He vaguely thought he remembered seeing a girl, but she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, he thought, she was just a figment of a dream. He could hear an annoying buzzing sound and his body was chill from the cold. He rubbed his arm and found a tiny bloody patch in his shoulder. A gadfly landed on his hand for just a moment, before flying loop-de-loops away again.

The damned thing had bit him.