Into Dream Valley

by Brybrysciguy

Chapter 2: Falling

For a person who spent all their life more or less without any real surprises, suddenly being who knows how high up sure was a shocker.

Boston had before this had thought a lot about what he would do if he fell from a plane without a parachute and just for fun. The silly plans he made in his head usually revolved around taking his shirt off and turning it into a makeshift parachute. He did however admit that a better plan would probably involve him keeping his body steady and splayed out so as to increase drag.

However, suddenly being thrust from a near dream state to a near death state made Boston slightly less able to enact his plan.

In fact, it made it impossible to enact almost any plan.

Immediately the blood to his head and lack of control made Boston experience an adrenaline explosion. The air in his lungs escaped in an unholy scream and his arms and legs flailed around at unnatural speeds trying to find some form of ground or leverage to hold onto.

Despite being fully awake, as one would be in such a situation, he was barely conscious in any matter. Pure unadulterated terror made it impossible to think about the situation around him and Boston lost all semblance of sentient thought as he plummeted to the ground below.

The sun above him didn’t help, its bright light made him nearly blind and made assessing his situation even harder.

Nearly all of his senses were dulled, the world around him was a blurry streak of confusion and despair. Probably to be the second most dramatic and important in his life.

He didn’t know how but he could sense the ground getting closer and closer. He knew he was going to die wherever he was now, being merely a pile of mush on the hard ground. Who knew who or what would find his tangled and wretched body.

The moment for his reckoning had come. Boston had never wondered or worried that much about death, as a kid it had always felt so far away. Things were different now that he could see its maw.

He closed his eyes, stopped his screaming and waving, and relaxed. Beforehand he had spent all his time on YouTube browsing through mindless videos that had satiated his boredom and distracted him from doing the things that he loved to do, he had started countless projects but never finished one. He rarely ever felt the satisfaction of a job well done or a masterpiece of art complete. He wanted to just look back at some masterpiece and sigh in contentment. Instead, he had only leached off of others work, using it to distract himself from the problems that doing so created.

He would not die now.

He could not die now, he had too much to left to do. He had always sat in his chair at his computer berating himself, technology was at his fingertips that would make creating all sorts of works possible with ease. He knew how much he truly could accomplish if he tried, but he merely sat there, and because of that he had been and always would be powerless. Knowledge without action was meaningless. From this moment on he would no longer be an observer of his own life. Today he would not die.

Acting upon instincts forged in him from an age long now forgotten and trained to the bone by his dreams and nightmares, Boston made his move. He started in a position where his legs and arms were in random uncomfortable positions, and from there he forced them all rigid. From their irregular positions his limbs seemed to naturally go to their desired position splayed out as far and as straight as possible. He also simultaneously tensed the muscles in his abdomen, causing his body to be straightened so as to increase drag.

Immediately as he did this he could feel the sudden intense push back from the deacceleration, almost like he had just opened a parachute. The G’s didn’t stay for long however as his new more drag friendly state reached its more tempest, but still likely fatal terminal velocity.

Now that his body was facing down and his vision unobscured by the sun, the aerial teenager could look around, albeit with some difficulty as there was still air rushing by his face at a few hundred miles per hour. He saw the forested landscape of green and brown below, but in all that he only saw rocks and trees. His best friend deep thick snow was nowhere to be seen. However, he spotted something in his desperate flight that might just help him, a speck of orange flying below. He could tell from its parallax that it was probably halfway from the ground to him, and it was moving fast.

With a seemingly out of nowhere elegance, almost as if he had done this before, he angled his body in the direction of where the speck was going like he was an expert marksman hurling a dodgeball at a running kid on the other side of a school gym.

Over the course of the next few seconds the speck grew to a dot and then to a figure. The small but ever-growing figure that morphed into his vision would’ve made little sense if the situation had been any different, but Boston had limited time before he was little more than mush on the forest floor.

The aforementioned figure was orange with two spots of a deep red. In the next few seconds features would pop into view, first four legs along with a body, and then eyes and hair and a tail. He also saw that the flying creature had noticed the down-bound delinquent and had flared its wings (which it apparently had) almost like it had floored its brakes to get out of the way. Even its legs were moving as if it was stopping on a solid surface.

“Oh no you don’t!” Boston shrieked. He shocked himself with the force of his voice.

Simultaneously he performed a sudden and sharp roll to the side and rammed the surprised target at an angle. He landed in the thing’s front arms and ended up sending them both spinning like two astronauts at the end of a good movie. The creature’s equine face with its gigantic brown eyes stared into the also brown but much smaller eyes of Boston. Both their mouths were locked open in shocked surprise at this chance encounter, and the world Boston saw around both of them alternated between the forest below and the blue sky above.

Only now did he actually register what he was seeing and almost simultaneously both their eyebrows scrunched up in curiosity. The horse creature, which just from the last few moments had undergone a series of rapid changes of emotion, somehow seemed to be female to him. He had no idea how he could tell, maybe the hair, maybe the eyes, but the hard-wired algorithms in his head told him for sure that it was a girl.

The she’s eyebrows then snapped back up as it seemed she realized that they were both spinning and plummeting towards the ground. Her feathery but worryingly miniscule wings then flapped with all their might and the force sent Boston who was previously up by her face to fall down and hang by both of his hands on her front legs. Soon their rotation had stopped and they were coming down at a more leisurely pace. As she flapped her wings the creature’s face scrunched up as she clearly strained to keep both of their weights in the air, and they slowly descended, bobbing up and down with the flapping of wings. The ground got closer and closer until just a few feet above the pine-needle covered and quite grassless forest floor Boston let go of the Orange legs and then with a thump he made contact with the ground.

The creature instead of proceeding to step on the ground instead hovered over it. Boston then noticed that she huffed out a large breath and seemingly wiped some sweat off her brow with her ‘arm’. Right then however it regained its focus and started hovering in a circle around the confused teenager, staring and scrutinizing every square inch of his appearance.

Boston now that he was in no immediate threat of death now allowed himself to ponder the mythical beast before him. Obviously the first thing that came to mind was ‘Wow, an actual Pegasus’. Then he noticed just how colorful she was, she had a pumpkin orange coat and her ‘hair’ was a deep red along with her tail. Her brown eyes didn’t seem to go all that well with her complexion, but who was he to judge? He had no idea if to her it went well or not, he was just avoiding the major elephant in the room. She was obviously sentient; the Pegasus had already shown very human expressions on its face like curiosity and was now thoroughly investigating him. If she was an animal there would be no way it would look at him for this long and this in depth he thought.

In fact, she seemed way too human to even make sense. Her eyebrows, mouth, and just general movements communicated the same emotions in almost the exact same way as a person like him would. She was even wearing brown leather shoes over her hooves! He had never heard of a place on Earth containing real pegasi, so he might need to ask someone (or something) for directions. Luckily this would hopefully make communication a lot easier than if it were like an alien or even an animal, after all, even after tens of thousands of years of co-evolution with dogs and we can still only tell the basic emotions of each other. Then he realized that maybe if their facial expressions were similar maybe their languages were too, worth a try at least.

“Hello,” Boston greeted. He then slowly pronounced the rest of his sentence “Can. You. Understand. Me?”

No luck, the Pegasus just tilted her head and just stared with a confused expression. Then she made a snort and a quick whinny in a manner that had the same tone as Boston’s. For a second, he contemplated what to do before it hit him, maybe he could try hand signals. He had seen her wipe the sweat off her brow just now, a distinctly human expression, maybe that would be how he communicated with her.

First, he tested whether or not she would understand pointing or not, so he pointed right at her. In response she put on a quizzing look and put her… He had to think a second before it came to him, hoof over her chest. He silently cheered at his luck. It seemed that she had understood that the finger pointed at her had been meant to convey something about her.

Next, he brought his finger up and tapped the top of his head softly; making care that she saw what he was doing. And finally after that he brought his hand down and splayed it out on his chest. He then repeated the mannerism but faster this time to make sure that she got everything. Her first emotion was contemplative, but then she just started look confused. Honestly, Boston didn’t know what the heck he was trying to communicate either.

Well, it was a start. Not being able to directly talk with the Pegasus would be annoying, but hand signals and facial expressions would still communicate quite a lot. He was already much closer to actually speaking with another species than professional scientists who recorded dolphin whistles off a boat. However, it would also give a much more short-term and practical use of being able to ask and answer very simple questions. If he could figure out how to do that.

Suddenly the Pegasus’s eyebrows fell back and she gained an anxious look. Even more unexpectantly to Boston, she tilted her head up and then bounced into the air above the trees. Now silently panicking, Boston could only stand there and hope as she looked out and blocked the glaring sun from her eyes. Just when he morbidly imagined her flying off, she plopped back down with a still nervous but also optimistic giddy about her.

She then threw her whole front leg over her body to signal Boston to follow her. The Pegasus then merrily trotted forward in a seemingly random direction from the clearing. He happily obliged her call to companionship and made haste behind her.

The pegasus’s visual optimism in front of him made his sudden fear of abandonment vanish. Instead of fear or mistrust he too went with a prep in his steps over the pine needle covered forest floor. It seemed that she had even started humming a kind of musical tune, with whinnying, neighing, and even some (surprisingly) melodical snorts. Music was dumb, Boston had always avoided it at all costs, doing only the bare minimum in his first-grade music class. The stupid symbols and lines on the standard musical notation confused him.

He walked through the woods merrily humming to the tune of the imperial march.

---

While they walked along the forest floor Boston mentally took inventory of his items he had with him. Somehow, he had managed to still hold onto both his regular and his string backpacks, however, unsurprisingly he had lost his binder in the confusion. He probably would’ve left it behind anyway as it contained nothing of practical value and was only a dead weight out wherever he was. Luckily, he still had a snack in his backpack and one more pair of clean clothes to put on.

They weren’t on any kind of established path as they had just landed in a random spot in the forest, so they had to scuffle their way through bushes and rocks, which was annoying in Boston’s shorts. He let his mind wander over his situation, this forest was clearly a lot different than the one he had seen in Arkansas. It consisted almost entirely of pines while the Arkansas flora consisted mostly of flat-leaved deciduous trees. The trees acid that they released made the ground a lot clearer of vegetation than the forest floor in Arkansas was, here it was almost completely void of grass. The prickly bushes more than made up in the regard of traversability though, they scratched and bloodied Boston’s exposed legs.

At that moment Boston remembered that he had long sweat pants in his string bag. He whistled to the Pegasus in front of him to get her attention and then eventually he was able to communicate that they needed to stop for a little bit. He then went behind a tree leaned against it and took off his tiny blue shorts to put on his grey sweatpants. The air was noticeably cooler and drier than the mid-autumn of Arkansas, his exhaustion from today’s events had made this more noticeable than it would have been otherwise.

Truth be told he was sapped from today’s events, running a 5k and then falling from a few kilometers in the air along with a terrible night’s sleep in a chair had emptied his mental and physical batteries. Now he was hiking behind a technicolor Pegasus who he couldn’t understand through an untamed wilderness, possibly in some distant land he had never heard of, maybe even planet.

If it was an alien planet, the forest around him seemed oddly Earth-like. Although it was nothing like Arkansas, it was almost exactly like the forests he had seen up north in Montana. The brown and pale red ground sloped upwards erratically, the roots forming their own little ledges. The bushes and some of the littler pine trees were quite annoying to him and his new friend.

After shooing an overly inquisitive horse, Boston finished changing and they made their way again through the forest. The golden sunlight streaming through canopy above came in at a slanted angle and the pine needles cracked and bent under his shoes and her hooves covered in leather shoes. They looked almost like little bags that went up her legs and hugged her ‘ankles’. He could tell the day was expiring, it seemed it was still autumn wherever he was, and the dry air was slowly getting darker as time went by. They would probably have to make some kind of camp soon.

Suddenly Boston noticed a stream up ahead in front of him. The flowing water formed a thin sheen over the rounded stones on its bottom, and the wrinkly liquid shimmered in the late afternoon sun. Looking at it Boston was reminded of his thirst; his white and blue water bottle had been emptied right after the race and right before he had gone on a freefall, and now the running, clear, and cold water made his throat purse.

With a thud his backpacks hit the mossy ground and he fell to his knees at the bank of the creek. He then bent his whole body down and tilted his head so that one side of it was submerged in the chilling water. He then relaxed the muscles in his jaw and the newly melted, nearly freezing water poured down his barren throat and his heart throbbed in his chest as the sound in his right ear was muffled by the ever-moving stream.

When his head lifted, the water that had accumulated in his scraggly hair first dripped back down into the stream and then flowed down into his latex cross-country tank top. Suddenly he heard laughter behind him, first it was a relatively soft chuckle. The Pegasus was actually giggling, a horse actually giggling. So he started chuckling himself. This only made her chuckle increase in volume to a laugh, and the escalation of laughter continued until they were both on their backs choking in their own levity.

Their chortles finally quieted down until they were both just sitting there laying on the pine needles. The Pegasus with a steady smile then looked to the sky along with Boston and saw the sunlight reflecting off the bottoms of the clouds. Now instead of the rusty and chalky yellow, the color coming from the sun was a deep crimson red. The Pegasus then weirdly signaled to Boston by moving her ‘forearms’ to form kind of a triangle shape. He assumed that meant they were settling down here for the night.

They both scavenged for sticks and tinder material they might use for a fire, and they scraped up some pine needles and leaves to use for bedding that would keep them off the cold ground. Boston even set up a little circle of stones where a fire would be. They were in a little clearing by the stream, he didn’t notice it until he glanced in that direction, but Boston saw that there was a little-used path on the opposite side of the stream from them. No wonder he hadn’t noticed it, it was overgrown by bushes and shrubs, and no one would be able to walk side by side on it.

Just when he wondered how they were going to start any kind of fire, from seemingly out of nowhere the Pegasus pulled out a piece of flint and flecked it with a stone she had pulled from the stream. A spark flew onto a piece of dead dry grass they had found. The dry environment around them made it so the sparks lit the kindling up like a bolt of lightening in a summer storm. In no time they had their own little fire going on. The whole scene reminded him of his camping trips in Montana with his Grandparents.

When they were done setting up camp the light of dusk had finally been whipped away and the sky above them was black. The Pegasus it seemed was down and dead on her makeshift needle-bed, nearly silent in the night. Lying down on her side, her body moved up whenever she breathed in, and to Boston it felt like she started sleeping the moment she laid down.

He figured he might be able to tell where he was on Earth if he would be able to find the stars, but no luck tonight. Thick cumulus clouds stretched from horizon to horizon, enshrouding the entire world below in an eerie darkness. This was not your average every day darkness (at least not to Boston), it was advanced darkness. Living in the city like he had, Boston had been used to the grey overglow that usually covered the bottom of clouds and coldly radiated out into space on clear nights. Now when he looked up he saw nothing but a complete and utter void of black peering down at him.

The only thing still holding him to the Earth below was the crackling sound and light of the fire and the water falling over rocks in the now darkened stream. One of the ways he thought he might find a way back to civilization was by looking for the tell-tale signs of day during night that humans created wherever they went. Even when he went out to dark zones to observe the band of the milky way in the far far countryside he could still see the faintest glimmers of light shimmering from under the horizon, there to remind him that he was never free from the grasp of human civilization. Here there was nothing, he couldn’t see the shinning lights in a sign of a motel, or the streetlights that beckoned to space. He couldn’t even see evidence for the tiniest porch light shining up above into the emptiness.

A nefarious realization slithered and slided through his head, the synapses slowly came together, and the feeling shook him to his very bone. He was alone. The darkness around him shone brighter and blacker than at any time in his life, and the only thing keeping it at bay was the orange light emanating from their tiny little fire they had both constructed. Just when he felt more alone and isolated than he had at any other time in his life, he heard a snort. The snort went up in volume like a leaf thrown into the sky, and then it fell slowly down to a whistle before rocketing up again. The Pegasus was snoring.

Like a pendulum, Boston’s emotions swung from one extreme to the other. While earlier he had felt the most isolated, the most cut-off, and the most alone he had ever felt in his life, looking at the sleeping body he felt the most connected and understood. Ironic, he couldn’t even understand anything she ‘said’, and yet he felt he already knew her better than he had known anyone else in his life. He had seen the curiosity in her eyes, the real interest she had shown towards him after they came nearly crashing to the ground. Despite not knowing who he was or where he came from (for all he knew at least) she hadn’t flown off on those tiny wings, she had instead lead him through the empty wilderness of the forest.

The black invisible clouds above then ceased to be the harbingers of doom to him and instead now acted like a warm comforting blanket, keeping the ground below them warm and cozy. Although luckily since he still had hold of his string backpack he retained a real blanket. He would find out what was above those hovering masses of water, but not tonight. For his eyelids became heavy and his mind quieted and his blood cooled from the hormones built over the long and strenuous day. Then finally, his thoughts fell to oblivion.

Author's Note:

Thanks for reading this far. I've already written the next two chapters, but I plan on editing them up a little bit before release. So expect the next one in a few days. Again, I am open to any criticism as I am still new and improving.

Comments

[ShortCaveman]

The flow could use some work. I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure you can find one on the blogs or try the writers guide but so far the stories interesting I'm looking forward to reading more😁✌️ but you should check out other people's material see if you like their flow and their stories 🤔

[Brybrysciguy]

10155142
Thanks so much for the feedback! Is it ok if I ask specifically where it dragged on the worst? The main reason I published this story was so I could find out where the problems are in it. The people I initially gave it to were kind of yes-men.

[Brybrysciguy]

10155184
Thanks! I can't believe I din't notice how clunky that whole paragraph was even when I've tried going through this whole thing multiple times. I think hopefully it makes more sense now.

[Nalamba]

An interesting start. It has potential, but there's something about the flow that makes my eyes skip all over the place as I'm reading. I can't quite put my finger on why but I did notice that a lot of the sentences are almost the same length. Some short sentences might help. Reading it aloud can help find natural break points too.

Viking ZX on this site has a blog series on being a better writer. I've greatly enjoyed reading it even though I haven't put anything out. Hope to read more from you! :)

[Brybrysciguy]

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I'm glad you liked it! I'm going to put a bit more work into redoing the next chapter so that it flows a bit better hopefully.