Everything looks so beautiful! The ice-glazed mountains, greenery everywhere, birds chirping and flying away in the sky that looks more open and freer than anywhere else. As if this part of the sky is different! As if this place is different! So serene, so free, so relaxing! Amari couldn’t hold all this beauty, all this calmness inside her. She’s not used to such silence, such peace, such order.
Giant mammoths, rhinos, and several crawling and
creeping bugs kept Amari on her toes. She kept running, trying to catch her
breath but failing each time.
“Run, Amari! Run!” The voice sounded familiar to her
but also fading. Her heart felt like it would explode any minute. Her lungs
couldn’t receive the air they needed, resulting in her organs retaliating and
demanding that her feet stop running.
The sky was still so vast, so free, so beautiful, so
clear, so blue, but simultaneously so mysterious! As if it could engulf the
gigantic mountains, the mammoths, the bugs, the rhinos, and the girl who was
desperately running without a direction! Could the same sky that looked so
captivatingly liberating be incarcerating, too? Could being engulfed by the
vast sky save Amari from those giants and creepers? The lush greenery that
looked so bustling slowly encroached on Amari to take over her body like a
shroud, to send her to oblivious death. What would she choose? Being mauled and
trampled or being totally devoured and imminently engulfed? Are these choices
any different from the ones she had to take back home?
“Where? Where do I go? Where do I run, and for how
long? Wherever I look, there’s danger, possible threats, impending death, and impeding
roads and destinations. Perilous! It’s a perilous death trap. This place is a
death trap!”
Amari kept repeating these words again and again. But the noise around and outside her was so loud that she could barely hear anything she was saying. Even the noises in her head were dead, buried in the corner of her ever-chaotic and deafening mind.
Silence! Silence!
Amari took off the blue and green embroidered jacket
she had brought from home while escaping. A jacket that contained her
childhood, her nostalgia, remnants of what she called home, her parents'
warmth, her siblings' laughter and company, and the scrumptious aroma of
homecooked meals. It was the only thing that she could take with her while
escaping. She tied it up around her waist as tightly as she could. She couldn’t
afford to lose it. No! The only thing that symbolized a home that once kept her
safe and let her sleep without the fear of losing people to destruction, chaos,
and atrocity. The blue and green jacket had a beautiful scenery embroidered on
it. Her mother embroidered the sky, and her father the green trees. A sky
unlike the one that wanted to engulf her. Green trees, unlike the ones that tried
to shroud her into oblivion.
Amari could see that her running would come to an end
soon. No, not because she had a destination that would keep her safe or a safe
place where she could hide herself from danger. That’s the thing about this
place: you can never hide from danger! You can die or keep running until you
end up where Amari would end up soon while crossing many obstacles.
A dark abyss, an infinite dark chasm that looked just
like a black hole. All Amari could understand was that if she jumped, she would
escape this place. But at what cost?
Where will this infinite dark chasm lead her to? What
even is that?
The creepers, giants, and encroachers were coming
closer and closer…
The bottomless chasm was right in front of her. What
would she choose? Is death escapable? Is death inevitable? Or is this a new
beginning in the ending?
Right at that moment, she looked at her jacket.
Something's inside the pockets.
What are those? Do they save her? Do they give her any
clues? Does the jacket, the last symbol of her home that she escaped from, save
her? With so many choices, a limited time, and a life-and-death situation,
Amari has to make a decision.
