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He’s surrounded by water.
Not in the traditional sense of being submerged, not really; the water forms tall walls on his sides, falling metres below the surface, down to the grassy floor on which he stands, shoes sinking into the dirt a little. He glances down. His shoes are brown. He doesn’t know why this feels strange to him.
There’s a massive house ahead of him. He steps forward. The cobblestone floor is rough under his feet.
There’s obsidian over his chests. He doesn’t know why, exactly, but the rock seems too dark to be natural. If he looks askance at it with his left eye, the purple tint between the blocks grows, and if he looks with his right, individual rocks glint unnaturally, the reflected light looking like eyes. Something in the back of his mind screams at him no no no this is wrong Grian get out wake up wake up wake—
He blinks. A scene at spawn (how does he know that?). A familiar face; blue eyes, an old hoodie. Himself, too— though not the himself he recognises, and indeed it takes a moment for him to realise. The green outfit and blond hair does not match with the fuzzy picture he has of himself in his head. He looks at his hands, but he cannot see them. Faintly, he finds this concerning.
He looks up again. The pair is walking off. They are halfway through a step, frozen as if in a diorama. He walks around to see their fronts; something like black smoke obscures their faces. If he looks closely, he can see swirling symbols coming out of the fog that he cannot understand.
He turns around. Behind him is a stone statue. A face— vaguely familiar, invoking feelings adjacent to grief and grief and why couldn’t I have just sadness that he couldn’t explain. Strangely, if he unfocused his eyes just enough, he could picture that face’s body. Blue tints the edges of his vision for a moment. One, two seconds, the floor in front is covered in roses, three, four, and the statue is crying, surrounded by its own rubble, and his vision is tinted with purple once more. This is, somehow, not comforting.
He looks up at the sky. He looks back down. There’s a portal ahead of him.
The portal is ringed with broken edges of bedrock— two Ls and two dots, forming a rectangle, carved into a rock face. Swirling purple pulses in its centre. He looks around, surprisingly desperate, but sees no one else. He turns behind him and there it is again, carved into that same hill. He closes his eyes; faces stare back at him, judging, but now he recognises those eyes on one, that sharp upturn of the nose on the other, that blue—
His eyes open again. He stands on the stairs leading up to the portal, just on the edge of the rock where he then has to jump in.
Mind the gap! A distinctly familiar, mocking, saddened voice says, in the deep confines of his mind.
He takes a step back, but he looks back up and he hasn’t moved one bit. He tries again, again, again, and still he doesn’t move. He thinks he’s panicking now, but the thought is distant, the feeling even moreso. Still, he can feel those hands that aren’t really his shaking, and tears running down his face, soaking into the cobblestone stairs that he can’t walk down.
He can feel the eyes on his back, he thinks; hundreds of them, perhaps thousands; when he turns, for just a brief moment, he sees darkness, a starless night sky, brightly green grass, sand.
Unconsciously, he takes a step, and he leans far over the side, and he’s falling, falling, falling, and the wings on his back (since when did he have those?) do not spread to catch him, and he’s going faster, and faster, and if he squints into the nothingness below him he can maybe see a tiny island, surrounded by water, no, void, no, water, no, void, void, void—
…
Grian Xelqua opens his eyes up with a sinking sensation in his stomach and no knowledge as to why.