The Impossible Sky
Caught between two worlds, a dying human finds sanctuary amidst a war-torn realm. One place is home, and the other contains a person she can't let go. She is not a hero. She is just a girl. But how could anyone make a choice like that?
Afterlife
When she woke up outside the Temple, her first thought was, I am alive.
This was before she opened her eyes, so she hadn't yet had a chance to see the sunset sky saturated with impossible colours that would make her take back that statement.
Taking one slow breath after another and focusing on the glorious cool air flooding her lungs, something she had once taken for granted, she gently curled her fingers. Her palm was warm. So was the humid air.
That was familiar. Perhaps she was back home on the ocean shores she had grown up on, where the summer air was as thick and wet as syrup.
But that was unlikely. Wherever she was, it probably wasn't home.
She thought about laying there forever and never finding out, but the bed of tree roots and thorny branches she had been unceremoniously deposited on didn't make for the most comfortable resting place. So she cracked open an eye.
Perhaps not, the girl thought then, slowly raising a heavy arm to reach for the sky. She blinked hard, but the illusion didn't break. The world blurred together like a watercolour picture, edges soft, imperfect, messy. An artist's hand.
For a girl that had arisen every day to the dull colours and sharp shapes of reality, waking up inside a painting was more than a little bit jarring.
And yet... It's beautiful. She let her hand drop and her eyes wander, drinking in the sights with ravenous eyes. The sunsets she knew were often boring, as if the world couldn't muster the strength, but this... The sky was an absolute explosion of colour, streaks of green and red and pink and blue spiralling together, bursting with an intensity her overstimulated eye cones didn't know was possible.
She thought she could stare at that sky forever, but eventually, as the colours began to fade and swirl towards the horizon, something compelled her to sit up. She did, stretching and picking leaves out of her dark hair, but as she opened her eyes, her breath caught in her throat.
She would have known it anywhere.
She'd grown far, far away from that little kid who refused to stop believing in dragons, and the game had become a distant memory. But even after all these years, she instantly recognized the building. The gigantic dome rising from its surrounding structures overrun with vines, a glorious stained glass ceiling sending colours spilling into the sky. Where else could this be?
Well, she thought, gulping and staring down the titan architectural feat that was the Temple, I guess this is where you go when you die.