Portmeirion

You were taken in the night from a dream of endless roses; when you woke you looked to your hands, thinking to see the depredations of thorns. Instead of bloodstained sheets you found smooth glossy walls and a space no larger than a coffin, lit by the rhythmic pulse of a single light—a rhythm which, it soon became clear, matched the frantic beating of your heart.

When the lid finally opened you came out fighting, clawing at the smooth, featureless faces of the creatures attending you. You broke half your nails on them before they moved to restrain you, and was over as soon as they did. You could no more stay their motions or escape their grip than you could still your heart or quiet your panicked breaths; so you did what you could, and slipped away from your body to watch what would happen next.

They took your body, now no more yours than theirs, with them as they left the chamber of your coffin, and you, unwilling, followed out into an endless night, into a garden lit by scattered eyes beneath a darkened sky. Beneath their feet torn and broken bodies wept, each step drawing fresh agony from those paving stones, and all about them throbbed the broken bodies of things which could not possibly be plants—for when has a plant had skulls, or weeping eyes marked by countless punctures? What plant’s spine is twisted and bleeding in such a way, what shrub burbles up fruitless prayers for death from a mouth of broken and sprouting teeth?

No—you, drifting after them and the body, could see clearly enough what their ⸢garden⸥ was, and even the watchful night could not pull you away from bodiless panic, from the desperate need to stave off what seemed inevitable no matter the impossibility weighing down every figment of the situation just as much as your escape from it.

And yet, and yet—you did not have words for the shape of your destination, nor the way its heavily laden wings rose up to cradle the sky just as any gallows does not, those hungry things stretched out from it to welcome them in and gently pluck the body from their hands to usher it into its final transformation, and yet there it was waiting on the horizon pulsing with ugly light and shivering with horrid anticipation—

And yet you broke free and ran, and your feet were buoyed up by the screaming ground and your pursuers were weighed down by their garden’s grasping hands and agonized maws, and from behind you and your body where your body could see not at all and you could see so painfully well came bursts of angry light and crushing steps and all the tools of compliance they had to restrain your garden—

And yet it was not enough, for you ran and ran and ran until you reached the end of the world and there you fell, plummeting down through heavy clouds and searching lights and the grasping tendrils of the thing which tried to reach out and take you and make you its own, falling and falling and—

And finally reaching the ground.

Where your body shattered and your mind broke.

Where the clockwork of your limbs burst over half a mile of clover and barley, and the whirring engine of your heart stayed whole;

And that was enough to let you hope.