While walking through the ash dunes, Orion noticed a large depression in the terrain. Deciding to investigate, he crawled along the ground, peeked his head out and found a group of small creatures. Lying quietly, he took a moment to observe them.

  The monsters he saw now were different from the one that attacked him. They were thinner and more humanoid in appearance, but only had lower limbs. They reached his waist in height and looked more like the equivalent of herbivorous, peaceful creatures. Watching them, he saw them lounging in a group. They even looked like they were taking care of each other. The sight reminded him that he was the intruder here. Deciding to leave them alone, he quietly retreated and continued his march. At this point, he began to feel hungry again, and his legs screamed for a break.

  Days passed, and Orion sometimes had the impression that he saw moving shapes at the edge of his vision. He didn’t know if it was reality. He wouldn’t be surprised if his mind was generating things, just to keep itself busy. Sick and tired of this monotonous journey, only Martha’s last words kept him somewhat determined. Finding a fairly large boulder to lean against, he decided to rest.

  During his short rest, the moving shapes became quite distinct, and unfortunately for him, it turned out that it was not his mind that was creating them. They were a group of small and hairless, hyena-like creatures. Surrounding him, they kept a safe distance, approaching a little only when he was preparing to rest. Orion stood up and tried to drive them away, shouting and throwing the rest of the pebbles he had kept. The beasts increased their distance, but still circled around him. It seemed that if he collapsed from exhaustion, they would immediately attack. So he lay down and pretended to fall asleep so that they would think it was feeding time. However, the beasts were overly cautious, almost as if they had some hidden sense that told them that he was pretending. Finally, he stood up with a groan and continued walking again.

  Another few hours passed, and Orion kept stomping and shouting at the creatures. Even though they fled, they returned a moment later, their movements strangely synchronized. He didn’t know how long this went on, but at this point he was already on the verge of collapse. The beasts, however, waited patiently.

  “So you’ll fucking wait,” he mumbled, irritated.

  Saying that, his vision darkened, and his mind began to drift away. He rolled onto his face, falling asleep before he even landed. While one would expect his dream to end quickly, you know, because of being eaten, Orion was dreaming of his entire life again. He saw himself from a third-person perspective, in moments he shouldn’t remember. A vision of him as an infant lying in a stroller pushed by his smiling grandfather flashed before his eyes. He watched his own reaction to seeing his little brother for the first time, playing hide and seek with his older sister, and his early days at school. Even though his dreams showed his entire life, they seemed short.

  Reaching the point where he was handcuffed to the metal chair, everything went as before, but the moment he felt pain, the dream skipped to the time he woke up in that place.

  At the point of meeting Martha, his dream staggered, as if shaking the world from outside. Orion held on to the view, however, wanting to experience their journey, their conversations, and their banters once more. This too soon ended, and he reached the point of driving away the beasts and collapsing from exhaustion. He slowly opened his eyes, which, falling asleep, he thought with the rest of his consciousness, that it would never happen.

  Lying down, Orion saw the ash-like ground before him. Shaking off his sleep, he decided to assess his situation. Did I really imagine them? He thought for a moment as he sat up. However, when he looked back, it turned out to be a false assumption.

  Orion noticed a carefully arranged mound, made of hyena-like creatures’ corpses, on which something else was lying. A beast whose body parts were darker than night and others looked like exposed bones. Its head was divided in half, horizontally. In place of the jaw, there was a white skull-like part with a set of sinister teeth, forming a smile. This ended in the middle, replaced by an impossibly dark substance. The dark part of the face was distinguished only by white eyes with glowing, silver irises, which were focused on him. The top of the head ended with black shapes, floating almost like seaweed in the water, moving slowly, and a pair of larger, stable forms resembling curved horns.

  The creature had dark, rather thin forelimbs, with hands resembling those of a human, but ending in sharp, bony claws. Its dark torso was slightly longer and thinner than a human’s, and there were sharp spikes along the spine, emanating a faint, ethereal light. The hind limbs resembled the legs of a lizard, matching the colors of the forelimbs. The body of the creature was crowned by an unnaturally long tail, which also had glowing spikes.

  “You lookin’ at my tail?”

  At the end of the tail was another bright part, resembling a sharp arrowhead. If the creature killed hyena-like beasts, then the tail was likely used as a primary weapon. Its entire body seemed streamlined enough to move quickly… to move… uhm… quickly?

  Orion experienced a short-circuit, only now realizing that the creature had said something to him. He raised his eyebrows in amazement, unable to utter a word.

  “I see you want to. Touch it. Don’t be shy.”

  The creature spoke the words in two ways. It was quite a strange experience for the listener, as the first part sounded exaggeratedly high-pitched, and then the last part was spoken in a deep and low tone, evoking associations of antiquity. Apart from these strange pitch shifts, its voice left a quiet echo behind.

  Coming to his senses, Orion quickly deduced what could have happened. The creature before him had apparently saved his life for some reason, killing dozens of the canine beasts. As if that wasn’t enough, it was waiting for him to rest and wake up. It was no use thinking about the issue of intelligence when hearing what were probably sarcastic sentences. He didn’t want to test the patience of a creature that had already spoken to him twice, even though the content was quite disorienting.

  “Umm, thanks for saving my life. May I ask who you are? You’re not planning on eating me, are you?”

  “Chill Ori, I already ate. I don’t eat meat, by the way,” the creature pointed to the lower part of its head.

  Only upon closer inspection did Orion notice that it was not a functional jaw, but rather more like the lower half of a mask with an engraved pattern of teeth.

  “Wait, how do you know my name? Also, the diminutive, no less. But how so? Did you hear me talking to Martha?”

  “But I literally just told you that I already ate.”

  “What? I don’t get it? What does that have to do with names?” Orion asked, clearly confused.

  The creature rose from the top of the corpses, stretching like a cat, wagging its tail, the tip of which reached alarming speed. It bounced back from its burrow, starting to float in the air like a fish in water. It performed a strange, horizontal pirouette, then placed its hands behind its head and ‘lay on’ its back in the air.

  “Well, I’d be happy to tell you, but I suspect you’d like to go? Or is it time for a snack first?” it replied, pointing to the corpse.

  Orion did indeed feel a nagging hunger, so he wasn’t going to refuse. As strange as it was to eat beasts in front of this creature, he figured it knew he needed it to survive. As he went to cut up the canine beasts, they continued their conversation.

  “I should have asked. Why did you save me? I still don’t know who you are.”

  Ah, before I could answer, a diarrhea of other questions landed on me. The answer isn’t simple, either. I don’t have a name nor gender, and I either landed here at birth, or I was already born here. So, to answer the question of who I am, I’m goin’ to tell you about my diet and this place.” The creature replied, moving freely in the air. “I feed on dreams, to put it briefly. Even though you’ve known me for a few minutes, I know your whole life right now, and all your dreams. By the way, seriously? A tap? Why a talkin’ tap? Ugh, going on: What I eat may also be the reason why I’m here. I don’t have an absolute certainty, but rather a fuckin’ solid theory.”

  Orion started feeding, but at the mention of eating dreams, he stopped. Something clicked in his mind, recalling his first dream in this place. He was afraid before he went to sleep that he would be haunted by his tortures, but since he got here, he’s had rather pleasant dreams. At the mention of his most silly dream, he was a little embarrassed, but he didn’t dwell on it, letting the creature go on.

  “Under normal circumstances, I ain’t got control over what you dream about. But with you bein’ here, so close to me, I was able to watch selected fragments. Initially, your dreams were very slow, from here I could only see single scenes.”

  At that moment, the significance of the fact that what he had dreamed, which was practically everything, was being watched by this creature, dawned on Orion. He felt a certain pang of anger at the intrusion, but the creature had saved his life. He also knew that he had far too little information to judge. So he decided not to hold a grudge. However, his attention was drawn to the last sentence. He swallowed quickly, feeling another burning sensation in his digestive tract, but he ignored it and asked.

  “My dreams were slow? What do you mean?”

  “Right, you said somethin’ about frequencies when you entered that zone. Remember the invisible wall? In the place where you woke up, time moved much slower for you. That changed when you went through it.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  He had no particular reason not to believe the creature, so he immediately thought about the implications of what it was saying. After digesting this last bit of information, Orion paled, clearly panicking. This didn’t go unnoticed, as the creature quickly calmed him down.

  “I’m talkin’ about a fourfold difference. Don’t worry. If they survived, they didn’t die of old age. And that difference is in this zone and the place where you woke up. The current place is also different from the outside world. Dreams from there are twice as slow.”

  At this news, Orion tried to calculate the situation roughly. If he understood correctly, it meant that in his current location, time flew faster than in the outside world. He still didn’t know exactly how much time he had been here, but since the beginning of his stay he had always counted something. The steps he passed, the time he had to go to sleep, and after Martha’s death, having nothing else to do, he had been mentally reciting the seconds for a long time. If his calculations were correct, the moment they reached the invisible wall, it should have been the fifth day of their stay. He didn’t believe that, without a circadian cycle, it would be at all precise. He also had moments when he slept less often, but when he did lie down, he could just as well have been sleeping off the lack of sleep without even knowing it. Without any changes in the landscape, he couldn’t estimate the length of his dreams. However, he assumed that about sixty-seven days had passed since they had passed through the invisible wall. Which meant that he should have been here for a total of seventy-two days.

  “Seventy-four. And no, I don’t read minds. I can practically see the smoke risin’ from your calculatin’ brain,” the creature said, spinning happily in the air.

  “Mhm, I wasn’t far. How do you know?” he asked, counting further. So, considering five days in the slower ‘zone’, it should’ve been more than forty-four days outside.

  “Based on your dreams. Since I was born; a long, long time ago by the way; I’ve been eatin’ dreams from outside and dreams from here, includin’ all zones. Although not all anomalies dream, I’ve had plenty of time to develop an internal clock. I’ll also add that I consider normal time to be the time that prevails in most of the universe. You know, excludin’ zones affected by time dilation caused by black holes or other forces.”

  While the topic of time was an interesting one, after calming down the fear that his family had died of old age while he was bustling around here, Orion had another idea.

  “If you feed on dreams and apparently know what they contain, is it possible that…”

  “Unfortunately, the closest person whose dreams I know is your distant neighbor, whom you’ve only seen a few times in your life. That, too, I only found out when I ate the ones you just dreamed about. But I have another interestin’ piece of information on the subject. A moment before you woke up here, all the dreams of this universe began to fade away. Planet by planet. I still feel like they’re out there, but I can’t reach ‘em.”

  Orion took a moment to reflect on what he had heard, while continuing to eat and prepare provisions for the future. For a moment, he panicked again when he heard that the dreams of the universe were gone, but if they’re still there, but inaccessible, that probably means there’s been some major change. It also sounded like it was the first time a creature had ever encountered such a situation. He still had too little information to speculate. Fortunately, the creature seemed to be quite open about its experiences and observations.

  “You mentioned you had a theory about this place?”

  “In that case, I have two answers to that question, depending on the scale you’re askin’. If you’re referring to this whole place, my theory is this is the universe’s garbage dump.” having said that, the creature paused for a moment, but seeing Orion’s confused gaze, it continued. “It’s still just my theory. I’ve deduced from dreams that no livin’ thing outside this place knows of its existence. As you know, the universe is governed by its own laws. The enormous mass creates gravity that may attract even light and can cause time dilation. Light has a speed limit, although it has no rest mass, it does have energy and momentum. There is a law of causality, and everythin’ is moving towards entropy. There are many examples, and one might assume that in order to maintain… well, order, the universe, without even having a self, created these laws for itself, or adopted them from something even greater.”

  Orion, listening attentively, finished eating. He didn’t force himself to eat the meat like he had the first time, mainly because he wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else. He had gathered a lot of provisions, so he nodded at the creature to show that he was ready. It understood him and slowly drifted next to him as he began to walk. Orion also remembered that the creature had already once described what, from the context, meant the living creatures of this place as anomalies. Coming to this, he assumed he knew where the creature’s theory was heading, but to be sure, he let it speak.

  “I’m assumin’ this place is the result of one of those laws. I think the universe doesn’t control what kind of life or event arises in it, but if it doesn’t meet the given laws, it’s moved here until it expires.”

  Although he was right about the theory, he hadn’t considered its end. If it turned out that the laws of nature would get in his way in order to get out of here... Orion felt discouragement lurking behind him, ready to crush him. If this was the actual situation, he could try to do anything for the rest of his life, but he would never succeed. If the theory of creation was true, it also meant that he was considered an anomaly for some reason. But why? He thought. He had no idea, which made him feel even worse. Seeing his scowl, the creature spoke again.

  “As I mentioned, just before you woke up here, all the dreams from your planet were gone. Suddenly. Then, a few hours later, they disappeared from another planet. I haven’t witnessed anythin’ like this since I gained a self. Ori, millions of years have passed since then. In all the millions of years I’ve been here, this place and this universe haven’t changed a single time, until this moment. You know what I’m gettin’ at?”

  Orion felt sadness at the thought that the creature had lived so long alone, but he tried to focus on the question. It took him a moment to face it. He didn’t know if his thoughts were being influenced by his own wishes, but having reached a specific conclusion, he spoke it, still formulating it in his mind.

  “When I was dying, something happened. Something beyond the laws of nature.” with that, hope began to shine through the dark clouds of approaching despair. He still didn’t know if he was alive at all. He could be a dead but functioning anomaly in this place. But in his opinion, he hadn’t become some mindless zombie. At least he was clear-headed most of the time. And then there was the case of Martha. Was she here for the same reasons?

  Although he didn’t get confirmation, he assumed that the change that had taken place in the world could somehow allow him to get out of this place. Of course, it wasn’t a certainty, just a small chance against the unknown. A question crept into his mind and he decided to ask.

  “You saved my life, and I am immensely grateful for that. But what was the reason for that? I apologize in advance if I offend you, but I have to ask. Did you just want a conversation buddy to wander around here with you for my entire life?”

  Orion probably wouldn’t have asked such a question under normal circumstances, mostly because it could hurt someone. But these weren’t normal circumstances. His will to live had begun to wane at some point during his journey, and surrounded by the canine beasts, he had prepared himself for death. If it turned out that the creature would end his life in anger, then so be it. But he didn’t think it would, either.

  “Eh, as usual, you’re overthinkin’. I have to admit, that question was a dick move, but I understand why you decided to rip off the band-aid. So let’s just say we’re even because I read your past and your dreams. The answer is no.” said the creature, circling Orion, after a moment explaining. “Even though you’re the first person I can talk to freely, I saved you, mainly because of your worldview. Your world knows many misanthropes, but I’ve never seen one so empathetic. It’s true, most of them hide and pretend to be nice, but you not only didn’t hide it on purpose, your morality is not forced or false, but natural. Damn, you might even have eaten a bunch of anomalies you bumped into on the way. I know you realized that you could hunt them easily, but you didn’t even think about doing it. That’s the main reason.”

  Orion felt a pang of guilt for asking the question, but also relief that he wouldn’t be left as a wandering, forcibly kept alive boy to entertain the creature. He was about to apologize again, but was stopped by a wave of a black hand.

  “Iiiiidiot. We’ll have time to talk about it, but I know somethin’ else is eating at you. Then let me say it right now. I am goin’ to help you get out of here.”

  By the way, there’s a little reference in this chapter. Did anyone catch it, and know where it’s from? ?