Prompt 65 – So long, and thanks for the ...

He was all alone. Completely lonely. The people he’d known, his friends, family, they all had disappeared in front of his eyes. They grew old, then died, became skeletons, then crumpled to ashes, dust, wiped away by the harsh wind that blew into his face. He wanted to run to them, stop them, cry. But he couldn’t reach them, even though he ran, and he wasn’t allowed to talk.

Fear trickled over his spine. “Will I die alone?”, he thought.

He didn’t have time to elaborate on that thought, as the scenery changed: Sitting in a library, he knew that he had to find a clue in all those rolls of parchment. Frantically hurrying from one stack of paper to the next, he blew the inch-deep dust away, ignoring the urge to sneeze, and then tried to read the words written on the parchment. He couldn’t. At first he thought it was one of the old languages, High Gallan or the one of the Old Ones. Then, the words started to gradually disappear. Rubbing his eyes, he looked around, and the surrounding started blurring, too. “I’m blind!”, he thought, yelling in his own mind.

Grabbing around, he searched for an exit, and found the big, iron door. It opened, and he emerged. Sweat-soaked, his full hair clinging to his temples, the veins in his muscled neck pulsing with his fast heart-beat, his lips bleeding from biting on them.

“So long, and thanks for the experience”, thought the soon-to-be-knighted Myles of Olau, then he turned away from the Chamber of the Ordeal – back to his friends, family and life.