Awareness awashed you, rousing you at the very heart of an omnipresent darkness. A languid light appeared from the void, slowly dissolving the curtains of blackness coating the things it hid like a varnish, the sights and tangibles appearing from within it sketched by rich watercolours and buttery brushstrokes. Waves of softened colours crashed against a sky of finely crushed glass, expanding with each surge, reaching higher and higher. Amidst the watered crescendo of colours, a blinding warmth bathed you: the cloudless noon sun hung above your head with its judgemental reckoning, akin to a God’s eyes scrutinising the drawn world below—or maybe, only you alone.

Sundry shapes and overflowing forms came from the banished gloom, drifting closer, like a scattering wind with crushed chalks of all hues within. Wooden facades, stone houses, spires of chapels, and leafy trees solidified around cobblestone streets—each of them absorbed and reflected the burgeoning light, like oil painting coming to life. Figures of people, too, emerged from the drifting rainbow mist. Dressed in fabrics and denims imbued with otherwordly dyes, their contours and faces smudged and rubbed, they moved about, as if it wasn’t them who stepped out of the shadows, but rather, they were always there, only needing some backlight.

When the colours sealed the circle of darkness encircling you, you found yourself still, much smaller in stature. There, right before you, walked a horse, its coat such a deep obsidian black not even the sun cold highlight it. Its mane, equally as black, laid motionless across its broad shoulders. The empty pits of the stallion’s eyes promised to show you the abyss … were you to dare to look inside. Your hands appeared second to last, reaching for another’s sidearm holster with a glistening pearl-handled revolver inside of it. A broad weathered hand grabbed your wrist, painfully tightening the hold. A cowboy rider sat in the saddle with a silver-streaked beard, his eyes as vacant as the cold metal of unlit lantern.

“You want it?” He pulled the iron from its holster in one clean draw.