Town

When you wake up, you are in the middle of an expanse of white void. The surface you step on is seemingly just a stretch of white nothingness. It appears that you are about to fall into it, but you aren't. You begin to move forward while the pure white fog surrounding you. After a walk for an unknown amount of time, you finally glimpse something except for the endless white. A town with stone-paved road emerges. You could even see the void below the thin sustaining slab of the stone road.
Regardless, you enter the town. The trees in the town are all withered, and their dark brown branches are exposed. Weeds grow in a stiff-twisted pattern and exhibit some ill wood color. Snow piles up on the floor and the roof. Ice cones hang from the eaves. The constant chilling wind go through your body to make you feel cold. You occasionally get obstructed by walls that abruptly protrude out from where they shouldn't. This place appears to be a maze consists of the Chinese white walls and town-like structures. Its complexity exceeds any building planning requirement. However, you would always find a way out after walking for a certain amount of time. 
The subtle differences between the buildings make it slightly clear for their original purpose. You find the buildings to be devoid of anything but basic structures. The retail stores on the street side have only empty counters. The residential buildings even have no furniture. You walk along the stone path to an open area where a few old utility poles erect. Shivering in the cold wind, the poles are frozen, and with some stickers attached on. These stickers are firmly locked beneath a layer of ice. You'd seen them before. But when you get close to read, you find yourself unable to recognize the words. You leave and make your way to the surrounding buildings. Entering a bungalow, you feel an unexplained wave of exhaustion. After brief inspection, you decide to rest in the room.
You wake up in the middle of that empty room. You suddenly sense an urge to do something, but you can't fathom what it is. You get up quickly and head for the door, walk down the stone path through the empty but complicated streets. You notice that the sky no longer seems to be pure white like previous, but a pale gray. You hear tiny voices in the ambient, as if someone were talking. But these subtle anomalous changes don’t concern you. You just keep walking, don’t even know where you are heading. A wall appears ahead, but still, you walk straight towards it. You no-clip through, which is much to your own surprise, but just then -
You wake up, looking around, you are still in the middle of the room. Cold wind outside constantly knocks against the windowpane. You feel a little feverish, and at the same time begin to remember everything just happened. You know it is just a dream, but it is so real that you feel confused. You walk out the door and come outside, knowing you should continue exploring the place. Labyrinthine streets wind into the distance, and the buildings around you converge in the direction of the street extension. You feel as if these streets were trying to lead you somewhere. You follow the direction, until narrow streets join into an open area at their end. Crossing the long pavilion connected to the stone path, you come to a lake. Holding the railings, you can see the entire lake, like the previous void, only a deep, bottomless pure white. Pale mist keeps rising from below and sluggish barren grass on the bank sway in masonry slits along with the moving fog. With another sudden wave of exhaustion, your hands on the railings gradually loose. 
You wake up, get up from a bench by the lake. All around you is a bustling crowd. The people walk past you and seem to be talking down to each other. You could hear the voices they utter, but you can't recognize their faces. The sky is even gloomier than before, and it looked like dusk. You feel like you have something to do, and you think about it as you walk, letting the crowd pass you by. As you make your way through the crowd, you feel the noise in your ears getting louder and louder, as if you could almost hear what people are saying. Soon more and more noisy sounds join in, sirens, wind; and a distant, mellifluous sound interspersed within all this chaos. You are just about to confirm -
You wake up, slightly disconcert that you fell asleep on a bench. The lake is far colder than the streets, and the chill penetrates your body causing you to shiver. Your fever seems to have worsened, and you need to get out of here and reach somewhere warmer. As you go back to the streets, you suddenly hear a distant sound, a faint flute whistle that seems to be coming from the other end of the street. You walk toward the source with both excitement and fear. As the sound diminishes to the point where you can barely hear it again, it comes back out from that direction. You just jog along past it, not knowing how many streets you have crossed. But up to the end, you have not found the source of the flute. Standing in the center of the street, you find the sky has become gray and gloomy, but the sound of the flute is still lingering in your ears and becomes ever clearer.
You sit on the paved floor. And you no longer attempt to find out where the sound comes from. Because you know clearly that it exists in a space, a space that is within reach and yet incredibly distant.
It's hard to tell if I'm in reality or a dream, or if I'm at the border between the two. Only then could I really reach that place, the town that had only appeared in my dreams, that exists from the beginning. 
> Open Author & Licensing Information
> Close Author & Licensing Information
Author: Grey Daydream
Note: Any rewrite of this article will be respectfully declined. Author permission is required for any other use of this article, including translation or posting it on other sites. This is my first creation on this wiki. Any help for improving this article is welcomed.
Category:Tales