08/06/2026
The Place From My Dreams
Terracotta, clay, stone, living succulents — 2026
Something came down here.
The vessel lies split at the center of the plain, half-buried in red gravel. Its hull is mirror-bright, and on that polished surface a blue-green world; a planet in orbit, perhaps. Or a distant memory held by the ship itself.
Look long enough and the question turns over: is the world above us, or was it always behind us?
The terrain is red. Iron-red, dust-red, the red of a place that has forgotten water. The ground is not soil but fragments; broken vessels, shattered rims, the curved shards of things that once held something. Every surface here is the remains of something else.
And yet it is inhabited, or is it?
On the high ground stands the StarGate; a serpent coiled into a perfect ring, its body inscribed with markings no one alive can read. Through the opening: another place. Not empty. You can see stone on the far side.
Below it, the green one waits. One of the keepers, patient, positioned exactly where the path meets the rise. Not blocking. Watching. It has been at this post a long time.
A face lies half-buried in the gravel, eyes closed, a mark between the brows. Beside it, four pale stones that are not stones at all — they are alive, patterned like split skulls, breathing on a timescale we cannot perceive.
A white dome rises from the dust. Windows cut in rows. A crescent opening near the top. Someone built this. Someone lived here. Something may be living here still.
Nothing in this world is whole.
Every element is a fragment set into new relationship with other fragments. And out of that breaking — a landscape. A settlement. A gate that still functions. Life pushing green through red gravel.
This is what happens after.
Not the moment of destruction. The long quiet that follows, when the dust has settled and something has begun again in the ruins. When the vessel that carried you here will never fly again, and the world you came from exists only as light on its surface, and you must build with what shattered.
If you find yourself looking for the way out, look at the Gate.
It is still open.
It was always still open.
