Dead man walking

The second his foot crossed over beyond the line, the water immediately dried. The wet feeling was gone, and instead, soft snowflakes fell on the dry boots.

'The hell!?'

This trial was already strange enough, but bending the laws of physics like this? How did this even make sense?

Somewhere in his head, a sense of his rationality reminded him that normal physics did not usually lead to people waking up in unknown realms where snow and rain was divided by invisible borders. Quill really didn't like his rationality.

Quill walked past the barrier, and sure enough, the drops of water disappeared as if they had never existed. 

He stared at his hand. There was something wrong about all of this, something he couldn't figure out no matter how much he tried. 

'If the water droplets disappeared so easily...could it be that they were illusions from the start?'

Quill narrowed his eyes. It was an unsettling discovery, but not the one that he was being bothered by.

Raising his eyes skyward, where the thick clouds lay low, blanketing everything, he prayed for an answer.

Of course, none came.

---

Quill was sure he was dead. 

That cave had been his day of judgement. 

There was no other explanation to the hell he was being forced to trudge through.

If Quill had been in the real world, he would have long been considered a lunatic. The side was deathly cold, and Quill was shivering in the raging cold. Now, he really regretted throwing away that jacket of his. 

He no longer knew which direction he was moving in, he had long lost sense of that. The misty clouds blanketed everything. Occasionally, he would bump into the mountains, or unknowingly cross the barrier.

He was thirsty, his throat begging for a sip of water. He was cold and fed up of the harsh conditions.

'...How long has it been...?'

---

'Who am I....? Who..? dares...! None...! None..at...all...?'

When had the blood showed up? Why wasn't there anything? Why was everything only watching?

Why was that flower of his so damn....pristine..!

---

The rain was so heavy that Quill could barely bear it's weight, the droplets hitting his skin harder than pins.

But he had food now. Raw meat, the texture of it strange, but it was sustenance.

Where was the fire? 

He turned the hollow cup in his hand. The cold frost had buried it under the snow, but he had found it. How, he didn't know. Memories were fickle, faint concepts that drifted between his consciousness.

All that he remembered was that he had climbed a tree, and he no longer remembered what he had done in it.

All he knew that he was now here, greedily eating some sort of white meat stuck in the hollowed edges of the cup. It was delicious, a fulfilling meal that had somehow cured all of his problems.

A miracle.

The rainwater was pure, better than any of that corrupted and filtered water he grew up on. The leaves he torn from the tree were bitter, but they were a treat to his frozen senses.

Finally satiated, Quill felt whole again, for the first time in a time so long that he couldn't even remember when it had started.

'Now, I need to figure out what the hell to do next. I cant wait keep wandering around, waiting for this place to eventually kill me...'

He was sitting next to a lake. Was it the same one, or a different one? deciding to test his theory,. Quill threw in another leaf. After all, not all lakes could be inhabited by strange creatures that lurked between grimy waters , right?

As it happened, the leaf floated peacefully, before eventually getting dragged down under the heavy rain.

He stared into the depths of the cup again, wondering if it could give him any answers.

He put his hand into his pocket, bringing out the little orange flower. He had gone through multiple stages of hell, yet the flower remained unharmed, its petals pristine and untouched.

Putting it next to the cup, that was two things he couldn't understand at all.

The cup was conical, and the strangest part about it was that despite the fact that were no holes in the cup, and it was made out of smooth, hard material, it seemed incapable of holding anything. 

However, there was curious little detail about the cup that confused him. In the middle of the cup, was a smooth white sphere that seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever.

He had attempted to scoop up snow with it, but no sooner had the snow gone in that it disappeared. He had tried to catch the rainwater with it, but his countless attempts proved unsuccessful. No matter how hard he tried, the water disappeared into thin air as soon as it touched the sphere.

Two objects, both as enigmatic as the other. 

'I'm still forgetting something...what's missing..?'

Quill narrowed his eyes, trying his best to figure out anything strange about the two items.

A few seconds later, he let out a defeated sigh. This was an impossible quest.

Quill wanted to go back to the cave, to check if he had missed something there, and more importantly, find his jacket, but he couldn't figure out the direction.

No matter which direction he moved in, the distance seemed endless. in logical sense, that didn't make sense, but logic didn't seem to apply here.

Quill sighed. There wasn't any point in wasting his time here either. Picking up the two items, he started walking towards the invisible line again.

When would this hell end? When would he find a single one of the three items?!

'How hard is it to find a damn fire..! Nothing here except these useless pieces of trash!'

His own complaints sounded repeated to his ears. How long had he been here, thinking those same thoughts? 

But it was the truth. A cup which could not hold anything, a flower which could somehow bear everything that was thrown at it...They were unique items, but provided him with no benefit.

Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks.

So far, he had not found a single normal object in this place.

So why had he assumed that the snow-buried cone was a cup!?

Quill brought the cup up close to his eyes. his pupils were focused on every single detail of the damn cup, memorizing it's features. 

'It's...the damn... torch!'