🖤 dark place ( alan wake 2 ). - day/night - when they stood too close to the water, or perhaps the water had come too close to them? and the surface of the lake parted and welcomed them into its embrace, hungry for inspiration. (...) the night whispered and the pines swayed gently to the lake’s sombre song, a siren’s song that led ember through the ancient forest, so close to the mystery, so close to the answer - the cult of the tree, the missing writer, mysterious murders – it all fitted together, the legends were true – the lake had power; words, images and notes reshaped reality in dark, sombre tones and the fiery red lights bleeding across the sky ; THE OVERLAP ... ( alice in the (wonderland) land of nightmares… follow the white rabbit whispering in your ear, follow the mystery; your heavy boots sink into the mud – the mystery you came here for, the one you returned for, the one that led you through the woods and over the mountains. ) but there was no bizarre, fairy-tale wonderland; the white rabbit wasn’t white and fluffy, it was woven from shadow and spun from darkness – alice / ember fell and plunged down, into the surface of the lake that was a lake and yet wasn’t, into cold water that had no bottom.
( dark cold icy water pours into the lungs. darkness leers into the brain. i'm drowning, i'm drowning. i can't breathe. i fall further, further, closer to the bottom…. i plunge into the darkness. into nothingness . it's a loop. it's a loop. it's a loop. no! round and round. spinning spinning spinning. the end is the beginning . the beginning is the end… that's the loop? … no, no, no! yes and no, no and yes. spins, spins. where does one begin, where does the other end? boundaries blurred, endless, the same, the same, all the time. )
the dark place leaves a mark and an imprint on the soul, body, and mind. a scar that refuses to heal. a chewed-up brain, a charred nervous system—blackened just like this place. timeless, lightless. time was a strange thing: curling and uncoiling like a spiral, rushing like a turbulent river, or drifting slow and lazy like a creek. sometimes it stood completely still; sometimes it didn't exist at all. minutes dragged on like hours, days passed like seconds, years felt like centuries. the lake was a lake, and an ocean, and sometimes it was neither water nor lake—just a darkness so deep and profound that even the blackest, moonless nights on earth felt as bright as the midday sun compared to this... murkiness. the darkness toyed with their minds, beguiled their senses and robbed them of their sanity ; not even god knows how long. sowing paranoia, fear and doubt in the mind, a blemish on the soul. you cannot trust a place that is a living nightmare – by turns an ocean, a lake, a rain-soaked new york – everything and nothing – a dark reflection of the mind – not just of their imagination.
( they had to escape. how? how long did they wander about? how long were they lost in the darkness? ) escape wasn’t a heroic breakthrough ; it was a desperate, agonizing crawl. in a realm where everything was fluid and time was a trap, ember’s fractured empathy became their only compass. amidst the suffocating noise and drowning blackness, their senses caught a faint, foreign frequency — not a sound, not a light, but the distinct, mundane warmth of the real world bleeding through the seams. a fragile threshold.
