Chapter 2: Predestined Deja Vu

It was in the last stages of sleep that I began to feel the warm morning sun strike my face, and hear the pleasant chirping of birds and crickets. I rolled slowly over, stretched my legs and my back, and stood up, with the last remnants of a dream playing quietly in my mind. But as I came to my feet and got a clear view of where I was, I realized it was not a dream that I had had at all, but something far more sobering. I found myself somewhere in the center of a very large prairie which covered the land for many miles around. From the sun’s lowly position on the eastern horizon, it was evident to me that the new day was just dawning, casting a golden hue on the grasses that covered the prairie’s surface.

Around the distant outskirts of the plain I could make out a ring of trees circumventing the whole, waving almost imperceptibly to and fro in the light breeze that was blowing. A few miles to the southwest there was a group of odd looking trees stretching up over the horizon to a considerable height. They were closer than the outer ring, which kept a uniform girth around the prairie, but somehow they looked very peculiar and foreboding, and I got one of those sobering feelings which I like to call predestined deja vu. What I mean is that I got a sense of deja vu, but instead of the past converging with the present into one thought, the present seemed to converge with the future, and the result was a mysterious foreboding of something, though I couldn’t tell what. That is the sensation that I had when I saw what I assumed to be a small grouping of trees somewhere in the southwestern portion of the savanna, though that was merely a guess, for in the distance I could only make out several dark forms rising out of the grassland like trees, or possibly buildings, one of them being a great deal taller than the others, with a spherical shape on top that only faintly resembled a tree’s crown. If it was indeed a tree, it was the largest that I have ever seen, for it looked to be upwards of 800 feet tall.

My mental warning bells were ringing quite loudly, and I endeavored to silence them by extreme exertions of the will, but they would not be subdued. I assumed that they were not at all correct, much like the fearful expectancy some have while swimming in the ocean, out of sight of all land, of being attacked by an enormous leviathan of the deep. As unfounded as the fear is, it places one into a frenzy of dubious thoughts that inspire equally frantic and anarchist actions. Because of this, I thought that my ideas were naught but superstitious fancies, yet try as I might, I could not rid myself of them.