Golden Current 1: Greygrass.

Greygrass

Greygrass is a dying city in a world where nothing dies. Ischah Nettleship lived there a while ago and she’s learnt that the reason it dies is because it does not live, well, not properly. The realm Ishah lives is named temporarily, its name is always changing, at the moment it's named peekaboo.  Peekaboo is  a transformative realm so the name changes naturally. There are other realms that have no names and realms beyond those but Iscah hasn't been to those.

Greygrass is a fine name for Greygrass, it crystallizes depression, each wall, membrane, surface, shell, blade, even sound is crystallized with depression. The proper name for it is a slough. Ever seen damaged water up close? Perfect fractals broken and weighed down with sludge? That's the building blocks of Greygrass. They trek through the mud, slow and scared, but there's nowhere to go, just more of the same. It's marvelously simple to escape a place like that. You just stop and let the sludge engulf you, slip down, drown and presto you pass through some mysterious plasma and pop out somewhere else; like a baby. The people of Greygrass are too tired for such bold simplicity so most of them just ‘plod along’ until they keel over from all the weight.

Greygrass is paradoxical, like about eight realms either side of it, below and above it, in and out of it. If the name died then the place would live - but - in wanting it to live the same dying would occur in a different way, reflected from the living, the dark side of the mirror. So it's a case of trying all of it and getting exhausted with the bouncing reflections until they get so intimate and pingy, so useless and singy that you just go ‘sod it’ and take the eternal mud bath.

The folk who live in Greygrass and the other paradoxical realms are nicknamed numans after there forefather. Numans go about  fixing whatever’s breaking, when, in fact, it’s in the breaking that the fixing begins. Upside downness, breakdown, breakthrough. Numans try so hard to live in a realm where living is clearly a spontaneous and involuntary fact, they are caught in the universal bull butting its head on a wall forevermore, it’s madness, it’s numans, and it all began when Numan came through a hole in our realm. Numan is two halves of a coin no one can spend. 

There’s a place they talk about on Earth, a place called Purgatory, it’s written about in a famous book, people aren't sure if it's real or not, but it is, it’s here in Grey Grass and elsewhere of course.

Now Earth is one of those realms that believe itself to be entirely whole and therefore is entirely isolated, so we call it a planet. It's so sure it's whole it has morphed  into a ball spinning in space. Greygrass and the realms around it and the ones beyond it can't be mapped or drawn, the further up you, are the more mysterious they are, they change, places move around. 

Once you're in one of the higher realms, like Karumi Field where Ishcah is at present day, you can see the Earth in all its shapelessness but it can't see you, Karumi Field  is right where Earth is in every way that makes sense once you’ve visited Karumi Field. Karumi Field was in fact named after an earthling named Basho, this realm was his last travel sketch actually. Ishcah will be leaving soon now, she wants go back to the beginning to meet her end.