There is a place in-between dead and living, awake and asleep, and Heaven and Hell. It is dark and light, a contradiction within itself. There is no feeling there, just a cold, grey mist that hangs over all. It’s called “The Grey.”

You won’t be able to find it on any map, it is somewhere on the empty pages in the back of the atlas. When you enter, you can see nothing but the damp mist which this region is named for- until you begin to adjust to the eerie gloom which lights The Grey.

When your eyes adjust, you can see tall, towering trees, made of metal, that have hard, pig-iron leaves. Eternally frozen in time, caught in-between summer, spring, and winter, the trees and the hard, mossy concrete floor hang suspended from the thread which ties the universe together- time.

You have no sense of time here, you can lose yourself and never know whether It has been an hour or a minute, or a year. If you wander a bit, you might be able to see the frozen waterfalls that hover over glass ponds, their reflections penetrating the depths beyond the stony lily pads. The Grey has no sun, nor moon, nor stars in which to give light by. Yet, there is always light, however faint, that seems to be produced by the air itself.

The silence is deep, as if it reaches to the roots of time itself, deep into the very soul of the earth. In a world encased in glass, the silence smothers you. It chokes all life and free will out of you, it smothers your soul. It is as if your heart is blanketed by The Grey itself.

If you look closely you can see an arch seemingly smelted to a rock face, an unearthly glow engulfing its vine covered pillars. A macabre aura surrounds the entire place. If you were to find the hidden knob and turn it, you would discover a long corridor, empty and dark.

The air has sickly sweet tinges to it, a nauseatingly overpowering stench. If you were to follow the corridor, you would round the distant corner and see The Far Gone. They are souls who have come before you and taken the wrong path, going farther down the corridor until they, like the wind, were swept away to the land that lies so close to you.

The land sings sweetly, silently, and calls you to it. No person has ever returned from The Far. Even though it beckons you to it, you turn away, and feel your way through empty, damp, silent halls, with each turn getting more lost, feeling the cold hard stone sucking your will to resist out of you.

Like each before you, the stone corridors seem endless, twisting and turning forever, stretching before you for an eternity. Finally you turn back and look again upon The Far. You walk towards it, it fades, a grey wall behind where it had been. Looking, you see the stone door through which you entered. Your pace picks up; you don’t stop to brush away the cobwebs that hang in the corridor that slap your face with an irritating regularity.

You reach the door and see the knob. You reach out for the door handle and get a handful of cobwebs instead. With a cry of frustration you realize what has happened.

Welcome to The Grey.