Patterns danced inside Choden’s eyes. He hadn’t opened his eyes for a long time. He’s lost track of time. It could have been days, maybe weeks since his last real meal. He didn’t need much food in this state, but eventually hunger disturbed his meditation. He realized he should probably get up and eat something, but found he was too weak to move. Then the world began to spin around him, as if he was in free fall through empty space.<br/>“Perhaps I am dying,” he thought. “No! It is too soon! I am not ready!”<br/>He struggled as hard as he could to move, and eventually he felt his body fall over. Suddenly he opened his eyes and quickly sat up, panting heavily. As he looked around, it took a few seconds to register that he was no longer inside the cave. How did he get outside?<br/>An orange fog covered the mountains. He scrambled to his feet, surprised to feel no stiffness in his limbs. He found he had no idea where he was. Was he lost? It had been a long time since he had been outside, and the fog made it hard to get his bearings. Something felt very wrong. Maybe this particular kind of meditation hadn’t been such a good idea, he found himself thinking for some reason, suddenly frightened of the extremes to which he had pushed himself.<br/>The mountain, made of loose sandstone and slate, looked just like any other mountain in Ladakh. Yet somehow the landscape didn’t feel like anywhere he knew. He started to feel the world turning beneath his feet again. The slope seemed to shift, and he lost his balance. The slate began to slide: it wasn’t just him! At the same time he saw the skyline change, and with a sudden sense of doom, through a gap in the clouds he could see that the mountains were really floating rock masses slowly swiveling around in the sky. Looking to his side he saw a wooded landscape coming closer, and past it, a mountain range. The floating mountain was on a collision course with a ridge on the other side of the wood.<br/>‘This isn’t what I had in mind when I was thinking of “detachment,”’ he thought.<br/>He held on to a crag for dear life and closed his eyes. “This is a dream” he told himself, and began to focus on his breathing, hoping to wake up if he would resume his meditation. As the floating mountain collided with a deafening rumble, the ground quaked violently and shook Choden off. As he slid off the floating mountain, he saw an avalanche had preceded him. The mountains, like those in Ladakh, were made of a mixture of slate and sandstone, which the avalanche had ground into dust. He tumbled onto the flank of the ridge, where he rolled in clouds of dust into the woods at its base.<br/>When he was done coughing up the dust from his throat, he heard faint voice in the distance. “What was that?” It was in English. Though English was second official language in India and he’d learned to speak it well by talking to tourists, it was over a year ago since he’d last heard English.<br/><br/>(OOC: A bit of a dramatic entry, but I had the image in my head and I just had to write it down. =) )