"Mind flayers?" Skandra asked with a scoff. "Those things are made-up."
She had a valid point. How was he sure that any of this was real? Because he knew that what he saw, however he saw it, no matter when he saw it, was real. Or real enough. How would his own mind play the same trick on him that someone else was playing on her? They were seeing the same thing, walking across the same stones, and one of them wasn't likely to be caught in a web designed to deceive. That was how he had to know that it was real. A knife, in his hand. A glance at his empty one. One cut - but what would a cut tell him? If there was something sinister at work here, if the wool truly was being pulled down and over his eyes, Skandra didn't think cutting his hand was going to tell him anything. Cutting her hand? Throw the knife at her? Parlor tricks. Not that he would have done it anyway.
He just thought it was funny to think about, given how heavy the stink eye she was laying on him felt.
"If this really is another world, that means we passed through a gateway," Skandra murmured in annoyance. "And the question really becomes, then, how did we find ourselves in such a gateway? What in all the hells you can imagine was it doing there? These things don't just appear out of thin air. You've got to know what you're doing. At least, I assume you've got to know what you're doing. Shouldn't you have to know what you're doing?"
Ahead of them was a great stone wall, though it was not cobbled-together as he might have imagined. At least as tall as three men were high, smooth on the surface - unnaturally smooth. Skandra cast his eye to the right, and then the left, peering into the gray around him for whatever he could see. It was the same on both sides. Now he stopped, twisted 'round, peered over his shoulder. As far away as it was Skandra thought he could see a wall in the distance. In fact, in spinning, he deduced - through observation - that the wall was actually one smooth wall, with rounded sides, making this place seem very much like a bowl.
He'd only seen one bowl naturally, before, and it was not half-filled with stones. They had to be unnatural. Didn't they?
"Don't answer that," Skandra mumbled; his distraction dominated his thoughts once again. "What is this place?"