Marlow could not imagine the odd sort of dance he went through with between the chaos of his magic, the unending flood of thoughts that came in, especially when their stops were within cities. It took a square mile of no one for Issac to find silence or Elia's brief dark bubbles of shadowy nothingness they called the void. But Issac had twenty-seven years of hearing thoughts to get used to it. The charm bracelet around his wrist from Alex helped block the noise from getting too bad; without it, it did not take much to collapse to the floor with a migraine. Even with it, the build-up happened.
The crash from seventeen cups of coffee should have been enough to put someone to bed for at least a day, not Issac. The moment his eyes would close, a panic set in, and he would wake soon after. But the time in a dream did not follow a linear pattern of time, one moment becoming hours in a dream or hours becoming a single intense moment for one to wake up to.
Wonderous vines gathered thickly in the tunnel before Marlow, some bright green or purple or glowing with patterns, but as the tunnel continued the vines turned black. Thick red mucous flowed from cuts in the vines, puddling beneath the foot. Soft metallic plucks of the calliope from the circus filled the air, swirling around any who entered.
At the end of the tunnel, Issac sat in the middle of a stone circle; a ring of molten silver rippling at its edges. His arms curled around his head and his knees covering his face, Issac rocked in place a thousand voices blowing out at him in a burst of cacophony from the large bell of a Victrola jutting up from the floor beyond.