Which is when he was convinced once and for all that that was exactly the case.
“Go baaaackk….” It was an auricular specter, a verbal shadow, a ghost of a voice, as though wind had momentarily been manipulated and palpitated to form a word in the same ponderous manner as a baker kneads heavy dough.
The unexpected voice induced him to take one last look around, but there was nothing else to see; nothing but flowers and field and fog. Determined, he tried to push on, only to experience the same sensation of being slowed down and held back. He was covering ground, but trying to force his legs forward through the persistent impediment would soon exhaust him completely.
“Go … baaackk….” the sepulchral voice moaned. It seemed to come not from one particular place but from all around him. Which made sense, since that which was restraining him was all around him. But how to fight it? A man with a knife he would have known how to deal with immediately.
He searched in vain for a face, for eyes or a mouth, for something to focus on. There wasn’t anything. There was only the fog, evanescent and everywhere present. “Why should I?” he asked guardedly, addressing his query to the damp, gently swirling mist.
The vaporous moan seemed to gather the slightest bit of additional strength from his reply. “Go back,” it intoned in a dark whisper. “Go home.” Airborne droplets of cool water eddied before his face. “It is all here, waiting for you. I have seen it. Disaster, complete and entire. You are doomed to unremitting misery, your quest to failure, the rest of your life to cold emptiness. Unless you end this now. Go home, back to your village and to your family. Before it is too late. Before you die.”