ASTRAL
PROLOGUE
It was a dream. She knew, somewhere –in a paint bucket in a maintenance closet in the recesses of her mind– that it was a dream, just a dream... Or was it?
Four humanoids –for they could not have been human– playing a game and betting their lives on it. Four hits, and one may get an extra life.
The life essence just oozed out of, and formed in the palm of one: a chubby, not tall, business-type, serious-looking man with a determined half smile at another player’s conceit. He appeared to be wearing a formal, grey suit.
The other player: a white male, a lot like grown-up Harry Potter with a short beard, seemed to have more lives than he cared for. He seemed to have dared the chubby one (or everyone, but only the chubby one rose to the challenge, rousing the other two into a high-stakes game involving all four, with heavy bias against adult Potter).
The chubby male, apparently standing beside a car –of sorts– with the door open (front door on the left side of the car), but turned through ninety degrees on its hinges such that the inside faced upward. He then stretched out his left hand, sky palm, and green orbs the size of lawn tennis balls began to form: merely a corporeal outline at first, then gaining depth, substance, and solidifying quickly. One orb, then another, and another, until there were four orbs floating in his palm. All four orbs were exactly the same size, but formed in his palm at non-uniform rates. The moment he had four fully-formed orbs, he sent them careening outward in the order they appeared. Before the fourth orb left his palm, more had already begun to form. In all, he let loose eight balls of life.
The game had begun, and progressed. It involved a lot of effortless running, jumping and flying around. It seemed a bit like lawn tennis played without rackets. Also, if lawn tennis were a 2D sport, this would have been its 3D equivalent –without rackets. The playing field was the entire white space they were in. Bizarrely enough, there were no edges our dreamer could see that defined the boundaries of this space; there was simply no way for her to estimate the upper limits of the space by sight. Also ridiculous, was the absence of any noticeable shadows. She could not even tell whether they were inside a building or not –but they had to be because, how else do you explain the light? Light so intensely white, yet, not blinding. It shone white from every direction. She could feel gravity acting on her where she stood…? It wasn’t so much that there was a floor to stand on, as that you just aligned yourself in the space as your mind allowed you to. The exact rules of the game were unknown to her, except that all four played, and each was a one-man team. The inhabitants of this white space seemed to notice her presence, ignoring her as one might ignore a butterfly in a flower garden. The life orbs seemed valuable, very valuable, and four meant an extra life.
As the game progressed, one of the remaining two players scored a hit off adult Potter. The player looked like he’d just stepped out of the cover of a high-profile, glossy, men’s fashion magazine: a tall, handsome blonde. While the exact dynamics of the game would be a tad difficult to explain, our dreamer would remember watching adult Potter in his neat, white, long-sleeved, corporate jacket shirt; lithely landing from a flight trajectory, recoiling as though from the impact of an invisible force, and grinning as a life orb just pops out of his right upper arm.
“Nice! Four of those and you get an extra life,” adult Potter seemed to say to the fashion model. That is not quite right. He never actually spoke, none of them spoke, but they seemed to understand one another perfectly. Our dreamer seemed to understand as well. She wasn’t sure how she came to know a lot of things. There was just an awareness about the space, she concluded, filing the thought away for further processing later.
The last player appeared to be a woman. Young and pretty with shoulder-length auburn hair framing her Caucasian face.
At this point however, our dreamer was becoming more aware of another presence, a wyoming (pronounced w??m??). She couldn’t see herself but she must have appeared irregular somehow because, though she was moving around a lot at mind speeds, and barely grasping the information of the space, she could tell the wyoming was watching her. She could not say if her inability to self-consciously keep up with white space events was due to the ridiculous information flux of the space, or because great focus was required to note and memorize any coherent information, or because it simply made no ‘sense’.
She wondered –not for the first time– where the wyoming was, and how it was able to watch her. Like a lot of other things she discovered she unwittingly knew, she had vague ideas as to what the wyoming was.
Sometime later, our dreamer would remember what happened next as perceiving an inaudible knock on a door. This should have been ludicrous because there was absolutely no sound in the white space (a phenomenon she would come to term, active silence). It was mute in the space, but it seemed really loud in an orderly way. It may have been silent, but it was most certainly not serene. She responded to the knock, moving toward the apparent source, guided by non-senses she hadn’t known she hadn’t had before. She attempted to feel ahead with her hands where sight gave no indication of substance, but where she knew was the right place. Unfortunately, there was nothing where her hands should have been. She was more frightened by her utter lack of panic. Limblessness did not feel unnatural, it was just another setting, a different state of being. There she was, looking at what should have been a door, but instead looked no different from the rest of the space. As she watched, the space was suddenly rent at that point, revealing the rectangular outline of a doorway –no more than straight lines on a piece of white paper. The door cracked open, breaching the white space and revealing a most disconcerting sight. Right there stood a wyoming in a plain white t-shirt with something scribbled across the front in a language she could not decipher, beginning to transform.
She tried to recall what she inadvertently knew about the wyoming. A ghastly skinny-limbed monstrosity that eats life. Having long spindly extremities, it resembles a skinny, faceless human until it transforms into its true form: a slippery multi-limbed, cold-blooded creature.
Very flexible and agile, it transforms into the monstrosity from a human form, in the presence of prey. She stood transfixed, staring, a little annoyed. From her perspective, what really made the sight of the wyoming unpleasant was that it was blocking the view. I mean, sure, awful creature, but what a view! The lush greenery (an open field of well-manicured grassland); the golden light that seemed to permeate everything, dispelling all un-wellness of being with its warmth; the…
“Run! Get out of here! Go home!” she felt someone channel her. It was adult Potter.
She had been so enraptured by the view behind the monster that the danger was almost lost on her ignorance. Thankfully, good ol’ Potter-man, still playing and losing, and getting ‘involved’ (not distracted), got in the way. He spoke something that was not any language she knew. In a short burst, he conveyed a lot more than should have been syntactically possible in any known comprehensive language. More baffling was that she could hear the meaning of his soundless words echo across the mute white space. The message was this:
“You are in grave danger. It wants your life. It will take that which is yours, if you don’t flee. You can escape. You can get away from here. Get away from here!”
He then proceeded –still playing that bizarre game– to bodily stand between our dreamer and the now manic, nearly fully-transformed wyoming. He stood with his back to the creature so he could look at her, even as he jerked, absorbing the impacts of spasmic thrashings from the thing behind him.
“Flee!” he channeled, “Find your system!”
Again, this language of thought translated to, “Flee! You can escape! Go! NOW! I’ll try to hold it off, maybe delay it for a bit.”
Then turning to face the thing, he seemed to say, “Hey! Take my life orbs; there’s a lot here. Look this way!”
Sparing her a backward glance, “Find your safe place. Find your native system.”
“GO!” he incensed.
Suddenly, the urgency of the situation dawned on her, and she fled. She could not have said whence she fled. She found she was moving incredibly fast, blurring through the lattices of dimensions; searching, as though through pages of universes; weaving in and out at unimaginably fast speeds. She was impossibly insanely hyper fast yet, the wyoming was hard on her heel and closing the gap. She had to find it fast –like now– this thing she was searching for. She could not call it panic –too mediocre a word. It was more like the sudden overwhelming visualization, in her essence, of an inevitable actualization of dreaded horror; like suddenly drowning, gasping for air in an ocean that –without warning– exploded from within her. However, in that moment, dimensional gravity caught; she was tugged and swallowed all at once, tunneling and then crashing into a green web of safety, a pulsing green cocoon.
She even risked a backward glance at what was giving chase, eating up her trail. All there was, swirling darkness and destruction, looming as a natural predator would. So, crashing into the cocoon, her mind abruptly woke her body. Her eyes snapped open, and worlds overlaid momentarily as she stared groggily at a pair of eyes blinking on the spine of her bedside dictionary. She understood, presumably by some lingering effect of the white space, that the wyoming was so close that it crashed into the barrier when she got sucked away. Her first thought, ‘Those eyes don’t do your degenerate hunger any justice.’ She watched the pair of eyes blinking and darting, and fading away into non-existence.
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