>>5844593>1For a moment, you were nothing—nothing but pain, and pleasure, and a million scents and sounds and tastes and physical sensations. You were everything and nothing, torn asunder and cast into a space without space, a for a time without time. You experienced something without reference points, unmoored from experience as you knew it. Your mind was open to all the universe’s knowledge, perceiving and understanding data greater than any mind could hold, filling it like a great bowl under it poured over. Burdened by the torrent, that bowl—your brain—cracked and broke, until that precious, incomprehensible information—sighsta nd sounds and so much more from all across reality—seeped through and was lost. You screamed, unable to even hear your own frustration and agony over everything else that you could hear…
And then you heard nothing.
>18You believed you had died for a moment, when again you were capable of belief—of unitary perception, of memory. But no… There was light, and heat, on your right side—a rising, ever-rising current of flame that threatened to sear and to burn, yet did neither. And on your left… Swirling air, currents of tornado-force winds enough to strip skin from bone, and so cold that it was as if it had never known heat… And yet you were not whipped away into that great whorl, nor frozen solid. Your <Free Movement> made both feel as natural to you as any other environment. You closed your eyes, breathed out, and were one with these alien natures—the Plane of Fire to one side, the Plane of Air to the other.
A hand squeezed yours, affirmingly, while another—clawed, rough-palmed—clutched desperately at your wrist. Gradually, you came to perceive that both of your fellow travellers—your experimental subject and patient on the side of the wind, and your rival-turned-friend-turned-lover amidst the flames. Yet—thank all the gods!—neither were harmed, for their temporary lightning-forms.
“Everyone’s alright?” you shouted, to be heard above the sounds of the neighbouring planes, which you and the two women somehow seemed to be bridging across a chasm of nothing-and-everything
“Yes!” Izirina cried, delightedly. “Gods… it’s beautiful!”
“AAAAA!” screamed Costella. “AAAAAAAAH!”
(That was fair, you supposed.)
“Okay!” you yelled. “Then let’s go! One more casting, Izzy!”
She said nothing, and so you looked to her… And your heart stopped. She was smiling, but still you felt your stomach turn and your breathing hitch. You recognized that smile. The smile from the Mirror Maze. The smile from the Fairy Court on Old Maple Hill.
“Izzy?” you whispered.
