Rain dreamt, her thoughts the shadows of reflections, impossible to grasp in that way that dream thoughts are. She floated upwards and out, existing only in her dream. She saw her world as a leaf on an ocean, a blue spot on a backdrop of countless stars and other worlds, comets, meteors, for the first time she understood how small it was, yet no insignificant. As she drifted further away, she saw other universes coalescing, knotting into a tight ball with hers, just one of many. Each with their own rules, which she understood but knew she would not when she awoke. Their own rules and other rules that applied where they came near each other – in places like her home plane. Laws that were applied when making a crossing between them.
All this she understood. Someone, perhaps not even some-one, some thing was showing her.
And her dream took her further out. Further until she could see the shape of that knot, all tangled, dimension upon dimension. See its workings, like a giant slow-moving brain. Each realm working together in concert. Each performing some specific function. Somewhere to process a concept, or an emotion, somewhere to store some memory. Lines of communication opening up and closing between them, like electricity on a grid.
“Look,” a voice in her mind.
Rain looked.
Touching the worldsphere was another, larger ball of string; similar in make up, different in purpose. It bled into hers, injecting festering juices. A predator dissolving its prey from the inside before consuming it. They fought, these two. One defending itself against the other. It was a slow process, by her standards anyway.
“Daughter. Help.” The voice drew her attention back to her own worldsphere. “This One Is Me. This One Is Garon.”
Despite being so far from it, she saw the freshly healed-wound where Tera had been bound, a translucent filament stretched from her back to there. The black scab covering the hole was blocking communication at that intersection of realms.
“Too Long. Too Far. Daughter. Birth. Soon.”
She was pulled back into the worldsphere that was Garon. Down and back into that wound, and through. Into a place that was her own. It was her body, yet it was not. Not physical, it existed as an idea. She realised that all she knew. All she had ever done. Everything was a thought of Garon's. She was nothing but a package of information travelling the paths within its mind. In her own mind, she opened a tunnel. A tunnel into herself. She would be her own realm. If she escaped from Garon, what would that mean? Was that even possible?
She tunnelled down into that realm inside her own mind. That nascent world created by the fusion of Tera, Pool, Dimit and herself, the conjoining of the forces of Shar, Lightning and Haze. It would be a world of life, energy and magic. Something that her homeland had come close to, but never quite matched, but it was not ready yet. It was all curled up inside itself, with no room to grow.
She left that place, opened her eyes.
She was still in the void, alone. She could not talk to her companions, if they could even be called that. The three had become one, had lost all thought of their own, yet they dwelt within her. Slumbering.
Discontent, she pushed on the void, forcing a gateway open. A gigantic rippling window opened onto another place, also featureless, this new one a pale grey, with ambient light casting no shadows. Two men stood there, apparently talking. The saw the window almost immediately. To them it must have appeared as a great mirage, filling half the sky. The taller one reacted first. He reached out to the other, grabbing his shirt. He spun, but not like a three dimensional object would. He spun like a piece of paper turning sideways, growing thinner. The other one, the one being held, seemed to stretch around with him. Dragged along with the first one, he was sucked out of that place.
Intrigued, Rain tried it for herself. She lifted her foot and stepped... sideways. Something pulled her. A beacon of familiarity, flaring in the darkness on her journey of near infinite length, running through what felt like both time and space. She focussed on that beacon. Her foot touched the ground.
In front of her stood Hammer and a strange feathered creature, their backs turned towards her.
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