I thrashed and tried not to look at the thing. Its grey tongue hissed like a snake’s. In that moment, I felt I could never gather together the fragments of my mind again after looking on that face.

“You pass from the long orbit, and are cut adrift in space. Fear me, only as you fear the deep parts of yourself.”

The thing walked past me, towards the lip of the hole. As the force exerted by it became perpendicular to the force of the void, I felt myself beginning to be able to move again. Eventually, both bodies were pulling me towards the void and I groped around me at the empty air for some means to secure myself in space. The creature walked across the space, finding purchase for unnatural feet along one of the lines of the grid. It zigzagged and was walking parallel to the centre of the sphere. I noticed a silver thread connecting me to the creature and the creature to the sphere. I remembered my belt knife. I slipped it loose from its casing and severed the chord. It recoiled and slipped off into the hole, followed soon after by the child-like creature.

In a flash of light the sphere disappeared. The flattening of the grid sent a shockwave propagating outwards and I covered my face to protect myself. After its amplitude had flattened, I stood looking into a flat, endless and neutral space and I felt my own power as the only weighty object in the plane. As if reading my thoughts, the grid subsided slightly around me and when I moved, a circular depression moved around me whichever way I went. A spell of dizziness took me and I fainted.

The feeling of a rough tongue licking at my face woke me. I was lying on the grass in the sunshine, outside the house I’d grown up in. It was a few blocks away from the house I lived in now with Lara. A small, dishevelled black cat stared at me with its yellow eyes. I sat up and began stroking her. She purred and rolled over to have her stomach scratched. After a few moments, she clawed at my hand and sprang onto her feet again. She began licking her paws and grooming herself, ignoring me. After a few moments, she scampered under the gate of the house, which was dangling by one hinge. Aware of the laughable cliché, I wandered in after her, careful not to upset the precarious gate.

I was taken aback when I got a look at the house. Yesterday, I’d walked past it and it had been standing upright, if abandoned. This morning, the only part of the house which was still standing was the brick chimney which stood in the centre of the living room. Around it, a sea of rubble sprawled out into the yard. Here and there, the rubble was dotted with familiar but long forgotten things of life—old toys, a sofa, rusty appliances. I could see that a blast had emanated from the fire place. Trees that had been standing in the yard lay flattened out like the spokes of a wheel, parallel to the direction of the force of the explosion. Eerily and inexplicably, the embers of a fire glowed in the hearth.

I could gauge from the fallout that something had taken place here. The intersection between my trans-reality experience of the evening before and the manifest, physical world was unmistakable. Of either monster, no trace remained but the feeling of an electric potential in my mind—a well of power. I could sense the transmuted presence of those two monsters, benignly resting. It was a presence full of mingling shadows but something that had happened beyond the veil had rendered it inert. It had been tamed and turned to my service. Its presence was not menacing. I tested it by thinking of my mother. Terror was replaced by a sense of loss. I allowed myself to feel that loss for the first time in ten years. As I yielded to it, it slipped away into a crevice and I laid it to rest amongst the other rubble. I turned away from the ruins and the glowing fireplace and made my way back through the gate, up the road, round the corner and homeward.

I walked the two blocks in awe, feeling lighter than I ever had. I marvelled at the vivid colour of the experience and the surety with which I had known what each element had symbolised and how I had known what needed to be done. It was beyond doubt—none of it had been in any way ‘real’. The situation had been something I’d made up for myself as a power-sink. It was a lucky thing that I had created that power sink for myself. I’d felt the strength of the force tied up in it; I could easily have buckled in on myself like a supernova at any point during that encounter.

Before now, I’d been too frightened and had not been ready to see the fullness of my own power.

***

Tell us: Do you think Shelby would have reached this point without Luke?