The Other Place

The next thing you know you are hit with a sensation so completely foreign that it nearly shatters your mind. You had no awareness of place or self or any higher thoughts as a soul wrenching pain dominates your whole being. It was as if you were your entire body and soul had been, in a split second, violently sucked through a twisty straw and shot out the other side at great ****. It was pain beyond all imagination…and then the real suffering begins.

You open your mouth to scream and the noise that pours forth is that of a thousand men and women howling in agony but then immediately swallowed up as if by dark cold waters. You crawl to your hands and knees and feel not gravity but some other strange **** holding you to the oily smooth surface you found yourself upon. You try for breath to find there is no air to pull into your lungs. Instead an ethereal yet viscous substance floods your mouth and begins to seep into you from every pore.

Looking up madness claims you. What assaults your faculties is not simply dark, it is a place where light and color simply had no existence. The landscape around you wasn’t knowable through any of your normal senses yet somehow you could sense it, like Vespera’s darkness moving within darkness, and what you can make out lays waste to your mortal mind. Distances so vast the known universe would span but a footstep within it yet pressing in around from all sides like a straight jacket. Time seemed to have no hold here, everything happening in a never ending instant. Shapes and angles that defied math and logic. Twisting shifting structures moving over inverted horizons of such unfathomable scale that your earthly reason could not even begin to make sense of them. And most disturbing of all you perceive other creatures, intelligences of horrendous oozing form, gliding through the tenebrous sky and casting shadows within shadows that could swallow worlds whole.

Even your most vivid nightmares or fever dreams paled in comparison to this entirely alien realm. You could feel your body beginning to come apart, cell torn from cell and atom from atom. Your presence, your life ****, even your Euclidian shape impossible abominations to this hostile foreign realm.

There is but one point of real light in all of this terrible place, the pale beautiful face of your sister. You focus on it knowing with complete certainty it would be the last thing you ever saw. Some tiny part of you that still remained you, still fighting for survival, calls out to her but you have no breath to scream. She turns to look upon you just as you collapse.