The woman’s plee strikes a cord deep inside of you. Thoughts race through your head, emothions churn in your heart. After a time... long, short, you can never recall after... you reach your hand out and grasp hers, almost expecting for your hand to pass through hers without resistance. Unexpectedly, your hand joins hers, sending a shock through you. There is a strong tingling sensation where your hands touch. At the moment of contact the pillar around you shivers, emitting a note beyond hearing, but which pierces your very being with its strength.
You hover for an instant, an eternity, and suddenly gravity tips forward, leaving you feeling as if you were somehow pinned to a ceiling, or floating above a deep, endless abyss. Your stomach twists uneasily, and your lower organs feel as if they are trying to climb into your chest.
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The planet rushes away from you, leaving the barely glimpsed afterimage of people running, sreaming away from where you were. There is a many-pointed star-shaped radial scorch mark on the ground above where you were hovering. Heavenly bodies and then stars flash past you with a rapidness that increases your sense of vertigo and speed. You try to turn your head to look about you. but. you. can. hardly. move.
More and more of the chain of people become visible. The faster you fall, the more solid and visible they become. Colors slowly leech into thier forms. You accelerate even more, feeling a solid pressure vibrate fiercly against you as you speed through whatever medium you now travel. There is a jolt and a sudden incandesent flash of brilliant white shattering into rainbows speeds away from you. The jolt causes you to spin around and flip back and forth, clinging desperately to the woman’s hand. Your surroundings blur into a tube of unsettling flickering greyish nothingness. Below you is a pulsating corona of the deepest crimson, above you is an all-consuming eye-searing violet maw.
The chain of people become smears of luminous colors, blurry and fuzzy in form. You can make out the flash of white teeth in the faces coming and going, words, something being spoken, sung, inaudible above the soul-jarring rush. Leviathian shapes bloom in the near distance, celestial orbs of alien mein, a sun of different countanence, all crowding about you, indifferent to the infitesimal specs of the chain of beings linking you to one of the smaller of the orbs below. They shrink and drift away with astonishing swiftness, assuming more proper proportions, as you come closer.
No sooner than you distinguish which orb the chain leads, than there is a shock of fresh air, laden with scents, visibling rippling away from you. Another shock and the land becomes visible, wiping away the clouds as with a giant hand. Another shock and you are falling into a lake, no a chain of islands in a lake. Another shock and there is a scintillating gleam, a city of towers spearing upwards into the sky to pierce you. Another shock and there is a great hall, and each person in the chain snaps suddenly into focus, one by one; in a lightning progression the colorful forms overlap someone sitting on the ground in a great spiral... Snap! Snap! Snap! More swiftly than you can follow, the people are rejoined with their bodies, each reconnection causing a titanic concussion that buffets you with a fury of blows. As the last person Snaps! into place, the cumulative impacts whiplashes through you, tearing loose your desperately clawing grip. The beautiful chanted chorus crahses in upon you, only to break apart into gasps of dismay. You tumble head over heels, flung by the hand of a titanic god, through the very stuff of matter itself. A flashing landscape of cities, islands, waters, sands, towns, mountains, forests, plains, and more tumble before your confused view.
With a final *!SNAP!* that reverbrates through your being and beyond, the air rushes past you, and you collide with something hard, solid, and painfully unmoving. Your overloaded senses cascade through a mix of your surroundings and recent experiences, jumbled and confused. The tune you have been hearing all day long, and during the eternity of your fall, wanders through you once more, settling into a warm spot next to your heart. Finally, mercifully, everything fades to black, releasing your aching exausted self to oblivion.
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