Ætherglow #21

You forget what you were supposed to be doing. The distant glow on the horizon beyond horizons has overwhelmed your thoughts. You've never felt so tranquil. Whatever form it takes seems to you exactly what it is supposed to be, and anything else is unfathomable. You can’t put any concept to what you’re seeing, yet you know you understand all there is to understand about it.

“Aydan…” a voice echoes in the back of your mind as if whispered across a room, barely perceived. “Come here…” the colors tell you in a sense beyond words.

The space around you is black. The stars have receded from the world. There is only the light and the voice that called to you from the dark. The light shifts again and in front of you floats a human silhouette. It matches your movements perfectly as if looking in a mirror. An aura of æthereal light outlines it, circling its form and bending around it like the accretion disc of a black hole. And much like that, what lies inside the outline is a nothingness beyond any vacuum. It feels distinct from the æther space around you, you can see nothing beyond it or within it. But you can hear its voice, “Aydan…”

Suddenly this all dissolves and you are back at the edge of the portal next to Vik and Synth. You feel yourself held in place like some kind of magnetic attraction, which is strange when nothing else here exerts a force of any kind.

“You with us Aydan?” Vik says. You look over and see him, his æthereal form looking a bit shorter and cuter than his body, his hair a little longer and giving off a faint glow on the ends of its strands like a fiber-optic bundle.

“Huh?” You are disoriented, unsure what’s going on.

“Hey,” Synth moves in front of you, looking you in the eyes. “Don’t look too close at that light. It’s just ætherglow, the blended echoes of technopathy long since cast, it’s meaningless.”