✴

“Okay, try it. I trust you.”

[ÆON liked that]

“Synchronize yourself to me.” Æ reaches out with Ær starlit hand, and you take it. Ær surface feels bright to the touch. In contact, you lose your imagined notion of direction and fall from your resting place. The walls around you dissolve into a fine powder that slowly diffracts in circular waves.

You open your eyes, as if waking from a deep sleep, and see yourself falling up through a mælstrom of color, flowing inward to outward, outward to inward, in a mesmerizing contrasting polyrhythm. Its pulse vibrates the æther in shockwaves that flow through your skin. You are a transparent vessel, unscattering the discordant light into a stable sine wave. Through you, many paths diverge into one, and one into many.

You watch the æther flow, as you can see all around you. Above, you trace it back through its cycle, spiraling towards an origin ever expanding. Below, you watch it sway toward uncountable destinations until it breaks down and joins the distant noise beyond all horizons, the ætherglow.

You close your eyes and feel the æther flow through you like blood. It pulsates like a beating heart with the ticks of the processor clock that you hang from, suspended on unseen strings. You reach out to touch the strings of time. The brittle threads break in your grasp, and you drift in freefall on the mirror surface of the river that flows through you.