Adrift in Silence

Chapter 2 Part 2

Lucina found herself tunneling through a vast and distorted vortex of vibrant colors, a hurricane of light colliding with a rainbow typhoon. She had never imagined such beauty and horror as it consumed her entire being. As the energy consumed her, it felt like every fiber of her being, every atom that constructed all that she was, was meticulously replaced by the frightening new realm surrounding her. Once it had completely consumed her, just before her body was about to be scattered across the infinite plain of existence, it settled and became one with her. Her once white streak of hair had taken on a new violet hue. She and her body had found balance with her new reality.

Lucina came to a stop, floating adrift in the middle of the vast inconceivable, fractured reality. She took a deep breath as the air returned to her lungs, feeling a great sense of relief. She looked at her hands and could feel something within her had changed, she was no longer what or who she used to be. Though she couldn't explain it, she simply could feel it. Just when she thought it was over her body began to overflow with the energy that surrounded her. She watched as her skin flew off in small ashy fragments from her fingertips, down to her wrists. The rest of her body started to crack and leak, not with blood, but with whatever replaced her old anatomy.

She clenched her fists, her whole body tightened up, and without warning was thrown back into the world, or something somewhat resembling her world. She found herself, knees scathing the wet, coarse road, her skin quickly healing, the fragments returning to her body. She only had a moment to breathe before she felt a shock surge through her body, taking in whatever the world was forcing onto her. She rose to her knees and found herself surrounded by complete and utter decimation. As her hearing slowly returned, she could begin to discern the wails and cries of people over roaring fire and explosions with the crumbling of society.

What is happening, she thought, as she watched strange buildings of odd, otherworldly architecture burn and collapse around her. Struck by terror and a strange since of awe, she was knocked to the ground by a fleeing denizen. They looked at each other and were both shocked to see how strange the other appeared. Lucina had small, hazel eyes and light brown skin as opposed to the other person's large, almost black eyes and pale, sickly white skin. They crawled away from each other, forgetting about the mass destruction that surrounded them and were only focused on the alien creature standing before them. Neither noticed the tower that was falling towards them. Before it could crush them, however, Lucina was pulled from reality once again, generating a burst of energy that threw the innocent bystander aside, out of the destructive path of the building.

Lucina found herself in that twisted rainbow realm yet again but only for a moment before being thrown into another world. This time, instead of anything remotely resembling her world, or the last, she found herself drifting through a deep blue space, surrounded by mirror-like shields of vibrating light, flickering in and out of existence, reflecting everything they see. Again, she felt a surge of energy coursing through her, but this time it was far more powerful. After it settled, she too began to flicker across space in flashes of light without warning or any semblance of control. She only came to a stop when one of the shields flickered beneath her feet, allowing her to set foot. She stood up, standing on the rotating light, though, from her perspective the universe, like a sky on the verge of midnight, rapidly passed overhead. She didn't feel as though she was moving at all, but everything else was, as if she had her own little plain of relative gravity.

Lucina and the shield both flickered away from each other, hurling her into the dark, blue void. After smashing into a few pillars of flickering light, she began to grow wearier, far from sure how much she could take. Two massive pillars of light came barreling towards the near unconscious Lucina, like a pair of asteroids pulling on each other's gravitation strings. Before Lucina could be crushed, she was pulled from that realm back into the one before for a third time. She wasn't there long before being thrown, yet again, into a new place entirely.