Prologue: Dream Logic

Malakai falls into a black hole.

Falling into a black hole is a lot like falling asleep: one minute you’re riding an unseen current drawing you slowly and inexorably towards some immaterial end, and then, just as you’ve settled in and gotten used to your stomach flying into your throat, you’re there. Past the event horizon, past that invisible wall that lets everything in and nothing out. 

Dream logic convinced me that everything was normal and nothing was at all the matter. 

Normal. The word struggled to settle comfortably in my mind as I remained a passive observer of the unknown world engulfing me. Normal. As a descriptor it felt incomplete. There was something distinctly not-normal about the drops of metallic silver expanding and shrinking and colliding with each other, forming an ever-changing kaleidoscopic web that glinted and shimmered in front of me as I continued to fall. 

Or was it behind me? Below? Next to? I settled on all of the above and went back to trying to remember what the word ‘normal’ meant. 

Perhaps I could define it through its absence. The alien substance seemed to be a liquid, gas, and solid all at once, shifting from one state to another in a fraction of a second before changing its mind and trying on a different form, just to see how it felt. It vibrated with an unfamiliar sentience and somehow I knew it was very not-normal and very indecisive about when and where in space it wanted to be.

“I guess we have that in common,” I mused into the void only to hear it echo back a few moments later from somewhere behind me. (Ahead? Above? Inside?) The words rolled out with a hint copper, which I thought was a strange taste for such an inane comment. I ran my tongue over my teeth and gums and became acutely aware of a disturbing amount of blood building up. I opened my mouth and traced the scarlet dots as they escaped my chattering teeth and began to expand like tiny balloons. 

One drop, larger than the others, bobbed along the nothingness on a collision course with the silver web. When they touched, the blood was subsumed into the mysterious silver-liquid-gas-solid thing and a vein of color raced outwards in all directions, turning the indecisive silver to a furious red. 

“What are you?” I whispered. When the words echoed back at me from all directions I realized I was asking that of myself. Who am I? Or - a shiver sent all the hairs on my neck shooting up in a panic - who was I?

I made an effort to look down at my body; the resulting cry of anguish added to the symphony of echoes that played like a soundtrack to my ongoing nightmare. I couldn’t discern anything identifiable below my chest. What I assume had once been legs and a waist and feet were now spaghetti-thin strands of blood-red thread that wove in and out of the emptiness around me, forming the strange network of alien consciousness that continued to morph and bubble and twist.

No, I thought. Not alien. Me. 

(This was definitely not normal). 

I watched the rest of my torso unravel and a twinkle caught my eye from where my right hand should have been. The light grew brighter and as I focused I could see humanoid shadows within writhing around in a macabre celebration of my incorporeality. More curious than scared, and comforted by the realization that I’d wake up if anything serious happened, I pushed my head (did I still have a head?) towards the light. In a momentary flash the entirety of creation was illuminated, from spark to smoking ember. And then the darkness returned and dragged me downwards in a swirling spiral of silver and blood. 

 Charybdis won, and Odysseus sank into the deepest circle of hell to be reborn.