The Mantis Continuum - Book Four - 9. Chapter 9 - Lahari, Part One

Lahari was standing in a glowing blackness. It was bright, and there was light coming from nowhere. She was standing on a black planet. It was not an earth-sized planet, but a tiny planet, and Lahari could see its curvature.

Above her head, the sky was a bright black that shimmered like onyx, speckled with moving stars that swirled and overlapped in impossible patterns.

“Hello? Hello? Hello?” Lahari echoed. “Anybody? …body? …body?”

The dizzying movement of the sky was hypnotic, and she stared at it for timeless ages that melted away, and there was only the black universe, in which Lahari was the only life. All else was stone and stars.

She began to walk, and the patterns above looked more chaotic. It did not take her long to make her way to the opposite side of the miniscule planet, and there she found a door lying flat on the ground. Lahari reached down and gripped its handle. She turned and pulled.

As the door opened, so did the void behind it, and Lahari was sucked into the yawning darkness. She tumbled endlessly, falling deeper and deeper into nothing. She opened her mouth to cry out, but she made no sound.

There was only silence.

Far below, Lahari began to see a flickering, and as she drew closer, she could tell that she was seeing water. However, she no longer felt like she was falling, but instead, it felt like her body was being drawn upward, almost as if she was flying. Her flight slowed until she was hovering below a pool of black water on the ceiling of this cave of nothingness.

Then she saw a light. It was not a bright light, and it was coming from deep in the pool above Lahari. Like a tiny fish, the light moved through the water toward her until it was at the surface, opposite from her levitating form.

Lahari reached out one arm, and her hand entered the pool. She gently wrapped her fingers around the light, and she lifted it from the water. Droplets dripped up into the ceiling pool from her knuckles.

In her palm, Lahari held a flower. Its petals were pale blue with luminous yellow at the edges. She lifted it to her nose and breathed its fragrance. It smelled of oleander. She knew it had a wanting, and she knew she could talk to it.

“What do you need, little flower?” she asked, her voice returning to its echoing resonance.

“I want to go home,” the flower responded.

“Where is your home?” Lahari asked.

The flower did not reply.

Lahari looked around the darkness, but she could see no means by which to exit the center of the black planet.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Again, the flower did not answer.

Lahari looked up into the depths of the pool of water on the ceiling above her, and she allowed her body to be drawn into it. First her hand with the flower, then her arm and head, and the rest of her entered the water. She rose deep into the pool.

Lahari ascended until she reached the bottom, or maybe it was the top.

Is this your home? Lahari thought to the flower.

The flower replied in Lahari’s mind. It is.

Why did you leave?

To come find you, the flower stated, so I could bring you to my home.

Why have you brought me to your home?

The flower did not answer.

What can I do? Lahari asked the flower with her thoughts.

Do what you can! the flower declared.

Lahari pondered what the flower meant. She released it, and it floated in the ceiling pool.

Then Lahari activated her powers, and she focused them on the flower.

The flower, the water, the darkness, the black planet, and the swirling patterned sky overhead vanished.

There was nothing, not even Lahari.