A Hero's throne

the sound of every aspect of the created universe.

It was horrifyingly beautiful, and its poetry nearly destroyed Daniel. And at the point when the vibrations started to create light from the music they made, Daniel felt himself racing toward it, even as it grew to envelop him. With apprehension so great it broke the barrier of fear, he plunged into the outer edges of reality, tearing through the skeins and spirals, and into the heart of the total whole.

The inside of the absolute complexity showed windows into entire wholes of reality, separated each from the other. They whizzed past him and he saw entire completions buzz by from every angle and perspective.

He was drawn toward a certain facet of the all of everything, and after an aeon of travelling, he saw it ahead of him, glistening and humming in a tone that reminded him of his mother’s voice. He willed himself faster toward it.

As he hit the wall, every atom in his cloud of perception crashed like a cymbal, and then he was through the outer border of his own reality. He could feel that it was his, although he could, of course, not recognise it. The galaxies and star clusters spun and rotated in spinning spirals, watch-like in precision and delicacy, but built and balanced on a celestial scale. The movements traced golden paths in the darkness, and where gravity and dark matter fields harmonised, purple paths that were far below the visible spectrum appeared to Daniel’s eyes. It was through these that Daniel was pulled, navigating across aeons among the quantum particle rivers and streams that flowed through gravity tunnels.

In this way he travelled across the universe, racing along the curved intersects and spokes from one gravity bridge to another, and one spinning star system to another, toward, he hoped, home.

After countless hops and jumps that took him through a tour of wonders that would still not be seen by those on earth for millennia, he came to his own galaxy and followed the curve of its shape down to his own system, which was like entering a tiny little hovel at the end of a short cul-de-sac and then sitting in the smallest chair in the tiniest room. His whole world-everything he’d ever known-was so small and overcrowded that he didn’t know how he could possibly tolerate the feeling of being so tightly hemmed in ever again.

And as he came closer to it and to the silver string-like path that his planet followed, he saw the string start to vibrate, picking up the sympathetic notes that the moon, the sun, and the other planets created. It twisted and spun in three dimensions and created a purple gravity bridge that drew him in and rocketed him to another system in another galaxy-a larger planet with a larger sun, populated by creatures from another evolutionary tree.

Comet-like, he fell into the planet, in the thin sliver than ran across its circumference where the light side met the dark. Its movement became his, and its gravity held him completely. The sudden stop of movement was jarring and stole his breath. He had been speeding through the infinite just moments ago and here he was trapped on a tiny speck of dust.

But which speck of dust?

He looked around and was staggered by a flood of sensations: a flood of light that ushered in a wash of colour, a roar of noise, a pool of smells, a rush of tingly picks of pressure and pain all around him. All of these sensations, but nothing to concentrate or embody them. The connections seemed random and fast, one after the other: a flash of grey-blue, a slap of cold, an ear-splitting crash, the scent of rotting leaves, a blast of heat, the rough edge of an immense rock formation.

He tried to tie together the disparate impressions, but they wouldn’t stay in place. He tried to follow one of them-the feeling of heat-concentrating solely on it, until exhaustion stole it from him. He was being stretched. He quit grasping for the heat and felt a bright green take its place.

He let the sights, sounds, feelings, smells flash through him. He was losing himself. Desperate, he clung to something of his own, not something he was experiencing, but something of his past, of him. He thought of a song his mother used to sing to him when he couldn’t sleep, the last time he truly felt safe and loved.

Robin-a-Bobbin

Let fly an arrow;

Aimed at a rabbit,

Killed him a sparrow.

Robin-a-Bobbin

Bent back his bow;

Shot at a pigeon,

But killed a crow.

Robin-a-Bobbin

Let loose another;

Over his chimney,

Striking his brother.

Robin-a-Bobbin

Taken to town,

Wearing two bracelets

And fit for a gown.

Robin-a-Bobbin

No longer singing,

Come the next morning,

He will be swinging.

The effects of this were immediate and drastic. Everything came together. The light blue joined with a cool sensation of wind blowing over him, enveloping him like a crisp bedsheet. The sound of leaves rustling against each other. And white forms, clouds, came into sharp focus. Then greys, blues, and purples-a mountain of enormous size seen at a great distance. Blades of grass as sharp and defined as knife blades.

But that was all it was-just a scene, there was no him in it. He was just a disembodied cloud of perception. He could experience and observe but so far couldn’t interact. Although relieved that he was still able to do anything, he was still terrified at his condition.

And then he got another shock when he realised where he was. He was back in Elfland. The song he’d hummed, bringing him back together, made sense now, at least. Poetry had power here.

The view was familiar-the mountain, the plain, the distant stretch of green forest-it was pretty much the same thing he had seen when he first arrived. He was standing, he presumed, on the same spot he had been transported to the first time, midway between the mountain and the forest.

He turned to look at the forest, but there was no “him” to turn. Instead, the tableau shifted to the side. Startled, he lost control of the centre of his perception and felt everything racing away from him again. He thought of the song and it all came back together-the sky, the mountain, all of it. He kept repeating the lines under his breath as he tried once again to turn.

He spun sharply and instantly, as fast as thought-completely out of control, but still coherent, at least. After the nausea had passed, he found the wood now before him, just as he remembered it, a line of trees along the horizon.

He sighed but expelled no breath. Now what? The lines of the song went around in his head (Robin-a-Bobbin let fly an arrow. .). He tried to move forward but only succeeded in making a sort of rocking motion, which he thought at first was movement, until he shifted his perception downward and saw that the grass underneath him was not going anywhere.

A thought occurred to him. He had made the landscape appear by focusing, so why not his body also? He tried to imagine his hand, imagine what it felt like to have a hand, imagined opening and closing it.

The world around him faded, dimmed, as if he were squinting his eyes. A shape appeared, like a shadow image coming into focus, and his hand coalesced out of the haze. It was like looking at some strange type of optical illusion. If he tried to leave off looking at the hand and follow his gaze down the palm, to the wrist and forearm, the whole of it evaporated, so he concentrated just on the hand, and the more he did so, the more defined it was against the now dark background.