Chrysopeleia by thoughtForm

You reach for the volume, a musty maroon hardcover, and pull it slowly from between the other books. It offers resistance, clings to its companions as if their covers are stuck together by a substance that stretches to a point before finally ripping with a dull snap as the book comes free.

You study the front cover for a moment. It does not have the title which had attracted you to the spine, only subtle, transforming organic patterns of deep crimson and burnt umber. These designs seem to escape from their rectangular bounds and produce the sensation of moving through a tunnel. You try to touch them, and they swim over your hand like light from a passing train.

They gradually become more like flames and unpleasantly warm. Finally, you decide you have spent enough time staring at the cover, reach for a random page near the middle, and hurl the book open.

You glimpse letters and words only briefly before they leap off the page in swimming torrents of photons that dissolve the labyrinth around you and reassemble its fundamental particles into a new and spectacular architecture.

Dancing branches and shafts of sun make patterns, same swimming script, same divine language. All is language, and now it’s music, too, oscillations of life and limbs heard or seen or felt, huge and growing, many rhythms of motion all a part of one rhythm of motion.

You’re up and flying, birds and insects and fish follow you. You don’t know where you’re flying to, no up or down here. Trees are an endless web without a ground and it’s all sky: sky with trees in it, trees and you and birds, insects, fish. And now other things, airplanes, boats, and rocket ships, and little things you can’t explain, living things part machine, all of you going not up or down but somewhere, somewhere in these woods without an end, in this song without an end, your voices in a chorus, and someone thinks to ask, “Where are we?”

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