Without warning, the bubble sped away from the rear wall. There was no way she could judge their speed; she felt no motion. All around, the darkness seemed filled with subliminal rainbows. Glancing up, she saw a myriad faint beams of light traveling in parallel from the triangular whiteness ahead, over and behind them, into the wall, where they vanished. The triangle grew larger and brighter; they were obviously approaching something, but what she could not be sure.

Hypnotized, Rhita stared until the whiteness filled her vision, a brilliant, almost dazzling luminosity with a pearly quality that both awed and soothed her. This was the light in which a god might come clothed. Those gods I don’t really believe in, she thought. They’re still inside me, though. Athene and Astarte and Isis and Aser and Aserapis and Zeus…and now Typhōn.

Suddenly the light surrounded her, and the blackness became a yawning wall or hole behind. With a sudden reorientation, she realized that she had emerged from a huge triangular prism into a surrounding bath of pearly light. She turned and saw the dark equilateral mouth receding. It was framed by a thin line of sullen red of a richness and elegance hard to describe—a color that seemed to carry within it the qualities of serene dignity, vibrant life and horrendous violence all at once.

“Where am I?” she asked, her voice no more than a whisper.

“Behind us is a vessel. We are in a vacuum, within a tube of glowing gases. We will descend through this tube momentarily.”

She still had no clear idea where they were. Her stomach had knotted; so much strangeness, she decided, was not good for her. How had the sophē reacted, seeing so many strange things? There was a time when Gaia herself must have seemed strange and perhaps awful to Rhita’s grandmother.

She held her fists to her eyes and rubbed them. They hurt. Her neck hurt from so much tense craning. Her head hurt; she felt miserable again, and yet there was a beauty to the light…. She was ashamed to be in pain.

I’m not reacting well, am I? Perhaps I should be grateful to still be sane.

The glow intensified and she felt a momentary tingle. They passed through the boundary of the tube of pearly light. Below lay something incomprehensible, intricate like an enormous map, pale green in color, covered with white and brown lines, dotted at rhythmic intervals with processions of cone-shaped towers made up of stacked disks with rounded edges.

Again she felt a reorientation, and saw with understanding instead of just coordinated sensation.

They were within a closed, elongated surface round like a cylinder or a pipe, but enormous. The surface of the cylinder spread out like a Krētan textile design, all pale greens and browns and whites, or like…she quickly ran out of comparisons.