The walls continued their oleaginous transformation into a twisted and organic non-shape. The material, membrane-like but strong, brightened further, and for the first time there was a sense of a world on the other side. Motion. Ambiguous forms slipping apart and congealing. Life. We’d arrived someplace new.

“Patton, you see that?”

He moaned in the affirmative.

I struggled to stand again, using my hands for stabilization, and pressed my eyes to the wall to see what lurked just beyond. One of the shadows came close, its outline sharpening until it was just outside. Then more shadows gathered, obfuscating the first, undiscernible. Their shapes were similar and then different, changing. There was an organization to the movements, coordination.

It suddenly exploded to triple its original size, then doubled again, and again. It was dynamic, expanding and contracting every few seconds, akin to the watery dance of Deepstaria enigmatica.76 Except, where enigmatica move gracefully, the thing on the other side of the wall altered forms with lightning speed, defying any logic of the world that I understood. The closest analog would have been an octopus, with its ability to quickly occupy volumes that seem impossible given its size. This, though, was no cephalopod.

The voidscull – or what had once been – drew farther upward, pulling the walls with it like spans of chewed gum. Hundreds of feet up. An opening appeared there, as if we were inside the tightly wound bloom of a moonflower looking through to the sky. But here there was no sky. We were inside of a breathtaking structure and directly beneath the apex of a great vaulted rotunda. Sinuous spans of black material radiated from the center, sweeping in gentle arcs toward the perimeter of the room, where they ascended out of view.

Near the top edges of the membrane walls, the frosted blue faded away and became clear, and this transformation slowly processed downward. The thing was still on the other side of the once-voidscull’s blurry skin directly in front of me. Undulating. Breaking apart and reforming. Innumerable individual pieces making up the whole. Only shape and movement translated through the membrane walls. Though not for long.

I was really squeezing Pickles.

I watched the morphing torrent of silhouettes outside and felt my mind running through its catalogue of Earth’s biota in a breakneck effort to make familiar what wasn’t.77

“Hold me,” said Patton.

I held my breath instead as the walls around us finally turned clear.

Have you ever seen something so unfathomable that you stared at it mouth agape? Like for real. Were you ever actually confronted by something so stunning that you only realized later that your jaw had fallen open? Because this is what happened. I froze in this state for an unknowable amount of time, aware on a subconscious level that slack-jawed paralysis was the best my body could offer in the face of the ineffable.