Between Worlds

Few people know it but traveling between the worlds is less like walking and more like a controlled fall. You don't fly, you glide from place to place, drifting until you finally slide between the worlds to come to the other side.

Usually it's lonely, a drifting descent marked only by the swirling colors of infinity that blind the eyes as your senses try to fill in the unfathomable. However this time as I was swept through that unknowable expanse, my senses detected something far different. A small patch drifted near me, a cluster of light and shadows and shades of gray in the colored mass of drifting insanity.

I opened my eyes and saw a form in a place without rules. A woman, no a young lady drifting along in a place where nothing has a physical form, falling through a world without sky. Though she drifted along back first, the bone white mask never left her face, though her hair streamed behind her. Dressed in the manner of a banker, yet lacking shoes, she made an odd sight.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, an old lessen, long forgotten chimed in my head. Not even gods can hold a physical form in the ether.

I nearly screamed when I saw her mask shift, the dead eyeholes shifting ever so slightly to stare at me, pinning me. And then I did scream as I was torn from my drifting descent, my very cells screaming in agony as they were forced into existence in a world that rejects substance. From eyes streaming in a half-formed head I saw her shift slightly, turning her position so that it resembles someone suspended in the moment before their feet hit the ground.

Her head tilts slightly as she grabs a chin still raw with nerves, her voice oddly normal and calm. “A magician...Do you know who I am...?”

I gasp, struggling with a tongue that forms even as I speak. “N-Nuh-No...”

Her mask shifts once more, forming an expression of mirth. “Ah. I am not a god, no. But I have a mastery of flesh...” She pauses as I give a little whimper, indicating that I had quite inferred this. “...I can also tell a person's story...And perhaps prod them a little. I can see you've had many...Do you want one more?”

I'm stunned. What choice do I have? She has me here, trapped, absolutely helpless. I can feel my legs forming beneath me, mere half-assembled stumps of agony. I know if she leaves, I will be adrift, stuck as I am torn apart by the reality of this place. I know if I do not accept, I will die.

She senses this, and so she smiles. She can feel my answer. It doesn't help that my skull has not formed yet, so she can clearly see my brain. I don't need to accept. She nods, and we are whisked away into a new world. And for me, a new life.