“What about that?” Comes a chuckle, from the man in the boat. You’re back, away from Ruddy Cash, or whatever the name was. “Some of my better work, no? I’m sure the analogies are…” he tilted his head, “a little off-putting, to some of you, if not outright offensive. And I apologize.”

  His face is clearer, now. It’s not so hidden against reams of scarves. His skin is light, and it’s speckled with little moles and stubble, particularly around the upper lip, and there’s smile lines around his eyes. “Blasted stubble,” he grunts, “can’t kill it for the life of me.” Everything but his eyes seem perfectly normal. They are an eldritch pitch, a sea of nothing, perfect void, only interrupted by those glowing cyan irises.

  “This is just the body I’m using, for the moment,” he says, “Of sorts, anyway. I could look like whatever I please, but I figured this was less… well, less obtrusive.” He was no longer shrouded by patchwork quilts and coats, and instead wore what appeared to be pajama pants, and a hoodie. He leaned back again; he was tall, at least sort of, no longer so hunched over. Lanky. “Enough about me, though, how about you take a gander at that?”

  He points to the world outside the boat.

  Floating islands dot the horizon and span down across the void below and up beyond the skies above, some huge, some small. All have swarms of fish, some of which are huge whale-like creatures, flittering about. They seem to collect around the islands. Down is still an infinite fog of nothing, up remains the same. The horizons continue to stretch on forever. The monoliths are still there, although maybe more defined, more clear.

  “Welcome to the lands in between,” he says. “This is the best representation, anyway, that I can come up with.” You look down again, and see something enormous down there – not a fish, but a building. A monolith. But different; this one seems to be a gigantic dome, centered below you, of marble and excellence. “Religion,” he says, a twinge of acid in his voice, “Abandoned but not forgotten. My fascination with deities and the divine undoubtedly stems from it.” He sighs, and puts his hands on his knees, looking out to the seas of sky around.

  Moments of silence pass. You notice that the man no longer has a rod. “Call me a fisherman. I reel in those difficult fish for the guy on the other side. Come up with all this,” he gestures around at nothing in particular, “as he propels the boat along this river of memory and ideology.” He winks, “A symbiotic relationship. Let me out to play and I’ll give him this in return.” You hear music, classical, playing softly in the background. How long has that been there? “Most of this time,” he says. “You would’ve never known, though. Sometimes it’s classical, when I’m feeling particularly pretentious, other times it’s rock or animal crossing soundtracks. I recommend Bach.” The boat is slowing a little. “Hmph. I better get to my end of the bargain, then.”

  He reaches behind him, towards the bow, and pulls out his fishing rod. “Fueled on sugar and late nights, this baby is.” He casts it out to the void of blue below. Suddenly, a sound, not unlike a whale’s cry, swells up from under you, then to the side; a great, huge fish of deep navy, sparkling around the edges with purple luminescence, erupts from below. Orange stars speckled across its body, twinkling against the dark. It bays and whines and whistles a song, not unlike a greeting lilt. “Look at that beauty,” the fisherman says, in awe. The whale – it must be a whale – trails behind it what appears to be ethereal silk, that same light purple color, glistening with its own opalescent light. Its back is to you, and it arches over the boat in a circle, leaping from the depths below in that same majestic way sea creatures have done for ages, but this time completing a full spin around your little dinghy. You must crane your neck to watch it float above you, blotting out the sky above.

  “Incredible,” he says. “Absolutely incredible.”

  “It really is,” Lylah replies, gazing out at the starlit scene in front of them. A solar system, a unique wonder, stretches in front of the two, interrupting the cosmic backdrop with half a dozen lush planets. You could see each planet from the star their ship hung over, in full view, on complete display. The only system stable enough, and the only star weak enough, to support such close orbits. Windows engraved with swirling designs – there to keep them structurally sound – wrapped the circular room in a 360 visual experience, so Lylah could see it all. It was peaceful, even though one could easily imagine the terrifying roar of a star’s furnace below. Serene. Beautiful.

  “Do you think you can try, here?” Derik asks. “It helped me.” Derik was Lylah’s teacher, a mentor of sorts, guiding her through the secrets of Nirvana. She’d been frustratingly behind the other students.

  “Yeah,” she breathed in, breathed in more than air, breathed in the beauty and existence around. This place, Jakksha, was one of the most unique monuments of nature humanity had yet found. Lylah could use this. “I can try here.”

  “Remember, steady your breathing,” Lylah heard him say, but she was already slipping beyond. “Steady your breathing. We’re still physical, even if our minds can see beyond.” She breathed. Tingles erupted across her body, then died as suddenly as they came – she was going too fast.

  “Breathe,” came a higher voice, “focus on this. Focus on the light, like we talked about.” It was Derik, again. True Derik. “You’re right, you’re going too fast, but you can brake. There we go, that’s better.” Lylah couldn’t speak – in part because she was too focused, equally in part because she hadn’t quite figured out how to manipulate Nirvana to such a fine degree. “Can you feel that? The ebbs and flows? The eddies of the universe? Delve into your mind, deep into metaphors and metaphysical existence. Ask why, and the Universe may answer.”

  She felt like a toddler pretending to be a plane – stretching her arms out and going zoom! – except the toddler really was ten thousand feet in the air, plummeting to its eventual doom, desperately grasping at the wind whipping past. Flapping her arms, beating the air, anxiously trying to glide with her thin, gangly wings. “Don’t beat against it, Lylah, flow with it.” That was hard. She was beginning to sense the little ripples of movement and speech all around. All she heard was Derik, though. He knew how to talk in both the physical world and Nirvana, simultaneously. It was why he was such a regarded professor; the man was a rare gem of intellect.

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  She breathed – forgot to do that. “Don’t forget breathing; it’ll come automatically, eventually, but for now you have to mediate.” Her eyes were closed, but her mind was open. Or it was supposed to be; she couldn’t really see anything. She knew that’s not how it worked, but she also knew she was supposed to sort of see stuff. “Don’t worry about that. You just don’t know how to translate your senses, yet. You’ll get there.”

  Still flapping like a baby bird tumbling out of the sky, but she was getting somewhere. She’d always been behind her peers. Children did the stuff she was doing now; most teens could navigate Nirvana as well as any adult and those educated in the Ways could do things that resembled the power of gods. Her father, when he’d been alive, had been a powerful wielder, she knew. Lylah remembered sitting on his lap, as he would hold some toy and shift it through dimensions she couldn’t see. She remembered the one time he’d ever gotten truly angry – some kid had hit her, when she was seven, and the parents had essentially blamed Lylah’s failings at navigating the higher dimensions. For a millisecond Lylah barely understood, as her father held her close, the world had gone sideways, and loopy, and a thousand different colors that couldn’t be named. Right after, the parents of the would-be assaulter looked mortified, and had scooped up their kid and left the park.

  Now, as an adult herself, she’d learnt of the things her father was known for. She could guess what those assholes had seen, in that millisecond. It made her shudder, hearing her father’s name in history class, learning of his accomplishments and atrocities side by side. Pioneered the way into new dimensions and galaxies; eradicated armies sent to attack their nation of peaceful Nirvana-dwellers. The man had always been kind to her, but Kieren Wylliams had been a terrible name to the enemies of Lorelain.

  “Stop thinking about your dad, you’re falling a bit,” Derik said. Shit. She readjusted. “You need to get out of his shadow, you know.”

  Thanks, she’d get on that.

  She could kind of hear other voices now, murmurs and mutterings. They only sounded that way to her, she suspected those truly in Nirvana could hear it all in full. Must be overwhelming. Almost as overwhelming as scuffling to not fall into back down into the physical realm. Almost as overwhelming as the titan of expectations rested upon her back; she was supposed to be prodigy, an implicit master of Nirvana. Her dad had been. He’d been able, even before he learned in the halls of mastery, to warp reality to his will. Bend it to his whim and imagination.

  She wobbled – “Steady, steady. You can do it, you’re getting far.” Derik’s voice was dimming, even his ethereal one. Lylah could feel her eyes closed tight again, could make out fingers and toes from the whelms and throes of the universe. That was bad. Nirvana, while a physical realm, was beyond corporeal bodies. “Your thoughts, Lylah, focus on your thoughts.” Her dad could’ve done this, easily. He did, at the age of two or three. Lylah knew he was travelling space at seven, folding time at nine. She could never live up to that.

  God, what was she doing? Fiddling around with some mentor like he was going to fix her problems? Pathetic. Lylah had done everything she could to achieve Nirvana, to be perfect like everyone else, to be calm and in control like all the other Enlightened. But she’d failed. She was always too bumbling, or scatterbrained, or just downright stupid. She’d seen the looks on her teachers’ faces growing up, as all the other schoolchildren waltzed their way through the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions with little trouble. They’d sometimes insinuate that she wasn’t Kieren’s legitimate child, when they thought no one else was looking.

  It wasn’t for a lack of trying; Lylah could recite every mantra of the seventeen tomes, every tenet of the Ways, but she just lacked the knack. Friends were only friends because she’d grown up with more than the rest – her father was a war hero, a decorated general, after all. She’d lived on a pretty planet with servants and paradise parks and beach getaways. But she’d never had her father. She’d never have her father. And even though she was appalled at the way her professors had painted him – his definite monstrous acts rebranded as heroic and patriotic – she would’ve given anything to see him for more than a few days at a time.

  Suddenly, she was falling. Really falling. Falling right out of the edge of Nirvana and down and down into the depths of something new – below the physical realm, behind the veil of reality. Her eyes were open, but it hurt to see. Kaleidoscopes of colors and images and atoms and laws whirled around in a torrential pool of unbelievable paradigms. There was no atmosphere or gravity, but she couldn’t help but feel herself fall, slipping into the catacombs holding up the world. What was happening? She found her mouth, her hands – they were there, but abstracted and wrong. Sensations rippled through her nervous system, screaming in her higher mind. This was wrong. This shouldn’t be. This was no Nirvana, this was something different, and malign.

  “Derik!” She cried, her voice warbling and corrupted by the sharp fractions of the world – what was this? Where was she? “Derik!” She yelled again, to no answer. Spinning patterns and nonsensical images flashed around her; old-fashioned trains doubled up on each other, reflected by an unseen mirror, two different realities brought close. A God, with a hundred hands and a thousand eyes, steeped in crimson and unspeakable wisdom, knowing, watching, smiling countless hideous smiles. A man, standing against an army, whipping streams of colors and wrath against his enemies.

  A boat, floating in a river, and a lump of cloth, staring her down with eerie cyan eyes.

  Down again, tearing through the steps of reality; atoms, then electrons and quarks, and whatever else below that. There are no visuals, no words to describe the senses she experienced; new, yet unfathomably old. Untouched by human hands yet long worn down by some other. Falling, falling, still falling through this rabbit hole of insanity, until –

  She found herself in the dark. Lylah was on the floor, her body aching from the fall. Nothing was broken, but she’d definitely been tumbling down. Her eyes strained as they attempted in vain to adjust to the pitch dark. Her hands groped the floor of cold stone, cracked and crooked. She stood up, waving her hands for something to grab onto. This sharp deprivation of sight was disorienting, leaving her imbalanced.

  For countless hours she stumbled in the dark, crying to herself, yelling for help, only receiving her own echoes in response. Derik wasn’t there. No one else was there. It was just her, alone, in this cold, damp dark. Finally, after clawing at the walls of what seemed to be winding caves, she gave up. Lylah curled up into a ball and rested her head on the wall. This would be it. She would die here, somewhere in the depths of reality, beyond Nirvana or what have you. So much for her. So much for Lylah Wylliams, insignificant daughter of that important bloke.

  She took a shaky breath and resigned.