The formula hit his veins with a spike of ice, then shot him through the hall of flashing lights. This time around he started to notice a cycle to the illuminations, almost like a strobe. Once again it seemed to last an eternity but was over in seconds.

  The doorway inside his mind floated towards him, and he opened it.

  He hadn’t Cast himself to any ping. He used the feeling he obtained from the space fish to navigate himself. Embodying its sense of function inside his focus and envisioning its end goal.

  He found himself in the middle of a system teeming with activity. Several closely packed planets orbited a bright star, and in between them enormous schools of crystal fish swam through space, some larger than any starship Gondo had ever encountered. Matisse chased one lonely fish across the starscape, bounding after it playfully.

  Bending his focus towards the nearest school he arrived just beside and began pacing it. The rocks had fully transformed into their wedge-shaped bodies.

  “They must only use the ball form for interstellar travel,” he surmised.

  The crystal fish were still moving at a great speed, tails whishing in unison. Gondo supposed they were much like the cargo laden haulers that ferried supplies from his terrestrial sphere to the outer planets and back, but these were much cooler. They caught the light from the sun and sparkled in a rainbow of colors.

  He let them go and turned his attention to the nearest planet. He imagined himself floating outside of its atmosphere and he was there. Jagged crystal mountains soared by him, orbiting the planet. They were huge. He wondered how they stayed in orbit like this.

  Various chunks of crystal glowed in hypnotizing patterns. He landed on one and followed a chain of light across its surface, noticing the change following the visible spectrum of light.

  He made sure to relay all this info to his astonished colleagues back on the Sunsword.

  Gliding into the atmosphere out of a cloudless sky, he beheld the surface. It was mesmerizing.

  The landscape was dominated by massive crystal towers, jutting outwards into the sky. In between them were smaller towers dotting the ground, making the surface spiked and denticulate. Multilegged crystalline spider-like forms clomped along the surfaces of these towers, some moving straight up vertically. Where their legs landed the crystals would briefly shine.

  They had small mouths, just like the fish he viewed in space. Periodically they would open those mouths and breathe out clouds onto the crystal walls, which adhered to them, making them thicker and larger.

  No one spider form was the same, from what he could tell. Some had three legs, some had over twenty. Some where the size of an insect, others were size of a building.

  Nearby he saw a school of the crystal fish break through the atmosphere and plummet into a large hole in the ground, their light disappearing as they submerged.

  Then the ground lit in three quick waves, going from horizon to horizon, in a line. From his vantage point in the sky, it appeared to have travelled across the whole planet.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Immediately after the third wave the spider creatures all retracted their legs and hugged whatever surface they were on. They began to hum in different notes, building into a great harmony. The smaller creatures made higher notes, and the giant ones created deep bass tones. Gondo waited.

  All at once the whole surface of the world burst with an intense blinding light. Each creature lit up in turn. Gondo’s vision recovered instantly, and he could see the brightness glowing through the crystal beings.

  After a few minutes the brightness ended just as suddenly as it had begun. The crystal spiders extended their many legs and resumed their labors, glowing brightly. Then the school of fish rocketed out of the hole, looking greyer and more rocklike than before. They exited the atmosphere, likely to branch out and canvas the stars for more raw materials.

  The entire process was breathtaking. If Gondo had had any breath to take, that is.

  Then the planet once again started to strobe, just like before, but it didn’t stop. The waves travelled outward and outward, until he began to see a slight curve to them. The curve increased and he noticed each wave radiating out from one singular point. A point that was moving directly towards him.

  It rolled over the many towers and through all the strange creatures until it stopped just below him. The waves blasting out from that central source abruptly stopped.

  “Uh oh,” he thought.

  The source of light travelled up the nearest tower, and once it reached the top transformed the crystal matter of the tower into a ball that floated up into the air. It gradually lifted itself into the sky and stopped just a few meters from Gondo.

  It wasn’t really a ball; it was more of a chunk. Crystals protruded at seemingly random angles from its edges. It floated there in front of him silently.

  This obviously wasn’t just random luck. It seemed the crystal chunk could sense Gondo’s presence. But how? Had these crystal beings developed a way to sense astral activity?

  It was possible, he supposed. If two astral travelers inhabited the same general space, they could surely sense one another. Perhaps these beings were capable of astral travel themselves, like the Newcomer.

  He was determined not to mess up first contact again. He raised one hand in what he thought was a peaceful gesture.

  “Greetings! I am Gondo Macready, of the Endless City. I come on behalf of humankind and wish you no harm!”

  Dammit. He had done it again.

  The crystal ball just sat there, doing nothing. Maybe it couldn’t sense him anyways. It was possible that it had just decided to float in this spot of the universe for some other reason.

  Gondo spent some time examining the floating mass of crystals. Its surface shone in a myriad of colors, each one catching the light in different ways and refracting it into the sky. It truly was beautiful.

  He started to feel a bit awkward, floating silently in the sky above the crystal planet with this other strange entity. Then it finally moved again.

  It began to transform, like the crystal fish had, or the spiders on the surface. This time, he noticed the crystals of its body weren’t morphing into a new shape. They were sliding and conjoining, drifting and building atop one another. They were moving outward in a rough star shape.

  The chunk finally completed its transformation and Gondo floated, dumbstruck. The entity had formed into the shape of a human.

  It was like Gondo was looking into a mirror, but the mirror version was made of a thousand multi-colored shards.

  He raised his right hand, and the crystal man raised his left. He nodded his head, and the crystal man nodded his.

  “Well, it definitely senses me,” he thought.

  He started to float backwards, and the crystal man floated with him, the space between them never changing. No matter what he did, the crystal mimicked him.

  He moved closer to it, and it drew closer to him.

  He reached out a hand, and it reached out a hand to meet his.

  Eventually the fingers touched. Gondo felt a jolt course through his astral form, and then the being was gone.

  Over his comms he heard what sounded like a muffled crash, then a scream.

  “Everything alright back there?” he said.

  Lowell’s voice returned after a moment, “Uhm, Gondo you better get back here. A glowing man made of crystals just appeared in the middle of our ship.”