'Quickly, now!' she ordered. 'The portal will open soon.'
I heard a faint flutter of wings, and the blue sand shook under our feet. The wall to our right grew in size, pulled upwards into a sharp angle above our heads, while horizontally it became endless. The blue sand was swirling in vortexes which shrank towards tiny dots of the purest and brightest white.
'Someone is coming!' whispered Kone, constantly checking the surroundings.
'You worry too much,' replied Nazull, yet no one could hear him anymore, as the blue sand turned violet, then red, and it began to swirl anticlockwise, so loudly and so fiercely that our hearts began expanding and drumming inside our chests, and there was something else there, something hidden in the doorway, perhaps a different portal, or maybe what we felt was that we were being completely un-made, disintegrating inside of ourselves.
A blow in the chest and the taste of sea water in my mouth, and there we were, two Onars and a Rayanar, standing on the platform of Chorus Na, the passage connecting the seven tunnel-worlds of our realm cluster. This narrow platform was the last strip of land under the jurisdiction of the Priests of the fifth realm, whose keeper is the almighty Veel'le, whom I bless, and the vast pit before us was going to take us to the sixth tunnel, the realm of Sá'aná, home to the Nýriols and the Layans.
Looking through the restless swirls of sand formed by the currents, we scouted for the guard, yet could not see him. The woman had teleported us according to her best gut feeling, to a part of the loop far from the main entrance. The Ëol was clearly sitting behind his post, approximately half a mile to the right; therefore, we were safe for the time being. There were numerous ways to travel from one tunnel to another. However, our only choice was the intimidating and possibly deadly one: the straightforward plunge.
Neen Th'al is a spherical universe, which makes it easy for it to move around its axis. Near its core lies our megastar, named by our Forefathers Níhalum, around which gravitates a conglomeration of seven elliptical tunnel-worlds. Chorus Na swirls through them twice, on both sides of the megastar, and feeds off its light as it mounts through the first tunnel-world, which is closest to the burning fires, a realm so far away that our minds cannot even comprehend such distances.
Níhalum's counterpart is the Sara Star, ten times as large and bright enough to be seen from beyond Pereö, the large veil that wraps the known tightly together, dividing it from the unknown that keeps growing deeper because beyond one streak of Pereö lies Saurus N'hal, a universe not our own, in constant expansion towards its own rim. Yet that not even the eldest of the Rayanars can see, even if my people does see very far, for our eyes have been blessed to pierce through the darkness and the distance, so we could live a full life in the inner sea of the fifth realm of our cluster.
Even if we can walk on our feet and roam the shores under the bright rays of the day or in the cool breeze of the night, we prefer to spend most of our time swimming in the purple inner waters of our home. All Rayanars weigh very little—nothing at all in the currents—and our fascination for the silky depths has drawn us far from the tumult at the surface of the fifth tunnel, which is inhabited by a single people divided into ten Houses, Onar's kin. They cannot breathe underwater and do not enjoy swimming in it much, fearing its darkness. Yet they are as fooled as the sea chooses to fool them, because dark as it might appear from the shore, our home has myriad lights, with azure and golden currents, with amethyst towers at the entrances to our cities and with two powerful magnetic poles, which absorb and refuel our two light sources: one is Öe and the other one is Swae.
Öe is the light from the cylindrical inner walls of the fifth tunnel-world, which is a ray from the four lights of Níhalum. Öe is green, even if it changes hue at the interference with our atmosphere. Swae is black, but that doesn't mean it cannot shine, for shine it does, and bright and burning. It binds the two poles and it contracts around them, like a pulsating vein which comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, for it has no such purpose.
The wind finally lowered the sand from the air and it revealed the sky, with heavy corridors of stars and nebulas, flying airily above our heads. Freedom, I thought, must smell like morning stars. I risked and took my time to watch them for a while, lifting my hand, my fingers loosely playing with the vertigo of lights above our heads.
As they poured down onto my skin, it became tempting to unwrap and spread all my fins, revealing my body beneath such marvels. They filled my chest and, together, we moved the world. I inhaled the sky into my lungs and then exhaled it back to Neen Th'al, as if in a dance, for I had become the magician dwelling inside the hat, holding the wand from the other end, being both subject and object of my own transformations.
I was still dizzy and the taste of salt lingered in my mouth. The wind carried small particles of sand, and I could feel them through my fingers. Freedom, I thought, must feel like a plunge into a new realm. And for reasons unknown to me at that time, we were offered a paramount honour in Neen Th'al: to see His hand appear in the Counterglass, pushing Pereö farther away, in one brief instant which shook our beings to the core. And thus it was that the entire érro-verse, the conglomeration of universes known to us, grew larger.
Our eyes widened beneath the starry sky, waiting for Her to arise at any moment. Níhalum was spreading a cold, bluish light through the veils of shimmering stars, layer after layer, dozens of millions of lights shining into the depths of Neen Th'al. She rose, on the other end of the rim, undulating towards Níhalum. And it was day. Thus the érro-verse became softer and forgot its sorrows for a while.
Before such greatness, we were prisoners no more. We had escaped by forgetting where we were standing. Yet who can truly escape who they have become? Take a look at us now: two Onars and a Rayanar, gazing upon the miracle of Creation, yet when you are fleeing justice, crooked as it might be, you do not have the luxury of standing boldly in the open for too long. The thunder stroke, and that was the signal that we had to run and hide with no delay. We were mice in the great pantry of Neen Th'al, trying to sneak out after having stolen a pocketful of divinity. We immediately plunged and started crawling through the airy swirls of sand, heading towards the dark vertical lagoon of Chorus Na, praying that the thunder had signalled someone else's misfortune, instead of our own.
I was crawling, flanked by the two, when we suddenly came to a stop because the sand swirl was not thick enough to conceal us any farther. I looked to my right, at Nazull. His dark, big eyes told stories in which only the very brave at heart could dare to even look, for he was a slave and slaves have seen plenty. The tattoo on his chin, a black arrow pointing down, was the mark of slavery in the Houses of Onar, and the direction of the arrow was meant to remind his class that they did not have the legal right to look up. Yet up he looked, one day. In an all-or-nothing madness, he got up on his feet, grabbed the guard's whip and hit him back, until the man had fallen onto his face in the mud.
Unlikely seem such sudden alliances which make friends out of strangers and escapees out of most probably to-be-hanged outlaws. Unlikely are the timely hands that help one another, yet Veel'le is wise and guides our peoples to live harmoniously with one another, even if one dwells above ground and the other deep inside the silky sea.
'There is no sea where we are going.'
I was abruptly removed from my reverie by Kone's voice. Even if he had not spoken very loudly, he startled me because he should have talked in an inch of a whisper or less. Besides, how in the name of Veel'le had he guessed my thoughts?
'If we get there,' said Nazull through his teeth, his eyes scouting through the swirl of sand. 'There's too much silence and not enough sand. This doesn't smell right.'
'N'aarat, what do you see?' asked Kone, inviting me to reassure him that we could indeed carry out our plan.
My sight turned sharper and sharper, scouting deep into the distance. Without uttering a single word, Nazull signalled to us that we should advance a bit more, as a sudden breeze from our left had created a shallow corridor through which we could reach Chorus Na. As we were creeping, my heart skipped a beat when, right under the marble cube in the distance, I saw an Ëol, patrolling unaccompanied. Since they are always tailgated, that was a dreadful omen.
'I cannot see the Aquari. It must be roaming under the sand. Prepare to jump!' I warned them and started crawling faster, with Nazull hurrying at my side, while Kone remained behind.
As we turned to look at him through the flying sand, I could read horror in his eyes. His face was pale and sweaty and he had stopped moving altogether, frozen and unwilling to advance.
'This has been a very bad idea. I cannot jump. I will not jump!'
Once more, Kone was unaware of how loudly he was talking. I thought I heard Nazull say something because I was looking at Kone and he had clearly not added anything, but as I looked to my right, Nazull was as silent as his tattoo.
'You are insane, both of you! You will–'
A shriek, with horrific, needle-like, sharp echoes hammered into my ears and interrupted Kone's irritating lament, as the Aquari rose suddenly in front of him, undulating its enormous snake-like red body, its two tongues out, its six wings unwrapped and beating furiously against the wind, causing the sand to rise many feet high.
Pushing into the ground with my palms and feet, I dashed up and kept running forward, even though there was zero visibility ahead. I jumped—or I fell—only Veel'le remembers. I felt a burning pain in my right shoulder, perhaps from hitting some sort of iron structure at the edge of Chorus Na.
The sky became a distant window above us and all sounds disappeared in the blink of an eye, for Chorus Na is a vertical land of silence, a crater of the dimmest cast. I could barely see Nazull, but he was there. Kone was out of my sight and I knew his fate had now been sealed. I tried to move, but I was paralyzed by the speed, relying solely on pure chance to get safely to the River An, on top of which Chorus Na ended abruptly, as decided by the Neenthallian Interstellar Council.
The Council had been formed by the leaders of all the societies in Neen Th'al countless generations before my time and it had only met once in answer to our plea, as we'd united in front of a common danger coming from the seventh realm. They decided to prevent the wicked peoples of the seventh tunnel-world from roaming freely among us, thus they shut the passageway on top of the sixth realm, and powerful spells disintegrated the cylindrical corridor which took Chorus Na from the sixth realm farther to those frozen lands, on both sides of Níhalum. Later, a cluster-level cell named Neenthallian Stellar-orbit Council was formed by our societies, but it was short-lived. Peace, nonetheless, had returned and it stayed in our grasp for a very long time, until technology brought us closer once more. As for Nazull and me, two specks of dust plummeting through a colossal passageway, the mercy of the great Veel'le, keeper of His fifth realm, shall guide us through whatever comes our way.
The sky-window kept shrinking as we kept swirling in the currents of Chorus Na for what seemed to be an eternity. I was horrified by the depth of the crater in which we were falling because I had never been able to anticipate the sheer size of the fifth realm and I had never travelled from its surface, all the way through, only to be released into the mammoth darkness between the fifth and sixth, with only these walls separating us from whatever roams the skies of Neen Th'al. Fear kept pushing its way into my heart. The sky at the top had now become a star—a single star upon a starless eternity, like a solitary tree standing in memory of the greatest forest that lived.
The passage between lands was not dangerous if you were travelling by ship or if an Illumon carried you. You barely felt a thing in their firm, cashmere-like embrace. While the Aquari were frightful guardians of Chorus Na, the Illumas were large white birds that transported individual citizens up and down the passageway, under given conditions and protocols, the contents of which completely eluded me at that time. A fluttering announced that one of their pairs of wings was lifting them off the ground, while the other two were folded protectively around your body. Oh, how I hoped that one day I, too, could live the great joy of flying with an Illumon!
My mind darkened as we were falling through the multiple currents, most of them lifting us up and thus cancelling our speed to such an extent that for a moment, as I was looking up, I thought we had stopped altogether and I tried to figure out if I had died or if I was still breathing. I felt Nazull's presence—a sign that I was still alive and falling—as his arm searched for mine; we grabbed on to each other, ready to confront the dreadful landing. Black became grey and grey stayed that way until the cold swallowed us and Veel'le finally had to let go of us, for we had entirely slipped away from his domain and had entered the one of Sá'aná, keeper of the sixth tunnel-world.