Black Avatare

44 | TIME

It was like crossing an invisible event horizon. The ground gave way as if someone had flipped gravity. Binara lost sense of direction as she tumbled in an arcing trajectory towards a splotch of light—a beacon that swirled and pulsed in the blackness. This was undoubtedly Kalacakra, the heart of Mount Meru, where unknown forces had warped space and time into a mystical anomaly.

This was where she must find Chandrahasa and make it out in time to stop an Avatare-level demon from destroying her city. On top of that, she was a lone human in a world where she didn't belong, facing what was completely beyond her.

The enormity of the task bore down with crushing force, and a chasm opened inside—of fear and loneliness. Her vision swam, threatening to black out. No, no, no. Binara gritted her teeth. Powerlessness overwhelmed her, and she was once again a child lost in the mist. No one was there for her now.

She struggled to orient herself and gulped down nausea, but it was no use. Up and down had lost meaning. There was no smell or feeling. Everything was quiet and loud at the same time, making her ears buzz as if her brain had gone haywire. It was so jarring and freakishly bizarre that she might as well have dunked herself in a sensory deprivation tank. The only anchor was the light, which grew brighter, making her squint. This was the eye of this spacetime vortex, which reeled her in like a hungry beast.

Through the void of blackness, she was finally close enough to make out detail. Space curled in on itself in dizzying shapes and emitted light—a cyclic animation that looped endlessly. It was like perceiving the curvature of wire in extreme closeup when it was nothing but flat from a distance. This was complex geometry that eluded description—a confounding glimpse at something that probably extended beyond three dimensions. Binara was limited to experiencing only a sliver of Kalacakra.

Panic clouded her mind, and she dry-heaved. Her arms flailed, trying to halt her motion, but it only made her tumble faster—a tiny speck drawn into a cosmic aberration.

As she drifted inexorably closer, the full breadth of it dawned on her.

It was colossal beyond belief, and each twisting plane hosted peepholes into moments in spacetime. They were too vague to make out—three-dimensional snapshots that blurred and glitched. There was no order or rhythm. This was a realm governed by probability.

Binara fell right in, as small and weightless as a mote of dust caught in a tornado.

All around, spatial planes spiraled and diverged, exerting gravitational waves that pulled at her like a riptide. However, it was not enough to jostle her off her spinning course to whatever lay at the center—or perhaps she was doomed to orbit it forever. If the hidden city of the Asuras made her feel insignificant, it was nothing compared to what bloomed in her chest at this anomaly that defied all comprehension. Fear and awe clashed within, warring for dominance. Her lungs burned, and she realized that she held her breath.

A ragged inhale doused the panic just enough to think, though she had to pull in more air to get enough oxygen.

She had no idea how Kalacakra came to be, but it was fitting that it existed in Holmanloke. Diyan's map had indicated Mount Meru at the center of Daval, which meant that this was the world's north pole. Does it have something like a magnetic field? Whatever forces clashed here, it had caused this anomaly.

As momentum kept her going, Binara stared at what she could only describe as a psychedelic simulation—so vast that she was reduced to a mere speck that spun out of control. Panic geysered up again—visceral and all-consuming.

Strangely, she noticed that her environment reacted, getting more chaotic. Light and color dimmed—feeble flashes through the blackness. It was like watching a cityscape going dark—many windows dimming or blacking out until the contours of the city were barely visible. A thrill pulsed down her spine when she realized that Kalacakra was mirroring her mental state.