N'aarat and the Tree of Life

Chapter 1: The Plunge

'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.