Awaken

She is adrift -- asleep and awake, translucent and opaque. She is where she is, and at the same time she is everywhere in pieces through the galaxy.

Voices and faces, people she knows -- some she doesn't know -- some she feels she should know - caress her and shout at her, whisper sweet oblivions into her ear. Among them flow frowning men and women in robes, a sightless woman in a scarlet veil, a brooding pilot in a beat-up orange jacket.

She wonders if she is dead.

Stars and planets float by large and looming, folding....unfolding as she watches. She names them idly as she passes, wondering if they had always been called that, or if she made the names up herself. She feels submerged in a gentle warmth, protecting her from the frigidness of space.

Vaguely in the back of her mind, she is aware she is floating. But nothing else registers.

Her ethereal wanderings bring her to a dark shell of a planet, surrounded by floating debris like a metallic halo. When the lightning flashes, she thinks she hears faint screams of pain, echoes from a time in the past.

Vaguely in the back of her mind, she is aware she has been here before. But nothing else registers.

A montage of images play like a holovid in front of her eyes...she is surrounded by hot twisting jungle and dying men in yellow and red...she is fighting next to a luminous woman in armor and a mask...she is standing on the bridge of a mighty ship with a horned man at her side...and then she is screaming, screaming, dying in her mind as the planet before her silently decays.

Vaguely in the back of her mind, she thinks she hears a voice, but nothing else registers.

:Awaken:

The screaming stops. A hole in her being remains behind, like a puzzle with the key piece missing. She reaches out to find it, but it is just beyond her reach. If there were another to help her, perhaps she could just grab it...

From her omnipresence across the expanse of space, she feels herself begin to withdraw, faster and faster in a flow of glowing blue energy, until in the midst of the flow she can see a tiny construction where she is about to land, a place empty of life, save for a tiny spark of a man.

Faster, faster, and faster still until she can see herself suspended in a cylinder of crystal liquid....

:Awaken:

Faster and faster until she lands within herself, and the Exile opens her eyes.