54 Lights In The Dark

It wasn't even a third of the way into the story before there was a knock on the door, prompting the occupants to once again don their masks. Without standing at attention, as soon as Rob opened the door, Chance strolled in and shut it behind him.

"Miss me?"

"No, but Rob is sh*t at reading. You read it." Rykar held up the book towards Chance with pleading eyes.

"Nah, I have something to show you guys first." Reaching under his cloak, he pulled out a thin stack of papers which were bound simply with some string winding around its long edge. "These are the notes from my dad. They are the reason I figured out the meditation technique!"

At the beginning, he started somberly as he retold his story of being left within the sewers from the young age of six. Even before then, he had no memory of living anywhere else, yet with the sudden disappearance of his parents, he had simply been left to fend for himself without having a clue as to the rhyme or reason. Despite the short story, the implications of being left to survive within a city such as this, at a much younger age than themselves, left the twins appalled.

"I guess that's the standard out here. If it isn't convenient, ditch the baggage." Rykar shrugged it off with sarcasm and annoyance.

"Nah, I was angry at first but, until I find proof to suggest otherwise, I know they wouldn't have left me behind for no reason."

"Well, that's on way to look at it." He agreed, before stubbornly going back on himself. "But I'm not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt."

"Either way, it's not important now. This will be way more useful to you guys than a crappy sketch I did in the sand from memory."

Instead of flicking through the pages one by one, Chance simply untied the binding before laying out the sheets one by one in a 4x5 grid. There were actually more sheets than they had expected, with the stack simply looking much smaller due to the paper being slightly worn and aged.

Rather than having to go through the pages like any book, the pages had come together that formed an entire tapestry, with a figure sitting cross legged in the centre while surrounded by notes, scribbles and diagrams. Taking a step back while marveling at his organization, Rob and Rykar patrolled the edges of the sheets while being careful not to step on any of them.

Despite the faded ink, the tapestry depicted a human figure which was sat within empty space, surrounded by stars and swirls. There were lines and swirls illustrating the stars seeming to form a vortex with him at the centre, but they seemed hazy, drawing in everything indiscriminately. It seemed to perfectly depict the feeling that all three of them had experienced while meditating, as the world began to revolve around themselves, the centre of everything.

Most of the notes on the side simply went into more detail yet covered the same things which Chance had told them while explaining how to enter the meditative state. By focusing on words, or simply a state of mind, while feeling the intent behind the technique, it was an easy feat. An 'easy' feat which had taken Chance years to achieve.

"Your parents, did they make this themselves?" Loki asked with a confused tone that left Chance curious.

"I don't know, why? I wouldn't say 'parents', my dad was always stuck on drawing this up but I don't know if he designed it or not."

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"I know a book that looks almost just like this. It's still pretty different, but the man and the stars are the same. It looks like one of the last pages."

"What, so you're telling me that you already read this in a book? Back when you lived in the woods and couldn't read, yeah?" Chance burst into laughter while disregarding Loki's comment as a joke.

"No, I'm being serious. I've seen it before."

Annoyed with Loki's insistence, Chance changed topic, explaining the principals of the technique to Rob while leaving the twins to their own devices.

Rykar quickly went over to the book he had left behind and began to put his newly learned vocabulary to good use but Loki didn't join him. Frustrated at Chance's condescending attitude and rude dismissal, he grabbed a chair before taking a seat at the other end of the room, settling down next to a stack of papers and an ink well.

With messy hands and a few smudged lines, he gradually became more proficient with the pen while scribbling away on the papers before him. "Why would I lie about a dumb book." He cursed at their behavior.

With Loki preoccupied and the other two invested in the diagrams, Rykar quickly grew bored with the book he could barely understand. Piecing together one in five words was fun at first, with the blatant improvement, but without being able to understand the majority, the world of dreams soon came calling while his eyes closed on themselves.

As he drifted away, he dropped the book completely, listening to Rob and Chance discuss the notes on the theories of void and his experiences when it came to calming himself while emptying his mind.

. . .

Darkness.

No stars and no light, yet being able to sense everything within the space as though it was as bright as day.

Rykar's consciousness seemed to melt and thoroughly disperse as is expanded outwards from a small dot to the size of a sphere of nine metres in radius. The darkness felt never ending despite the warm and comforting pulse which he felt from the centre of his being. Rather than simply being a dormant ball of consciousness, he slowly began to perceive pathways flowing within himself.

Still lacking his sense of sight, two cool tendrils extended from a spot just outside his detection range, reaching all the way to his core before staying there and revolving around itself, like a ball of yarn being rolled around itself. The tendril formed a ball while compressing itself over and over, giving him a feeling of fullness.

Like grasping in the dark, he tried to push himself in the direction which the meagre stream of energy was flowing in from yet, although speeding up the stream by a fraction, was unable to do anything to effect or speed up the flow further than that. After reaching just below ten metres out, his consciousness had also stopped expanding at the same rate as before, now barely spreading a centimeter out with each passing minute.

Frustrating him endlessly, he felt as though one of the sources of the streams was only a tiny but further before he would arrive at the source. The other much smaller one, however, felt as though it was endlessly far away even now.

9.9m in diameter. The core of his being was still beating faintly, with the cool streams supplying it with a sense of comfort. However, despite still not finding the sources of this input, he was able to pick up what felt like 'nodes' which he had a desire to connect to, making himself while.

Like fireflies in the dark, hundreds of these nodes lit up simultaneously as he reached out to them. Just like that, a circuit was formed, with a fine stream coming into his core and then hundreds of silk-like threads extending out towards the periphery like a spider's web. Despite not simply being on the receiving end anymore, the feeling of wholeness and growth didn't decline in the slightest, as though he had taken a massive step in the direction of accomplishing something huge.

Slowly but surely, the meagre amount of energy that was flowing into his core was being amplified slightly, allowing the output to barely fall behind what was being drawn in. It was like breathing in a deep breath, yet with each exhale, more air was being released than being inhaled.

Syncing his breathing with the slow and steady pulse from his core, he felt his consciousness unwillingly recede from the 9.9m mark, all the way back to the size of a pin before vanishing completely while leaving the previously built circuit completely intact.

. . .

"Don't touch him, this could be important."

"What if all this air makes him blow up?!"

"Dumb ass, it's obviously not the air that's going into him. By now he would be fatter than this room. He would be a stain on the walls if it was actually air."

For the last half hour, the other three occupants of the room grew increasingly worried by a light but noticeable current of air enveloping Rykar with him in the centre. Despite not being strong, only comparable to someone blowing out a candle, it was didn't simply cover just the area around Rykar, but also the rest of the room. Chance even opened the window fully in order to allow air into the room, preventing the low whistling noise caused by the gap in the door.

Laying along the edge of a table, Rykar's hand was dangling over the edge, along with a sliver trail of saliva which escaped his mouth. The book he had been reading was now on the ground, open at the last page he had been looking at. All indications lead to him looking as though in a deep sleep, but his breaths were bafflingly long, causing Chance to only guess he had entered meditation.

1, 2, 3… Counting the seconds between each inhale and exhale, Loki found it to be almost fifty seconds during each inhale! Without placing his hand over his hand and nose, it would be difficult to even realize he was breathing relying on sight.

With nothing they could do to stop or help the situation without the risk of disturbing what was happening, they eventually decided to simply let him be, returning to their previous tasks while keeping an eye on him.