I opened my eyes and I was back in the Nothingness.

The Nothingness. A land of pure white. Where depth and perception was impossible and the mind couldn’t make any sense of where it was or what it was looking at. Indeed, now that I had come here with some control over the temporal domains, I could sense that time did not apply here at all.

To be clear, this didn’t mean time ‘stood still’ in here or something. It simply did not apply here. Or rather, the very concept of time, all the knowledge and rules associated with it, they did not exist here at all. This was a time-less space. This was a space-less place.

But it wasn’t liminal. A liminal space is a place between spaces. A sort of intermediary or limbo. The condition I was in while moving through the past and future was a sort of liminal state of being. But right now, as I took a single step inside the Nothingness, I knew I was not in a space between spaces, or a space above like heaven, or a space below like hell. This place was not even purgatory.

It did not exist.

What an odd concept to wrap one’s head around. In the Nothingness, even nothingness did not exist. It was a true void. Nothing should be able to exist here. It was purely abstract. No, at least abstract spaces could be thought about, they could be somewhat comprehended.

I realized I could not actually understand the Nothingness. I was merely experiencing some indeterminate part of it. Was the Simurgh controlling what I could experience? Or was this simply everything I could understand, everything I could explain about this place, this world, this Nothingness?

I didn’t know.

“Where are you?” I said aloud, knowing I would be heard, even though no words left my lips, and even if they had, there was no air to carry them.

No answer. That was fine. Madness had done me a massive favor already. He had told me that the entire reason he had wanted to take over the domain of Annihilation was so that he could use it to return to the Nothingness. From here, he had said, he could find a way to return to our world by going back the way he came—through meditation.

Meditation about what? I remember learning, once upon a time, that meditation was not actual the strange orientalized thing popular media had made it out to be. It was rumination. It was thought. It was experiential. It had many forms, but for me, right now, stuck in the Nothingness where there was no up, no down, no sense of self at all, I knew all I needed to do was to form myself, my presence, and poke holes at this space and its relationship to the physical world in which I had been summoned.

I imagined that I had sat down. I knew there was no floor, no place to actually sit down, but I imagined that I had done so anyway. No, I did not merely imagine it. I believed it. I believed it so strongly that I felt it.

I felt my legs fold under my body. Crisscross applesauce as the kids would call it. My legs touched the ground, ground that not even my feet had felt up until that point. I had not even imagined that I had feet in this world until I had that thought, that imagined experience, and I traced a newly formed hand along my leg.

I felt the sensation of skin on skin. The slight brush against hair. The strange sponginess of skin. The uncanny feeling of blood pumping through veins. My body took shape with my thoughts. My senses preceded the existence of the object. What a curious thought. What a strange feeling.

I took a breath, forming lungs. I breathed out, forming nostrils. There was no air to breathe, but I was breathing something in. Was there something in this Nothingness? The ancients on my world thought there was an extra element, out in the void: the aether? Was this what I was sensing? No. There was nothing here.

Magic in this world was based on knowledge and wisdom, on thought and rationality, on sentience and being. Why should I assume the Nothingness was any different? In fact, the importance of thought in the Nothingness was intensified. I felt like, if I believed in something strong enough, I could get it to appear in here. I could turn thoughts into reality in the Nothingness, couldn’t I?

I reached out a hand, forming it as it appeared in my vision, and imagined a cup in my hand. Nothing happened. I frowned, forming a forehead and eyebrows. I had been so sure that I would be feeling the curve of a cup, the coldness of porcelain in my hand right now. What went wrong?

A cup appeared in my hand. No. The outside of a cup appeared in my hand. The inside was empty, and so was the lip of the cup. The lip of the cup that would meet my lips so I could sip the hot tea inside. Burning tea. Liquid. Floral. Aromatic. Warming.

I formed lips. The cup’s insides appeared. I took a sip. The tea was there and it was exactly as I remembered it. Even the cup was one of those cups I had stol—borrowed from the university dining hall. And the tea was made from tea bags and the water was from the water kettle I had scrounged off of a senior who had been trying to get rid of it last year before his graduation.

None of those things appeared. No kettle, no tea bags, and certainly no dining hall. I tried to think about my dorm room, the library, the classroom, even my old apartment that was no longer mine because my mom was no more.

I thought about my mom in a panic. Just in case. Just in case.

No, it had been a wild thought. And thoughts, no matter how wild, couldn’t actually take shape here. I would need sensation. I would need feeling. I would need to remember the way my mother’s hand felt on my head, stroking my hair, pulling me close, kissing my forehead and calling me the nickname she had given me when I was a kid and which cannot be reproduced here for you since it was personal and embarrassing.

My heart pounded into existence. Cold sweat poured down my back as it materialized too. No, I shouldn’t go down this road. This road was dangerous. Materializing somebody else. Somebody who was dead. My mother. Even if I did so, even if I materialized her in this world, she would not be her real self. She would be an imitation. A pale imitation. The specter left in my memory after the real being was resting in the dirt.

Not every road less traveled was worth it.

And that made me realize that this teacup, the tea inside, my own body as it had appeared in the Nothingness wasn’t real. My thoughts hadn’t left my mind and turned into reality. Everything that I felt was still inside my head.

This was because there was no reality. There was nothing ‘inside my head’ in here, only a disembodied consciousness that was trying to make sense of everything in a space where nothing existed, where the rules that defined what I felt, experienced, and thought about no longer applied.

Where was the Simurgh, the thought came to me quickly? I remembered how I had gotten here. Madness had reached inside the Simurgh and the Simurgh had faced me and let out an attack. A powerful, dangerous, frightening strike from a domain that I faintly recognized.

No, I recognized it completely from what I could remember. I remembered the way my body was ripped apart. Atom by atom. Hair split from skin. Muscle scraped from bone. It was a terrible, painful way to die, but there was no pain and I didn’t die. I was here after all. And I had already established that this place was no heaven, no hell, no purgatory even.

I didn’t die. I wasn’t killed. I had been Annihilated. Ironically, it was exactly what Madness had wanted all along, except he hadn’t been willing to push the Simurgh so far that it would risk sending me out here.

Wait, why wouldn’t it risk doing that? I frowned with my fake face and realized something. Madness would’ve jumped into the path of the attack of Annihilation for sure. He should be here too. There was no way that maniac wouldn’t take this opportunity to come here!

“You’re a smart kid,” said a voice behind me. “Little Caspian. Thank you for your help!”