Grand Creations in the Aether

A field of stars stretched ahead, millions of them. An infinite sea filled with light and life. But here in this ship, I was alone. A long journey had brought me here, but I didn’t know where that place was. I only knew that my father was fellow passenger of this vessel.

The solitude, the isolation that had been my companion all through the trip, suddenly got heavier. The vastness of the universe felt like a massive void. It was suffocating me, crushing me in its naked emptiness. My heart raced faster, beating out of control, like a dying bird trying to fly away from its hunter. But there was no escape route for me and neither could I find my father in this endless universe filled with lights.

The others on board? Where were they? Had they left me alone? Perhaps they never existed in this voyage at all? But then how do I explain the presence of other passengers like me? Were they illusions created by my imagination or figments of my demented mind? Was I really going insane? If so, then what about my father's disappearance? Did he ever exist in the first place?

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe slowly and deeply to calm myself down. My head pounded with agony as blood rushed into it, trying to find a way out from this suffocation inside the cabin.

I opened my eyes again when I heard a soft gurgling sound coming from outside the cabin door. Like ears being cleared after being blocked due to excess pressure.

The sound repeated itself three times and then stopped abruptly. A moment later, the cabin door opened and two people walked in calmly. They looked familiar but I couldn’t remember their names or anything else about them. The man was tall with dark hair and the woman had long blonde hair flowing loosely behind her back. Both wore simple clothes made of some fabric that couldn’t be found on Earth somehow - strangely familiar yet alien at the same time. They sat down on either side of me without saying a word and waited patiently for something to happen next.

My rapid heartbeat slowed down finally and a little more color returned to my cheeks. A few seconds later, we moved out from our places in the cabin as if carried by some invisible force towards a bright white light ahead at the end of an aisle that separated us from a huge window-like structure hugging the ship’s hull on both sides as it stretched across it horizontally from port to starboard sides simultaneously like shields protecting us from any possible harm from the outside world we were journeying into now.

The light grew brighter until it reached its peak intensity just before reaching us and engulfing everything around us entirely including ourselves while we stood transfixed in front of it watching spellbound as if hypnotized by its powerfulness and beauty. And then suddenly it dimmed down rapidly and disappeared altogether leaving us standing amidst darkness once again staring blankly at each other wondering what happened to it just now making no sound whatsoever even after an incredibly long period of time with no one willing to break that silence filling up everything around us with its deafening vacuum until eventually someone softly said: “We are here...”