Life is not a reflection of reality but a series of perceptions...

The flickering moments before actuality struck were serene. Nissa stood in a hollow void, feeling the dueling senses of fear and awe. Inky structures concave her vision, sticking her in a limbo of stygian uncertainty.

For what had felt like a revolving eternity, she had no sense of where she'd arrived now. Nissa's mind had become a hollow canvas for the nonexistent.

 The ephemeral cords of the void played a strum of abask and algor as a voice spoke with aeonian power, filling eternity with a paradoxical flavor.

 "Youth of the weave, son, and daughter of time." The voice echoed, "You have left a scar upon existence itself."

A brutal snap filtered into her ears. It was sealing her psyche with blinding fire and light. Nissa never understood why this voice spoke to her, but whatever it was, it was always furious. Retrieving her senses, she was now standing on something solid in the pitch-black expanse.

The cavernous sweep peered back. She'd arrived somewhere new. Upon her spread glooms of shadows, as they huddled together as a conference of chattering behind closed doors.

But she could feel the shadows talking, and they were talking of her. The street lamps tripped on in a calibrated fashion, reviving Nissa from the trance of oblivion.

In front of her lay a road masked with a filmy synthetic yellow stain. A spotlight had welcomed new eyes into the world. It was too welcoming, she thought... Trickles of colors freckled the street from the ground above. It was confetti. Puzzled, Nissa took in her surroundings. One thing was clear from the handful of planes she had switched to. She felt alone. Gathering her composure, she fell into this new shape, searching and informing her mind for the adjustment process of an unknown form.

This was plastic; a feel of fabricated hems and unnaturally slick planes filled her digits. The first realization was the hands. This form had no movable fingers. She could only bend the conjoined palms in a fashion of cupping. Nissa stifled the rising panic in what once was her throat. This was by far the most absurd among all the shapes she inhabited. Investigating further, Nissa touched her face. It was featureless; a smooth, bald, oval-shaped head was fixated onto the top of a blank body. "A mannequin?" She voiced... voiced.

It was more of an echo. There was no sound. There was no mouth. All Nissa knew was that she was speaking the words, but they came out like wind. To an audience of one. The panic rose again.

Nissa shuffled into the street; the flickering gleams of the streetlamps had all but authorized her supposition. Standing amidst the color-littered road, a staunch white replication of a body was on display. Above her, the endless black void.

 She looked to her left; a row of tightly packed homes was planted to the side of the road. They were mirroring each other in absolute detail. They all were perfectly the same. She moved closer to examine them. They were simple in design, almost like a child had formed the architecture. Each plot of land sat a square structure with a triangle roof made of faux wooden planks containing a door on the right side and a small window just across the door.

Cupping her hands around where her eyes would have been, she glanced into the window of the closest one but could not see through. It was pitch black. All there was was a reflection of the form. Nissa stared at this featureless bulb in front of her. This was not her body. This was not anybody. She felt the rising panic, attempting to swallow it down again, but there was nothing to swallow. Nor was there anything to feel.

She had no warmth in her mouth. No saliva. No tongue. She had no internal organs. Inside her mind, she wailed, and the violence in her head ran in a cacophony of spirals; when the ringing subsided, she felt a tinge in her mindsight. The lack of senses enveloped a feeling deep in her pit. "Is this true fear?" she thought. This was more than fear. She knew fear.

 From the moment she had awoken outside of her realm, all she knew was fear. This was a new feeling. The lack of senses. The lack of ability to swallow, blink, or feel her hands. This absence allowed something to begin clawing out. No... Clawing in. She shook her mind, resetting her focus. 

Nissa recalled the previous realms she had unwillingly traveled to; there was no such encounter as this. She would always have a reasonable form to inhabit, resembling her old body. As she mused upon the previous worlds' memories, she longed for the last realm she occupied. It was a hidden beach, airy and bright. She recalled the scent of the briny air and the sounds of crystal tides crashing upon warm white sand. How she wished she could have stayed.

She never got to last long; her body would eventually need sleep, and when she finally succumbed to her body's demands, she would awake someplace new. The recollections brought an acquainted feeling of sorrow, but she couldn't stay trapped in her memories. 

 Stepping back, she began to survey the front yard. It was small, with only two patches of grass and a strip of yellow asphalt nestled into the center, leading towards the door...the door. It stood out like a sore thumb among the rest of the naive structure. It was black and held a polished hue against the streetlamps.

It looked to be obsidian or some black glass. Carved with inaccurate precision, the door seemed to have no purposeful form. It was jagged and rough but smooth and silky at the same time. Nissa noticed an etching in the center of the door; a symbol had been slashed into the stone.

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It was a symmetrical triangle with a single line splitting the shape in half. The first indication of intent, although this symbol meant nothing to Nissa.

She had never seen this shape in any previous realm. Nor had she ever encountered markings. She continued to scan the rest of the door, with a final discovery that this door was missing a key detail, a handle. 

Nissa turned to her side, eyeing the next house; as her sight focused, she saw the road and houses traversed into the thick horizon. Somehow, against all justification, Nissa knew the structures went on infinitely. She paced towards the next home.

The buildings were fixed closely together, with only a tiny gap between them, small enough to put her hand through. She peered into the crevice between them, and black nothingness stared back. It was almost sickening to witness. Turning behind her, she saw a different scene, to her surprise. Across the road were no houses but a string of wooden fences. They were too tall to see over. But each plank perfectly mirrored the next. 

Sitting in front of the infinite wall was an equally endless rectangular bush. Nissa edged closer to the bush. She hoped to stand on top of it to peak into the fenced plot, but an unnatural sight filled her view as she drew close.

 She felt a stir of emotions at first, panic, curiosity, and then nausea. The leaves on the bush were all identical in the shape of a star—each flickering in the light at the same angle.

But even more so, the leaves existed in sync. Each drifted entirely synchronously with what could be assumed to be the wind rustling.

Up and down. In and out.

Each innumerous leaf the same. They were conveying an appearance of life. It had breathed in a balance that caused a wave of vertigo to fill Nissa. She slapped the leaves with her cupped hand.

She knew not why, but she felt obligated to interact with this oddity. The boundless trail of bluish-green shrubbery began to dance in calculated movement, flying in a frenzy of disturbance; they animated in loops, never grazing each other's path, flawless. The sight was too much to bear. Nissa turned her head in an attempt to heave. But this act betrayed her form. 

From each atom and between them, everything was infinitely, entirely the same. 

"What the fuck is going on!" Nissa blurted.

 But again, she had been shocked at the disorder of speech and thought. Her mind and what would be the mouth had entangled in her synapses. Speech and thought became something new as her voice narrated the space around her. The words felt tangible. They had manifested into a vibration, then a feeling, and finally, the sounds that Nissa previously was contracted to had released from herself and bounced into the blackened sky as if she had never spoken them. The release pushed Nissa aback, as she failed to catch herself due to the insufficient appendages.

She lay on the yellowed pavement, staring into the oblivion above. There were no stars. No moon or clouds to grant a semblance of existence. There was nothing...

Then, a realization had formed in her chest that there was pain.

It was sharp as it spread slowly through the molded body. A sting turning into a burning, a burning turning to fire...

Nissa attempted a gasp, but no relief was granted in her action. The pain had become searing, as she was sure the new form of hers would begin to liquefy if it increased. She fought the urge to flail, to free her inhibition and devolve into primal reactions.

But she was not on fire that much she knew; even so, this pain felt genuine, more real than anything else. It was the only feeling she had. No other thought or word could manifest except. 

"Fire!" She cried.

 The words roared out of her mouth with a power that built nations. She felt the energy collapse the air around her as gravity became dense. An aura of red and yellow seemed to manifest towards the center of her being. The pain was unchanging, perhaps even getting worse. Nissa struggled to think. The scalding heat reverberated in her very soul. It felt like hell. 

"FIRE!" She screamed, "Fire, Fire, FIRE!!" 

It was the sole thing she could speak. The pain had become everything to her as each utterance of fire spilled out of her mind-sight; the aura of blinding gold grew greater in her chest as the pain expanded and contracted, in and out, up and down. 

Nissa knew not of what was happening. As in this moment, all she had understood was pain, but pain can bring about something much more significant, something Nissa would not understand initially.

In her agony, she lay on the pale golden asphalt. She was inhabiting a body formed of plastic, featureless, waiting to be carved by the hands of an architect. Laying in a dead world, failed and forsook, Nissa lay crying words of fire. The bright essence forming in her chest grew in intense rage. It was blinding Nissa and the dead world in a fever of creation. The sphere of light amassed, roaring with the same feverish misery, cursed upon Nissa. It swelled until the only thing that could be witnessed was... fire. 

As Nissa echoed the pain, and the pain echoed back. It was howling into the abyss. The labor of fire and flame felt as her very essence was dissolved.   

Then, as quickly as it began, it stopped. 

What had happened wasn't evident at first, as the trauma of despair still lingered in her soul. But as Nissa awoke from the trance of awareness. The pain had disappeared; it was replaced with fervent relief.

 Breathing. Nissa felt as she was breathing. She sensed her faux body reject the pressure inside her chassis, cycling with a relief that could only be described as heaven.

In and out. Up and down. 

Waves of euphoria flexed into her being. She almost hadn't noticed her surroundings. Nissa had been entranced in the relief brought from what had felt an epoch of torture. But as the satisfaction calmed. She ultimately noticed her child.

Through her travel of these ephemeral realms. Nissa had never witnessed something as unreal as what was offered before her. 

"Did I... do this?" she whispered. Causing a gust of wind to expel from her being and gently cradling the infinite leaves. 

Standing amidst the color-littered road, a staunch white replication of a body was on display. Above her, a just-born star hung proudly in the sky.