The Black Passage

A silent, sullen man hurried off the street and into his apartment, a bundle of supplies in his arms. He closed the red door behind him and locked it with three locks, then set about the business for which he had prepared for months. He swept everything off his kitchen table and spread out the contents of his bundle. He changed into the robe the bundle was wrapped in and donned all the various amulets and instruments he would need for his journey. He laid down on his bed, next to which he lit a line of eight candles, each carven all over with mystic runes. After sleep took him, he slipped from his body and stood beside it, the world around him faded and out of focus, unable to touch anything except the smoke curling upward in eight colors from the candles. He took from his spectral pocket the instruments he had stowed there before in the waking material world. With these he drew a doorway in the air before him and then summoned up seventy downward stairs beyond. He passed through the shimmering gossamer film stretched across the doorway and began to slowly descend these steps, and at the end found himself alighting in another world, and weight and solidness had returned to him. He stood in a stone-brick chamber with slick lichen growing all over every surface, lit solely by a single light like a dim purple candle flame floating in the chamber's center.

There stood before him an open doorway, a yawning, malevolent portal filled with impenetrable blackness. He stared into it, and his soul went cold and he was sick with fear and dread. And yet, he knew his goal, whatever it was, the unknown prize at the end of the long-planned dream-quest, lay somewhere beyond that sinister gate. As he walked forward, his skin tingled and then burned with growing intensity, but he continued through the doorway and was plunged into the utter blackness. His skin began to bubble and melt from him as if the inky black into which he had plunged were acid, but he pressed on. His very flesh corroded away as he walked, and his organs withered and were consumed as if by unseen flames. All he could feel or perceive was burning corrosive pain and ice-cold fear and the choking darkness all around him, but he could not turn back now for he had gone too far not to finish this journey, whatever it was, however much he suffered from it. His skeleton, bare now to the violence of the passage, began to crack, and to slough off layers as dust. At the same time, a luminous foetus appeared, floating in his ribcage where his heart once was, and as the skeleton was slowly reduced to oblivion, this grew over agonizing minutes into a girl and then a woman, standing tall and strong in the face of the darkness. Her body shed opalescent light as if she were made from light itself. The darkness fled before her, and the pain and the fear followed quickly after to hiss and snarl impotently from the farthest corners. Only now that she had finally come into her true self could she begin her dream-quest in earnest.