Once is enough to have beheld the unlovely realm of Hell, once to have gone across the stream of Styx.
--Ovid, Metamorphoses
The storm spun around me.
The elemental might of it was dizzying. Intoxicating. Once I would have sought to tame the power of this maelstrom, but it was far beyond me now.
Amidst the twisting tumult of shrieking wind and black water and salt, there was a gasping moment of agony and a strobe of lightning, then I could see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing except an endless moaning roar. I was reduced to a mote of consciousness, quiescent at the center of the darkening tempest. The voices in my head which had whispered at me since childhood were silenced. The centuries of memories over which I brooded disintegrated, and I had no past, and no future.
I simply was.
Time passed, in a place where time was meaningless.
--Ovid, Metamorphoses
The storm spun around me.
The elemental might of it was dizzying. Intoxicating. Once I would have sought to tame the power of this maelstrom, but it was far beyond me now.
Amidst the twisting tumult of shrieking wind and black water and salt, there was a gasping moment of agony and a strobe of lightning, then I could see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing except an endless moaning roar. I was reduced to a mote of consciousness, quiescent at the center of the darkening tempest. The voices in my head which had whispered at me since childhood were silenced. The centuries of memories over which I brooded disintegrated, and I had no past, and no future.
I simply was.
Time passed, in a place where time was meaningless.