As they contemplated that divine structure—or what resembled one—a distant mechanical hum emerged.
In an obscure corner of that infinite silver void, a small black dot appeared.
Slowly, like an eyelid yielding to sleep, a door opened in the emptiness. Clonmacnoise announced herself.
And in a moment neither Butler nor Mogan could clearly recall, the door stood before them.
Had they jumped? Teleported? No one knew. Yet it felt unnaturally natural—like a dream whose beginning you've forgotten, yet one that still, somehow, makes perfect sense in your mind.
They took a single step… yet it was more than a step.
They crossed much… and little… all at once.
Then, they found themselves inside the ship.
The ship's interior… was exactly like the exterior.
Boundless white. No walls. No floor or ceiling.
Perhaps this was due to a simple truth:
Clonmacnoise did not distinguish between inside and outside.
She existed beyond such concepts entirely.
But within the narrow scope permitted to human understanding… one thing was certain:
To be inside Clonmacnoise… was always to be inside her.
Fayette raised her small hand and let her fingers sink into the white void, like someone brushing dust off forgotten furniture.
An electric buzz crackled from nothingness.
Then…
The white split.
Into colors—innumerable, indescribable.
Clonmacnoise was no mere ship. She was an entire universe wearing her own skin, a cosmic television screen flipping through every possible frequency at once before—as if someone had pressed pause—finally settling on a single channel.
…An endless silver corridor.
As if carved from metal glass polished to death.
The hallway teemed with… devices. Machines without names or labels. Yet these were not machines with fixed functions, as the world knew them.
Here, in Clonmacnoise…
Any machine could be anything.
A coffee maker could write a novel.
A washing machine could birth a stellar explosion.
A toaster might invent a complete language… or erase one from existence.
Boundaries had dissolved.
Everything depended solely on *thought*.
Your idea—a passing whim—could instantly manifest through the nearest machine.
As Clonmacnoise stabilized into this scene, Mogan and Butler inhaled their first breath since entering this non-place.
The air was strange… almost air, yet not quite.
Though aware of their surroundings, interaction felt impossible. So impossible, they didn't even notice it.
Mogan, staring into the white expanse, murmured:
"Clonmacnoise? So the legendary ship is real…"
Butler replied absently:
"More than real. I'm starting to doubt if *I* am."
Fayette laughed lightly:
"Don't flatter her too much—she's easily embarrassed. Now… let's move."
She led them toward a sheer white wall. No doors, no seams—just void. Then, abruptly, the wall slid aside like a curtain of light, revealing a passage into a vast glass dome.
Here, everything changed.
The dome overlooked a cosmic vista: a shadowy shore stretching to the horizon, the sky woven with galaxies intersecting like threads in a spiderweb of light.
Inside the dome?
Holographic screens flickered in and out. Computers floated midair like half-formed thoughts.
3D control panels spun aimlessly, as if waiting for the right idea to take shape.
Here, anything could become *everything*.
A control panel could morph into a tea brewer. A display screen could turn into a violin.
No one truly knew any machine's purpose—unless you decided what it should be.
On the translucent holograms, data streamed… incomprehensible, yet somehow useful.
Mogan, struggling to parse the madness, asked:
"What is this room?"
Fayette grinned:
"Isn't it obvious?… The bridge."
Butler laid Simon's body gently on the glass table, his rough touch attempting, for once, to learn tenderness.
Every movement was slow, deliberate—as if the body might shatter from a mere glance.
Mogan paced the central chamber in silence.
His eyes traced the floating screens, the panels that formed and dissolved like mist, as if searching for hidden logic… or an escape.
Fayette, meanwhile, hovered above them. No sound of wings, no shadow cast upon the white floor.
Suspended between ceiling and ground, she watched them for a moment, then turned her gaze to her small hands.
She flexed her palms before her eyes, as if seeing them for the first time. No anger crossed her face. No surprise. Only something quiet—something like boredom.
She smiled.
And in a voice so light it might have been a thought:
*"I don't like this anymore."*
No one looked up immediately. The words weren't strange… but the world shifted after them.
For a breath, the Clonmacnoise's machinery stilled—a sterile silence, like the pause before a storm—then split by the hiss of fire with no visible source. The voids between the glass walls trembled, as if the unseen flames burned the emptiness itself. A crackle of electricity seeped through, sharp with the scent of scorched almond husks, and the lights dimmed to a strobing pulse—white/black, like filmstrip devoured by a projector.
Fayette froze midair. Her breaths slowed; the motes of light around her hardened like suspended snow. Her pupils rolled inward, leaving only pearlescent white. In a voice scraped raw, as if broadcast through a broken radio, she uttered:
"O spirit…"
The laws of mass unraveled. Her small head lifted higher than her body, as if pulled by a thread from another dimension. Her frame elongated slightly; her wings splintered into silver sparks. Then, suddenly, she gasped—an unnatural inhale. Her narrow chest expanded to an impossible breadth, like liquid mercury swelling inside her without logic.
From a mouth too small for a matchstick erupted a pillar of lapis fire, threaded with black veins like spilled ink. A flame perfectly straight—a seamstress' needle stitching void to nothing—lanced through the glass dome's ceiling, fracturing it into a filigree of glowing cracks, then surged upward like an inverted tree. The heat burned no one, but the air around them peeled away: sounds dissolved, colors stripped, until the scene became a flickering photographic negative.
At the flame's zenith, it curled upon itself like a tongue consuming its owner. The pillar spiraled around Fayette in a vortex, collapsing like a video rewound until it was nothing but a burning nerve swallowing its source. One final flash the sound of glass stabbed from within then silence.
The fire vanished.
In its place stood a strange woman at the center of the room: wild yellow hair, emerald eyes too bright, ears long and tapered like an elf's. Her wide smile was Fayette's, carrying the same familiar mischief—that eerie confidence, that hint of mystery.
Mogan stared, his voice a mix of awe and fear:
"Fayette?"
Hesitant, as if questioning his own sight. He was no stranger to shape-shifting magic, but this this felt sacred. Different.
The woman laughed, a sound bordering on hysterical delight.
"You could call me that."
Butler stayed silent, his fear etched into every muscle, but he knew better than to argue. Some moments defied questions.
Fayette's voice was steady now, unwavering:
"Well. We're saving Simon now."
The unspoken threat in the air snapped them back to focus.
Butler exhaled.
"Right. What's the plan?"
Fayette snapped her fingers with a soft click, and the table holding Simon's body shifted gaining organic-looking wheels, as if it had become a new creature ready to move.
At once, it began darting around the room with frantic energy, as if screaming, "Look at me! See how brilliantly I glide without dropping him?"
"I'll heal him," she declared. "Stay here. Do whatever it is you do."
Mogan turned to her, uneasy.
"You're leaving us alone? What if we make a mistake? Ruin something?"
Fayette shrugged.
"Do you think the Clonmacnoise is just a hunk of metal obeying random orders? She knows you're sometimes fools. She won't let you do anything stupid."
With a decisive step toward the exit, the gliding table in tow:
"Now—let's go."
Fayette strode down the silver corridor, the modified table floating smoothly behind her. Only the faintest hum betrayed her presence.
At the end, a door materialized—a frame of translucent energy, its name glowing in the air:
T-NEXUS.
The letters pulsed in gradients of pale blue and metallic gray. The door slid open, revealing not screens or controls, but an empty chamber dominated by a single pinprick of light.
Fayette stood before it. She raised her hand—not touching, but *intending* toward the light. Her face settled into calm certainty.
"T-Nexus… the next model."
A whisper. A tremor. The door dissolved inward like collapsing light.
She entered, the table following. The surfaces sealed behind them in a seamless electric sigh. A flicker of gray darkness then a flash.
They stood at the threshold of a new room. Its title hung in the air:
It wasn't a room in any conventional sense. More a bounded field of light, its walls not fixed but participating in their own construction pulsing, rewriting themselves moment by moment.
At its center stood a machine: part medical scanner, part cosmic loom. Transparent rings rotated slowly around a horizontal axis, some segments solid, others woven from frozen light or breathing metal. Through them, distortions of time and space warped—not literal lines, but conceptual bends, mapping the invisible seams of the moment.
Fayette guided the table forward. It merged with the machine effortlessly, as if the ship had been waiting.
The rings ignited in pulses synchronized to something undefined—as though the room sensed Simon's presence and began parsing his temporal frequency.
No commands. No words. The Clonmacnoise already knew.
Fayette turned. A new passage opened in the wall light birthing light. Before leaving, she cast one last glance at Simon, suspended in the glowing rings.
Then she was gone.
The machine hummed to life. This wasn't healing. It was redefinition a recalibration of his place in time.
Hours later.
The machine's murmurs faded. Simon stirred.
Waking felt like dawn neither warm nor cold, but hazy, as if time itself waited for him to coalesce. He lifted his head slowly. The rings still pulsed around him, cycling between velvety blue and silent gray. The air no longer moved normally; it stretched and recoiled around him like languid breath.
Consciousness returned strangely: first, he *heard* time. Memories flowed like transparent filmstrips. A new weight settled in his chest his heart, denser.
He opened his eyes.
The change was subtle. His pupils, slightly elongated, caught the light diffusing from the rings. When he touched the cold platform, his skin felt unchanged yet richer, as if each nerve now pulsed between past and future.
He looked up. The chamber's ceiling reflected phantom moments: lands unknown, events unborn, memories displaced. He couldn't distinguish what had happened from what might only that the machine had stabilized him amid the storm.
He tried to stand.
The first step was sharp—a surge of motion through his veins, as if he moved through tunnels inside his own body. Gripping the platform's edge, he resisted collapse. His feet met the faint floor. The space bent to accommodate him.
Then—a voice.
"Your balance is preserved. But reality has shifted."
Simon turned. A stranger stood before him: wild yellow hair, emerald eyes, tapered ears.
"Who are you?" he rasped. "Where am I?"
Fayette raised one hand theatrically, the other pressed to her chest like a bourgeois orator.
*"Oh, you poor thing… Have you forgotten? You've met death. Now you're in Xibalba."*
Simon recoiled. "Xibalba? Am I—dead?"
She laughed, bright and merciless.
"Relax! I'm joking. You're not dead. It's me—Fayette." Her voice echoed through the chamber, welcoming him to something beyond life and death. "Welcome to the Clonmacnoise."
Write's Corner
Greetings dear travelers,
Honestly, this chapter didn't fully land for me.
I'm not sure what's missing
Maybe a rhythm that hasn't found its pulse yet.
Still, I can't quite put my finger on it.
What do you think?
If something felt off—or almost right—tell me.
Your thoughts might be the next frequency Clonmacnoise needs to hear.