A spear and a rope, lashed to a fragile wooden boat; a sharp flint head, knapped by small cunning hands, pierces the hide of a whale — but the whale is the ocean and the ocean is the whale, a living leviathan vaster than all the seas of earth, too large to turn inward to examine this tiny pinprick wound, too massive to comprehend the sting of stone on skin. The blubber is the water and the dermis is the waves; the muscles are currents, the blood is a thermocline, and the meaty darkness of internal organs becomes an abyss incarnate.

The spear snags in folds of flesh. The flint-sharp head is wedged in a tangle of thought, caught in a knotty twist of fractal mathematical perfection. Eyes proliferate across the whale’s hide; awareness grows where there was none before. Wounding and blood and torn meat forces attention outward.

The whale sees the spear, but it cannot know what the spear means. The spear is in my hands, rammed between the lids of a great Eye.

The whale and the ocean pull and buck and dive. The tiny wooden boat is sucked after the leviathan, speeding toward a lightness, spaceless, soundless nothing.

Pulling us down.

And down.

Down.

D

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An ocean closes upon itself, like water compressed into a ball. Reality folds tighter and tighter, squeezing with pressure enough to compact a whole world into a pinprick of mass and time. Nothing can escape the event horizon of a black hole, not even light, certainly not love.

But thought is faster than light. Hyperdimensional mathematics does not need time — only intent. Intent is timeless.

I had intent. Clear and clean and pure and bright.

But I could not fight an ocean, nor wrestle a whale.

Are we confusing you? Good. Does this poetic nonsense not help your comprehension? Then you begin to understand how it felt. Are you unmoored, missing your handholds in reality, lacking the familiar shape of words to lend meaning to space and time? Well then, welcome. That is what it was like, trapped in that single blink of non-time as the Eye attempted to negate the purpose of its own being. Human metaphor fails at the edge of a black hole; decent people do not contemplate what lies beyond the event horizon. Past that there is nothing that the human mind — the mortal mind, Earthly or Outsider or other — would recognise. Not even the King In Yellow, or Hringewindla, or Lozzie’s Star, or any of the weirder forms of sentience we had met in all the dimensions of Outside, would have grasped any insight into this collapse.

Perhaps not even the Eye itself understood what it was doing; it did not comprehend what lay beyond the moment of singularity toward which it was rushing.

Sort of like death.

The Eye was compacting itself and Wonderland — one and the same thing, in a way — past the point of no return, past the point at which nothing can escape the pull of gravity. Not physical gravity, but the gravity of pure observation. The weight of seeing and knowing. The mass of insight.

In that moment, as the singularity closed, as the Eye closed on itself, there was no such thing as time or space. Myself and my family, my friends — Raine, Evelyn, Twil, Praem, Lozzie, Zheng, Sevens, six Caterpillars and thirty Knights and a squid made of clay which lived in a bucket — were frozen in the act of turning toward the gateway back to Camelot.

There was no possible escape.

And I? Us? Seven Heathers?

We were all inside the Eye, clinging to the shivering boards of a tiny wooden boat as the whale dived toward crush depth.

This was not like being in the abyss. There was nothing here but an ending, a negation of everything that had been, Wonderland about to implode into nothing. The Eye was trying to stop observing, stop being itself, reject the underlying purpose and meaning of its own nature.

Why? To kill us?

To kill itself?

Because we were grit wedged against its surface and it didn’t know what to do?

I could not think, could not answer these philosophical questions — not because I was panicking, but because actual meat-based brain-powered thought was impossible. ‘I’ was abstracted beyond even the non-material core of my abyssal truth.

So it did not matter why.

I pulled and I fought without care for the damage I did. The Eye was trying to fold shut, but I had wedged a spear between the two halves of the lid, desperately levering to force it open with the fulcrum of a blood-soaked haft. My hands were slick with sweat and gore. My arms were torn and tattered from wounds I did not understand. I pulled and ripped at the innards of the giant with the point of the spear. I grew razor-sharp talons and sharp-edged claws. I sank glittering teeth and rending barbs into the endless sea of wrinkled skin. I sprayed acid and chewed up the flesh of reality, then spat it back out again mangled and melted and steaming. I became a living spear-point myself, wedging my entire being into the gap in the Eye to hold it open so it would not close forever with myself and my friends within.

But none of this was right. None of this could see victory, not against the weight of an ocean.

We widened our purpose. We gave up on metaphor.

Panic fell away. Sense fell away. Everything left us except intent.

We were in an ocean, and we were an ocean. The Eye was above us, scrunched up tight; we were within the Eye, standing upon the fragile cornea, ready to be swept away by the lids bearing down upon reality. We could not stop this process — not because the Eye was beyond us, not because it was too large, or too great, or too alien.

We could not stop this, because one cannot force observation.

One can force another to look upon the world, yes, but not to comprehend what is beheld.

The Eye was blinking. It would open again, vision cleared, to behold reality anew; the cessation of observation itself would wipe clean the slate of self and other. A cleared plate would await, empty of irritating grit.

We refused to go unobserved.

The Eye did not understand, did not comprehend, had no insight into human beings. So we held our arms aloft between the crashing halves of reality and unfurled everything we were made of — every memory, every experience, every fear and desire and intent. We would not be washed away by the ceasing of observation; we would pass through the blink, through the event horizon and out again, whole and complete and on display, unchanged by the act of being seen. The Eye could not ignore us, not blink us away like a speck of grit.

I’m here! Look at me! See me, observe me, even after you look again! Fuck you!

An apology for my foul language. A hiccup that was neither sound nor motion. Even beyond time and space, I was a very weird girl, I know.

Yellow tendrils grasped my hands.

A strange sensation in a place that was not a place and a time that was not time, but there was another there, working behind the scenes, deep in this ocean trench. A familiar soft touch joined my strength and weaved her own ways among the raw materials I had given. She worked to turn the dross I had spilled from my guts into a play worthy of a god. She wove and riddled and chiselled and chanted, imposing her own metaphors on this closing of the Eye.

But still reality folded up like a bubble.

I took everything I was, everything I had ever done, all the love and support of my friends — and Sevens’ hurried scribbling — and used myself like a pressurised wall of force, pushing outward, pushing back against the folding up of reality.

The blink met me.

And it burst.

Reality split asunder, like a sea parting down the middle. Eyelids rolled back, forced to awareness. Shining silver light burned bright and infinite. Air and open space. Time and being and—

And then reality crashed back upon us like the falling of a tidal wave, swallowing us all together.