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I’m awoken by a soft whisper in my ear and a light hand on my shoulder.

Wake up, Kyungsoo.

What is it? I murmur back. Why? Sleep is still heavy and thick in my voice.

Something is about to happen.

Nothing more is offered to me. I sit up with a groan, wipe my eyes clean of my interrupted dream, and begin dressing.

Swiftly, now. We will miss it.

I heed the words and pull my fur over my shoulders. My companion lifts the flap of the tent up, and we step carefully outside amidst the burst of chilly wind. I straighten up once we are outside and breath in the crisp air, pulling my fur a little tighter around me. From our high mountain view, the stars are clear and bright. The darkness stretches on forever around me. It is a beautiful night, but there is nothing special about it.

Why did you wake me?

Ah, but you will see. Watch the sky carefully on this night.

Our breaths make small puffs of air that linger in the air. I gaze steadfastly at the sky, though I feel foolish. Minutes pass as we stand there.

Do you see it? There. I follow the finger to where it points.

An ordinary expanse of black night. I am about to turn away, question in my eyes, but then I, too, see it.

A small disturbance rippling among the stars and distorting into a circular shape. We watch, breathless, as the circle expands and then... opens up. Dual gasps hiss through the air. The circle is a sphere that holds iridescent flames, and the orange fire that spits around it has formed itself into the shape of a cat’s eye. I can’t look away from the center, the pupil of the eye, mesmerized by the otherworldly, swirling matter that speaks of things beyond what I will ever see in this world. A movement from the side catches my eye, and I tear my stare away reluctantly, only to see another eye open up. It is massive. Purple flames ring its center, and shiny black liquid in the center moves to its own mysterious pulse, flickering with little bits of silver. Slowly, my vision becomes filled with movement. I am transfixed, utterly so, as nebula eyes open up across the entire sky, some miniscule, some gargantuan. The largest seems so close to our mountaintop that I daresay I could touch it if I reached out. Each eye is a different hue. Soon, there are so many eyes that it seems as if the entire night sky has become one mass of pulsing material. A thin silver nexus, barely visible, forms and crisscrosses across the night sky even as we watch until everything is connected. The eyes to each other, and we to the eyes. We have become part of something more vast and alien than our own universe.

And it is beautiful, and it is terrible.

Each eye, each beating, living center, is a universe unto itself. I am staring into all that has existed and all that exists and all that will ever exist. The eyes call out to me, draw me ever closer. To step inside those rippling energies, those alien portals, and to disappear in an instant as if I had never existed, to be transported to a different universe with no way home, to be lost forever and yet to have found everything. I am filled with its ungraspable potential. There is so much out there, so much more than I ever imagined, and it is all here before me now...

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