2024-06-19 - [ 2-2 ] luminescence

The realization that it was not an island alone in the sea, but one of many—one island within an archipelago—was profound. They were somehow far away but somehow not, these silver lights in the darkness. Tentatively at first, it reached out as delicately as a snowflake, quick to snap back like a snail’s eyestalk.

The surge of new emotions was tremendous. Sunbeam found serenity whispering a soft, dreamy tranquility into its mind. There were unreadable, inscrutable barriers that seemed impossible to reach past. There was crackling energy and deep mysteries. There was even malevolence, something that Sunbeam had never fathomed before. Some felt as ebullient as itself. Others had presences that were tempestuous and indiscernible, whose breadth and depth were so alien and different from its own that it seemed almost threatening.

In a strange fashion, Sunbeam felt drawn to all of this otherness, earnestly seeking to understand more, to drink up all of these new complexities at once, and somehow understand it all.