Sci-Fi Shelf

The chamber did not speak in words. It breathed.
After the red thread flared and the compass was absorbed, the crystalline sphere began to rotate faster, casting fractured light across the domed walls.

Shadows danced in patterns Thane couldn’t decipher, some geometric, others organic, like the silhouettes of forgotten rituals.
He stood still, waiting, with the sense of vertigo, making him grasp out at the wall for something stable.

The pedestal beneath the sphere began to hum, low and rhythmic, like a heartbeat buried beneath stone.

Then the walls shifted, not physically, but perceptually. The chamber folded inward and Thane was no longer alone.

It was like tripping on a ‘magic mushroom or an all-night drinking session it was surreal...

A memory unfolded around him.

He was standing in a room he didn’t recognise, yet... felt intimately familiar. A child’s bedroom, perhaps. The walls were lined with books, drawings and fragments of circuitry.

A small bed sat beneath a window that looked out onto a field of stars.