Last year I joined a writing group.  We met through a Facebook-for-writers type site and worked together for about 5 months.  We were all working on series, so we made our focus really pushing each other to refine the concepts and worlds our stories lived in.  Our goal was to delve deeper and push our concepts as far as possible.  I found the experience both inspiring and, at times, extremely frustrating.  Having one’s blind spots revealed is educational and humbling.

During that time I wrote many things that opened my heart and mind to the far corners of the Void and the characters that live there.  Some of these things have appeared in the short stories I’ve been posting and some found their way onto FemaleoftheSpeciesband.com

This piece was written purely as a love letter to the Void; the complicated world that appeared fully-formed in my mind as walked through the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  (The museum is one of my favourite places in the world.  If you ever get the chance, go! You won’t regret it.)

So here it is.

The Void.

     The ground is a deep gray.  It is pliant and yet impenetrable, walking on it feels like moving through a dream. This feeling is heightened by the gray sky, only two shades lighter than the ground.  The vistas move and undulate, hills and valleys morph with no heed of physics or time.  Cool black streams cross the landscape and leafless trees claw at the sky.

     This is the Void.  This is the portal to all of Time.  This is the place Travelers call home.  These creatures are the amalgamation of moments of evolution both seen and unseen throughout the galaxy.  Here they meet and prepare to watch us.

     They are invisible in our world to all but the extremely sensitive, animals can sense them and the trees know they are there.  The Travelers move in and out of our history, as at home crawling through a WWI trench as they are on the streets of New York City.

     It is through Phoenix that the worlds combine.  Watch as a mind raised in our linear mortal time is forced to embrace the fluidity of the Travelers’ world.