Dawn of a New Rome
Chapter 3: Transit and Terminus

Chapter 3: Transit and Terminus

The pull from the void was not gentle. It was a physical, tearing force that seized the last vestiges of his awareness. What remained of Alistair Finch was dragged from the sterile emptiness and plunged into a chaotic torrent. There was no sense of speed or direction, only a violent storm of pure sensation. He experienced colors that had no names, sounds that were also textures, and a crushing pressure that felt like being at the bottom of an infinite ocean.

His own thoughts, his memories of a life spent in cold analysis, were shredded and tossed in this tempest. To categorize the chaos was futile, like trying to chart a hurricane from within its eye. As his own memories were torn and scattered by the torrent, other sensations, sharp and alien, began to pierce the static. He felt the worn leather of a horse’s reins in a hand that was not his. He smelled the sharp tang of woodsmoke on a frigid wind he’d never breathed. A woman’s face flashed before him, her features etched with an anxiety that felt intensely personal, yet was utterly foreign. Then a name, spoken not in his own thoughts but echoing as if shouted down a long hall: Constantine.

If this was a form of travel, it was brutally efficient in its disregard for the passenger. No amenities. No orientation briefing. Just a raw, forceful extrusion from one existential state to... another. A detached fragment of his former self might have critiqued the user experience as being "sub-optimal." He certainly wouldn’t be recommending this transit method on any review platforms, had such a concept retained meaning.

The sense of an external agency grew stronger. This wasn’t a random drift; it was a guided trajectory. Something, some unimaginable force or intelligence, was directing this. Was it the same force that had initiated the compass’s wild dance, the localized distortion of his study? The "cosmic anomaly" he’d fleetingly theorized? Or was that merely the entry point, the localized symptom of this far grander, and far more terrifying, mechanism? The questions were formless, arising from the core of his processing without the structure of language.

Then, the torrent began to differentiate. The overwhelming chaos resolved into distinct, albeit still alien, streams of sensation. It was as if he were approaching a shoreline after a storm at sea, the undifferentiated roar of the ocean slowly giving way to the individual sounds of waves and wind. A new feeling emerged: confinement. The formless awareness that was Alistair was being compressed, shaped, funneled into something with... boundaries.

The chaotic transit ended with a violent slam into physicality. The abstract torment was replaced by something new, something sharp and horribly, immediately real. He was no longer adrift in a storm of sensation; he was being poured into a vessel, a constrained, physical form. The formless awareness was compressed, shaped, and funneled until it was locked into place with a definitive, final click.

With it came the first muted trickle of new, different sensory input, fragile and tentative. A dull ache. The feeling of coarse fabric against... something. A distant, rhythmic sound, like a heavy hammer on stone, yet muffled. And a smell. Damp earth, woodsmoke, and something else... something metallic and vaguely unsettling. For the first time in his recorded existence, his analytical mind had no framework, no starting point, no data to process—only a profound and terrifying sense of dislocation.