Floodwaters

Most teenage girls don't spend their free time researching quantum physics. Then again, I was not exactly your average thirteen-year-old. I found myself torn between belief and logic, and yearned for balance between the two. A small part of me was beginning to panic as I wondered if I was simply insane.

Thankfully, Ahkra had pointed me in the right direction, even if his wording had been strange. As I looked to Stephen Hawking for help in his "The Universe in a Nutshell", I discovered that Ahkra's explanation of the birth of an infinite number of worlds, while far more poetic than the physics version, was surprisingly accurate. The idea that we live in one universe amount an infinite number of parallel universes, with all of these worlds being a part of one multiverse, had a lot more support than I would have expected. As for dark matter, that mysterious last suggestion that Ahkra had given me before I began my frantic search, it seemed far stranger than magic or any of my unorthodox spiritual experiences.

More or less, our galaxy (and for that matter, the universe) should be flying apart by now. There just isn't enough mass to hold it all together with gravity. Even so, nothing is flying apart, and it seems like things are held together pretty well. So, something in the universe is producing quite a bit of gravity, but we can't see or detect it at all. Hence the name: dark matter. It was tough to find very much information on dark matter, though. Apparently it is still very much of a mystery in science. I did read an interesting theory somewhere, however. Large gatherings of dark matter could be "reflections" of a great star in another parallel universe -- a star large enough to effect the gravity in the next world over.

I can't say for sure whether this is really the case or not, and science is always evolving, but all in all, my questing through physics books did more to reassure me that what I was experiencing with Ahkra and Arc was indeed possible, and assured me of my own sanity. Ahkra had insisted that magic and science were not at odds with each other at all, and it seemed more and more like there might be a bit of truth to that statement.

Reassured that I hadn't taken a swan dive off of the deep end of crazy, I began to trust my traveling, and Arc and Ahkra a bit more. That trust, apparently, was the equivalent of a damn breaking, however, and the water was starting to rush in.

Before I knew it, I felt almost like I had one foot in this world and one in every other world, and new 'connections' began to form. More, and more, and more of them.