Passage To The Other World (Fiction With A Touch Of Science)

Hello there! It is my name day today! First of all I'd like to wish Χρόνια πολλά! (Many happy returns of the day!) for the rest of those who share the same name with me! We are a God's Gift as our names suggest, but after all every person on this universe is ;)

For those of you who don't know it, a name day is when we celebrate the memory of the saint whose name we bear. In Greece we have it almost like a second birthday, with food and drinks and presents.

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Image source: pexels.com

A story that will unfold in a few episodes is coming out today. I hope I can find the time and inspiration to get the rest of it out soon, because real life sometimes deprives you of the privilege to creative isolation. Anyways, I hope you enjoy it!

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I don't know your relationship with requiems, but this one I feel it fits my story perfectly

She was walking on the beach... Her bare feet were touching the wet sand grains. Cold. She could sense them cold under her feet, stinging her and their cold touch penetrating her skin and travelling all the way to the rest of her body. Her fingertips were numb, hanging in a meaningless way from her palms. With every step she was taking, her arms were moving back and forth as if there was no life inside them. She was walking like she was already dead. 

They told her that if she wanted to find him, she had to walk along the beach on a stormy night. There had to be clouds in the skies. There had to be thunder in the distance. There had to be lightning to open the gateway to the Other World.

Afraid? She wasn't afraid. She had just been through so much pain, that she couldn't feel anything anymore. When they did part, the burden on her shoulders suddenly grew enormously. She felt like the whole world was drawn away. Her universe became a vast desert of gray figures wandering around her. And she was pinned in the middle of it. In her white dress, the one she was wearing right now, she was trying to move, but her soul had paralysed. 

Her breath and heartbeat were the only things that worked on autopilot and therefore she could not make her getaway from her shell... or cell? You choose how you see it. For some the body is a shell that carries the soul, for others it becomes a cell that confines it. Right now she felt she was imprisoned and there was only one way to escape. Find him. 

So, here she was following the instructions they had given her. She had to make it to the water, chest-deep, and then wait. She was still walking on the sand. The rumbling of thunder in the distance was almost hypnotizing her. She had to stand for a moment to marvel the spectacle, because the lightning had already started. The bright whips of the gods were tearing the skies in two. One right after the other, the divine punishment for the earthly sins was taking place in front of her.

She wanted to find herself in there. Get blind by the divine light, get deaf by the tremendous sound, get burnt by the scorching heat. She imagined becoming one with the energy that flew from the dark clouds and evaporating to mix with them. She imagined the tiny in size but humongous in power particles pricking her all over her body and passing through it, just to let her plasma dissolve in the air. 

The pain should be unbearable for a moment, but once you pass the crucial threshold of it, then nothing can touch you and you can't feel anymore. Then you have become something else, you have become one with the gods. No! You can't become one with them, that's blasphemy. You only get to touch the essence of them, but you are certainly miles away from your petty, mortal nature you were carrying a few fragments of a second ago.

There was darkness all around, but the scenery was all so brightly lit by the demonstration of the celestial mightiness! Her face was changing colors as the one flash was falling after the other and reflected upon it. Her eyes were wide open, trying to absorb as much of the miracle as she could. She was blinking and it was the only part of her body that was mooving. 

The storm was coming closer. The flashing clouds were moving towards her. They were coming to meet her in the shore. Her breaths were now deep and awe had taken her over completely! Soon the raging charriot of the skies was right above her head. She couldn't take her eyes off it. One more deep breath and oxygen filled her nose and mouth to travel down to her lungs.

The light was dazzling, but she did not close her eyes. The sand grains around her were dancing, they were twirling and slapping her legs in violence. They were rising from the ground and getting to her hands, arms, shoulders. They were now getting around her neck, she could feel them, she had become a sand tornado around a swirling white dress.

She opened her mouth and a scream that sounded more like a chant got out. Another, smaller tornado was coming out from the depths of her existence. In the beginning it was dark and grey but as the seconds were passing its color started to change; it became whiter. It was spinning out of her and spreading up the skies to meet with the threatening clouds she was confronted with.

As it was slowly approaching, its color turned whiter and whiter and from a dull white it finally turned to glowing silver ether. The moment of its final transformation coincided with a forceful lightning that became one with it and headed straight down to her.

A moment that lasted no more than a tenth of a second was enough to mark her touching the essence of the gods and passing to the Other World to find him.

All that was now left on the beach was beautiful glass and sand sculptures. Remnants of an existence that managed to fulfill its destiny and move to a superior level of being.

Image source: commons.wikimedia.org - Creator: Ji-Elle - Licences: 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, 1.0

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*Original story from @ruth-girl - Steemit 2018

Those sculptures on the sand are not some imaginary creations!

They are called fulgurites (from the latin word fulgur meaning lightning). They are actually lightning souvenirs since they form when discharge hits the ground and the extremely high temperatures "melt" the sand into these hollow formations. They can also be made when high-voltage devices touch the ground, during an atomic blast or even a meteor strike.

Image source: commons.wikimedia.org - Creator: Ji-Elle - Licences: 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, 1.0

Let's explain a bit more

Fulgurites are hollow and soft inside with a harder and rough outside. They are made from sand, which is rich in silicon and quartz. It can also form on soil, clay or rock. The result is a lechatelierite, an amorphous silica glass mineraloid (SiO2), whose final chemical composition depends on the elements found in the initial sand mass. The most common type is the sand fulgurite, found across deserts and beaches. The impurities in the sand will define the final color of the fulgurite, which ranges from white to black shades, but with a little iron in the sand you can get brown-green fulgurites as well. The ones created in rocks, are even rarer and take a vein-like shape inside the rock mass (as if the lightning tries to give life and blood to the souless stone). 

When lightning reaches the ground on its desperate search to let off steam somewhere, extreme temperatures of around 30,000 Kelvin end up melting and vitrifying the mineral grains of the sand. They are categorized among mineraloids, because they do not show a crystalline structure, they are rather amorphous. Fulgurites can grow deep beneath the subsoil, even as deep as 15 meters or, if the soil composition allows it, they can form on the ground. Their size can reach in diameter some tens of centimeters.

A piece of fulgurite found in an ancient greek altar dedicated to Zeus (the father of lightning in greek mythology) suggests that in the past they could have been used for spiritual purposes. The altar was situated on Mt Lykaion (Greece) and the fulgurite was found by geoscientist George Davis from the University of Arizona (source).

DIY fulgurites

It seems like you can make your own fulgurites at home (or lab preferably) through "controlled arcing of electricity into a fussable medium", since the chances to find some in nature are really, really low. You can either make some outdoors using a lightning rod during stormy weather or indoors like the youtube video below shows:

References

wikipedia.org
thoughtco.com
mnn.com

Thank you so much for your time!

Until my next post,
Steem on and keep smiling, people!