"I'm nowhere." He thought, followed immediately by "I'm everywhere.", that was right before the first sensations started to reach his distant mind. Blackness faded, the sky glowed overhead, a pale opalescent bubble so close it seemed to brush against his face. Fingers trembling he lifted his left arm, stretching out his hand towards heaven. Long luminous webs of hot translucent slime snapped his arm back down with a resounding thud. It felt like it weighed as much as a monolith. Then all was light. There was a crash like thunder, accompanied by the impact of an invisible battering ram to the chest. Following the vacuum, he took a ragged first breath, the air whistling and then thrumming into his lungs with a sound like the whining turbines of a jet engine. There was a sensation, like an echo of the crushing blow from before, deep in his guts. He screamed as his heart beat for the first time, relentlessly pumping lava like blood through every thirsty vein in his tingling naked body.

"Fuuuuuuuuuuuck!" The alien word seemed to bounce off the surrounding structures, as he wrenched his entire body in a graceful half roll, half arc, that brought him almost instantly to his feet. Legs and arms spread, he stood semi-cocooned in a glistening net of deceptively salient ectoplasm. Wrapping his hands around the thickest rope-like strands, he strained to keep his footing on the slippery surface of the circular slab. Although it seemed of little relevance, he noted that he had been lying directly in the center, made conspicuous by the countless intersecting grooves etched from edge to edge of the dais.