It ran from her in rivulets, twirling in the fantastic gravities of the supercluster.

Most of it boiled away in the heat, but what thin streams remained flowed long and strong, flickering with shoals of worlds, alien yet familiar in their patterns.

Upon these worlds moved unconscious systems in which the tiniest creature was a cog in a delicate balance eternally precarious. She watched herself go away, the semblance of flesh and its trappings becoming transparent folds in the vacuum.

Then it twisted away, and she watched its movements across the baryon to meson. She was a creature shedding a dream of herself with the dry, cosmic rasp of a sundered chrysalis. She turned in the void, a galleon of self, enjoying the slide of sheer thought on the lubricated surface of reality as opposed to wading through it in a corporeal form.

She thought of a memory and she was there, instantaneously traversing unthinkable distances. She had thought herself almost godlike before…