The world around him finished dissolving. All the colors broke up and flowed madly into one another and around one another and over one another. It was like being in the middle of a gigantic whirlpool trying to whirl in three or four directions at once. Blade saw streams of incandescent color flowing through him, but felt nothing.
Still the droning went on. The world was all madly racing colors and terrible noise, more and more furious each moment.
Then it was nothing at all but a blackness and a freezing, silent cold that Blade felt in the split-second before he stopped feeling anything at all.
Chapter 3
Blade popped into the new Dimension with his mind still filled with memories of the bone-chilling cold in the blackness between Dimensions. He found himself shivering violently as he drifted up to full consciousness.
He was lying on his stomach, on a hard, cold, rough surface. He could not see more than two feet in front of his nose. In those two feet he saw rough gray bare rock, with a few pebbles here and there and a small clump of sickly grass.
He shivered again, and realized that there was still a chilly wind blowing over his bare skin. As it always did at this point, his head ached. But it ached much less than usual. Blade raised himself on his hands and knees, scraping his skin on the rough stone. When the movement didn't make his head throb or spin, he gathered his legs under him and shakily rose to his feet.
He was at the bottom of a small draw in rugged, broken country. All around him rose gray rocky hills, seamed and scarred by millions of years of harsh weather, supporting a few stunted trees and a few patches of grass. The air was chill but dry and crystal clear, and in the brilliant sunlight that poured down from a flawless blue sky every detail of the landscape stood out dramatically.