Empty, cold, lonely, terrifying.
The boundless vastness of the universe filled all life with awe.
The three who stepped through the Stone Archway found themselves within a corridor of flowing light. Every second, countless brilliant starfields and bizarrely shaped nebulae swept past their sight.
Those starfields and nebulae were made up of billions upon billions of stars, perhaps home to innumerable dazzling civilizations.
Even at Amosta's current level, the mystery and immensity of the universe still brought an indescribable shock to his soul.
If gods truly existed in this world, if there truly was a Creator, then it had to be the universe itself.
An instant was eternity.
The three of them might have spent hundreds of years in the passage across the stars. Or perhaps it had only taken the blink of an eye.
At the end of the radiant corridor, a dazzling white light appeared.
Before the three of them could offer any opinion on it, the white light that had just entered their sight swallowed them whole.
Silence.
Eternal, unbreakable silence.
It was as though "sound" had been stilled in this world, so as not to disturb the peace of the dead.
What kind of world was this?
At the end of the passage stood another Stone Archway, rising from a boundless gray "ocean."
An ocean.
Dumbledore lowered his eyes toward his feet. He used the concept of a "sea" from the world of the living to describe the magnificent gray liquid below them.
But in the next instant, the entire liquid ocean turned into thick gray mist before his eyes, ever-changing, gathering and dispersing.
There was no concept of earth or sky.
Where they stood was simply a space filled with gray mist.
Spatial storms were especially violent and chaotic here, sweeping the gray mist through