The darkness in the bottle spilled out, flowing past her lips and teeth, down her throat, and into the depths of her digestive tract.
There was no time to savor the taste. It was either tasteless, or tasted like a concentrated distillation of every substance in the world—yet still not as flavorful as a sip of plain water. Incredibly complex and incredibly bland at once, impossible to describe as any one thing, yet reminiscent of everything that had ever passed through her mouth.
Before it reached her stomach, before the last trace of chill vanished into her body heat, a thought from deep within told the drinker: if you wished to understand, you first had to make contact. She was as certain of it as she was of words she had copied down herself, reading them while the ink was still wet. No second thought, no doubt.
The bottle's mouth still rested against her lips, waiting for the remaining liquid to fall, when an unbelievable change began.
She felt the stone-built structure grow as fragile as paper, as unreal as a dream's bubble glimpsed half-awake, unable to bear her light weight.
It made no sense. By all reason, the potion should have affected her body. She had prepared herself for a stomachache, or pain somewhere else. But in truth, everything except herself was changing.
Before she could figure out what was happening, everything around her seemed to have grown too brittle to support her weight. The support beneath her shattered with a crash, and her body dropped straight down.
It was like falling from one floor of a building to the next, but the scenery remained still, and the floor did not break.
Spots of color appeared everywhere she looked. They were mushrooms swelling at a speed too fast to