Excerpt: Unity

Chapter 6

He lay there on the bed, motionless, staring at the pattern on the ceiling as it danced around in twirls and twists, each line darting between the others, knotting themselves together. Each line was a subtly different shade of blue, changing slightly as he followed one, round and round and round, the line never ended, looping back upon itself, ready to twist it's way around the others again. He followed another line, and it was the same, and another, and another.
Every line crossed every other atleast once, some twice, before looping upon it's own beginning. The overall picture looked like some Eldritch calligraphy, or a mangled Celtic weave. Ribbons of sparkling blue highlighted on the deepest, darkest unchanging black.
He could stare no more at the strange pattern that adorned his ceiling and looked towards the half open blinds.
At once he was standing there, looking out upon the city in all it's glory. The magnificent city he built, stretching for miles to where the broken line of buildings ended and the cavernous patchwork dome arced into the sky. A lattice of steel and glass that criss-crossed it's way back towards him.
Something was wrong with the sky.
Instead of the blanket yellow of Titan's near-night, punctured only by the domes own floodlights, the sky was a deep purple, gradually fading to blue at the horizon.
A presence behind him, he turned without moving. A young woman stood at the far side of his bed. Motionless, Emotionless, straight faced and incredibly beautiful. Her clothing was black, with a lace vail covering her face that none the less shone with light. It shone so perfectly that it reflected his own image back at him.
“Iona,” he whispered.
She beckoned for him to come to her. As he began to move, the room disappeared, replaced by the unpainted girders he had awoken to for the past three days.
He turned to his bedside clock, 10:14am. Startled, he jumped out of bed, straight into his clothing, and sprinted through the base towards the laboratory.