A second wave of reverberating noise filled the bore, but this time it was somehow less deafening. Lars heard voices echoing around him, but could not focus on any one in particular. On the inner surface of his eyelids, a kaleidoscope of impossible colors danced and pulsated, and, in that moment, Lars was unable to see anything. In his last moments of consciousness, the voices around him grew louder, as he felt his body lifted up, and then swiftly dragged down with force. He drifted into a cavernous, gaping maw, where nothing of him remained but the chaotic, frantic chatter of a mind suddenly freed from all physical constraints. The kaleidoscope before him swirled and heaved, as whatever abstraction of his former self continued to spiral down, ever deeper. Somewhere, in that dissonant vortex, a version of him existed, born out of the sacrifice of his corporeal form to a deep and uncaring void. Somewhere, in a place where time and space existed only as vague memories, and where life and death were traded in the same currency, he could feel himself tether to an innate and boundless reality. Somewhere, beneath the light and the darkness, between the pain and the acrid gas that filled his lungs, within the electronic chatter that resounded in his bones, and among the voices that rambled in their unceasing, ancient drone, Katerine was waiting.