The old man and the Kagami sit silently, waiting for the sun to rise over the treetops in the forest around them as the clear indigo sky gives way to bright orange and red that spread across the magnificent skies. The old man sighs and breathes deeply trying to stretch his hand up carefully as sharp pain crosses his whole body. Slowly, with a painful expression on his face, he pulls his arms back down into his usual hunch-back stiff posture and shakes his head.
"It hurts..." the Kagami said quietly without looking at him directly.
"It is" he murmurs. "but so beautiful at the same time..." he tried smiling, hoping it might be the last time he feels any pain.
His life journey on Six Gate, a small Earth-like planet orbiting Tau Hydrae, a triple star system in the equatorial constellation of Hydra, 59 light-years from Earth was never an easy one. At a young age, he managed to break his back falling from an apple tree and could never use his legs ever again. The colony on Six Gate was not an easy place to live in a wheelchair, alone, without any way to significantly help with any chore or task around the colony. Rumors about the Kagami have circled since he remembers himself. The reality designer and shapeshifter who could in a blink of an eye, transfer you through a quantum tunnel into a new reality timeline, but different from the other reality designers on Six Gate who could only shift the environment around you, the Kagami would transfer you into a different body, allowing you to restart a new cycle of life, fresh as a daisy they say.
"Are you ready? " the Kagami asked quietly, looking at me directly for the first time. I managed to bring a true real smile to my face, a smile I forgot I can even express anymore.
The Kagami rose and stood closer to me. A strange dizzying forcefield seems to surround her, I heard a loud high pitched sound rising over the early morning forest sound, almost deafening. Closing my eyes in pain and trying to cover my ears with the palms of my hand, reality around me starts falling apart into billions of shiny multicolored bright microscopic orbs.
"It might hurt a little at first" I heard the Kagami whisper close to my ear.
"Thank you, thank you so much..." I tried saying but my voice was lost in the sensory overload chaos around me and then I blacked out.
---
I woke up slowly into awareness - it was pitch black. Strange darkness I never experienced before. I tried moving but felt rigid without the ability to feel my body at all. Taking a deep breath felt as strange, I felt the air rushing into me from everywhere around me while a strange feeling of warmth filled me as Six Gate triple suns seems to bathe my body with their light from all directions. Coming into focus, I felt the hundreds of creatures walking all over me, and in me. It felt so strangely comfortable to be that rigid, strong and so large - spreading myself all around my bark hundreds of feet into the air and miles deep into the ground. It's a magnificent morning in the ancient Six Gate forest and I can feel all the rest of the trees around me phasing into a daylight state and the forest as a whole - I could literally feel everything around me for miles and miles away. I did not wake up myself I realized, we all woke up together into this gorgeous warm beautiful sunny morning and it felt so comfortably stiff for the first time in my life.
