The Vision
It shimmers brightly in several places.
The branches glimmer red. The interior of a knothole writhes with green shapes...
Tiny specks, here and there, glow a bluish tint.
And a wall of fire springs up around the tree.
Now, two other places of light are starting to glow.
Midway up the tree, at roughly equal levels, two spots are increasingly bright.
Spots appear on almost all of the branches, but not by the roots or the very top.
Writhing shapes from the heart of the tree spread out, and two of them go to the two new glowing places.
Then, for a moment, the outline of an angel springs up around everything, and shatters to shards of light.
Half the light of the upper branches diminishes, replaced by a smoky red glow at the roots.
The two new glows each shatter at the same moment, separating into two different colors.
In one, white and black.
In the other, blue-green and purple.
Now, everything, tree and lights, swirls up into a central point again.
This spreads out into the image of a featureless white figure overlooking a city.
It folds up into a full moon, which then has a red handprint stamped over it.
Stars falling from the sky and dissolving to something smoky, and a sound like ice cracking.
A regal-looking woman appears, and then falls, a gleaming knife in her back.
Two serpents writhe across each other, and below them tormented shapes contend against each other.
Everything goes dark for a moment.
Then, two more shapes appear. One is a crystal with cracks in it.
On the left side, they're healing, but the right side is cracking more, and dust is falling off it.
The other shape is an apple with two bites from it.
Then, the crystal and the apple move towards each other, and contact with a bright explosion of light.
A flaming bird rises up, and then crumbles to ash.
