Limit: 1,000 words

A thousand colours swished around her in an ever-moving whirlpool of light. There were greens and blues, reds and yellows, purples and golds and more shades of orange than she could ever have imagined.

Astra was aware that she was moving, floating through what to her seemed like a long tunnel, filled with small sparks, fireworks, of light.

They spun around her, each one shouting words, telling stories that she had only seconds to try and understand.

Some were short, stunted images of gnarled hands pressing what to her looked like red paint against a stone wall, the painter clad only in sparse pelts - animal pelts - crouched over like they couldn't stand up straight.

Another, of a scientist, a physicist standing in-front of a blackboard, pointing to the complex diagrams spread across the board with a long, slim wooden stick. Up at the top left corner of the board, she made out the word 'Einstein'.

What were these things? Were they memories? Were they historic events? Astra couldn't remember much, not before the tunnel, before the flitting images and bright, patternless lights.

There was another now, longer, flitting past her as if I'm slow motion, unravelling like a butterfly from a cocoon, the colours forming pictures. She became immersed in the moving images, a part of them as they spun and twisted together before her eyes.

Suddenly, she wasn't floating anymore, suddenly she was standing in the middle of a field.

There were people around her, talking amongst themselves, gathered in a loose crow. They all wore shimmering clothing that seemed only half opaque, that glinted in the sunlight. As she watched, the tailcoat of a tall, older man with greying hair transformed into a neat waistcoat and blazer, complete with dress shoes, smart trousers. It was interesting to her, she took a few steps closer, looking him up and down.

He was unfamiliar to her, not someone she'd come across yet in this strange, strange place. He had a charming face, with soft blue eyes, shaped eyebrows and a neatly trimmed beard. He nodded to the woman beside him, and then stepped away from the small group he'd been standing with, gesturing to a blue-tinged screen that sat on his wrist.

He closed his eyes, pulled his left hand into a fist, and suddenly began to shimmer himself.

Astra watched, entranced, somehow knowing she could do nothing anyway, knowing without any explanation, that if she'd tried to touch him - anything here - she wouldn't have been able to, and so she observed.

The shimmering moved from his clothes, to his skin, across his wrists, his neck, his face... and then he was gone, just like that, vanished into thin air.

The colours returned after that, sparking around her, engulfing her in seconds.

It was all so strange, she couldn't make any sense of it, or what was happening.

Where was she? What were these colours? These images?

She looked down at her hands, her body, at her hair floating around her head, not sitting on her shoulders as she'd have expected it to. It was all just strange, she didn't have another word for it, nothing else really described it as well as that did.

Astra floated for a while more, she wasn't sure how long, whether it had been hours, or minutes, or days, or seconds, she had no way of knowing. The lights were constant, she felt no different than she had what felt like hours ago. She wasn't tired, or hungry, or thirsty, she was just weightless, just falling through a tunnel that made no sense.

Eventually, she grew bored with doing nothing, with only getting sucked into a few of the images to break the cycle. She decided to try something, to try and do something other than just sit there and do nothing.

She raised one hand, holding it out in-front of her, and thought. She thought of that first image, the one she'd seen barely any detail of, the one with the paint and the stone and the animal pelts, she pictured it as best she could, which really wasn't all that great.

It was like she'd done this before, which was strange for Astra, definitely strange. She knew how to get the image, she knew what she had to do, it was just actually doing it that she guessed would be more difficult.

Then, she felt a kind of chill travel along her arm, towards her fingertips. She could see nothing on her arm, nothing at all to suggest anything spectacular was going to happen.

And then it did.

A beam of light shot from her fingertips, exploding in a fountain of colour, shaping itself into the image she'd seen before, only this time, there was something different about it, this time, the painting on the wall was shown in all its glory.

On the wall there was a girl, drawn in black paint, her hair a white-grey blur around her head. Colours spiralled out around her in all directions, each leading to new, different images, possibilities, scenes and spectacular events.

She was at the centre of it all.

She was at the centre of the universe.