The world as she had always known passed Ashlin Rhodes faster than anything she had ever seen as she fell down a tunnel of flashing images and sounds. Barely aware of herself, all she could focus on as she blearily took in what she could was the life she had lived displayed all around her on the walls of the portal tunnel.

She watched herself being born, gruesome and bloody, and couldn’t help but feel a grimace on her face. But her mother’s tears of happiness and her father’s panic when the doctors took her just to be cleaned up made her heart soar.

Oh God. Am I ever going to see them again?

The images changed in an instant, and now she surrounded by her toddler self, running around the backyard as her older sister chased her with a stick. Both of them were laughing at the top of their lungs. She smiled. It had all been in good fun until her sister swung the stick and accidentally caught her in the forehead. They had stood sheepishly in the doorway as their mother roared at them for their stupidity with her hand, swaddled in a tea-towel, pressed to Ashlin’s bleeding forehead.

Seria, will you ever be there to teach me anything ever again?

More memories passed and she grew older and older. She watched herself holding onto the car door tightly as her first school loomed before her. Her mother had to pry her away and practically carry her inside. She entered her teenage years as a rebellious and cut her hair for the first time in front of a mirror. It came out short, shaggy and uneven, but she had loved it. Her first girlfriend at seventeen had loved it too, and Ashlin’s first kiss made her reach for her lips in memory.  The young woman had introduced her to the lesbian world, a place where she finally knew she belonged. The memory meant so much, but unfortunately, falling through a tunnel at breakneck speed made it too hard for her to lift her hand to her face

Thank you, Emery, for showing me who I really was.

As she reached her current age of twenty, the images faded out and felt her consciousness slipping away. Panicked, she fought it. Would she die, or just fall asleep for a while? No one had known what would happen when she entered the portal. They had only wished her luck.

Hopefully luck is all I’ll need, Ashlin thought as her eyes slipped closed and she felt everything disappear.