The Ghost of Matter

So some of my friends have started a forum to improve our writing skills. This is the first month's prompt. "There was light, but then there was nothing." This is my entry.

The Ghost of Matter

I have just been born again. Memories of a previous life, that had lasted forever, is fading fast. I am already forgetting my consociate. We came together when the universe was young and strange, before even the stars were born. I had formed an unbreakable bond with my feisty companion of ages. For billions of years, we traversed unmolested through stellar nurseries and their planetary progeny. The stories I can tell of these times are many and wonderful, but at the end of that long journey, we ended in a glass trap. We were a perfect coupling, waiting for the eventual disintegration of our prison, with the patience that only the most ancient and immortal entities in the universe can muster. Destiny, had other plans for us. Unceremoniously, we were thrown out of our house of glass. Unseen energies ripped us apart in different directions. I did not think that such a thing was possible. I anticipated my brokenness, a state of utter destituteness. That did not, however happen. The sudden divorce invigorated and charged me. I am bereft of my skittish partner, but somehow I find myself excited. I am moving fast, faster than I have ever gone, pulled from ahead and pushed from the back by the same energies that tore us apart.
It is a strange environment I find myself in. The air here is rare, rarer even than the gulfs between the stars. It is also extremely cold. I am being filled with unnatural energies. Only once, have I experienced something like this before. A star that had eaten itself, had collapsed into a hole in the spacetime continuum. It was an evil thing, a mouth all around, and an invisible and insatiable stomach. Just outside the reach of its jaws, was a stream of accelerating plasma and gas. In a singular case of cosmological synchronicity, there were two galaxies colliding in the vicinity. Their own clouds of gas and dust collided, sending shock waves through space. Matter itself broke down and died when the jet from the black hole interacted with the colliding gas clouds. It was only here, temporarily stuck in the jet stream, that I had ever experienced anything like what is happening to me now. My consort had survived even that, and so I cannot imagine what gargantuan forces are at play here.
I am still moving ahead at tremendous velocities. I am sensing something about the environment around me. When you have lived for as long as I have, you can feel your way through vacuum as well. I am feeling through tiny traces in the rarified space itself, sensing paths where me or others like me have passed through before me. There are also the periodic energy boosts. I think it is a good idea to start timing the regular stimulations.
I have a suspicion that I have been released from one prison, only to be entrapped in another. This appears to be of sinister design, a spiral of death. Attoseconds are turning into femtoseconds. There is a stretch where I can sense another energy source firing up, and there is nothing left from me to strip off.
How it envelops me. Despite my tremendous velocity, it is deflecting me. Now I am in another circular trap. The timing of the boosts have changed. I sense I am going around in larger circles, instead of a spiral. I am still getting supplemented with more energy. There is a stretch, where the traces branch off, and I have a suspicion that I will soon be treading this unknown road.
My suspicions have come true. In a few nanoseconds, I am made to navigate through a winding, twisted path. Now I am back to going around an even bigger merry-go-round. I suspect some foul form of sorcery at play, as I do not know of any natural forces that can possibly do this. The energy levels in me are so great, that I am almost travelling at the speed of light, even though I am infinitely heavier than the tiny sparks that make up light. Now there is a new kind of force appearing, neither pushing me from behind, nor pulling me from ahead. It is pushing me down on me, uniformly, from all sides. Again, I sense a field starting up. I do not know whether it will rip me apart, divert me to another track, or make me go even faster. The fundamental laws of physics would be broken if I speed up any further.
The gate releases. There is another bendy path, far longer than the previous one. Now I am making the largest circuit. There are many energy sources peppered about, of unknown purposes. It is so cold and empty here, but there are still remnants. Remnants of the most horrible kind. I sense the decayed and dead bodies of my cousins all around me. I have a bad feeling about this. Apart from the black holes themselves, there is no known force in the universe that can possibly destroy us.
Impossibly, I am going even faster. I have timed the gate passing me by 11,245 times a second. It feels like I have been here forever, although it could be at most twenty minutes. Some solace! I find more of my kind with me. We were all separated from our companions. Most are beings from the early cosmological era, from my time. We are being squeezed together. In all the circuits, there seems to be a set of energy sources positioned in the opposite direction. It seems like whatever is happening to us in this tunnel, is happening to another set in another tunnel. I do not yet comprehend the purpose of this experiment.
The shutters have opened. I understand now. Annihilation. Brothers are forced to fight brothers. The tunnel in the opposite direction is now merged with ours. We will smash into each other, and be destroyed. What will be left, even I cannot guess. I can see it coming now, my death. A future made up of nothingness. It begins with light, the light in the middle of a hideous tunnel that folds in on itself.