Excerpt: Something Rich and Strange

She threw herself overboard.

It wasn’t what she expected. She’d expected oblivion, and what she got was more sensation, more awareness, all of it physical, all of it unwelcome. Every thought was driven out, which was good as far as it went. But her body...she had no idea her body contained a feral intelligence and will of its own.
She was cold, condensed. Then a point where intense pressures strove. There was motion around her and inside her; she was both scoured and invaded. The water wasn’t liquid; it was fire and ice and iron hands; it was intimate and universal, like the God she had been taught to worship if only she’d had the sense to know it, but sense was lost to her among her senses, all of which were raw and strengthened to hyperpower.
That was the first second.