Up ahead the bright heavenly body that had been our guide swung sharply to the right and then seemed to pivot around in a circle and then was gone from our sight. Jim and I shared a meaningful look and quickly we stood to either side of the wheel ready to help each other.
I saw it only moments before we plunged headlong into it. The upturned waters of the sea had been turned into a gigantic whirlpool!
"Turn the wheel!" I yelled, but Jim had already spun the wheel from his end, as I pulled from the other end. The Celestia's Prize swung to the right and plunged downward around and around the whirlpool of cylindrical flowing water that went down and down and down into the depths of the sea.
It became so dark that all we could see was the faint light of the star that we had followed here far far below us. It was as if we were in a long train tunnel and the outside light was just a brief dot of color in the distance.
The ship was beyond steering and we were all thrown around the wheelhouse as the ship's wheel spun free making its own way down the mad white-water course. Overcome by the dizziness of our spiraling descent there wasn't one of us that was able to keep from retching horribly as we tried to grasp a hold of anything we could latch onto in our desperation to find a solid purchase of some kind in our fast-moving world of spinning fright.
Fear began to rise up in me that we could never survive such an event as this. Somehow this had all been a terrible mistake. It had to have been.
I grasped a hold of the threads of my spinning consciousness and jerked them to stop, because what I had dreamed and seen was real and it would come to pass even as God was not a liar. Armed with that faith I looked ahead out the forward windows and almost lost my faith for the second time.
There was a lot of light ahead of us now. Red light glowed eerily up at us through a hazy mist. It appeared like we were plunging straight to hell!
The smell and steam of boiled seawater pervaded into the wheelhouse so thickly that we could hardly see each other as we coughed on the somewhat acrid fumes. I wiped at the condensation of the wheelhouse window and briefly saw a vision of what hell must look like.
Columns of red magma rose all around us as the seawater rushed around the hissing landscape of molten fire as we plunged down through a gap in the mantle of the world. The red was suddenly gone after it seemed like it had been there for an eternity and breathing became easier for only a moment, until it became clear that we were all freefalling through space.