Of all the faces to greet him.
“Hector,” said the general.
“Sensus,” gasped the duke.
He looked over his shoulder at his companions. Holloway shrugged. Behind him and Sam were the stairs they’d climbed for hundreds of paces; translucent slivers of crystal, each resting static atop nothing, stretched in a spiral through space. They climbed, trusting Albion, while around them the living vessel unfolded its deepest workings, changing into… something.
And there they all were; the duke, the duchess and the crew, and all the CIC was powered and intact.
They stepped through and rhe doors closed behind them.
“What… where…” Salamanca failed to find the rest of his question.
Sensus found nothing on their faces. Each pair of eyes was mute with stupor, their mouths slack and quiet.
THEY ARE SHEEP.
He flinched and looked around him.
“What’s wrong?” asked the duchess.
Of course they didn’t hear.
SHEEP.
And am I their shepherd?
SEE HOW THEY SHIELD THEIR EYES. CAN FIRE TURN A PAGE? CAN A LION LEAD A FLOCK?
I won’t harm them. I will never harm them.
WON’T YOU?
Never!
AND THE WOLVES, ARE THEY NOT A DANGER? THEY CIRCLE. WILL YOU FIGHT THEM HERE, NEXT TO THE LAMBS? OR WILL YOU GO TO THEM AND BATTLE IN EMPTY LANDS, FAR FROM THESE SUCKLING YOUNG?
He went to the tactical display table and traced a circle on the navigational probe console, summoning an image of the ship from their many cameras and sensors. All in the room gasped at what they saw, except for Sensus.
One could dispute the likeness if they felt inclined. The ship’s innumerable components were seperated from one another and in constant movement, and the massive, glowing conduits seen when the ship first began its change looked almost animal; the writhing arms of a kraken, or ophidians battling each other over prey. And the blasts of plasma and electrostatic clouds obscured every detail in a miasma of bleeding color. But still, amidst all that visual turmoil, there was left an impression, an after image; Albion had taken the form of a man.
“I don’t understand,” said the duchess.
“He does,” said the duke, looking at Sensus. “He tried to warn us.”
“General!” shouted Holloway. He pointed at a flashing screen on the table.
Sensus gestured to the nearest crewman, and when the man did nothing, the general went to the screen and called up a display of its warning. An image of Bundu Prime appeared next to Albion, and again the standersby gasped and exclaimed.
Even the most skeptical observer could not deny that the Temple of Fiends had opened, and that it appeared in that state to be a pair of hands opening, briefly revealing a core of ethereal light so red it seemed a pulsing cosmic heart. The fingers, long segments of the planet’s crust, twisted in their sockets, and the beating heart they held was hidden again.
“Well,” said Holloway, “circumstances have now fully exceeded my usefulness.”
The voice, echoing with antient authority, seemed waiting, ready (eager, even) to speak.
What must I do?
BE NOBLE.
He closed his eyes and took a breath, then looked at Holloway and Sam. “Not by a long shot, Joshua. I need you both to watch over the ship. Maintain order and keep everyone safe.”
Holloway squinted, then smirked. “You’re about to do something interesting. Aren’t you?”
Sensus returned his smirk. “Very.” Then he turned to face the others in the room. “I am temporarily deputizing these men as my emergency representatives and granting them such authority. You will follow their instructions regarding all matters if security. Is that clear?”
All nodded their agreement, and Sensus went back to the doors he came through, taking a deep breath before stepping back out into space.
When they first saw those doors, Sensus had felt such a strong sense of relief he ignored the stairs spiraling upward beyond the lone room, its walls connected to nothing like the shores of an island. He climbed those stairs now, mounting each one with purpose.
He looked for Bindu Prime but the movement of Albion swirling about him obstructed his view, so he focused his eyes upward, trusting the stairs to find his feet as he ascended.
Round the ship he went, his stairs wandering further afield until the disembodied CIC looked distant and small.
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Then, in the vacuum of space, he heard a sound. It was a chorus, soft melancholy with a haunting refrain.
He grew impatient, and wanted to vault off the stairs and find his own way to where the four minds in Albion were leading him. He thought of first shooting straight out from the stairs to find a vantage point, and then, as he was a being of light, propel himself as photons do to the goal. But in the short time since the membrane between his mind and matter was punctured, he’d noticed how hard he had to exert himself to move through vacuum. And besides, bright as his eyes glowed, did he possess the means to see clearly in space at long distances, without the aid of a skullfort?
He kept walking.
For a while it felt like he was on a treadmill with only an illusion of making progress. He might have turned back even, if not for the chorus. The song grew louder as he went, so he trusted this path that showed itself only when he stretched out his foot.
The stairs began to flicker like stars as he neared their zenith. Thin slabs of crystal, alive with dancing light, his frustration over the length of his journey faded as he regarded the beauty of each step. Then he saw them.
He felt like he’d wandered into an ocean. There was a blue haze suddenly surrounding him, and above was dense globe of white light surrounded by what his brain could only interoperated as jelly fish. They were too far away for him to see their shape clearly, but he could tell they were in motion. He quickened his pace.
At the peak of his climb he stopped, wondering why the stairs had ceased to form. He was tired, so he waited a moment to catch his breath, then stretched out his foot, but no stair formed. The singing was loud enough for him to make out, not words per say, as the language was foreign, but the distinctions between sound and silence. And with the words came a feeling, a feeling that he followed, finally thrusting himself upward, carving through the blue haze at great pain.
He felt constant resistance as he rose, almost to the point where he felt he was burrowing through stone. It became so intense that he wanted to stop, turn back even, but those desires filled him with instant regret, which he responded to by, after a brief rest, pushing himself upward with all his strength.
He was grunting and sweating when he was near enough to see the strange creatures in detail. They were a disturbing mix of beauty and grotesquerie. They had the features of men and women in random number and alignment, and all of them appeared to be in constant pain. But they were luminous and translucent, and moved like hair in deep water.
One he recognized.
You, he thought, recalling the shadow child that came to his aid so recently.
The. They all felt familiar to him, and he felt a new motivation to finish his ascent. But moving through space was hard, and he had strained himself a great deal leading Holloway and Sam through Albion.
You’re so close, the shadow children said.
Can’t you help me? He replied
We needed help as well, they said
Eno, he thought. Then, with all the strength he had left, he shouted
MOTHER!
His radiant voice was answered. Eno appeared, hunched, hooded and robed. But she stood to the side of his view and turned, then reached to the stars and pointed. A pinpoint of light, not a star but like one, grew steadily closer, rushing faster than even Albion as it hurtled at high warp. It made no noise, but when it was close, Sensus felt deeply afraid. What had he called out to? All his eyes could see was light that should have blinded him, but somehow, he could stare into it, and while his eyes burned, they were undamaged. In fact, the light healed him and filled him with strength, and he saw images in his mind that moved too fast for him to understand, but they left emotions behind, and not so much understanding, but clarity. It was overwhelming and Sensus longed to be free of the being.
Then came its words. The voice it spoke with was female, but it was in no way woman. It sounded like death, but he could feel it’s living power in his cells, and he screamed until it stopped.
You are my warning to my kindred, the harbingers of my rage. I will give you my bones, all I have left to offer. Forgot not my last echo.
First, I caution you against hubris. There is nothing made since Origin. We wield the power of ohr, which comes from Origin, and it would be locked away from us still, were it not for the sacrifice of mighty Othomo long ago.
Be brave, be noble, be wise, little titan. And follow the guidance of Eno. I give her specially to you, for you have a son’s heart.
At all costs guard my tomb. You have called it Bastion, and so it is. All hope for life lies there. Do not fail, harbinger. This is your final chance. No more can I turn the Wheel.
While the Titan spoke, he was lifted. He now hovered over Bindu Prime, and he could see it clearly, as the great vessel Albion had broken into a universe of pieces.
The shadow children carried him away some distance, where he watched in awe as Bindu Prime reconfigured itself. For a brief moment he saw what looked like a cluster of calcified remains, immense in their size. No bodily shape could be discerned. It was as if a colony of creatures had been swallowed by death and their bones had been grafted by passing eons. And their glow! There was no light like the one he saw inside that lonely sphere. The bones were like living glass, and the shimmer of them made music that breathed inside him.
Then the planet seemed on the verge of breaking apart, but glowing tendrils, like massive versions the conduits that stretched like a net between Albion’s fragmented parts, turned the chunks of earth and magma around and pulled them inward, forming them once again into a planetoid.
But this was no cold grey world wrapped in an empty sky. Its surface was teeming with green, broken up by vast sapphire oceans, and its clouds were milky white.
“Sensus,” a voice said in his ear.
He was taken from space for an instant and sat on an island surrounded by a dark blue moon.
“Yes, Eno?”
She sat on the sands next to him, young now, not much more than a child. Behind her, a ways off, stood three men of war. One was wild and covered in eyes, one was angry and clad entirely in silver rings, and the other looked frighteningly calm, and was surrounded by serpents and birds.
“Look,” Eno said, gesturing upward at the moon that dominated their private horizon.
“What is it?”
“The eye of Albion.”
“What is Albion?”
She grew old again, her narrow shoulders sagging under the weight of generations. “The result of a long and painful work. The answer to every question that has not been asked. The hilt of a sword long in the forging. The infant form of all life.”
He shook his head. “We’re going to have to learn how to communicate.”
“You will,” she said with a patient smile.
She took his hand and her fingers felt warm. He saw tears coming from her starry eyes, then he was among the shadow children again.
She dies, said the closest one.
The light spread in a blanket of tiny shards like sand, then there was a dark shape, a tear into nothing, that formed at the edges of Sensus’s perception. The tear grew at first like cracks, then dropped over his vision like a blanket, or a curtain, or a lid being placed over a jar, and he felt a sudden tingling throughout his entire body followed by a flash of multi spectral light that restored his vision.
The planet was still there, but much of the green spaces had turned brown.