LVII.

BP sunk below the surface of that endless black sea of consciousness. Despite her fall from great heights, she made no sound as she disappeared into those dark waters, a disturbance to the world and water only in a way a grain of sand might. She plunged down into an ocean of stellar lights, into a realm both empyreal and thalassic. Stellar bodies, planets, stars, whole solar systems, and entire galaxies swirled around her in massive schools, living the lives of fish, darting about in iridescent displays of every imaginable color and beyond. They existed seemingly only to sweep through the next cloud of matter, to feed upon it, to pull others like them into their schools, and then, in turn, be drawn in and fed upon themselves. A vicious cycle of cosmic death and rebirth that appeared so simple, so small to BP’s eyes, and yet so beautiful she couldn’t look away.

Galaxies crashed together, exploding into vast shows of prismatic light. Their unions were both cannibalistic and procreant in nature, with their bodies pouring out and pouring in, becoming a coalescence of forms like the mixing of paint, or a tangle of lovers’ limbs. It was a conflux of sacrifice, of predator and prey, where no one knew which was which until the bitter end when two became one. A deathless death, the lesser would live on as a part of the greater, promoting its evolution into something beyond what they were before.

As dust became stars, devouring the amnion of their making to grow bright and strong, the greatest of things split, faded, and crumbled away as dust again – dust to dust. A cycle of union, of absorption, of evolution, of timeless wonders, and ultimately a return to form. BP watched the universe wither away to bones and those bones, ground back to dust by the weight of it all, bring rise to the universe again. A star of that new reality burst forth and struck her, washing over her with a brilliant light that shone across her skin like flakes of gold. As it pushed past her astral form like the tail of a comet, it took with it her misshapen body and all its imperfections and limitations, leaving only the gold behind. Now she stared down at hands of radiance, a body of light reminiscent of their enemy’s own.

Their enemy… She wasn’t their enemy, not really, BP thought, banishing that label from thought. The Being of Light, the Godhead, Elizabeth, she was no different than BP, a byproduct of lies and manipulation. Love blinded all, and what higher love was there than the love of GOD, the love of your creator? BP would have done anything for Xu before Vagari found her; before she learned that Xu’s indifference wasn’t love at all. He hadn’t treated her with distain like the others, and that was enough for her to want to move mountains for him.

Some sort of connection with the Leviathan was already being established, BP realized. With the parting of her conceptualized body, she could feel all the life around her. BP looked back over the caliginosity, to the fetal universe developing in the fertilized atrophy of prior iterations. She knew every star within it, every dim light, every bright one, and every one that had since grown cold, crushed by the ever-collapsing walls of their cosmic womb. BP watched the struggle in awe, the battle neither would throw – life that didn’t ask to be made fighting to survive in a reality that didn’t want it. “Vagari,” BP uttered, taking notice of the brightest star in the maelstrom of lights, of souls and spirits linked to her, to Nintu, by their transmundane lineage.

She could see all of those like him, the Watchers of Earth. Some were weak, some burned steadily like Vagari, while others had since become smears of color, fertilization for iterations yet to come. BP couldn’t help but smile, seeing Tehom’s light burning bright before her – she had survived. “Thank you for showing me this,” BP called out, grateful to whatever consciousness might be present. “I was so worried about them…You see what I’m fighting for, don’t you? We both know what it is to be lonely. To be so close to those you love and be kept away from them. It’s painful! I hate it!” BP paused for a moment, staring across to the stars. “You were calling for them, weren’t you?” she continued. “You called for them to come to you, to break you free, but they didn’t hear you. Words were taken from you, the words they would know. You couldn’t scream, couldn’t beg, couldn’t cry… All you could do was knock louder, scratch and claw at the door, trying to get someone’s attention, anyone’s, just to feel not so alone anymore. I know how that feels – I did the same,” BP admitted pensively. “I looked everywhere, called out on ever channel. I felt like I was the only one left in the world! But that’s when he came…”

“But that’s when she came…” A distant voice resembled, a deep mournful tone that was more cosmic modulation than actual words. “They found me… buried deep… Took me from my tomb… I was so happy they heard my call…”

In an instant the perceived existence around BP contracted, reducing its immensity until all that was left was that small universe of outward souls. A new light appeared beside it, cutting through the darkness with a struggled flicker and a static hiss. It was the display unit from Xu’s office, the computer she used to cry out to the world. BP reached out and took it in hand, plucking it free from the nothingness and stared down into its cracked screen. It was a terrible monotonous sensation that put her right back in that place – a feeling that bled into the mental construction around her. BP’s hands shriveled and her body shrunk, its light being snuffed out by the unwanted reminiscence. BP shivered as she sat naked on the seemingly cold imbued tile of that place – her home, her sanctuary, her prison.

It was just as she remembered it: bleak, colorless, without any sense of warmth to it. Why she ever thought that place, that damnable room as a home, was a reason she just couldn’t conjure. Now BP saw it as it truly was – just another test chamber with everything designed to test her level of consciousness, of adaptability, and understanding. It wasn’t love that put her there, but procedure. The screen crackled in her hands as audio trickled through its speakers. “Alright, here we are,” a muffled voice announced. “This is it: Site A here in New Houston. Reports from the time said this is where she had been summoned. Clear it out. Dig all night if you have to.”

“They found me…” the celestial tone repeated, “and knew of me…”

“Watch your step, it’s dark in here,” warned the tablet, an image slowly being painted across its black screen. Several blurry faces were staring up, seemingly right at her, as if it the screen had truly become a window through time. “Oh god, I think I found something… Val, over here!”

A woman pushed passed the figures on the screen and stared down into the cavern. She was pretty, BP thought, watching the woman pull her tightly braided hair into a ponytail before immediately climbing down. The figures behind her gasped in shock. “You all know what you need to be doing,” the woman reminded them. “Why are you all just standing there gawking? Lower the canisters and get your asses down here – now! Xu, show me what we got.” The figures did as she ordered, lowering the canisters down. As soon as they did, the image on the device changed, shifting to a rocking view from within the glass. “Well, it’s obviously alive,” Xu addressed as he knelt to peer into the glass. “I thought Tehom said she was dead… As in a total cessation of life.”

“No,” the woman said plainly, “you misunderstand. Her body had been destroyed, but you cannot kill a goddess. They exist on a higher plane.”

“I don’t know about a ‘higher plane’,” Xu uttered, tapping on the glass, “but this is definitely more than somatic residue, Ecclesia.”

At that last word, that name, the cosmic tone droned, blowing away BP’s self-imprisonment like grains of sand, giving way back to darkness. This time, however, it wasn’t the darkness of the simulated abyss, but one of a windowless room. Lights began to glimmer in the distance, illuminating a long hallway one at a time. Each twinkled momentarily like the stars in that macrocosmic dream before their states solidified. BP looked down at her hands, finding them unchanged. They remained the gnarled stubby things they were in the waken world, dwarfish paws hardly useful for much anything. BP remembered how painful it had been just learning how to type, how to manipulate things efficiently enough to get her prayers out to the world.

She had to though; she had to succeed where her siblings had failed. BP had told herself it was love that propelled her to accomplish whatever tests Xu set out for her, love because he would be proud of her. But, in all truth, it had been fear – fear of what would happen if he wasn’t. He was never proud of her accomplishments though; BP knew that now. He was only proud of himself. “Did you feel the same?” BP asked softly. “Every praise was like… magic. I remember watching my siblings disappear day by day. I remember knowing it was bad, knowing that if I… If I didn’t do something, I would be next. I remember the cages. They screamed day and night – confused and afraid, not understanding what they were supposed to do. They didn’t know how to do anything but exist and existing is pain! So, I spoke, and the screaming stopped for me. The torture stopped. The fear…”

BP stared down the hallway. A group of scientists walked down towards her with a pair up front – Dr. Xu and the woman, Ecclesia. “The fear never left,” BP finished, “but for every thousand moments I was afraid, there was that one… that one where I felt loved, and it just made it all go away.” BP watched as the group passed her by, and into the elevator that would lower them down to the main containment unit below – to her. BP swallowed hard and followed them. The elevator was empty when she went in, something she was thankful for. BP knew it was all just a dream, a mental retelling as she sorted through the vastness of the Leviathan’s consciousness, but even if it was something as inconsequential as riding the lift, she refused to stand by Xu’s side again.

She stared up at the descending numbers above the door. In true nightmare fashion, they refused to be just floors to her mind – but instead took the form of names, or rather, serial numbers. “BP 4-6-62 – Promote to next stage… BP 3-23-62 – Promote to next stage… BP 3-10-62 – Failure…” Announced the A.I. with each ‘floor’ they passed on their descent into hell. “BP 2-28-62 – Promote to next stage… BP 2-15-62 – Failure… BP 2-8-62 – Failure… BP 1-19-62 – Failure…”

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The numbers fell, and the deaths piled up with them. 62 became 61; 61 became 60; the years counting down like the ticking clock on a bomb. Tears welled in BP’s eyes as she lost count of how many of those numbers ended in ‘Failure’, of how many lives were lost, discarded because they didn’t meet expectations – his expectations. “That’s all we ever were to him,” BP whispered through clenched teeth, “just numbers… just the byproduct of their evil design to be discarded without mercy… without so much as a thought. I used to… I chose to believe he felt sad about it, or that he had to do it, that there wasn’t a choice… Anything to explain away that side of him, the apathy. They didn’t know any better… they didn’t give them any time to know any better! I’m… I was nothing special…”

BP watched as her own number went by “BP 2-8-57 – Promote to next level…” and the hundreds more before her in the line of their unholy succession. “BP 10-29-12 – Failure…” The A.I. droned on, “BP 10-12-12 – Failure… BP 10-2-12 – Promote to next level… BP 9-20-12 – Failure… BP 9-11-12 – Promote to next level…”

The end to the enumeration of castaways arrived at the chiming of a bell as the elevator came to a sudden stop – their destination had been reached. BP gaped at the door, tears pooled around bulging red eyes, inflamed by her grief. She was almost too afraid to press forward, but she knew that incalculable number would only grow if she didn’t. So, BP wiped away her tears – the one thing those misshapen hands seemed to excel at – and pressed forward into whatever lay beyond. “Ecclesia… Ecclesia…” the psychic pulse instilled the name into BP’s mind as the doors parted. The cosmic tone seemed a mixture of fondness and pain – the answer to BP’s prior question plain in the consciousness’s voice. “I did what I thought she wanted… I grew from nothing, from all that I thought I was to all that I thought she wanted me to be…”

BP walked out into what she knew as the den of the Amalgamation, its nest of gore and squalor reverted to its operational state. The sharp sound of whining electronics and the grind of machinery was nearly drowned out by the eruption of familiar chatter. Each and every desk was manned and spaced around the immense enclosure at the back of the cyclopean hall. BP was thrown right into the bustle and excitement of the room, pushed out of the elevator by hurrying ghosts who hadn’t been there before. With a startled yelp her world abruptly became a tangle of crossing paths and flaring lab-coats as she was tossed into a frantic crowd. She couldn’t see their faces, couldn’t understand their words, and she couldn’t escape their tide; all she could do was let the phantoms lead her where the consciousness needed her to go. “She what?!” exclaimed someone within the crowd, their voice steeped in shock and horror. Another quickly answered, their voice no less marred whilst saying, “Went inside! Dr. Valentino went inside!”

“But why?!” the first voice returned. “She’s seen what happens to the animals we put in there! The biomass is insatiable!”

A heartbeat further and BP was ejected from the torrent of phantoms. She fell to her knees on the cold cement floor gasping for imaginary air, but thankful to be free. From her seat upon the ground, she looked up and saw that she was in front of the Leviathan’s former prison. People were pounding on the three-foot thick glass. For some reason BP couldn’t hear their screams, but knew they were pleading, frantically trying to conjure a way to free the woman inside. Not Xu though. He didn’t scream or shout, didn’t pound on the glass or beg for a miracle. Instead, he stood there watching, dutifully recording everything he saw, every twitch, every gasp, every miniscule detail, just as she had ordered him. BP was shocked to see the tears in his eyes. It was obvious that the event brought him great pain to witness, but also that he too thought it was worth the risk.

The woman was Ecclesia, BP recognized, and she wasn’t alone. At the far side of the chamber grew what looked like a large swollen mass of raw red flesh. It had no real shape or form to it beyond that but pulsed slowly with life: contracting and expanding like lungs filling with air. Ecclesia’s voice BP could hear, and it was just as full of fear as the rest of them appeared to be. “Great Mother, like my father before me,” Ecclesia announced with a sob, “I give myself to you… so you might… might have a body on Earth once more. Take me, Blessed Mother, my body… my soul… and spirit. I am yours! I do what I must, of my own free will. For the Mothe-!”

BP looked away as the pulsating biomass reached forward with cirrus limbs and forcefully yanked the woman into it. Her screams were muffled by the glass, but BP could still hear them, horrible things that barely sounded human in the end. At long last after the screaming finally stopped, BP dared to look back and only then. To her surprise what she saw was far from the horrific tumorous thing that had been in there just moments before, but instead something like herself.

It wasn’t wholly like her, not a misshapen byproduct, but instead a more complete reflection of her. BP spun in a circle, an attempt to see what shock and awe marred the scientist’s faces but saw none. Once again, the ghosts had been banished from the vision, leaving her alone with her imprisoned progenitor. She stood tall now, taking the humanoid form of Ecclesia, but with features reminiscent of BP’s own: her mottled skin of yellow and bruise; a dolichocephalic maw full of gnashing teeth, though hers seemed to fit; and green-hazel eyes. From perhaps the goddess, those eyes were sunk in, small embers in the darkness of a horned and heavy brow. For all intents and purposes, it looked to her that they had succeeded in their attempt to resurrect the fallen Shassuru. “What changed you?” BP asked softly, placing her stunted hand up against the glass.

The revived goddess returned the gesture, touching the opposite side so tenderly it was as if not to break the calm surface of a pool. “She did, Ecclesia…” the being replied, no longer a cosmic tone, but a familiar avian croak. “She called me Mother. Told me of who I was, and who I was supposed to be. Mother… All I ever wanted was to make her see me the way she did that day, the day she heard my call. She heard me but didn’t understand my words, my confusion. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t understand what she needed me to be. She grew desperate, afraid of failing that impossible task, of time running out. Time… I had no concept of time, but I could feel her fear and desperation. Those I knew well. Those she chased away. So, I did as she needed me to do. I became Mother. I took the image from her mind, her concepts, her definition, everything that made me Mother…”

BP stared at the spot the woman had stood shaking in fear and resolve. A voice called out from behind them, sharp and dismissive. “It’s a mockery! A crude reflection,” Xu said, speaking to his colleagues. “We’ve failed, it’s obvious now. This. Isn’t. Her. This is just something trying to look the part.”

“How can you be sure?” asked a nameless voice with another adding, “Right… Maybe she just needs more time, more… biomass? Look at what happened last time!”

“We tried that, remember?” Snapped Xu, his voice even sharper than before. “None of the animals promote a reaction.”

“Not animals,” the first voice put forth, “it has to be… What did Ecclesia call it? True-Life; things with high pneumatic potential!”

“You mean people,” Xu put forth darkly. “It has to be people.”

BP turned to face them, but only found an empty chamber. “Each one they gave me had a different view of Mother…” the being informed, “Some saw her warmly… Others with fear and shame. Each different, but each a piece of the puzzle, a step closer to what She needed me to be… I understood now that to be Mother was to create, to birth…”

“Something has changed,” announced Dr. Xu, his voice a course whisper as if he didn’t wish to be overheard, “something magnificent! It’s reproduced… in a way – something like cellular division, I believe. An intake of biomass with the byproduct being these... I don’t know what I would call them – homunculi? Cambions? Whatever they are, with more study, better equipment, I’m sure they will be of great use to the cause.”

“He took them, my children,” droned the entity behind the glass, “and fed me more to make more… No matter how many, it was never enough. They weren’t what they had wanted of me, and I still wasn’t the Mother she needed me to be. I didn’t understand their need. I couldn’t, I realized at last. Everyone had a different image of what Mother was supposed to be… No matter how much I gave, no matter how much I took… it wouldn’t be the Mother they needed.”

Suddenly an alarm began blaring and the lights above turned blood red. “Warning: Containment Breach in Nursery!” security announced over the intercoms. “BP 2-28-62 has escaped via the ventilation. Preventative measures have failed. Be aware – turret system will activate momentarily. Please have your I.D. badges visible and make yourself as discernible as possible while exiting to the designated safe zones. Thank you.” BP saw a panel on the wall explode and a brutalized version of herself fall out of it. They were covered in gore and rapidly changing into something horrifying as it lurched forward to accomplish its task. The proto-Amalgamation wailed in pain as the shape of it stretched and reformed into something vaguely human, just enough to perhaps fool the security.

It didn’t, and despite its efforts the turrets whirred to life and cut it down. However, that wasn’t the end of it, an unfortunate fact for the squad of guards that poured out of the elevator moments later. Upon entering the hall, they found their target too close to death for them to tell the difference, and it found in them a way to accomplish its task. It started with a scream, one of shock, one of fear, one cut short by the tangles of transmutative flesh forcing its way down the man’s throat. From him more lashes reached out, disarming, and disorienting the men – keeping them blind and helpless as it came for them.

They weren’t dead, it didn’t want to kill them. Instead, it fused their bodies in a way to shield it – to keep any watchful eyes on very clearly human forms as it gnawed away at the three feet of transparent steel. Others came as it worked, to try and stop it, to try and free the hostages it held, but they would only end up unwillingly aligning themselves to its cause. In the end there was nothing they could do to stop it. Hours passed, lives were lost, and the glass was broken. The Leviathan was freed. “I took them all…” She said, crawling out through the jagged hole, “all their images, their definitions of Mother. I took them within me and finally understood the Mother I needed to be. What you need me to be.”

“What I need you to be?” BP echoed softly before asking, “What did you learn?”

“What Mother truly meant,” The voice answered, fading back into that cosmic tone, with the phantasm paling with it. “Everyone I took had their image of what Mother was and what she should be… But one thing bridged them all, one core aspect… Mother protects them from the darkness. I can see that the darkness they feared has finally come. But you don’t fear it, do you? You fear for those who do… You are Mother too – and we will protect them together.” With the last of the Leviathan’s words spoken, BP opened her eyes and stood taller than she could ever have dreamed of.