XLVI.

“Remember…” a spectral voice whispered in the back of his mind. “What you see here, what you feel, what you are… is an illusion, reflections of infinite realities. Don’t lose yourself to them. Stay upon the path. Remember…” He fell from a great height, from heights unimaginable. He plummeted through streaking stars and pulsing nebulas; through solar systems and entire galaxies; past billions upon billions of worlds, each more alien than the last. And, from those inconceivable heights, he plunged into the oceanic depths of being and was swept up upon lapping tides into the inescapable currents of the Abzu – the transcendental river of existence. “Don’t fight it…” cooed the voice, so distant that it was hardly even the whisper it once was. “Let this be your first lesson, Vagari… Focus on the question, and let the soul of the blessed Mother guide you. Focus… Remember…”

Right, that was his name: Vagari; Vagari the wanderer, the searcher. Vagari. Vagari! Va-ga-ri! He had to remember, had to keep himself from drowning in the macrocosm he had been swept up in; the twisting, twirling, never-ending whole that was the Abzu. “Vagari!” He shouted his name to himself. He shouted it to the world, the system, the galaxies spinning around him in dizzying blurs, at speeds his mind could barely comprehend, and it all stopped in that instant. Now, there was no motion, no sound, no turbulent waves to be caught up in. The cosmic riptides that would drag him further and further into the crushing depths of realms unknown had stilled.

There were only two things in all existence now: himself, and a small light he held cupped in the palms of his hands. It was the warm core he had found within himself and was all that was left of the being known to him as Nintu. Hardly an ember left of the raging fire it had been before, that she had been, but it still remained more than he could ever hope to imagine – the timeless being that was the GOD of Man. Small as that spark was, her heart fitting in the palms of his hands, he could see that all existence in turn fit within it, all of space and time, and the paths between them.

There, at the edge of the space between space, Vagari whispered to the heart. He uttered a question, the question. It was the only one that ever mattered – “Who ended the world?” Once again, the universe spun around him. It glowed so bright in its whirl that all became a blinding white blur that, as suddenly as it had, snapped to black – total and all encompassing. Vagari’s own heart raced in the darkness that enveloped him, and he frantically looked about for something, anything that might guide him further. But just as he began to fear himself forsaken to that nothingness, the core of light shone bright again in his clutching hands. A voice called out, soft and distant, not at all like the cavernous drone from before. This one called out from the ember. “Ħme soTreseyeti…” uttered the voice, her voice, the voice of Nintu. “I was so afraid… I didn’t understand. I was so lonely, and that loneliness, it drove something inside of me to… create!”

With an empyrean explosion of colors, of sight and sound, of being, a world appeared before Vagari, a world of life and love, of innocence and purity. It was the first world, her first world. “Ħme phle soPreyheyeti… I felt so loved,” she confided. “And I loved them so very much… So much, that the pain of their loss haunts me still! The First came and took them away; told me the Way of Things, the natural order, and the way of me, a Shassuru… I didn’t argue. I couldn’t offer any defense. It all made sense, in a way. Despite the great pain and terrible loss, I knew that that was simply nature, that all things that begin must also come to an end.”

The world before him burned, rotting at its core like an apple before fading back into cosmic dust. More worlds appeared before him, countless, all growing, all prospering, all withering, all dying, and all returning to dust in the blink of an eye as he watched, as she watched. As was the way of all things. “One after another… gone. All I could do was grow bitter,” Nintu growled, her burning fury felt within her heart and within his own. “My love, my innocence… They turned to hatred and viciousness, to war and violence that spread amongst my children like a sickness. The more I hated them, the more they hated each other, and the longer I got to keep them safe and to myself. But, in spite of themselves… they always overcame my instilled cruelty eventually. Then, with my bitter fruits grown sweet like wine – he came again to drink his fill of them.”

Once more the planets burned, and once more everything faded to black. In the darkness Vagari could hear sobbing, the unending anguish that was a mother’s loss. “Better for them to be born dead…” the Mother cried mournfully, “to be born dead and my accursed womb to become barren! Even the tears I cried for them, falling like rain upon the stillborn worlds where I tried to hide from our cruel fate, seeded new life from the gathering pools. New life to love… New life to hate, to despise for the fresh pain they would cause me. Nothing… There was nothing I could do to save them! No escape from the cycle of torment! There could be no fight, no resistance. It was just natures course, after all – the Way of Things! It was simply the journey’s end: the destination. As surely as the suns rose upon my worlds, so too would it forever set upon my children.”

This broken creature, sobbing into the void, bore no resemblance to the imposing goddess he had known, however briefly. She had felt so grand, so tall, that the whole damned world felt small next to her. She had been a fighter, a warrior queen, not someone who would bend to something as insignificant as fate. What had happened? Why did the question lead him here? Vagari had to know. “Are you saying the First, that they destroyed the world?” Vagari pressed. “I thought you found a way to fight, long before you came to Earth, before you reseeded it for mankind. You didn’t give in. You refused to let the reaping happen! You found a way to fight!”

“Fight…?” uttered the specter in such a distant whisper that it felt more like an itching at the back of his mind than actual words. “Yes… I fought,” Nintu announced, her voice ringing loud and true now, as if she were right there standing before him again in all her might and glory. “I learned how to fight, how to kill. I learned how to wage war against the heavens, against the First! Violence I learned from my children, watching them play, tempting fate by sending each other into the lion’s waiting maw. So readily they jumped into those gnashing teeth, into that… end. An end of experience, an end of learning and knowing; an end of mistakes, of regrets and burdens, of all the sadness life had to offer, and all its happiness too! That end was the undying death of the Wehroshenh, of True-Life. Total oneness with the First… Fuel for his eternal fire.” Her voice trailed off a moment before picking up again, uttering softly once more, “I tried to teach my sisters what I was taught, the means to defend what they held dearest. Some listened. Some ignored. And some, some tried to turn the fight to me… I did not want to hurt them! I didn’t… But, I had long since found my calling in war.”

The universe began to bloom around him, flowering worlds engulfed in a field of fire. Whole galaxies burned as Shassuru fought Shassuru, their worlds united against each other in an unimaginably vast conquest of the stars. They fought for eons upon eons, until the beginning of the universal war was but a distant memory and its architects were unrecognizable to their descendants. Each civilization that rose to the call – for or against – was more and more fantastical and uncanny than the last, the complexity of their designs growing increasingly specialized to the art of war as the generations went on. But, at the same time, it was more of what came before, what always came in the end: a feast for the First. As worlds burned, the First fed. As stars collapsed, the First fed. As galaxies sunk back into the boundless black depths of the cosmic river, forever darkening the sky, the First fed.

“In the end… there can be no escape,” Nintu’s voice called out defeatedly, her body appearing before him at last to speak the words that emanated from her heart and soul. She was no longer alone, but was followed by others, other voices, other Shassuru, and all those who died fighting in that all-encompassing war. Countless versions of Vagari stood before him now, countless iterations of the one called Abaddon, of Tehom, of all the others like them – like him, but not. He was unique in the chain in that he was the end, the final link, and the last of his line: the last Abaddon. And now, seeing the scorched universe around him, carrying her soul within him, he could see that he was the last Shassuru as well.

They were dead, and the universe, all the worlds they had fought for had been killed alongside them. The end wasn’t just nigh but had come and gone for all others before them. Vagari could see the horrid truth of the heavens above displayed there before him, that it was lit solely by ghosts and sounded by the fading echoes of their death rattles. It appeared so bright, so alive, to their distant eye, so chaotic and infinite. But, in truth, it was dark and empty, a voice in every sense of the word. All that was left of the lights in the night’s sky were undead things, eidolons that had fallen still, quiet, and aphotic countless cosmic years before the first man ever took to the ground from the trees.

Stolen novel; please report.

The weight of the God of Man’s cause nearly crushed him as the realization of their place in the universe sank in. They weren’t just fighting for mankind, but for the very concept of life itself. They weren’t the first to reach for the stars, humanity, but they would be the last, and the last to fight in a war that had been hidden away since before their inception, lost, obscured in the encroaching nothingness that was the end of all things – the last supper of the First. “N-no… No, this isn’t right,” Vagari began, pushing back at the unfathomable immensity of it all. “We can’t be the last… We can’t be at the end of everything! It’s not true… It can’t be! No… No! If you truly believed it was futile, then why did you fight?!” exclaimed Vagari, pushing off the weight, pushing away the finality. “You fought! You… You were taught how to fight. You said you were taught! Who taught you how to fight back against the First?! Who could teach you how to defy the ‘Way of Things’, something that in your heart you knew to be true?! They had to have proof that you could fight, and that you could win!”

Vagari strained against the end, against hopelessness, against the Way of Things, that accursed natural order set about by the timeless being known as the First. He denied it, rejecting it wholly. He had to regain his purpose, remember what he had dove into the void to find. That distant voice… Tehom – Tehom was their name. They had warned him, warned him that the streams of the Abzu led to many places, many times, many realities beyond his own, beyond his purpose. This end, it wasn’t real! Not yet. He had gone too far, let her hopelessness lead him into a possible future that hadn’t happened yet, that perhaps would never happen. Vagari had to regain his purpose, return to course, and ask the question again.

He held the light close, pressing it into his chest as if the heart of the goddess were truly his own. Vagari shut it all out, the overbearing weight of the universe, pushing it back, back into the furthest reaches of the cosmos, back into the memory of Nintu’s soul. He had to push it away, push away the existential expanse of the shassuru’s struggle, her conquest, her fears, and foresight of the end. It wasn’t what he was here for, what he was supposed to find, what he could keep in his untrained mind and return sane. He had to push it back before it swallowed him whole! “Vagari… Vagari was… is my name,” the traveler of eternity reminded himself, pushing back the worlds, pushing back the faces of past incarnations, pushing back everything and all until all that was left was his fragment of Nintu and the void. “I… AM,” he shouted, pushing back with all his sense of being, “Vagari!”

Vagari reached out from the absence of form, from the purity of his consciousness unbound. He reached out and pulled all he had lost to the nihility, to the cold end of the divine experience, back into form, back into a body, his body, the mortal form of a man, the body of Vagari. Once more he was. Once more he was Vagari; not Val, not Abaddon, not Nintu the GOD of Man, and not any of their countless iterations along the streams and branches of the Abzu. He was himself once more and the form of her, of Nintu, was gone from his sight. Vagari held her heart to his own and looked to where she had been. “Who?” Vagari asked the question softly. “Who corrupted the Godhead?”

“soĦelalyos…” Nintu replied, her voice distant and static. “She came to collect on our bhendhayl, our contract… I… I thought I had more time. I thought I could hide. I thought I could find a way to break our bond. But how does one hide from omnipotence? She is always watching, she always knows…”

“Nintu… what did you do?” Vagari pressed. “You made a deal with what? A demon? An anomaly somehow? For what?” He didn’t need her to answer. It came to mind in a moment’s thought. “That’s who showed you how to fight back against the First, isn’t it? You offered them something, and they gave you the means to defend yourself and your children against him… But, who? Who has the power to defy the GOD of GODs? Who set you down a path of war and destruction by handing you the flame to set the universe ablaze? Who killed you?”

Nintu appeared again before him, her image flickering like fire in the blackness. She stared down upon him, eyes showing bright with all the nebulitic glory he couldn’t hope to retain within his mortal shell. She then pointed, raising a hand from her side, drawing direction back into the void behind him. Vagari’s eyes followed, tracing her form from her fathomless gaze to the sharpness of her fingertip and beyond, to the answer he sought – the answer he had withstood eternity to find.

It sat on a bed of wilted grass sprung up in the darkness, crouched over the brutalized body of a bloated lamb, sinking its teeth into the creature’s flesh, burst open wide like the rupturing guts of a fetid corpse. The lamb wasn’t dead. It couldn’t die, the thing feasting upon it wouldn’t let it. The lamb raised its crown of seven horns and stared at Vagari, through him, with seven pleading eyes of absolute terror and despair. At what, Vagari did not dare turn to see, lest the consuming horror take notice of him. No, he stood frozen, as still as the dead universe around him, staring back into those agonizing eyes.

The lamb sputtered desperately, struggling in vain to escape. It opened its mouth and screamed, bellowing in all the voices of being, crying out with all the fear and agony of all the souls it had imbibed, an entire universe of souls retained and imprisoned within it. The lamb cried out for help, for salvation, and for death, but there was no one left to hear it. And with each bite the horror took, each lump of flesh torn from its undying hide, its cry was only one voice less, cutting seconds mere off the eternity of life it had left.

The monstrous thing that fed upon it was a thing of shifting form, of unknowable visage, of twisting and contorting geometry of the most alien kind. One moment it was distinct, a being of a shape almost humanoid, of crystalline form as black as the void behind it. Another and it was an idea, a thought, the writhing in the pit of Vagari’s stomach, the shadow out of the corner of his eye. It was the Adversary, the Yetzer Hara, the evil inclination. It was a feeling that Vagari had since grown to know all too well, that alien alignment, that ultimate aversion. This was it, the source of that sickening invasion, of the watcher who had haunted his shadow every step of his journey.

In all instances, in all its forms, it consumed, drinking deep of the cup of life, swollen and overflowing still, despite all that had been already taken. Vagari tried to study the metamorphic entity, tried to comprehend its existence, but every second he stared at its ever-transmuting state, that deep aversion grew within him, expanding, filling him up until it was everything he could do not to burst under the strain of it. Still, he looked, despite the animosity and disgust, despite himself, he looked, studying every shifting molecule. He had to, it was the answer to his question – thee question. He had to learn all he could and bring it back to Tehom, to find out how they could purge its influence from the Godhead so they could push back the next apocalypse just a little further.

Vagari pressed the ember of Nintu closer to his chest and prayed to the dead goddess to give him strength – the strength to see, to remember, and the strength to know. The core of her glowed faint in his hand. He focused on the light, struggling to overcome the pressures placed upon him, to adapt and filter it into something his mortal shell could comprehend. In an instant the pressure was gone, the pain, the aversion – just like that, as if it had never afflicted him in the first place. But it hadn’t been the heart, Vagari quickly realized. It had been the horror before him.

The otherworldly thing had stopped feeding, stopped shifting form; it had solidified, taking on its comprehendible crystalline shape once more. It had no eyes, but somehow Vagari knew that it didn’t need them to see. The entity stood up on jagged legs and stared through him as the lamb had. No, not through him… At him. In that moment, the words of that far-off cavernous voice, of Tehom returned to the forefront of his mind. “Remember…” the voice reminded him. “What you see here, what you feel, what you are… is an illusion…” But that wasn’t true, not in this instance; the fear he felt was very real. The Ħelalyos, the horror before him, it existed there, alive in the ebb and flow of the Abzu. It could see him, see his mind, his astral-self projected there by the tome. He was as real to it as the lamb it gorged on, and there was no going back, no being unseen. All Vagari could do was muster his courage and face the living answer in front of him.

Vagari clutched the ember of light in his hand and called out. “Who…” Vagari began, feeling fresh waves of that alien aversion washing over him like a lapping tide, in tune with his heartbeat. “Who are you? What do you… What do you want? And why, why have you done what you’ve done? So much pain, suffering, and for what?! You’re behind it all… the ruining of my world… Why? Why did you destroy everything?! You ruined countless lives for generations, and for what?! FOR WHAT?!”

The entity stepped forward suddenly, seemingly spurred by his fiery anger. The action was enough to freeze the flame solid in his chest. But the devourer took no further steps. Instead, it swayed where it stood, following the cosmic wind in the grass, all with the suggestion of a smile slowly forming across its ebony features. It wasn’t angry it seemed, but instead quite the opposite. It appeared happy, elated even to see him, it’s sway almost like a dance. This only proved to unnerve Vagari more. “Seħgaino, tuħ nehgigneħ ħme,” it said, the adamic feeling strange to his ears and mind.

“Found you?” Vagari translated in question. “Who are you?”

“Ummu-Hubur Ti’amat…” the entity uttered, speaking in all the voices it had stolen before settling on one – Trois. Pressing a long slender finger across parting lips and vicious obsidian teeth, it then said in that familiar voice, “Shhh – hrohweħ…” In that moment, as soon as the word left the horrid thing’s mouth, Vagari felt himself being rejected wholly by the realm around him. With a scream escaping his lungs, he was thrown back into the void, back into the fathomless depths of eternity.