Chapter 26: Orb
Darkness once again. It was all that he could see. The passing of time was hard to feel in such a place where your senses were null. Whether it was but a moment or for centuries, it passed by all the same. Perhaps the true nature of eternity was just like this, and that thing known as time never existed.
A deep resonating hum vibrated through the endless void. The youth heard– no he felt the sound, and it reverberated through his very soul. Zan sank into the feeling, leaning in towards that sense of resonance and oneness.
The hum grew louder and louder. The sound became the only thing that the boy could hear within all directions of his being. It filled him with a mysteriously profound feeling, as if the sound’s qualities of being omnipresent and all-consuming hinted towards the presence of what a true god was like. The sound never stopped growing louder yet it never once felt uncomfortable or blaring, it felt so mysteriously like the opposite. It transcended itself again and again until finally, it surpassed itself entirely and turned into silence.
A deep calling tugged at the essence of Zan’s soul, he could not talk nor move but his entire being hummed and vibrated, expressing his acceptance. The surroundings shifted dramatically, he could not see but he could feel it. It was as if one moment he was in one place and without blinking he was at another. The youth felt that he could, so he finally opened his eyes. His ethereal body was floating in a span of darkness but what was in front of him took his breath away.
An immensely gargantuan orb of pure radiant light seemed to be looking at him. It was like a human looking at his own planet from outer space, and to their surprise, it was as if they were being watched by it back. The massiveness of the orb’s scale jarred Zan, before he noticed the ringing sound and pulsing light that the orb was pushing towards him.
Like a form of telepathy, a transfer of information and emotion directly hit his ethereal body. He felt extreme strength, love, grace and…weariness. It was…a call for help.
‘Help you? How? With what?’
Another hum and another pulsing light gently burst forth. Seeing such a huge object of gargantuan proportions send such a massive wave of light to him was both astonishing and frightening. The swimming light that approached looked like it would drown him, like the oceans conformed into a gigantic crescent of ethereal glowing white.
‘Look? Look at what?’
Zan’s eyes were too preoccupied on the gigantic orb of brightness that he did not see everything around it. Just outside the radiant ring of light that the orb emanated was a darkness that literally tried to eat away at it. The black darkness manifested into writhing black flesh and sharp jagged edges. All around the orb was a gigantic circular maw of countless teeth. On that large circular mouth were countless other deformed mouths of varying sizes and shapes, doing what they could to erode away at the light.
But the light shined steadily and unwaveringly, burning the flesh and teeth as the monstrosity endlessly squealed in pain. Zan wondered how he could hear such a thing, so he focused on the sound to his regret.
‘AHHHH!’
His very being felt like it was bleeding, his eyes, his ears, his ethereal body itself felt a ruinous essence. The youth tried to scream but he could not. If Zan was made of threads and string then at this very moment it felt like he was unwinding. The luminous ethereal body felt disharmony so deep that his very soul threatened to dissipate.
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Another gentle pulse was sent towards him and the light enveloped him in its healing embrace. It not only alleviated the pain, it made Zan feel a sense of contentment within his mind, body and spirit. The healing aura brought him back together and even strengthened him. He opened his eyes again to find that he could see more of everything. With this, he directed his gaze back at the disgusting thing, feeling that his observation was not done and the orb of light was encouraging him to look further.
Zan was…reluctant from his earlier experiences but did so anyway. Focusing his senses once again, he saw the flesh and teeth were burned to ashes yet the darkness regenerated itself time and time again. It grew malformed disgusting flesh and misplaced teeth like tumors growing on top of each other.
On the outskirts of where the darkness ended was a white glowing outline.
The orb once again sent a gentle pulse and the boy felt another increase to his ocular powers. Looking closely into that outline he found that the glowing white matter was made of twisted and pained faces. The textures of the matter were not uniform and still, each had a unique face, young or old, man or woman, and their faces moved, crying and screaming in unspeakable agony.
The youth gazed at the face of a woman whose mouth and eyes were wide open. Her eyes seemed to be twitching but despite the pain, she vehemently tried to keep them open. In the next moment, Zan’s vision turned blurry and his lungs started to burn. To his dismay the sky above turned into an ocean while the waves below toppled and clutched at him violently. He tried desperately to breathe in the air and despite the water splashing his eyes he kept them open no matter what. His tired and exhausted body looked above and below the water as his tears mixed with the rain.
Suddenly, a disgusting gaping maw of uneven and deformed teeth was all that his eyes showed him, before he felt a pulling sensation bring him back to his previous point of view. Zan saw as the woman’s face he was looking at was consumed by a mouth manifested by the darkness, and he swore that he saw a little boy’s face enter the mouth too.
The scene reflected in the youth’s eyes as he held a sickened face. Before he could ask the orb more questions, something in the peripherals of his vision caught his eye. It was almost impossible to see, for the thing he saw blended into the background of darkness. A gigantic black spider skittered along a thin line of white web, slowly approaching the glowing outline of white material. Holding in its gigantic mouth was a series of cocooned things which…Zan could only assume were its dead prey.
The spider reached the glowing outline and as Zan guessed, it laid the cocooned bodies on top of the tormented faces. It then used its eight, piercingly thin and nimble arms to hammer the cocooned body into the white material. In the process of doing the same thing for its seventh consecutive body, the spider looked up and locked eyes with the youth. Zan’s heart dropped, for he could feel the horror, malevolence and power in the being before him.
The darkness that manifested deformed and twisted flesh and teeth, the gigantic orb of pure radiance, these two beings were so powerful that Zan could not accurately measure them. He simply tried to focus on the disgusting thing’s screams and it almost snuffed out his soul. The spider however, was just within the earthly limits that he could perceive.
Zan observed the spider and he could tell that it felt something, it felt something but it wasn’t sure if it was ever there. It casually started to push bodies into the white material again and Zan breathed a sigh of relief.
A pulse of light redirected his senses towards the orb again where they shared a brief moment of silence. Zan was looking at the orb and he could feel the orb somehow gently smiling at him.
He pondered a bit about the ridiculousness of the situation, how he could feel an object without facial features giving him a smile and how it was asking him for a favor.
‘The spider…’
‘You want me to help you with the spider.’
A pulse of light generated from the orb and the boy could already tell that its answer was a resounding yes.
‘Shit…’
‘Why should I?’
‘What’s in it for me?’
Another pulse of light pushed towards him.
‘Ask?’
‘Okay…’
Zan pondered on both the daunting task and the gratifying rewards to follow. He already had something in mind for what he wanted but the boy was extremely acute to danger. This natural talent was ruined only by his bravery or more precisely, his recklessness. That hellish spider was still within his “limits” but going by that same trajectory of logic was foolishness in its prime. A normal human could never measure himself next to a god, but being able to compare his strength to a five hundred pound lion wasn’t going to do him well either.
Speaking of lions, the youth wondered if back then he should have fought that mountain lion…
‘Nah, I definitely would have fucking died…’
‘Wait…’
‘Hey!’
A pulse of light and a deep but calming hum sounded out once again.
‘Can you tell me the difference between me and that spider?’
Another droning hum came out.
‘...Yeah I know I’m human and it’s a spider. I meant in terms of muscle! How large is the difference between us?’
Another pulse of light.
‘You'll…show me instead?’