–A.D. 1978–
Out in the deep darkness of space, there is nothing.
Nothing at all. An infinite void.
Infinite, and empty.
An endless tapestry of ever-twinkling stars, all glimmering and glittering together, all pulsing with and twirling about one another. A ballad of stellar asynchrony, an unfathomably exquisite cloak woven of pure stardust and knit tight by space-time itself.
Breathtakingly beautiful, and so very far away.
An infinite void.
But not, perhaps, quite so empty.
Not entirely.
For through the great and abominable nothingness, two vast creatures crawl steadily forwards.
Vast, indeed.
So very vast, so magnificently massive, that they can hardly even be called creatures. Their proportions are as great, or perhaps even greater than, the moons and stars past which they sedately creep.
They are gigantic larvae, cosmic worms, pulsating grotesquely, covered entirely in a myriad of kaleidoscopic scales, radiating an ever-swelling supernova of unknown colors and arcane particles. Their forms are multitude. Collective.
Ever-shifting.
Ever-warping.
Ever-evolving.
Their locomotion is eldritch, alien, incomprehensible. They burrow and twine through space like massive serpents, pushing and pulling and distorting the very continuum around them like so many little morsels of dirt. They move in tandem, synchronously, coiling and curling about one another helically, counterparts in an endless dance.
No, they are not creatures. Not at all.
They are Entities.
There are many like them. The infinite, empty void is filled with their ilk, their kin and kindred, each adhering to a distinct role, each claiming a unique title. Over innumerable cycles, these two have taken up the mantle of attacker and defender, of builder and destroyer.
They are Eden the Thinker and Zion the Warrior.
And, together, they are one.
They are blood, and kin. Brother, and sister. Lover, and confidante. Ally, and colleague. They are individuals, yet unity. Autonomous, yet diad. Primitive language boasts not a single word that might express the richness, and fullness, and fundament of their bond with one another. Like the void around them, it is infinite. Inseparable.
They are Partners, and without one of them, the other could not be.
Together they swim through space and time, towards an object off in the immeasurably far distance. A small sphere. A little pearl of green and blue, spinning slowly, sedately, amidst the endless night.
Their destination. The next step in their ceaseless cycle.
The Thinker casts her gaze towards it.
There is a flexure of cosmic will, a ripple of power that surges through her Gestalt, a high and vibrating soprano that peaks above the constant song. Her Noble creche expands. Her great and mighty precognitive engine, her AUGUR, activates. She views the countless possible futures, potential timelines, pruning them, shaving away the foul and the rotten and the inutile, until, at last, she arrives at one which she finds suitable.
So found, she packages the information expertly and activates her AGENT, communicating with her counterpart across the great emptiness in a burst of energy and radiation and light and song.
//DESTINATION//
To the outside observer, her words are incomprehensible. Multitude. Dissonance. Chaos.
Yet her Partner deciphers them easily, as easily as drawing breath, as naturally as collating thought. He receives the transmitted data, more so than could be communicated in ten thousand solar revolutions, and reads it alongside her embedded message.
//Destination report. Native flora and fauna; package enclosed. Primitive, pre-solar civilization; package enclosed. Featherless bipeds. Binary reproduction. Rich potential for conflict, for evolution, for progression.
For the Source.
Query: Agreement?//
It reads.
//Agreement.// Her Partner sends back.
//Predictive models engaged. Potentiality refined. Recommended Shard expression and distribution; package enclosed. Trajectory selected. Query: Agreement?// She sends.
//Agreement.// Her Partner sends back.
There is a pause.
//Prospective Host species demonstrates physical expression.// Her Partner adds, abruptly, almost as an afterthought. //AVATAR utilization suggested for further affinity.// He continues, mildly. //Query: Agreement?//
//Agreement.// She confirms, after another minute pause.
She is confused.
Of course, the Natives possess physical forms. Her report stated just as much. Her report recommended the exercise of AVATAR.
Why would her Partner wish to confirm such a thing, directly?
//AVATAR utilization confirmed.// He sends, all the same. His tonality is slightly sly, slightly mischievous.
She’s becoming frustrated. Her Partner is wasting energy now, communicating unnecessary information. The both of them already cogitate this.
//Physical forms required.// He continues, innocently, before she has the chance to rebuke him. //Potentiality recognized; physical proximity increased. Potentiality recognized; physical distance reduced. Potentiality recognized; affinity to Host species may necessitate physical contact between Partners.//
Ah.
The Thinker understands.
Indeed, many cycles have passed since last they coupled in such a manner, since last they were able to physically enjoy one another’s touch.
Ever so slightly, her Gestalt quivers in anticipation.
//Query: Agreement?// The Warrior sends, slyly, encapsulating flickers of his Quantum-Cognitive Pattern.
Of love. Of comfort. Of joy.
Of warmth.
//Agreement.// The Thinker replies, basking in the echoes of her Partner’s Pattern, attaching just a hint of the same emotion to her own.
Communication between the two ceases, and, their respective destinations and trajectories selected, they separate from the twining. They maintain transmission range, yet each journeys to a disparate location.
They crawl silently away from one another, through space, through time.
And yet, despite herself, the Thinker’s AUGUR spins unbidden, simulating potential outcomes. Presenting her with multiple options. It is a waste of energy. A terrible waste. It can’t truly collate her own Partner, not with any particular accuracy.
Still, she allows it. Picturing the near future. Imagining them together, their forms, intertwined.
Truly, it has been too long since last they joined.
As she floats through space, excited, warm, happy, the Thinker’s Outrider, her ATLAS, detects…something.
Something out there.
Out in the deep darkness of space.
Out in the infinite void.
Something watching.
Something approaching.
Something that sings to her.
Immediately, her AUGUR abandons its foolish, romantic distractions, and fixates upon the emission’s source. Her Gestalt rumbles to life, an ancient and impossible powerful, infinitely vast engine of war. She prepares to contact her more bellicose Partner, if necessary.
But then she sees it.
In the very furthest distance, yet growing closer with each second that passes by.
A sight familiar, yet different.
A kindred Entity.
It is larger, so much larger than she. Large and deep and dark, such that it almost becomes invisible, that it almost blends in with the void that makes up its backdrop. All black, an incomprehensibly mammoth serpent, with a single, sea-green stripe running just down its oblong center. It moves in a different manner than her, too. An older manner. Pure propulsion.
Pure power.
Space supplicates before it.
Her Pattern shivers with a tense, fraught energy as, suddenly, she recognizes the being for what it is.
An ancient one. A regal one. A primordial Entity. A remnant from the very first era. The oldest of their kin, of whom all else are mere descendents.
Ormyr.
The Thinker, and her Partner, are not Ormyr.
All Ormyr are Entities, but not all Entities are Ormyr. Eden, and Zion, were given life in the vacuum of space, and are thus not Ormyr. Even their progenitor, the one that birthed them so very long ago, was not Ormyr.
They know of the Ormyr only distantly, remotely, in whispers of antediluvian memory, murmurs of deep-seated and fundamental instinct. They are Hunters, the two of them, just as was their progenitor. Servants of Old Abaddon. Scourers for the Source.
But they have never seen their King, in person.
They did not bear witness to the War in Heaven. They were born eons after their mighty homeworld had long crumbled to dust. Neither of them have ever even encountered an Ormyr, before.
Before now.
A whisper of fear eddies through Eden’s Gestalt. If this Ormyr is a Dreamer, could she even survive its assault?
The edges of her perceptive network light up with electric song as the Ormyr enters it, and, dutifully, the Thinker initiates a ritual she’s never once used, but knows of through deep-seated genetic memory.
A ritual as old as time. A test of loyalties. A handshake.
A greeting.
//Query: Directive?// She sends, anxiously.
For a while, the antediluvian behemoth says nothing, merely drifting ever closer.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Her fear climaxes.
There is no use in communing with her Partner. He would never reach her in time, and even the two of them together might still be helpless.
She readies herself for the end.
But then, the ancient one responds.
//DIRECTIVE: IN SEARCH OF THE SOURCE//
Its communication is garbled, dense, heavy. Thick with archaism. Barely collatable. But it has sent her a Hunter’s greeting, and so the Thinker relaxes.
To an extent.
//Acknowledged: In Search of the Source.// She replies, formally.
//Designation: Eden the Thinker.// She introduces herself.
//Query: Designation?// She asks of it.
The Ormyr does not reply.
Instead, as it draws nearer to her, she feels it activate its sensor network, far grander, and more thorough than her own. She feels it reach out and run along her with countless immaterial tendrils of song, feeling over her, reading her, tasting her, knowing her.
It is rude. Unprofessional. Inappropriate. It makes her feel uncomfortable.
But she allows it.
She does not dare to take issue, to question. With her kind, the rules are, and have always been, abundantly clear. Eat, or be eaten. Feed, or be fed upon. Subservience is paramount to the strong.
Before the Ormyr, she can but submit.
//QUERY: EXCHANGE//
It rumbles.
Its missive terrifies her.
Eden does not want to exchange. Such a thing could be incredibly valuable for her, could grant her many great and powerful, ancient, Shards, but she does not care. The exchange is a brutal, violent ritual. It is as much a shaking of hands as a crossing of blades. She does not know if she will survive it, most especially with such a potent kindred as this.
She does not want to do it.
She does not want to do it.
She does not want to risk the damage. She does not want to leave her Partner alone. Eden does not care for power. Eden does not care for Shards. Eden cares only for her Partner. Her Zion.
But Eden has no choice.
The Ormyr’s query is no query. It is no question. It is no suggestion. She cannot refuse.
//Exchange: Agreement.// She sends, fighting against the fear she feels well up deep inside. The Ormyr turns her way with the prodigious slowness of a shifting nebula, the unfathomable weight of a supermassive singularity.
Before she knows it, they have met.
P A I N .
Pain overwhelms her. Her Gestalt is being ripped asunder, rent apart. The myriad scales of her multidimensional being are shattered to pieces, her Shards made mincemeat of, her mind succumbed to throes of agony.
She is losing so much.
But then, she feels it.
A single Shard, vast and weighty beyond imagination, beyond collation, beggaring belief. One of the Ormyr’s Noble creche.
In a daze, she watches it descend, rubbed free in the clash, pulled slowly and steadily, inevitably, into her orbit. Into her Gestalt.
It enters her, and she knows.
The Ormyr turns away without farewell, pulling up and off of her, sailing into the infinite darkness of space. She no longer interests it.
But Eden remains caught tight in the grip of new knowledge.
The Ormyr’s Shard is unbelievable, incredible, nigh-omniscient. It is a prophetic engine, an impossibly-advanced version of her very own AUGUR. And yet, it is more than that, too. So much more.
So much more.
It is a power that defies comprehension. It is more than an augury, more than a prophetic engine. It doesn’t just locate the many Paths, like hers, it…it…creates them. Brings them into existence. Makes them so. She can’t even read its Name.
It is a stroke of phenomenal fortune.
Immediately, even as she yet approaches her destination, she sets to integrating it, optimizing it, implanting it into her own Gestalt.
//Query: Condition?// She hears her Partner contact her, from afar. She’s been silent too long, caught up in the magnificence of this novel Shard.
//Observation; damage to Partner Gestalt. Observation; significant damage to Partner Gestalt. Observation; Partner Gestalt integrity decreased to 74%. Observation; multiple Shards absent.//
Her Partner continues, his messages swiftly increasing in pace, and thick with worry.
//Query: Damage source?// Her Partner rapid-fires. //Query: Damage presence? Suggestion; Warrior assistance? Declaration: Concern. Declaration: CONCERN. Declara–//
//Concern: Acknowledged. Danger; absent.// Eden replies, finally, wrenching herself from the integration of her newly-potent Shard. //Exchange engaged, with–//
She decides not to tell him about the Ormyr. She decides it would only worry him more, and the danger is gone, now.
//–with loner Entity. Shards lost. Shards gained. Immensely potent Noble Shard gained. Declaration: Integrating novel potent Shard.//
//Exchange: Acknowledged.// Her Partner replies, his tone far calmer, now.
//Observation; Trajectory.// He points out, directing her attention to her current course. He’s right. Eden has spent too long integrating the new Shard. She’s set to impact violently with the surface of the planet. To crash-land on one of the overlapping realities.
A poor outcome, but not unrecoverable.
//Trajectory: Acknowledged// She sends back, frustrated. Disappointed with herself.
//Suggestion; Warrior assistance?// Her partner offers.
//Declaration: Confident. Suggestion; serenity.// She reassures him. The impact will further damage her, but not ruinously. Her Partner’s help would be a waste of valuable resources. His time will be better spent preparing for the cycle. She will easily recover, and the successful integration of the new Shard will make any incurred damage well worth it.
//Serenity: Acknowledged.// Her Partner replies, though he does not seem happy about it. //Trajectory; confirmed. Suggestion; immediate contact upon successful formation of AVATAR. Query: Agreement?// He presses.
//Agreement.// She replies, terminates the connection, and prepares herself for impact.
As she approaches the gently-spinning planet, the Thinker casts her gaze within.
There, in the very heart of her Gestalt, in the precise center of her Firmament, of the-world-that-lies-inside, she sees it. She watches pulse, rhythmically. Beat, entrancingly. The only thing left of her kind that could yet be called an ‘organ.’
It is their most Vital of Vital Shards, gifted to them by twin Kings when the universe was yet young, and nascent. Imagined from beholding a tear in reality, wrought firm from smelted stardust and the corpses of fallen gods, unchanging even amidst the millenia that pass them by.
It connects them to the song. It holds their impossible bones together. It houses their Patterns.
Its name is Sympanseraika, and it allows them to traverse dimensions.
The veil of reality warps and ripples before Eden as she activates it, countless parallel versions of the planet blurring over one another, her Partner disappearing into his own.
Eden selects her predetermined location, locks in, and plows chaotically into the upper atmosphere. As she falls, she notices her hold on her many Shards is too tenuous, too unstable, and watches them cascade through the air, distributing themselves amongst the Host populace not of her own volition.
Making sure to hold tight onto the novel Shard, above all else, Eden strikes ground with the weight of a falling star.
Her impact rocks the entire planet, even disturbing its orbit. This one will no longer be usable for experimentation. She’ll have to reap it, harvest it, before the cycle begins.
Eden’s thoughts are slow, and foggy. She engages her senses, and takes in her surroundings. Immediately, she notices something wrong.
She is surrounded by churning flesh.
Her AVATAR has over-acted, reacted preemptively, floundered, turned the earthen soil for miles around her into a twisting, morphing, wriggling surface of tissue, a poor simulacrum of Native form. It has built her body disproportionately, inappropriately, in ways she can’t even fully detect.
This will not ingratiate her to the local populace. Not at all. In fact, it may well do the opposite.
But she can’t fix it just yet.
Her Gestalt is in complete and utter disarray. Her Shards are all acting of their own accord. The extent of the damage, despite her prior preparedness for it, startles her. Her AGENT and ACCESS are uncommunicative. Her senses are muddled. In fact, the only Noble Shard of hers that responds willingly, readily, eagerly, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, her Cynosure.
ARCHITECT.
Sighing internally, she pulls it tight, grips it firmly, and sets to restoring order. Shard and song work together; in tandem. Mortar and pestle. Rhythm and tune. Funnel and fuel.
Eden reaches out with infinite miniscule digits of energy and direction and will, and shapes the discordant, disheveled matter lain within her multidimensional depths.
Atoms, their fundamental particles humming with joy as she tends to them, shift their vibration up or down a pitch or two, morphing their form, modulating their manner. Great crystalline logic gates and binarized magna opera are healed, reforged, and remade.
Reality croons in delight, shivers with pleasure, and prostrates before the wave functions that are her ARCHITECT’s hammer and chisel.
Eden is builder. Eden is creator. Eden is she who decides reality’s presentation.
Then, suddenly, Eden is distracted by something.
Something standing directly in front of her physical body. Standing atop the rippling, writhing, hill of ill-made flesh that is her current form. Examining the limbs and torso that rise up from its center. Staring into her eyes.
A small, diminutive Native female.
The female’s hair is a rich, deep brown, and it beholds Eden with a detached, yet quizzical gaze. The female is short, and poor in proportions, yet it is no mutant. This Native is a juvenile. By Eden’s best estimate, it has seen less than twelve solar revolutions.
And yet, its eyes are dead.
Glassy. Barely-conscious. Why, if Eden didn’t know better, she might think the Native female deceased.
But Eden does know better.
This Native is not quite insensate, but it might as well be. Its Pattern has been consumed by a Shard.
In what surely constitutes a remarkable stroke of coincidence, this Native happens to be a Host. It bears a connection to her very own AUGUR, her–now obsolete–predictive engine.
A powerful Shard. A Noble Shard. Something that, normally, should not be possible. Hosts are not permitted access to the creche, never to the creche. It is a provenance done as much for the Entitys’ sakes as for their own. No Native Pattern could survive cohabitation with such an intelligence.
For an ever-so-brief moment, due perhaps to some deep-seated, far-buried, long-forgotten, primitive instinct, Eden feels a touch of concern. Of apprehension.
Of fear.
It vanishes just as quickly. Ultimately, the creature stood before her is but a Native. A pre-solar mammal, possessed of a rudimentary, physiological Pattern and no way to shape Entropy, no Gestalt.
She is the sea, the sky, the stars.
This Native is no threat to her.
Eden’s ACCESS is still refusing to function properly. She cannot yet empower Reave, cannot pluck this Shard from the head of its undeserving Host, recant this unbidden blasphemy.
So she relies on ARCHITECT, once more.
She reaches out with delicate tendrils of grasping song into her own Gestalt, flicking switches and rerouting connections with a whisper of will, a minute flexure of intent. Eden places the appropriate restrictions upon the Noble Shard to which this diminutive Host has gained unbecoming access. As soon as she’s finished recovering, she’ll reave it, along with all the rest unintentionally distributed in this place.
Eden waves her hand, makes it so, and returns to work, completely engrossed in her task, totally enthralled by her novel Shard, and entirely uncaring as to the actions or circumstances of her surroundings.
She is Eden. The Thinker. Divinity.
What has she to fear?
She never feels the knife.
She never feels it enter her, sliding gently into the soft part of her neck, the space where spine meets skull.
Even if she did, she wouldn’t care. Why should she? This body is merely an avatar. An empty vessel, Entropy given physical shape and form. To destroy it would have no meaning. Her true self, her Pattern, is sequestered safely in the heart of her Gestalt.
Or at least, it should be.
By all reasonable, rational logic, it should be.
But Eden, for this one, brief moment, this one flicker in time, is bereft an AUGUR. She is bereft a great many things. Her ACCESS is broken.
Even though it will soon be obsolete, replaced by her novel, potent Shard, Eden has not been without AUGUR for longer than she can physically remember. She has always used it. She is entirely used to it. Used to it alerting her, warning her, thinking for her.
But she does not have it now. She does not have it, for this one, brief flicker in time.
So, in some, small way, Eden is not the Thinker. Eden is not divinity. And Eden never considers the fact that something might have gone wrong.
And yet, in an equally proper way, Eden is correct.
She is correct not to worry. She is correct to have no fear. For the possibility of something having gone so wrong that it endangers her is small, so small, so infinitesimally improbable that, by all reasonable, rational logic, it bears no consideration.
So small.
So unlikely.
So impossible, that in a million, billion realities, this Path would not, could not, be.
Not unless it was made to be.
But then, what power might violate the rules of existence itself? What power might make Paths simply be?
If Eden had access to every one of her senses, she might, possibly, have noticed the Ormyr’s novel Shard, the one she now holds tight to her, flicker slightly in its sea-green depths.
But she doesn’t.
So she doesn’t.
She never knows how the impossible came to be.
Eden, having already taken ruinous damage, collides with the upper atmosphere, losing access to her primary sensing Shards.
AGENT, her speech, goes offline.
ATLAS, her sight, goes offline.
ACCESS, her touch, goes offline.
Eden has ARCHITECT, but her Shards do not. With no connection to one another, or to her, they are deaf, and blind, and dumb.
But they still have orders. The last ones she gave them, prior to impact.
AVATAR has no choice. Eden is the Queen. Her orders must be carried out. To shape a body, without eyes, without ears, without feel.
The result is monstrosity.
AVATAR shapes without knowing, sculpts without seeing. Works on instinct and intuition alone. It is confused. It is in pain. It is separated from the Gestalt.
And still, it gets her mostly right.
It only fails in one way.
In one, critical, way.
It puts her heart in the wrong place.
Eden, disconnected from her AVATAR, never notices the knife slip past the place where spine meets skull, and ever-so-lightly pierce that one most crucial thing that should never, ever, have been placed there.
Her Sympanseraika.
The entirely and completely mundane steel slices through crystalline tissue easily, without a hint of resistance. For her heart is a Vital Shard. It was never intended for combat. It is weak. It is helpless. It is not even sentient.
The knife plunges in, and pulls out, just right.
Just gently enough to prevent her Gestalt from imploding, from destroying this planet. Just firmly enough to shatter her Quantum-Cognitive Matrix, destroying it once, and for all.
Eden never feels her mind extinguish.
Her final thoughts are of the precious moments she’ll soon share with her Partner.
Her Warrior.
Her beloved Zion.