"What the hell did we just see?" Kat asked, her voice barely a whisper in the darkened room.

The lights had dimmed, flickering. Something seemed to be wrong with their vessel.

"We just saw . . . how the Leviathan at Terris came to be here," Brooks said slowly. His mind raced, trying to understand the implications of all he had just witnessed.

No one had known what happened to the Leviathan after it plunged into the Terris sun. Many had presumed it dead, some alien act of madness like its attack had seemed.

The Voidfleet and Sapient Union government as a whole could not accept that. Without proof of its death, they had to accept the possibility that it could come back out.

The system remained a cursed place, and the memories of the horrors were a wound that would not close.

Even if no one truly believed it could have survived. What could not only plunge into a star but then survive staying there?

It was long dead. Still a threat in death, for what it signified about the dangers of their universe.

But not alive.

Now, Brooks had seen it come out of a star a million times more intense, and be unperturbed. It had survived that star going hypernova.

It was still alive in the sun at Terris.

"When the gate collapsed," Kell said. "It became trapped in our universe."

"Did it kill the star?" Brooks asked.

"No," Kell said. "The star would inevitably die. But it was tipped into an early death - by this observatory."

"Are you saying we caused this?" Nadian asked.

The room around Brooks was suddenly white.

He turned in place, looking for the Present Mind.

"Tell me what I just saw," he called out. "Why did you show me this?"

It was in front of him then, startlingly close, and he had to crane his neck up to look at its featureless, armored face.

"You and your people, the most overriding question that lingers in them is why the Terris event occurred. Now you see."

"The star - the gate - collapsed. It became trapped in our universe," Brooks said slowly. He wanted confirmation.

"Yes," the Present Mind told him.

"But why Terris? Why did it attack us?"

The Present Mind was silent for a time. "Its reasoning is beyond me. The system you call Terris was, perhaps, just in its way."

"You're saying that by sheer goddamn chance it attacked an inhabited star system?" he demanded.

"It did not attack your system, Captain. It only passed through on its path to the star. I can tell you with certainty that it was not even aware of your presence."

"Bullshit!" Brooks spat. "It killed millions of us! It engaged our fleets and broke their backs! Do you know how many-"

"You betray your own, tiny, bias. You believe the Terris event calculated; but do you even know if the Great One went to other star systems before that one?"

Brooks fell silent. Then; "Show me that, then."

"Your singular desire does not sway me," the Present Mind replied. "This event, what I have shown you, was due to the overriding question in the heads of every one of you who has come within the enabling bounds. Even those outside, I can hear the question echoing. Thus, I have shown you."

Brooks felt his knees start to buckle, and he dropped down.

"So all of it, all of the suffering and misery at Terris, it was just . . . random? An accident, as this Leviathan blundered towards another star? Hoping to find a way back to where it came from?"

"Yes," the Present Mind told him.

Brooks felt broken. One of the most defining events of galactic history . . . and there was no deeper meaning?

"Are they even intelligent?" he asked. "Or do they always act this irrationally? Are they even aware of what we do, that we exist?"

"Intelligent - yes. In their own way. I cannot say for certain, but my creators observed moments of intelligence, even brilliance. But the Great Ones operate in their own system of logic, and in their own way and in their own time."

"Was it able to use the star in the Terris system to escape?" he asked.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Let it be gone, he thought. Please let it be gone.

"I do not know," the Present Mind replied. "It may simply be in the core of the Terris star, deciding what to do next."

Brooks struggled to think of what to ask next. He opened his mouth to speak - he did not even know what he might ask - when the Present Mind shifted, turning away from him.

"My attention diverts elsewhere. My creators have come."

----------------------------------------

Apollonia's mind felt different than it ever had before. Even the scant few times when she had gotten a contact high off drugs, it had not been like this.

Her mind felt expansive, widened to a point where she could entertain more than one thought at once, multiple - endless. She felt/heard herself talking to herself in a million of her own voices and wanted to scream, to pull back in and curl into a ball as the cacophony threatened to overwhelm her. A sensation of falling that she could not stop until it peaked, and she knew she should be feeling nauseated, except she had no physical body, she could not see or feel or be her body.

Finally she could take no more, and she screamed.

She felt like she screamed for an eternity, but it did no good.

Little by little, though, she began to comprehend herself. She did not narrow it down to only a few thoughts, but she could . . . focus on one, even while the others ran.

No, that was not it, she realized, her thoughts growing exponentially. She thought all of these things at once.

She saw the Craton; not simply the room from the table she had laid down upon.

The altar, she corrected herself. She was the apex of the movement of the higher balances that even their tiny bodies bound to lower dimensions disturbed. The disturbances of the higher balances tipped into her now, largely from the two whose lives had just been extinguished, trading one set of chemical reactions, life, for another, decay. Also the energies of those present, their horror and terror and frustration. She picked out individuals in the crowd. Their pain was overwhelming, and she felt a new exponential growth of thoughts of her own sorrow and sadness at their pain, even anger and self-hate.

She could not stop what Cathal had done, but she saw that the formations in their minds were already countered by motions above that would tip their states into new ways.

They would not remember this. It was a subtle and clever manipulation of the eddies and currents from above, she thought, but recognized as well that this was new to her.

And ephemeral. Her consciousness had been enhanced to this, but . . . only for a time.

Would she remember any of it? She could not view her own mind as she did theirs.

It had to be. Cathal - Cathal the traitor, Cathal the friend, Cathal the bringer of revelation.

This was what it must have been like for the ancient prophets to touch God, she thought in a remote line of thought.

To touch hell, another thought.

Outside of the room, she could see every room, every surface of the Craton. It was badly damaged; the streams of radiation had damaged thinking crystals and disturbed lines of power and people, poisoning and wounding both ship and crew.

She did not know if it could be saved; for all she saw, she did not understand it, from these endless angles even their simple geometries seemed to make no sense.

Outside of the ship, a tiny distance away to her mind's eye, were the Others Like Her.

No, not like Her. They were Great Ones, and she was only a Beginning One, a bud of a tree that became aware enough to dream of the day it would bask in the sun.

Oh, but now she saw, her consciousness spreading even further out; she saw how their shapes and balance were bringing together the material to create the great star. Not Now, but Then, they were only seeing Then along with Now, because that was the shape that this section of space had been twisted into for this 'moment', thanks to the temple.

The Great Ones cooperated, altering the reality to conform to their plans.

Where the balance of their power came to rest, the levels of reality were driven together, a doorway - a highway that allowed the free flow from higher to lesser levels and back. Through it, even she could return to exist on just the mundane levels.

Was that her out? But no, not yet. The thought now of returning to that tiny, stunted shape was terrifying. Like the thought of cutting off one's own body.

She looked in all ways, all directions up and down and all the other endless types, to find something.

There; a small intrusion that stabbed like a knife through layers. It damaged nothing, but its crudeness and ugliness were immediately apparent. It could be ignored, but it mattered to her for some reason.

She saw within and without the temple. Inside were tiny, tiny shapes - beings she knew. One was vastly larger than the others, though she still dwarfed it.

Kell. Or rather, the thing that played Kell. It gazed at her, and for the first time she could truly see all of his horror.

A disgusting tear in the layers that should not be. Created by the hubris of tiny beings who thought themselves great; it insulted her in infinity and the finite through being neither.

But her mind looked past that as well, and she saw the others.

A single tiny presence that she knew. She could not even remember what its name was, only that it mattered in some way, and she did not want it gone, as its balance was tipping it.

The Present Mind of the temple abased itself before her, and she ordered it; return those beings.

The Present Mind obeyed. The little vessel that was part of the station, that had been sent forth in time and space to answer a burning question suddenly turned - moving back towards the temple.

"Why do you obey?" a thought of hers asked.

"You Speak with Its Voice," she was told.

Of course, she could see that. She and it - it?

What was it?

She was she. Herself.

Apollonia Nor. A meaningless cluster of sounds that she had made up to rid herself of her birth name, at least partially. Yet still holding to the last sound, a thread of the past she could not bring herself to abandon.

She and It were separate!

They were not one being, but they were . . . fused. The Embrion, the Beginning One, longing for a full definition and balance that could not exist until it was birthed into the lowest levels of reality. Through her, somehow connected to her by sheer chance at birth, its grasping presence holding desperately to hers. Both parasite and savior, all of the times that it had felt her fear, when she'd been in danger, and it . . .

It had acted, lashing out like a baby to swat at the sources of pain.

Becoming more and more aware, more powerful, and more precise with time.

Her mind collapsed back into herself, into a single thread.

The after effects of it all were too much, though. Memories of infinity lingered, and her conscious mind, too, stopped functioning.