////

As was expected, everyone lost their collective shit when the eclipse blackened the sun and a five-eyed moon rose in its place.

I took command quickly as the only woman without any skin.

“The moonlight will burn you and give you powers.”

Perhaps the millennia of social isolation had dulled my ability to understand my fellow man because people just ran from me, screaming bloody murder.

“Caralho.”

Welp, I should’ve seen that coming.

////

It took some people becoming moonscorched before the rest of the lot fell in line.

When the monsters finally came, even the hidden unbelievers had to acknowledge the writing on the wall: ‘the crazy woman’s on our side; we’re having soft tacos later.’

Maybe not the last part, but I did miss Aztecan-Vespucian food a whole lot. It didn’t beat my undying love towards Pindoramean food like feijão tropeiro, but that was neither here nor there.

“Now, watch and wait—they should be here any minute now…”

Insects infected with Antediluvia’s brand of insanity swarmed down the hallway perpendicular to my creative writing elective. That time felt like eons ago but I knew it had been longer.

I caught a scythe’s eponymous blade-limb in between two fingers. In that tiny, microscopic blind spot in the cosmos, I was free to imagine into being anything that I wanted.

And I wanted strength.

The fungal sword-steel crumpled under the weight of a white-hole spewing infinite matter from its reverse singularity. Consensus reality quickly collapsed the paradox, especially so because of the eyes just behind me—the more witnesses you had to a manifested hallucination, a paradox construct, the less stable it became.

My esoterica suite, [Ragnarök-Womb] and [Stygia] were made for short bursts of raw power and I used them to full effect.

I shot bullets of compressed air with flicks of my fingers, each hitting like an artillery shell and disabling the swarm further and further still until it was naught but a mangled heap of fungus and metal—the display surely impressed my spectators, but had they known how low on paracausal energy that I was…

“Now, I suggest we get the move on because this place is soon going to be a touchdown point for a [Finger].”

Noah, alive this time and not just another deoxy-nucleic-acid memory-byte in the repository-stomach of the [Ark-Of-The-All-Life], lifted a hand.

“What’s a finger?”

Huh, they did not have the [Omniglot] yet to be able to intuitively understand the New World. Well, no hurt in enlightening them.

“An extra-dimensional aperture into [Antediluvia]; a living realm of fungal flesh—even its space-time analogue is a living organism, allowing Antediluvians to traverse thousands of miles in a blink through the [Mycelium] web.”

“Why do your words feel like they’re tickling my ears? And why’s it called a finger?”

“The answer to the first question will dawn on you real quick, so I won’t spoil the surprise. As for the second: because they are fungal hives the size of skyscrapers that vomit out primordial horrors with a predilection towards the color red; and they kinda look like fingers from afar.”

////

All ten of us survived through the Long Night.

The main six that usually did: Johnny McCarthy, Bao, Rex, Mike, Juan and Aisha. And the three that usually did not: Eli McCarthy, Noah and Alexander.

Moonscorched esoterica stayed the same; only an outside observer such as me could change anything in a time-line. Outsiders themselves, though they kept their previous memories, could not act on them unless in specific circumstances such as in subliminal-space. Their avatars, the prime vessel through which an Outsider interacted with consensus reality, were constrained in [Golgotha] lest a losing battle become a curb-stomp.

What I had become to call the Brotherhood of the Ten, or simply the Ten, lounged inside an apartment building, the mattresses and furniture blood-stained.

The Long Night had not been kind, turning most of the globe’s populace into Empyrean monstrosities.

“Mary, why aren’t you affected by the moon?”

I turned around to see Noah once again, asking a question. He was a rather inquisitive if cautious man, keeping his dark skin far and away from the Empyrean radiation unlike me. Now that I rummaged around the steel-trap of my mind, I realized I didn’t know much of his reliquary or even his old-world background, for that matter.

“My esoterica.”

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Answers as to [Ragnarök-Womb] were impossible to comprehend, breaking minds with their unwords from the inside-out. It was a useful enough vector of attack when I found myself isolated from allies as the non-discriminatory cognito-hazard could cull even the sturdiest of anomalies, so long as they had even a semblance of said cognition.

Noah continued to try and pry out some answers from me so I decided to cut that line of inquiry short.

“Do not tread this path. The truth will render you an insensate vegetable.”

At my ominous tip-toeing around the topic, Noah got the gist of it and returned to the darker corner of the apartment where the rest of the Ten recovered their minds and bodies.

I ruminated as I was wont to, meditating on the trials and tribulations that were to come.

////

You could not peek into the soul of another.

The [Omniglot] denied access to a human’s ontological transcript unless they surrendered the information themselves. Even then, sometimes a person could not lay bare their hearts because an unconscious part of themselves just couldn’t trust.

Coercion could still happen but it was a near-rarity.

For all but the [Heart-Eater]; the first murderer of the apocalypse. He could see and understand the reliquary of any person, even my own, through the paradox-idol he took as his name. [Ragnarök-Womb] could not make a psycho any more insane.

Thankfully, that threat was all the way on the other side of the globe. It would take time until I had to deal with him once again.

////

Once we got enough distance from the touch-down point of [Antediluvia], I led the Ten towards the sea, towards the East, towards the future location of the Last City; it would coalesce from the ether in about a month, brought forth from the collective unconscious in the past location of humanity’s first metropolis, first incarnation of civilization and its last bastion.

Any and all surviving humans would be drawn towards [Labyrinth] once it manifested but getting a leg up on the competition would help us tremendously. In the center of the labyrinthine city, Babel the Omniglot Tower arose—on the last week of Year Zero, seven days before the Advent, the maze would fold in on itself, plunging the last remnants of our world into a series of filters, of crucibles until all that was left was strong enough to fight the Outsiders on the Sabbath.

Human souls fallen by human hands returned to the collective, the world-soul, awaiting for the observer to do with them as the [Seneschal] wished. Any spirit trapped within the bellies of the Outsider beasts would be returned to the fold once the corresponding avatar was slain.

We looked over an expanse of water that was entirely still. Enough time had passed for the oceans to freeze over into mirrors that led into the sphera of [Akasha]; the endless skies where leviathans swam.

I took the first step and walked atop the water as if treading solid ground.

“The ice will only crack on a waxing crescent moon and even then, large enough shards will persist that can get us across the Atlantic.”

Seeing their reticence, I explained my plan and why it was important to reach [Labyrinth] first. Confusion came over me at not being able to convince them to step on the mirror-surface of the ocean. We went back and forth until I saw that they wouldn’t budge, fearful of the leviathans.

“You would choose a certain death over an incertain one?”

“Listen here, bi—”

I appeared before Mike, instantly folding the space in between us and dragging together the two halves of the universe to mend the gap.

He backpedaled, stumbling on his feet and then shuffle-crawling back another half-meter.

“I have been nothing but honest. I have helped you without expecting anything in return.” There was no anger in my words, only more confusion. “Tell me, Michael Jacob Alter, why have you repaid me with naught but mistrust?”

The man gurgled a thousand half-formed, aborted responses before Bao stepped in and explained calmly: “We’re scared, Mary. Our tempers are short ‘cause of the stress—everything we knew was thrown upside-down and then some. Mike’s shaking, Mary. You talk strange and know things but can’t explain why; that doubt’s festered and though Mike’s outburst was uncalled for, you gotta see things from our point of view.”

It was then that I understood how far up my own ass my ego was.

Millenia of isolation within yourself tends to make you a bit self-absorbed. Didn’t help that I was already a bit egotistical before the Apoc.

With paracausal energy at the finger-tip’s of my mind’s eye, I pinched a commissural tract of my ontology closed; I, essentially, lobotomized myself, excising the corpus callosum between my mortal and immortal halves.

The psyche of a scared adult came to the surface, the ghost of something unfathomable just behind her.

I fell to my knees, tears streaking down my cheeks. The calcified tartar of eons of witnessing death and despair made me buckle under my own weight—there was only so much a person could take.

Slowly and nearly unconsciously, the pain was shunted away into [Ragnarök-Womb], into the ether just beyond my grasp. I wiped away the tears and shakily stood, the Nine giving me the space like I was a leper.

In a way, I was. If we didn’t win this time, I would infect the rest of consensus reality no different than leprosy.

“I…” a swallowed gulp. I steeled myself, starting slow and then letting my momentum carry me forward. “For every esoterica… there is a corresponding hubris.”

I let those words gestate in the silence until someone took to filling in the gap.

“You can’t talk about your esoterica because of your hubris. You can’t confirm or deny—it’s like a geas.”

The thing about paradoxes is that they tend not to like it when people find loopholes.

I felt the darkness of my own skull boil my brains, the pain unlike anything else. Without a person through which to channel its insanity, my hubris was mine alone to bear.

Noah shut up and dashed towards me as I convulsed on the sand, laying my head in his lap to stop me from giving myself a concussion. He did not grip me or restrain me, simply offer a buffer in between skull and ground.

“She’s not radioactive, you idiots! Come and help me get her back to safety—we’re exposed out here.”

////