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Once the paired guardian died, its world-wound was shunted away from the consensus, reverting the prolapsing of the Outsider reality from our own. This included decoupling the heart, the dimensional anchor, as well.

Touch-down points formed around space-time loci saturated with mass-death; the bygone campus of MIT being one such place. The coalesced souls of the slain formed a metaphysical singularity, a paradox-idol.

But it wasn’t like any other idol, instead able to be stored and used at a later date.

I would not be using it myself because others of my team needed one to materialize a reliquary proper—that way, they were inoculated against theophany-events among other forms of conversion and eldritch possession.

The idol looked like negative space, like an approximation of an object made by an alien intelligence that had held no conception of physical existence. Nondescript in shape and form and ideal, it was held within a Faraday cage of black-alabaster lightning—the temporal ice that made up the boundaries of a given reality.

////

When all was said and done, I only realized that we’d won when Mary appeared before me like a Fury ready to enact punishment on the wicked.

“Let go of the power, Noah; the battle is over. You are safe.”

For a second I thought that the guilt had finally festered into a psychotic episode, the words more like a hallucination. I just couldn’t believe them.

When I stood still and unreactive, Mary approached and hugged me as if I was not a dangerous animal, a murderer.

She pulled back, holding my shoulders at arm’s length and looking me in the eyes behind the molten lead. Behind me, a crown of thorns trailed like the horns of a great and ravenous stag.

“You can talk to me, Noah. I will not judge. I’ve made more mistakes than the entirety of all of humanity, past, present, or future.”

Maybe it was the premonition-sense that I got after being moonscorched. Maybe it was just something in her earnest, undeceiving eyes and firm voice. Maybe it was because I was at my wits’ end and venting this burden was the only way to relieve some of the agony.

[Adamant] released its hold over my head, letting me confess my sins. The horns now rested on my shoulders, nearly a hundred-meters long.

Mary listened, no hint of reproach in her face, no matter how hard I looked for it. By the end of the retelling, she gave me another hug.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“Johnny became a vestige—a lobotomized vessel for his esoterica. It usually happens before aphelion-class is reached in earnest; the body is strong but the human mind held within is fragile. His consciousness was not so firmly rooted to his idol so as to survive that much physical trauma.”

She saw the guilt that ate away at my soul like maggots and she could not help but want to relieve it.

“He was dead with no hope of return, Noah. Out of the countless times that a person devolved into a vestige, only one ever returned from beyond the brink of that sort of insensate catatonia.”

I could not help but ask: “Who?”

The smile she gave me did not reach her ancient eyes and I got my answer.

////

We returned to the majority of our group licking their wounds.

The fungal flesh of [Antediluvia], harbinger of the [Ark-Of-The-All-Life], sublimated into Euclidean fractals that recursed back from whence they came.

Eli was the first to greet us, getting up from the bare dirt to ask her dreaded question.

I shared a look with Noah and told him to go and get some rest while I spoke with Elizabeth.

////

To say that Eli did not take kindly to the death of her twin brother was the understatement of the last zettasecond.

“What do you mean you’re not going to do anything? He fucking murderer my brother!” Eli signed.

“He did not take Johnny from you. There was nothing left of your brother at that point, Eli. Just an empty husk with an idol within. An idol that, had Noah not taken, would’ve spelled your deaths.”

“And how can you be so certain that it wasn’t just greed? That he just wanted the power that Johnny had?”

Since regaining my mortal point-of-view, I loathed to return to the ageless, alien state of a being that had lived longer than universal heat-death. It was like putting on clothes that were both too tight and too heavy—suffocation.

But, sometimes, I found that people only responded to power and authority, not arguments. Not understanding and discourse.

I stared down Eli, letting the nothing-waters beyond existence flood into my voice. I spoke not with a twenty-something young woman’s tongue, but instead with the weight of an Outsider. I knew then, through a proprioception of the soul, that my eyes had grown recursive and hypnotic spirals that went all the way down into the reality-soup of [Euclid].

“[I have never, in all my incomprehensibly-long life, witnessed a grief so suffocating that suicide seemed preferable. Do not make out that man to be a villain; he would have chosen death had your lives not been on the line.]”

The weight of an existence so far beyond her own pressed down onto Eli, vast beyond her ability to fathom and alien beyond her ability to recognize. Where the [All-Consuming-Eye]’s presence was like a baleful heat, this was an arctic undercurrent; the rarified, breathless air of Everest.

I retracted my ontological weight when she began to shiver and shake.

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