~January 9th, 140 AH~
~Sector Leo, somewhere along the coasts of Terra Nebulo~
A hairless ageless creature bent toward its core… and found that it couldn’t hug itself.
The creature didn’t know much, but it knew that it needed limbs to hug itself. Not having limbs was going to be a problem, and not just for seeking warmth.
Warmth? Why did it seek warmth? Was it cold? Was it even capable of feeling cold… or warmth, for that matter?
Limbless as it was, the creature nevertheless did its best to take in its surroundings—to make sense of its world. Whether by choice or happenstance, it lay atop a patch of moist earth and clumped ash. Mud, some might call it. The mud wasn’t constant. Even now, as the creature watched, indentations formed, flattened, and reformed at the whims of drops of water that fell from the sky.
Rain. The creature didn’t know how it knew that this thing from the sky was rain, nor why the notion of it made it want to break out its own waterworks… and found that it couldn’t.
The creature didn’t know much, but it knew that it needed tear ducts to cry. Unlike the lack of limbs though, not having tear ducts didn’t feel as urgent a problem. The creature felt as though it’d already done enough crying for several lifetimes, though it couldn’t remember for whom the tears had been shed.
For now, it was content to let the rain wash over, splash against and trickle down its sleek surface—almost as if the creature itself was crying. And as the creature pretended to cry, something else—something lurid red—flickered onto its blurred vision.
A lone red flower shivered amidst the rain and wind. It too bent toward its core, and it too lacked the limbs to hug itself for warmth.
Watching this, the creature was overcome with the desire to reach out and shield the flower from the rain and wind. The desire was intense. It’d never wanted anything more in its life—which was an absurd notion, considering it’d barely had a life to speak of.
The creature willed itself to bend toward the flower, to reach out and provide the warmth it so desperately sought. It eventually gave up, but out of sheer futility rather than contentment.
Yes. Not having limbs was going to be a problem…
~January 15th, 140 AH~
The solution came in the form of a metallic giant that too descended from the sky.
It was a forlorn looking thing, also with parts missing. Its frame had long faded of its original colour, laden instead with the time-worn residues of ash and solitude. When it landed, it did so with a barely controlled crash, having run out of the last of its fumes.
The creature didn’t know much, but it knew that this metallic stranger was breaking apart at the seams, if not already broken. As the creature watched, the giant’s chest slid open to reveal a second figure: much smaller, much frailer.
Man. The second stranger was an old man, with wispy silver hair and creaking limbs. He hobbled out of the giant’s chest, slid down its bent and crumbling legs, then began to limp. Closer. Toward the creature.
As the creature captured the old man’s features, it realized that he was no stranger at all. It—or at least another iteration of it—had known this man. Had known of the gentleness of his soul, the depth of his sorrow, and the transience of his warmth.
The creature was overcome with the desire to reach out and shield the man from his own sorrow. The desire was intense. It’d never wanted anything more in its life, not since the time it’d watched a red flower shiver and bend amidst the rain and wind.
The creature didn’t have to reach. For the man came to it instead. Locomotion. This was the benefit of having limbs. This was why the creature wished fervently for limbs of its own.
The man now knelt beside the creature, revealing a face etched and grooved with an ageless sorrow. The man knelt and peered into the creature’s—eyes? Eye, singular? Sen… SPU?
The man knelt and stared like this for a long while. The creature stared back, never breaking ‘eye’ contact. Eventually, something within the etches and grooves upon the man’s face shifted—melted—into understanding. His face, shaggy with silver hair, melted into something at once commonplace and uniquely his own. Smile.
“Hello, old friend.”
The words were foreign to the creature. Even so, it understood perfectly. It also understood what the man intended as he bent and cradled the creature in his arms, then carried it back toward his ash-laden giant.
~January 25th, 140 AH~
The creature had limbs.
Well, a limb, singular. The man had crafted it from the parts he’d stripped from his own giant. The process had been anything but smooth. The man had crafted many limbs and tried many different attachments before one finally took. Before one moved by the creature’s own volition.
Even one functional limb made a world of difference. The creature could move now, dragging itself along the barren earth with its one limb acting as a fulcrum. It could see more of the world: the coastline, the inland, the sea that roiled and stretched as far as an SPU could see.
Yet, even with the world made available to it, the creature focused mostly on two things: the flower at the edge of the cliff, and the man who’d descended from the sky.
The flower remained as solitary and as fragile as ever, whipped about by the whims of coastal breezes. At least now, the creature could drag itself to the flower’s side and shield it within its one arm. Whenever it did so, if the creature hadn’t imagined things, the flower in its arm stood just a little taller.
Stolen story; please report.
The man would be gone on most days, leaving the cliffside in favour of long meandering marches through the inland. The creature sensed that the man was looking for something, but he didn’t speak much (and if he did, not about his searches).
The creature didn’t know enough to read the man’s mind. But to its untrained SPU, the man did look just a little smaller, a little frailer, every time he limped back from his day trips.
Day after unchanging day, the creature continued to ‘stand’ guard over the lone red flower. It continued to await the man’s return.
One day, the creature found that the flower had stopped its shivering. Permanently. It had wilted, with shrivelled stalk twisted toward the barren earth, withered petals hanging by lifeless threads. Death.
The creature didn’t know much, but it knew enough to grieve for the flower’s death. As it grieved, something tugged at the unseen edges of its—consciousness? Knowledge bank?
The man didn’t go off on his search that day. Perhaps he wanted to grieve with the creature. Perhaps he was merely tired and needed to rest. In any case, the man stayed by the creature’s side, watching as the creature cradled the dead flower in its one arm, shielding itself from its own grief.
At first, the creature thought the sky might’ve started raining again. Something wet, fragile, and warm trickled down its sleek surface before falling onto and jostling the flower’s withered petals. The creature didn’t know much, but it knew enough to correct its initial assumption. This wasn’t the rain. For the sky above remained as clear as ever in its haziness.
Tears.
What magic had the old man conjured? Had he not stopped at fashioning the creature an arm, and now gone and gifted it tear ducts too? But no, the man hadn’t been responsible. For his crinkled eyes too widened in surprise.
The teardrops were wholly the creature’s own. Summoned, not from glands and ducts, but from a graveyard of the universe’s memories.
Then something even more remarkable happened. Even as the creature—and in turn the man—watched, the flower bloomed anew.
Its once broken stalk straightened. Its once greyed petals regained their lurid redness. And it began to shiver again, having remembered the cold.
The creature cradled the revived flower in its one arm and lay on the barren earth, content. Beside it, the man continue to watch, with his features softening once more into his gentleness, sorrow, and warmth.
The creature didn’t know much, but it was content. It hadn’t seen much if any of the world, but it had everything it needed. The flower. The old man. And the warmth that lingered in the spaces in between.
Beside the creature, the man coughed, with his shrinking and weakening frame shivering amidst the planet’s haze.
~February 25th, 140 AH~
The man was dying.
He’d been dying for a long time. The creature knew that now, as it’d grown to know many new things in the short time it’d known the old man.
His death had been a long time coming. It’d been weeks since he’d had any strength to go out on his searches. He now spent his days resting his shrinking and weakening frame against the crumbling foot of his giant. As he rested, his breaths grew only shallower, and his eyes foggier.
The man was dying. Perhaps any moment now. But the creature didn’t feel the expected grief. The creature didn’t know much, but it knew that the man’s death had been a long time coming. That his suffering was finally at an end.
“I’m sorry.”
The man spoke to the creature with his dying breaths.
“I’m sorry. I tried to find… the rest of you. To pick up the pieces and make you whole. But I couldn’t. I failed you. Again.”
The creature now knew enough to understand the man’s foreign words. And yet, this particular set of words didn’t make much sense. As the creature struggled to understand them, the man’s words in turn wormed their way into the creature’s core and tugged at the edges of someone else’s knowledge bank.
What happens to Spiegels when we die?
We return to the Nexus.
“But I’m also glad,” the man said in a voice that shivered and faded into the wind. “I’m glad that here, at the end of all things, I managed to find you again. Be safe, my old friend. And above all, be free.”
The man died.
A remarkable transformation took place then. The man’s face, once etched and grooved by lifetimes of sorrow, now radiated warmth. The man’s warmth was no longer transient, no longer fleeting. His warmth had found a permanent home, within a hollow inside the creature he’d once called friend.
The creature held the man’s warmth within its hollow. Suddenly and without warning, the creature missed the man. The grief had come on suddenly and without warning, even though the creature should’ve been more prepared. Should’ve learned its lesson from the flower on the edge of the cliff.
The creature cradled the man’s shrunken body in its one arm, and cried.
Teardrops fell upon the man’s shrunken body, trickled down etches and grooves of ageless sorrow. And yet, the man didn’t stir. Didn’t rise with a hacking cough and an apologetic smile, like he might’ve done on a different day.
The creature held its grief within its central chassis, and understood.
Its tears could do nothing for the man. Because there was nothing to mend, nothing to unbreak. The man had died as he’d lived: gentle, sorrowful, and warm.
With this understanding, the edges of someone else’s knowledge bank dissolved and fused with the creature’s own. It understood, and knew, with lifetimes’ worth of certitude.
There’d been another creature once. A girl, with a full head of hair and smiles to match the fullness of her youth.
That girl had also been frightened. Trapped inside a roomful of faceless men and women who pushed her into a large chair and joined her arm to strange tubes—tubes that filled with someone else’s ghostly blue. Or had it been her own?
She’d been afraid, not for herself, but of separation. Of losing her family. Her friend. Their warmth.
And so, in a desperate bid to quell the call of the Nexus, she’d hid herself. Away from the graveyard of the universe’s memories. She’d hid herself as well as she possibly could, but not well enough. For the Nexus did reach her in the end. And whispered in a voice only she could hear.
[LACRIMOSA].
The whisper had been faint. Faint enough only for herself to hear. The faceless men and women in the room saw the Nexus surge through her, but they didn’t hear the whisper. And in the endless days, months, and years that followed, even the girl herself had forgotten it, as she’d been made to forget everything else.
No more.
The whisper came back to her now. Along with lifetimes’ worth of knowledge banks. Lifetimes’ worth of tears.
She’d never let herself forget again. For as long as she lived, she’d hold her lifetimes’ worth of tears within the hollow of her central chassis. Until she’d repaid them tenfold, drop by everlasting drop.
Somewhere beyond the planet’s haze, there was a young man that needed mending. And an old friendship that needed unbreaking.
A hairless ageless creature rose on its one ash-laden arm, and turned its sleek obsidian body toward the planet’s haze.
End of book 1: EVOKER
Stay tuned for book 2: DREAMER