What does the face of infinity look like?

Is it kind? Cruel? Indifferent? Is it the culmination of time’s beginning to end, folded into a fractal geometry that defies entropy?

I’d never thought of such a question, obviously. What would be the point in asking something I can’t comprehend the answer to?  

But now I stand before that face, now that question is as manifest in my mind as the towering form before me, unknowable, yet intimately familiar in design. 

Come to our valley, they had cried. See what we have found. And so we’d come. Down into the shadow of the hillsides, a place untouched by history. They’d vanished before we got here, if they’d ever been here at all.

Their discovery remained.

Here I am, the last one left, before that face.

When a powerful magic presence closes in, you can feel it. For the natural world, it’s a steady drumbeat, thrumming endlessly through stone and tree and mud.

For a sentience, it’s a change in the air pressure, a weight that pushes down, and brings the hairs on the back of your neck to rise. I have communed with the flesh of Aigia. I have battled with wizards mightier than nations.

Neither compares. Not against infinity. The air burns, hotter than molten metal, and heavier than the ocean. It’s pure, white, radiant.

Despite a lifetime surrendered to training, I cannot stand. I am at my knees, the skin of the world beneath threatening to buckle and swallow me. A drumbeat of the apocalypse rings through my mind.

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What happens now? Run, hide, fight, speak? I strain against my own implosion, and even as I dare my voice forward, the words turn to ash on my tongue, bitter and sweet as blood. It stands there, in front of me, its silence thundering until nothing else exists. 

Then it reaches out, the light refracting around its skin, long dendrites phasing in and out of being. Head tilted, a mimicry of curiosity or real fascination indistinguishable.

I want to scream. My throat is dry and brittle. Three options are impossible. One remains.

A primeval instinct grows in the back of my mind. Fight, it shrieks.

Fling everything, anything at it, boil away my whole being in the dream that some flare of ice or tempest of lightning will tumble through its defences.

How well did that work for the others? Forbidden utterances sprayed from lips, vows broken the moment fear overtook them. Power stretched light and shadow across the valley; every single  typhoon of destruction reached the perimeter of this entity – only to never have been cast at all.

This is what pure magic, uncontained in its majesty, looks like. The laws of physics stop applying in proximity. The function of causality itself vanishes. How could anyone hope to overcome the ruin of the laws of nature?

It had looked at them, a stare made without eyes, and they had simply ceased. No blood, and no terror, and no violence. No desperate clawing defiance against their finality. Their lives had ended as calmly as one might close the last page of a book.

So I am without hope then. I can’t fight. I can’t move. I can’t speak. And soon, I know I won’t be able to breath.

It keeps reaching out, its palm open. Its heat and radiance is a cold fire that will peel away my existence.

I do the only thing I can. I close my eyes. And I try to make peace.

It touches my face. The hold is gentle, and soft, and so very normal. And a moment passes. And I am still alive. 

Against every better judgment, in defiance of my basest instinct, I reopen my eyes, vision settling on its featureless gaze again.

What does the face of infinity look like?

It looks like something that is beginning to understand it exists on the precipice of becoming a god.