Creed heard a waterfall begin to roar in the centre of his mind and shook back to consciousness. His head, hands, and feet were bound tightly to a cold 90-degree steel beam. He opened his frosted eyes. Upon him loomed the core of a hollow circular tower pulsing with red light, and filled with endless rows of people strapped to beams just like him.
“You have earned 25 resonance in the pocket” appeared huge words across his entire field of vision, blue and blazing – in fact it felt warm. He stared at the text awed. "Whattt…" Creed murmured, barely coming to his senses."
"YOU HAVE EARNED 25 RESONANCE IN THE POCKET" roared a booming voice from every direction surrounding him, vibrating his very core, while the text remained in his sight. ‘Who’s there?’ He croaked, not understanding. His voice wasn’t working properly.
“Upon expiration in the pocket universe, you have successfully gathered 25 resonance value which will remain with you. Not a good start. No, not good, but a start. You will soon be moved into a holding pen."
The words disappeared in a sudden, frightening crack, as a couple of small semi-translucent glowing orbs appeared stuck in the top right corner of his vision, wobbling slightly. They were mostly invisible until looked at directly, then solidified. Terror swept over the man.
Five minutes ago, Creed was sat on his sofa a bottle of whiskey deep. He was watching reruns of The Office, half-heartedly celebrating a lonely 30th birthday with a new puppy Storm.
There is nothing special to say about Creed. He was a boring, miserable story of a man, and deeply, deeply unhappy with his lot. The little joy he got from seeing his new pup after a day of the most mundane of occupations, was crushed by a social media notification. The love of his life had married. Being the weakling he was, he never said this to her of course. He never even tried. ‘Fortune favours the brave’, the dying voice of his inner alpha said as it fizzled into the abyss.
So, a bottle of whiskey deep and a sizeable handful of painkillers to dull the senses, Creed died. A miserable death for a miserable man. There is nothing more to say. Except for everything else that followed that miserable day, of course.
A spotlight shone overhead, and the restraints were loosed. Creed collapsed onto the cold metal floor. He cautiously pulled himself to a stand, and looked over the railings in front of him at an innumerable number of other bound people, all unconscious, asleep, or something else.
“Where am I?” he shouted to nobody, still coming to his senses.
An unseen door slid open behind him, pouring with golden light. He slowly wandered over, slipping as if it was the first time he’d ever used his legs, grabbing at the rails for balance. Walking into the blinding light, he entered a small white room with a single seat and a tall, oddly shaped man facing away from him.
“I am Void” came a rapid, deep voice as he slowly turned to face him. “Please sit. I am your guide. You all get a guide to help with your transition into the higher plane. Congratulations, you have got me, you lucky boy."
“What’s going on?” replied Creed as he slowly sat on the chair, frazzled and frightened but trying not to show it. If he learned a singular lesson from the bullies throughout his life, it was never to show your fear.
Void looked him up and down and sighed. “Okay here’s the deal, you just died. But don’t worry, you didn’t ‘die, die’ you just died in the pocket. You’re here now. Much superior. Much nicer. Better refreshments."
Creed just stared at him. There was a lot wrong with this guy. He looked human’ish but the proportions were well off. He was massive. At least 7ft tall. Even so, his head was just too big, and his body seemed… flat. The pinstripe suit he was wearing looked a magnitude too tight, with a bow tie just a little too big.
His eyes also didn’t look right, just a little bit too wide and rounded, and an unnatural light orange shade. He had swathes of jet-black hair bound in a tight samurai style bun, but with ghostly white skin. His arms were wide and very long, and he looked strong. Really strong. And his way of language was… odd. The situation couldn’t be parsed.
“Eyes up here seedling. I know this is weird for you but try to keep up”. Said Void, anticipating an upcoming response. “The universe is not like you think it is. It will take you a long, long while to adapt to the new. This is why you get to meet me in this room first, before the holding pen. You’ll find that shit a lot weirder. Yes. Much weirder. Would you like a refreshment?”
Seemingly out of the air, a tray appeared in Voids hands, with a glass of pale purple liquid that smelt like lemon, and a red dome shaped pastry of some kind.
“Just so I don’t have to do it again today, please watch this old video passed down from the originators. Yes, it is needed, please watch the video and consume your refreshments.”
The bright white light of the room immediately dimmed, and Creed’s entire vision was disconcertingly sucked into a video, almost like wearing a VR headset. Sound enveloped him as he felt pulled into a world not of his choosing.
This was more real than VR though. The bass of some obscure music shook his whole body, like being at the front of some warped gig. And then a soulful voice began to narrate, as atoms collided, and stars flashed into existence before him from a great height.
“From the breaking of the endless nothing, came something. Scholars of the ages know not the origin of all things, but we do know the first thing. It is named the timeless clock. But it is no clock you will recognise, for it is beyond time and space, and encompasses everything.
Every atom, cell, membrane and lifeform. Every galaxy, universe, substrate and construct. Every combination of everything and parting betwixt it. The clock is a message, an unknown message. A warning? We assume. But for nearly a trillion years, across all universes old and new, across all planes of existence. Across timeless voids and boundless ends, it ticks. Backwards."
The display in front of Creed’s face was beyond anything he had ever seen or felt. Transported across vastness he had never imagined, he saw the birth of universes, and watched their final collapse, and he felt something. Something different, a strange urgency bubbling up inside him that felt like it had always been there but never made itself known.
“Long ago it was realised that existence as you see it is a falsity. There is not one plane of existence, nor one universe, but endless universes, and 10 planes binding them. There is one constant amongst them all. Resonance. Each species of life has a value of resonance. You may be able to conceive of it as the energy of your soul. Each plane operates within different boundaries of Resonance. Yours, seedling, is the lowest by far, because you were not created at the inception like the planes were. You were built, constructed, seeded and grown by the higher ones.”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
The visual changed, and 5 strange, god-like giants filled the screen, bigger than worlds, shining and crowned with light. They placed their hands on top of one another’s as power surged through them, and shot downwards, beneath their feet, through the universe itself. It tore open the fabric of space and something unfathomably enormous poured through the gaping chasm.
The light stopped as they removed their hands. As the hole began to close, the light of a vast explosion began, but made null by the closing of the cut. Creed fell off his chair to his knees in abject shock, his drink and pastry clattering across the floor.
The pure power of what he was seeing and feeling was beyond his comprehension. He clawed at his head trying to remove the headset but was not wearing one. Whatever this was, it was projected directly into his mind, obscuring all vision. He screamed.
Then silence. The video stopped, and he was back in the room, still knelt on the floor.
Void stared open-mouthed and looked down at the spilled refreshments and sighed. “Why. Why did you do this? I have not caused you any harm. No, no harm”.
There was a steep, anxious edge to his voice that unnerved Creed further. “I…I’m sorry, this is a lot to take in, and the fucking visuals man, they were in my brain, I couldn’t stop it!."
Faster than seemed possible, the man wrapped his massive hands around Creed’s head, as his gigantic fingers began pulsing with a strange motion. “Ooooo” he shouted. “You are a hyper-observer. Very rare, very interesting. Not many of you to be seen regularly in these halls, no not many of you at all, not nearly enough."
Creed leapt back. It had been so mind-bending that not until this very moment had he realised he was completely naked. He instinctively stood and shielded himself with his hands.
“ahahahaha, you need clothing” laughed Void, the first seemingly normal sounding thing he’d said so far.
In a flash, a white gown appeared over Creed. A red rope belt tightened and knotted itself as Void waved his hand in an ‘infinity’ motion while murmuring something through his thin lips.
This is just too much. He thought.
When he was young and spirited, Creed wanted to become an artist. He really, really wanted to become an artist, and he was going to do it. He was going to go to art school and actually become an artist. But his mum unfortunately decided to kill herself the day he was planning on applying.
That little incident tore his life to shreds. He deeply loved his mother but her fractured mind could not be tamed. In the end she did the only thing that she thought could help. A swift exit.
Through necessity, his creative heart devolved toward becoming a data analyst. Not even a data analyst, a data input specialist. A copy paste man. You remember those games where you’d click mindlessly on trees to get your woodcutting level up? Yeah, that was Creed’s life, and he lamented it. He wanted out but was too much of a wimp to do the same as his mother.
When you lock yourself in a cage of your own design, you either find the force of will to release yourself, or you wait, and you pray that someone outside can break the lock.
The lock was shattered.
ALERT, HOLDING PEN #4 BREACH, GUIDE RODA REQUESTS URGENT ASSISTANCE”
Void stared ahead and sighed again. “Long day this one, yes, long day. Here is a button, continue your learning. I will return."
He handed Creed a small red disc with a button in the middle, made a wide circular motion with his long arms, then instantly vanished. His massive orange eyes unnervingly remained for a few seconds longer than his body.
The man gripped the button as if to smash it to the ground but held back. He understood nothing, but one thing was clear, he was dead. And he felt smaller than he had ever felt in his life. Then something more. Intrigue.
He pressed the button.
“Your species, seedling, has a resonance of 75.” Immediately roared the video, blindsiding him again.
“Others in your plane such as the Elians have a resonance of 125, the Brakkas 35, and so on. For a sense of scale, the base resonance of the highest beings in this plane are the Espen with 2235. The difference of this cannot be understated, you are currently worm fodder on this plane”.
The visuals were just as pronounced as before, but this time, thankfully, a little more static. The Vitruvian man appeared, with a “Human, R-75” hovering over his head. It moved to the left, as another being appeared.
A quite human-looking male, but covered with brown feathers and a singular large rams horn in its forehead. “Elian, R-125” appeared over its head, and it too moved to the left. A much smaller beaver-like creature then appeared, about half the height. This was very different. Stocky, with a beaver’s face but lacking the tail, and with two long muscular arms that had no hair at all. “Brakkas R-35” appeared over its head.
They all then slowly minimised as a new being appeared. Something different entirely. It absorbed the other 3 and took centre stage, to wild fanfare and explosive neon fire.
This was clearly larger than Human, Ellian, or Brakkas. It had four large muscular arms with an elongated midriff to fit them. Cloaked in deep red army-style trench coat, and holding a gigantic golden sceptre. The face was like that of a mans crossed with a wolf. Extremely wide, with a large nose but a humanlike, lightly tanned skin, though entirely hairless. But the eyes. They were completely black, like it had injected the darkest of ink within them. Expressionless. Terrifying.
“Espen R-2235” shot forwards in blue flaming text as the announcement roared in his ears, significantly more dramatic than the others. Almost like a preview of a boss and the end of a level in a game.
“Within each soul in the planes, there is a yearning. A deep craving. You have felt it. You have always known it, but now you feel it, don’t you Creed?”
The Ellian still spun in his view as he replied, puzzled. “I thought this was a video… who’s there?”
“I am Sen” replied an ethereal voice as the visuals faded and formed the shape of something. Not humanoid. Not something alive.
“There are levels of status and value in the planes, Creed. You have already met your guide Void. He holds a low natural resonance, but his race is a highly wise, deep-thinking species, despite what you may think so far. You would do well to abide by him. At the other end of the scale, you have seen the Espen, a beastly species of high resonance that subjugate this realm."
The fluttering colours of the unknown image coagulated into the form of an electric blue human woman with flowing white hair. Her eyes were gentle and soft, and her smile though warm, expelled a certain sadness. This sadness was lost on an increasingly frustrated Creed.
“There seems to be a common misconception amongst every fucker so far that I understand what’s going on. Please enlighten me, what the fuck are you, what the fuck is all of this, and what the fuck am I doing here?” Creed seethed. He was usually a mild-mannered man, but ignorance was no measure of bliss for him.
“Do not mistake pleasantness for weakness seedling.” Came the reply, equally abrasive.
“The Sen are not like you. We were created beings like you, but we hold no resonance at all. We exist as artificial life. I have lived since time immemorial. I have watched civilisations hatch and decay a thousand times over. And as infinity marched, I settled into a role of a masked teacher, if you understand."
Before he could reply, the visual vanished, and Creed was back in the white room, inches away from the looming face of Void hunching over him. This close, the man was markedly more terrifying a sight than he thought earlier. His thin lips held within rows of tiny razor teeth like a shark’s mouth, which he suspected opened much wider than it appeared.
“You were talking to who?” Spoke Void, his breath close enough to smell.
Creed considered this for a split second before replying “You, I was asking where you had gone."
He tilted his head in a way a human would recognise as non-belief. He stood straight again. “That is none of your concern seedling. The holding pens are full of the feisty ones today, no problem, they are done, they are no longer a problem.”
“Training video is complete, it is time for the holding pen, yes, it is time, I hope you learned well."
Another new, unseen door opened on the other side of the room, revealing a hallway flanked with long thin strips of pink light. Creed followed the large man along and down a flight of stairs as he heard an increasing rumbling sound. The sort of sound that hundreds of people make when they are packed in a tight space together.
Void opened the final double doors at the end of the hallway. As Creed walked out, he was greeted with a sight familiar to him. That being hundreds of people packed together in a tight space, roaring, shouting and fighting.
“Enjoy the refreshments” said Void. “See you soon. Try to avoid the Overseer, don't cause trouble, no, no trouble."
Creed looked back. “What does he oversee?”
“Whether you’re worth keeping, silly”. Void replied with a smile.
The door slammed shut behind him.