How long since Khadam had dreamed?

How long since she had the vision?

When she came to Rodeiro, or rather, when Rodeiro found her all alone, Khadam was only a child, not much older than Poire must be now.

Her three caregivers brought her to this distant, uninhabited world after Seedfall. A cold, gray, watery planet, where the most advanced life grew like moss on the sea-worn stones. How they had found this planet, she never knew.

Together, the three of them built a shelter, which grew into a home. A large dome for their living quarters, and a few half-underground sheds. The first few months, Khadam remembered how angry she was to be stuck out here, in the middle of nowhere. Omair promised, “it’s only until this all goes away.”

Galactic nowhere. Safe from the visions that were ripping through humanity. Or so they thought. Khadam never found out who got it first, Omair or Vymand or Piri. Probably, the three had hidden it from each other, in the vain hope that it might go away before the others found out.

Khadam could remember the three of them, sitting at their kitchen table. The gray clouds collecting outside their viewport window, fogging the ocean view below. She walked in, and muttered a groggy “good morning,” and headed for the water maker.

Instead of their usual chorus of cheerful good mornings, her caregivers were suddenly silent.

“Khadam, come sit with us,” Omair said.

She shuffled over, dread growing in the pit of her stomach. She already knew what they were going to say. And still, she couldn’t help but gasp as Vymand unwrapped his hand. His olive skin was drying out. Carved with jagged, crumbling lines that cracked and glittered with black dust. Dark veins spread up his neck to the corners of his eyes. Khadam didn’t say anything after that.

“We might as well take her with us,” Omair had argued, then.

“Oh? And will you kill her, too, or will you let her suffer?” Piri said, for the two were ever at odds with each other.

“She is already dead, Piri. We are all dead. You’ve seen the feeds. Billions of us, dead. Everyone will get infected. We came all this way. There is no one around for light years.”

“No!” Vymand shouted. Khadam had never heard her softspoken caregiver raise his voice in her entire life. Especially not at Omair.

“I will not condemn her! I will not let you-”

“There is no where to run,” Omair said, as calm as ever. “It has already spread. The whole universe is damned.”

“Omair,” Piri said, “She is but a child.”

“Exactly. Think of how much worse it will be for her.”

“She might be resistant.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“You don’t know.”

“When? When will we know? And will you stay to find out?”

“A vote then,” Piri said. “There are three votes, and we’ll cast the decision.”

Khadam didn’t get a vote. She didn’t think she could ever move again, listening to this. To numb to say anything, she could only look at her caregivers. The ones who had been with her all her life.

When they left Ranjing behind, and everyone she ever knew, they had been so careful. There wasn’t a trace in their ship. Over the last months, they wouldn’t even let Khadam use the beacon to access the grid, for fear the disease might transmit. It hadn’t worked. She hadn’t spoken to her friends on Ranjing since the day they’d left.

All for nothing, Khadam thought, as she saw the signs in their bodies. Omair, itching her eyes. Vymand, hiding his hands below the table. Piri, even, scratching - and trying not to scratch - at a spot on her chest over and over.

Vymand and Piri voted against Omair.

“Fine then,” Omair said, pushing herself away from the table. Calm, and angry. “I want no part of this. You tell her we’re leaving her to die alone.”

Tears, as they said their goodbyes. She wanted to hug them, but they wouldn’t touch her, for fear of contamination. That’s what hurt the most.

Vymand choked on his tears as Piri told her to be good, to be careful. But it was Omair’s face Khadam remembered most: nothing but pity. Omair knew what hell lay ahead for Khadam.

“We’re doing this to help you,” they said. Khadam remembered crying so hard, she couldn’t breathe. Not understanding in the slightest.

They packed light. So light, as if they were only leaving for the day. And then they left. One little shuttle, going off-world. Khadam screaming at the sky, and when the shuttle blinked out of the atmosphere, she ran back to the comms room. Begged them to come back. They said they loved her, and they severed the comms.

That was the last she saw of her caregivers.

Hours passed. Or days. She remembered about the beacon, the one she wasn’t allowed to touch. Khadam went digging through their sheds. Had to figure out how to power it, and set it up herself.

And when she hooked into the grid?

The feeds were so damn quiet. There were still people alive, but the core worlds were a fraction of what they had been. Ranjing and Ullenfal and Mars. Everything was breaking down.

And Earth, once the most populated of them all, was completely silent.

She stayed for a year. Maybe two. Every night, she had the same dream that all people have. Of paradise, falling. Of the Herald of Ruin, drawing his impossible, incomprehensible lines across the Universe that stretched on forever and ever.

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Existence itself wavering in his wake. Tearing itself apart. Crumbling. Changing.

Khadam worked on her family’s ship, converting it into a voyager that might cross the stars, allowing her to seek out others. There were strange warnings from the core worlds. They spoke of a destructive force, an errant machine crawling across the face of Earth. A living mistake.

The warnings grew stranger, more outlandish, until one by one, all the core worlds went silent.

And every day Khadam tapped into the grid, there were fewer people tapping in with her. She had no idea that every time she used the grid, the Swarm was watching her. Nothing but luck saved Khadam. Luck, and Rodeiro himself, who noticed her. Talked to her.

“Do you want to be alone?” he asked.

“No,” she replied, “And never again.”

And when he gave her the coordinates to his planet, Khadam packed up and left. She couldn’t know that her lonely, empty world was about to be swallowed by the newborn Swarm.

When Khadam came to Rodeiro’s coordinates, she found a massive station orbiting around a planet. Elevators extended all the way down to the planet’s surface, and machines were drinking the world dry. Consuming every last vital element they could find.

She idled a few hundred kilometers away. Watching. She didn’t see the fleet of drones, nearly invisible against the blackness of space, racing towards her.

They caught her ship. And pulled her into Rodeiro’s station. They pulled her out of her ship like a crab out of its shell. They laid her out on a table and drilled holes into her skull.

The first implant was the most painful.

“This will stop the dreams,” he said. “It is better than nothing.”

How she had screamed. And writhed, and gnashed her teeth, tugging against the restraints. Bleeding, sawing at her own wrists and ankles. She cursed him. She bit off part of her own tongue.

And all the while, he looked at her with nothing but genuine love in his eyes. “You have no idea how important you are,” he said. And, “You are loved,” he said, as the machines drilled deeper into her skull.

How she had hated him after that.

And how she came to thank him, for saving her life.

“I must thank you, child,” Rodeiro had said, “Not everyone survives that. And there are so few of us left.”

All this, all these bleary memories of her ancient youth, lie forgotten like a distant dream until, standing at the foot of His Everthrone, the Emperor waved his hand, and every last implant inside Khadam crashed.

Sleep was immediate. It was the first time she had fallen under in centuries. In millenia, including the ages spent in her coldchamber under the sands of that nameless planet.

And as she slept, she dreamed. Not the brief snatches of the end, but the Vision in its terrible, crystal entirety.

The dream began as it always did: with a single light, in the void of stars and darkness.

There. That’s Earth, she thought.

Another lit up. Then another, becoming a string of jewels, stretching across the galaxy. The first stirrings of humanity, rising to meet the stars.

So tiny, the core worlds were, amidst the vastness of the universe. And how long we lived on them.

And then, came the Scars. Or maybe they had always been there, the anomalous residue of the creation of a universe. Or maybe there was some other explanation, but what mattered was how Humanity flocked them. She could see the Scars flaring with light as her ancestors opened them. And then, learned how to close them.

And then, how to harvest that brilliant, miraculous energy from the Scars. And, eventually, how to punch more holes, and open new Scars.

The earliest days of extraction, so crude. So much waste.

So much power.

The flashing of the Gates that could be see from orbit, and beyond. The First Gift. Suddenly, Humanity flung itself across the stars. Billions of them, streaming in every direction from the Core worlds. So many seeds, exploding across the universe. So many lights on so many distant worlds.

The sheer beauty of it was agonizing, for she knew what came next.

Seedfall.

There were eight in all, the first pieces of matter to come through the Scars. The Seeds were huge, misshapen things. The size of cities. They appeared, as if drawn from nothing but the Scars.

They retooled the extractors, turned them into dams made to harness the Seeds themselves. Such power. Raw, and vast as to be infinite.

Khadam tried to scream, “Don’t touch it! Don’t go near them!”

“Too late,” a voice called back.

It was a part of the dream she had never had before. A man’s voice, like Poire’s, but deeper and more tired. “Too late.”

The majesty of humanity continued to spread glittering Light across the worlds, bringing in daily new and more wondrous discoveries and expanding to ever more distant lengths. And the core worlds grew brighter than ever.

But the stars didn’t. They outer reaches of humanity began to dim, as the disease crept inwards.

The core worlds remained bright and resilient. There were too many living there to give up the old ways so easily. That was, until the day a pestilence was accidentally unleashed.

Khadam saw the birth of the Swarm. The covering of the core worlds. Of Ullenfal. Of Ranjing, where Khadam was born. And of Earth. She had been off-world by then, but the dreams let her see her old home. And what machine horrors had become of it.

The universe, then, was a quiet place after humanity fractured. She could feel the ages passing, feel the quieting of the universe without humanity’s influence. A dead place.

Until one of the dams finally broke. It began to split open, spewing itself out into the void. Everything it touched, becoming the same black, glittering dust. Slowly devouring everything.

But the universe is vast. It would take millions of years for all to become dust. The scattered remains of humanity had time to figure this out. They always figured it out…

She could not say where he came from. Only that he was there, before her, now. Floating in the void. Wreathed in that impossible cloak that seemed to stretch on forever behind him. As he moved, his body could not be human, for it turned in shapes and movements that made no sense to her eyes. His arms seemed to break and bend the wrong way as he turned. His ribs jutted and became absurd until his torso crumpled inwards and reformed exactly as it was before. He was a giant, and a fragment. As thin as a blade of grass, then as large as a sun.

And when he shed his cloak, she could see he was just a man. Old. Hairless, save his heavy eyebrows and that overgrown beard. A face of old anger and older misery.

“There will be nothing left,” he said. “For I have come.”

And the Herald of Ruin extended his arms out. Where his hands should have stopped, they seemed to keep moving, forever unfolding.

Impossible.

The Herald pulsed with Light, beyond comprehension, expanding across the universe.

The final change.

Every star, every world, every isolated rock and atom of unchained matter, touched all at once.

And turned black. Crumbling into dust, as the quiet death of all things left only infinite darkness. Neither time nor space to fill the void. Only Khadam, alone, drifting in all eternity.

She woke up, screaming.

Only, no sound ushered from her throat. Nor any sight lit her eyes. For a terrifying moment, she thought the dream had already come to pass.

A voice rumbled, “Be calm, young one.” The Emperor’s words echoed across stone.

Khadam tried to scream again. Tried to lift her body, and struggled against a hundred weights pressing down against her. Compressing her lungs, making it hard to breathe. She gasped-

“I said be calm or I will force calmness upon you.”

She tried to do as she was told. Took in as much air as she could - why is everything so heavy? Why can’t I move? - and tried to focus on what she could hear.

His breath. The slow, ponderous thudding of his boots on stone. The trickle of fountains. Tears streamed down her face, unchecked.

A wave of pressure, a breeze over her. A stinging in her chest, her lungs. A flood of relief, as the weight seemed to ease up and drift away. “Don’t move too much. A few of your bones have broken, and they will take time to heal.”

She gasped again, feeling her throat unlock. The implants that guarded her trachea finally giving way. A wet, noisy coughing as she hacked up all the saliva she had swallowed. And found she could speak again.

“Turn it back on,” she demanded. “Turn it on right now.”

“Your sleep inhibitor?” came the Emperor’s voice, as if there was nothing to worry about.

“I’ll die. You know I will. The dreams will kill me-”

“Everyone dies, Khadam. The difficult part is figuring out how to live again.”