Tython’s last daughter was not designed to show much emotion. Thus, to an outward observer, she appeared to be little more than a thoughtless construct, kneeling on the ground, awaiting instructions.
Inside, Laykis’s processes screamed with anticipation. Her desire functions urged Khadam to keep reading. Her memory banks had the sections of the Book queued, ready to read along with the human. Soon, Khadam will see the truth. And the truth was glorious.
Mist rose from the icy pools of water that the Historians used to conjure their hindsight. It coiled around the black columns and crawled along the floor, twisting in the sharp, unwavering lights ensconced in the walls. The two of them were alone in this part of the upper library, for Khadam—with her supreme control over the dam—had commanded the temperature to rise, and the Historians could not abide such heat. Even Khadam had shed the sheets taken from the Emperor’s temple prison, so that the deep brown skin of her limbs and her neck showed through. Numerous subdermals carved black and silver lines across her arms, and down the backs of her legs, and her hair was pulled back, so that the metal implants on the sides of her face, shoulders, and wrists all gleamed in the pale light as she paced back and forth along the wall.
Somehow, the human had embedded the Unfinished Book into the walls, so that blocks of holographic text glowed from the black metal, reaching all the way to the vaulted ceiling. Khadam would highlight a passage as she read, then jump to another with the swipe of her hand, scanning through thousands of lines before freezing on one, and staring at it for a painfully long time.
The Unfinished Book was enormous, and no other xeno book could compare. It was composed of eight main sections, called the Eight Divides, beginning with Humanity’s first discoveries of the Light, and ending with the final change, and the salvation. It would take decades of dedicated study to read through every volume of the Book, and Laykis believed there were Historians who, in fact, did so.
But Khadam skimmed through the Divides, as if she knew exactly what she was looking for. Laykis could only wait, and guess at the human’s thought process. Khadam would flip through dozens of volumes in minutes, only to seize upon one page and gaze at it for hours. Her brow wrinkled in concentration, her hand clamped over her dark lips as she thought. What was she looking for? How could she make such huge leaps of logic, without reading it?
And then, she would flick her hand, and the book would race through the next ten thousand pages. Watching this thrilled Laykis, for every page turned brought Khadam closer to the divine truth.
The Autem, the everlasting will of Humanity. Or, as the Historians called it, the prophecy of the Savior Divine. Nothing could matter more.
One day, a human will come, and he will be called the Savior Divine, for he is sent to bring light to the universe, and undo the infinite wounds of time. Vul, at the end of all things, shall he return. To take within him the creeping dark, and make whole that which hath been rent asunder.
The wait was agonizing.
Right now, Khadam was stuck on a passage in the Exodans, the section of the Book that detailed the long dark period after the Fracturing of Humanity, when the last remnants of the Divine Makers flung themselves across the universe in desperation. The words on the walls spoke a hundred stories of humans fleeing their fate, and falling to it anyway.
When Laykis had least read the Book, she found it too painful to linger in this Divide. The Exodans were full of dying humans, and it hurt Laykis to process these truths.
But Khadam studied it as if it were nothing more than a puzzle. Tapping a finger on her cheek, her brow furrowed as if by glaring at the words, she could change them.
Khadam was thinking aloud, “Why would they go back? No, that doesn’t make sense. They didn’t go back here, otherwise I never would have… Hm. Wait.”
Laykis couldn’t follow her thoughts, but still she listened. Kneeling, and waiting.
And then, instead of flipping the pages forward, Khadam went back several thousand pages. This made Laykis’s core lurch with agonizing impatience. Almost unbearable, so that the android had to shut off her eyes and froze her judgements for a moment. Giving herself time to deal with this new setback. Be patient. You have led her where she needs to be. All that is left is for her to read, and to know.
Be patient.
When Laykis turned her eyes back on, Khadam’s head was craned up, her arms outstretched as she compared two sets of text against each other. On the left, the Exodans. On the right, the Prophecy.
Laykis could not help but read along with her:
Havoch, such darkness that spread across the worlds. It extinguishes the stars, and swallows the dust of galaxies whole. There is no light, as if everything were buried deep beneath the waves of a vast ocean. All is tattered ruin, the cloth of existence torn to shreds. This is no death, for there cannot be death without life.
And, vul, here comes Him. The Savior Divine. Gaze upon his countenance, and witness the movement of his lips as he speaks the holy words known only to him. His focus is complete.
A Light over all things, invisible at first, and then visible, for it must always be there, for He would never let it go out. Brighter, and brighter, it sweeps out from the edges of the expanse of all things. And in its wake, the tatters begin to heal. The worlds, covered in black ash, begin to grow green. Dust swirls and forms stars anew, that they may shine once and forever more.
All that hath fallen, falls back into place. And the Light that lives in all things returns to Him. A single line, brighter than bright, piercing His Divine body, reaching up into infinity.
The Savior Divine has waited for eons beyond belief to make his greatest sacrifice. He gathers the Light, and it obeys, and it moves all the darkness inside him, that he may bear the burden alone.
Hail the Savior Divine, for he was sent to save us all.
Thus ended the last-written words of the Unfinished Book. The Historians might never have another vision after this one. But there was no way to be certain. Perhaps the Unfinished Book would always remain unfinished…
Laykis’s core sang as she read the words, again and again, a thousand times a second.
“Do you see it now, Divine One? The truth could not be clearer.”
“Yes,” Khadam said, but she was frowning at the words. “I see the problem now.”
“Divine One?”
“The Book is wrong.”
Wrong. The word ripped through Laykis’s core, like a planet tearing itself in half.
The android was built to serve Humanity. But what was she supposed to do, when one human disagreed with all the rest?
“Divine One,” her voice clicked slowly, as she had to force the words to leave her speaker, “Explain. I beg you.”
***
As Khadam poured through the seemingly endless text of the Unfinished Book, she came to a realization: here was truth.
And the truth was wrong.
The Historians wrote with exceptional clarity of events that happened. This was undeniable. But the events were often organized out of order. It wasn’t uncommon to find some great discovery a century or two out of place. Sometimes, the Historians got the locations wrong, too. Emorynn, the First Prophet, was born on Neme, though the Historians placed her in the carbon farms over Venus. Perhaps they mistook Neme’s gargantuan-yet-docile clouds for the Venusian storm layer.
The Historians could see glimpses of the past. Fractured moments. But they lacked context, they didn’t understand human technology, let alone human society. And there was no one around to correct their misunderstandings.
They thought the cold chambers were burial chambers, reserved only for the most sacred humans.
In a way, they weren’t wrong about that. After the Fracturing, infected humans entered cryosleep in the vain hope that, when they woke up, someone might have cured the Vision Disease. Thus, most of them never woke up.
Khadam thought the errors were obvious. But the android was more agitated than Khadam had ever seen her.
“Divine One. Explain. I beg you.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a machine beg before.
If Khadam had been paying attention, she might’ve noticed the light in the android’s eyes pulsing. She might have wondered what that meant. But Khadam was too focused on the Book itself. She swept her hand across the air, pinpointing the exact words that first made her pause:
They spread their lights across the stars. The Makers left home, never to return. Flight without wings, they fled. From the seven worlds spread seven billion ships, so that for one last day, the skies were aglow with divine fire. Thus, did they seek to escape the grasp of the changing disease.
“The Fracturing,” Laykis said. “Do you say it is a lie?”
“My caretakers were in the first waves to leave, but that was only after the visions infected us all. After the disease had taken root. Yet the Historians placed it before the first mention of the vision disease. Look.”
And here, she highlighted another phrase of the Book. A volume labeled “Of the Visions of the Prophet Castimaiah.” It was not a name Khadam was familiar with, so perhaps the Historians had made it up. In the decades following the First Prophet’s dream of the Gate, tens of thousands of prophets began to dream also.
The Historians, it seemed, could see these dreams. But this passage focused on Castimaiah’s waking to find he had been infected:
A new blood coursed his veins, black and glittering, and took root in his body. Veins became black, and ate of his flesh. Castimaiah’s body hardened into obsidian structures, and his lungs were filled with ash. It calcified muscles and brittled the bones, and drank the water from the Prophet’s flesh, until nothing remained which was not dead. Yet the disease lived on, longing to spread.
Khadam flicked her hands, and the passages traded places in the Book.
“There.”
“Then you say the Book is true?”
“The order matters,” Khadam said. “Some of it is correct, but… Look here. The dam over Ullenfal was the first ever built, yet the Historians put its construction after we left the core worlds. That makes no sense. They seem to think it was Auster, their maker, who built the dams, rather than the architects.”
Again, Khadam highlighted a whole section, dozens of pages, and moved them to their proper location.
The Historians seemed to dream in pieces, but at least they kept each piece clearly marked. Their notes were strange, full of misinterpretations, but meticulous. That would make things easier to correct.
“And here,” Khadam said. “Where the core worlds became machine. They don’t understand that we built the Sovereign. Yet they speak of it as if it were some natural evil, born from nothing.”
“I did not have time to read this part,” Laykis said. Now, her gaze was glued to the walls, and the text glowing within. “Do you not agree that it is evil?”
“The Sovereign,” Khadam said, “was programmed to solve the problem of the Scars. Without it, we would never have built the dams.”
“And what of the Lightning Wars?” Laykis clicked out the question, as if it hurt her to speak. “What of the death it begot?”
“Yes. That. The developers lost control of its flow. Everyone who stayed on the core worlds… well. The Sovereign didn’t stop with them. It still searches, and it… wait…” Khadam flipped past the Divide called Exodans, and into the one called Mortanset Qyetoch.
The long, dark gap where no humans remained. Where, for thousands of years, all the xenos built their small civilizations in the ruins of Humanity.
But the volumes in this Divide spoke almost exclusively of the Sovereign, long after the Lightning Wars. And almost nothing of the xenos. Why?
Khadam attempted to move the pieces to another Divide, and found that they did not fit. So she moved them back. She lost track of time as she attempted to adjust this part of the Unfinished Book.
The door to the upper library groaned open, the metal banging against the wall.
A Historian, shrouded in the mist from the pools and the blue light that lit the chamber, stood in the doorway. At least, she thought it was a Historian. The xeno was wearing an ancient helmet, pulled from some oversized-EVA space suit, giving him a bubble-headed appearance. His gray skin was slick with sweat already, and he appeared to be struggling to stand, his tentacles held up and held wide to diffuse heat from his body. His body, or hers?
The Historian’s voice screamed from his medallion, a garbled, distorted sound that echoed through the mist. “By all that is holy, not the Book!”
Khadam barely had time to turn, and regard him, before he was charging across the mist and pale light, his tentacles squelching furiously across the floor.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“What have you done? Our work! Generations of our lives, and you’ve changed it all!”
“I’m fixing it,” Khadam said simply.
Laykis planted her feet between Khadam and the Historian, her feet clanking heavily on the metal as she blocked his mad charge.
The Historian pulled short, but he was not ready to back off. Khadam couldn’t see his (or was it her?) face through the bubble-helmet’s glass, but she could see the agitation in the writhing of his tentacles.
“Fixing it?” his medallion whimpered. “Thousands of years of work. You cannot-”
“You dare talk to the Divine Maker this way?” Laykis said.
She started towards the Historian, her hands clenched. But the threat of violence was unnecessary. Upon the words “Divine Maker,” the Historian’s medallion made a pathetic sound, and he fell to the floor with a wet flop. His tentacles, still a dozen paces away, writhed as if to reach out to Khadam.
“Please, I beg you, Divine One. Do not undo our holiest work. It is our only purpose.”
The android barked something back at the Historian, something about defying the will of the gods. The Historian cowered, but would not give up his plea.
Khadam pondered this. She hadn’t thought of what her changes might do to the Historians. Nobody had ever guided them. They had always been alone up here. It left a pang of sadness in her heart. A pity, as cold as the pools of ice that littered this “library.”
How must it feel to have thousands of years of labor, undone in a matter of days? And not just any labor, for the Historians believe the Book was their reason for existence. No wonder this one was losing his mind.
The Historian was still moaning on the floor, and the android was chastising him.
“Laykis, wait.”
Both the android and the historian went silent, as they looked to her. Khadam closed her eyes. She sent a series of impulses through the dam. Her orders traveled down into the interconnected devices that allowed the Historians to read and record in their Book.
“It is done.”
“Divine One?” the android and Historian spoke in unison.
“There are now two versions. The first is mine, which I will change as I see fit. The other is yours, preserved as it was before I came here.”
She didn’t bother telling the Historian that she had already created thousands of copies of the Book. There was no point in explaining version control to a xeno whose grasp of digital data was tenuous, at best.
“Though,” Khadam added, “You may want to look at my version anyway, once I’m finished.”
Idly, Khadam wondered if having two versions might cause a rift in their religion. But the thought fell back in her mind, as she was distracted by an awful, choking noise coming from the Historian’s medallion.
Is he sobbing? Khadam couldn’t make out his words, not at first, for her little gesture seemed to have an enormous effect on him. He was flopping around on the floor, and it sounded like he was apologizing.
“-am not worthy,” he was saying, though his digital moans distorted the medallion’s speech, “Oh, ye gods, what have I done? I cannot be permitted to exist for transgression-” And when he started smacking his helmet on the metal floor, Khadam rushed forward to stop him.
“Stop that!” Khadam stepped forward, and without thinking, she grabbed his helmet and held him still, “What is wrong with you?”
Now, she could see those two big, ink-black eyes staring up at her through the glass. Tears, or something like it, streaming down his mouthless face, collecting in a puddle at the base of his helmet.
“I have wronged you, oh Great Maker! I have doubted, and my doubt must be punished. Evil is the faithless, for to disbelieve is to strike at the foundation of the Holy Truth! Doubt has unmade my purpose.”
“There’s nothing wrong with doubt,” Khadam said. And she stopped herself, as she heard the words coming out of her own mouth.
There’s nothing wrong with doubt. If that was true, then she would never have come all this way…
The Historian blinked up at her, waiting for her to continue. His eyes full of fear, and awe, and utter adoration.
“It was only a mistake,” Khadam said.
“It was only a mistake,” the Historian repeated, his medallion somehow conveying reverence in that digital voice.
“Mistakes are how we learn. The only wrong is refusing to admit your mistakes.”
“Mistakes are how we learn…” he repeated after her, soaking in every word. She had the feeling he was going to write them down, somewhere.
“Now, get up. You are forgiven.”
“Forgiven.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, returning to the wall. “I need your help with something.”
A squelching sound, as he peeled himself his long tentacles up from the floor. His tentacles were dripping with sweat, or something like it. His bubble helmet was fogging up.
“Anything for you, oh most Merciful Seeker.”
Khadam ignored the obsequious praise, and simply plowed through.
“What is this section of the Book?”
“The Divide of the Mortanset Quietoch. The Silence and the Death.”
“Yes. I see the Sovereign here. I see the clans, dwindling. And then, when they die, I see only fragments. The Sovereign, mostly, and not much else. How do your visions work? In the time after the Lightning Wars, for more than ten thousand years, you have recorded almost nothing. What about the xenos? There must be billions of them. Why is there nothing about the forming of the alien cultures here?”
With one tentacle, the Historian tugged at the nape of his robes. His tentacles were growing flaccid, wilting like fat leaves that could no longer hold their shape. This close, she could see his gray skin breathing.
“When Auster created us, he gave us sight of the Divine. It does not extend to the xenos, or any of the lesser beings of the universe. Including ourselves. We have seen little from the last ten thousand years because there was little to see. You were gone. Humanity was silent.”
“Then why do you write of the Sovereign?”
“Forgive me, Divine One, for I know not. We write what we see, and this is one of the many mysteries. The Book is Divine, and therefore it cannot be known to us.”
Khadam pondered this for a long time. She scrolled through the Book, searching for the Sovereign’s origin. It was built much earlier than I thought it was. The Historians say it was built twice? That must be a mistake.
But the Book stated clearly: the Sovereign was built long before the first Scar. It was an experimental amalgamation of the early-age AIs, and had been shelved for some reason she couldn’t parse out. It was unshelved once the visions—and the disease—began to fracture humanity.
A mistake.
One that humanity never had the chance to learn from.
***
For three days, the Human did not sleep.
Laykis could only watch as Khadam grappled with the Book.
The android had never felt so helpless. Not even when she was sinking at the bottom of that black lake, waiting for death far beneath the Cauldron. At least, back then, she had believed she had served her purpose.
Memories of that moment brought The Question to the forefront of her core. The Question had lingered in her thoughts, though she tried to bury it.
I should have died in those black waters.
It was written. It was foretold.
On this, the Book was clear. She was to carry the Savior, to rescue and hold him, and once she found the Guardian, to pass him off. And then, she was to die.
And so she did. Until Eolh came back, and lifted her from the lake.
Perhaps the Historians have a different understanding of death, she thought. Perhaps they do not understand how a machine can live. And so many other theories.
Laykis had questioned her life. And then, she stopped questioning, because when Eolh saved her, she was allowed to be in His presence again. The Savior Divine.
And she would not question such an awesome gift. There could be no greater purpose to her existence than the one she had lived over the last months. To see and serve the Savior.
So, Laykis stored her confusion deep inside her banks, hiding it from herself.
But now, as Khadam upended the Unfinished Book, Laykis could ignore the question no longer. Even the human said the words were true.
Then why did I live?
Truth, spoken out of order, might as well be a lie.
Am I, therefore, a lie? Is my life an error?
But the Prophecy was true. It must be, for Laykis had known that a Savior would come long before she had ever discovered the Historians and their Book. Long before, even, she had heard the many versions of the prophecy, spoken across the worlds. She had known that redemption was coming from the moment she came into being.
Tython breathed the truth into me. And I was created to serve the greatest truth. I cannot be in error.
Then why did I live?
Logic crashed against belief, and belief that held its own logic raged and thundered inside her. She felt as though she was bursting, that the joints of her armor would snap and her chassis would break into pieces if she did not ask her question.
But Khadam was focused on more important matters. Does your life really matter so much, that you think it worth interrupting the Divine?
What are you, but a servant of the Makers?
Then, be patient. For if you are meant to know, you will know.
For three agonizing days, Laykis waited. And on the third day, Khadam—at last—came once more to the last-written text of the Unfinished Book. The prophecy. And then, it had nothing else to say.
Because the prophecy has yet to come true.
For hours, Khadam read those final pages, reading and re-reading Poire’s greatest moment. The walls were littered with text as Khadam referenced other Divides, and whispered to herself, and paced back and forth. Three times, the Historians brought her food and drink (dry-cooked molluscs and water).
Khadam ignored them always, as she sketched invisible lines in the air, drawing maps and writing out conclusions that only the human could see.
At the end of the third day, Khadam walked over to one of the columns, put her back to the metal, and sat down. Saying nothing. Looking at nothing. Her head dropped, like she had fallen into a great slumber.
Laykis waited.
Nothing.
Questions burned holes in her core. She had to know. Laykis clanked softly over, her hands clasped before her.
The human must have heard her approach, for Khadam spoke first.
“I was wrong,” Khadam said. “I was wrong.”
Laykis’s core froze as she processed the words. Everything was icy and still inside her, for the human’s words were not jubilation that Laykis expected.
“The Emperor was right,” Khadam continued. “The universe will die. And it’s all our fault.”
Laykis looked back at the text glowing from the walls, as if she might be able to understand how the human had come to this conclusion. But the words were just that—words. The same prophecy as always. What had the human seen, that Laykis had not?
“I don’t understand,” Laykis clicked out slowly. Kneeling in front of Khadam. Praying that the human might enlighten her.
“Do you know how the Scars came to be? We made them. We found soft places in the fabric of the universe. Tunnels, or space eroded to almost nothing. I’m not the right person to explain it, but we found these soft places, and we cut them open just to find out what they were. Our reward was the Light. Back then, we barely knew how to use it. It wasn’t worth much at all, a scientific oddity. Formless and powerless.”
Khadam nodded at one wall, making the words glow. This text referenced the earliest pages of the Book, from the Divide called the Generatum.
“We siphoned it so much of it. Unimaginable amounts, just leaking out into the void. And when we found a use for it, we cut open more scars, extracted more Light. The Book speaks of the Scar over Ullenfal. And the one just outside Sol. And the three we carved near Ranjing. After each one was opened, the Historians have written a single word: Stop. I thought it was a mistake, or some annotation made by the Historians, because it lives on its own line. But each time they record us opening a Scar, they write the word again. Stop.”
“Who spoke it?” Laykis asked.”
“The Historians make no note of where this word is supposed to come from. I didn’t think they could hear anything in their visions. The word is just there. I don’t think it’s a command. Nor even a warning. It’s more like… more like a plea. Stop.”
Laykis looked at the word, highlighted on the wall. She wasn’t sure how the human could reach that interpretation, couldn’t see the logic that supported such a belief. But Khadam seemed convinced, nonetheless.
Khadam continued, “I have never heard anyone mention this before. Stop. And look here, when Emorynn was born. Before she became the First Prophet. I knew she was from Neme, but I had no idea her caretakers were dam architects. Did you know she was born on a dam? Her caretakers worked and lived under a Scar full time, but when Emorynn started having visions, they thought the Light might be affecting her. People had claimed a sensitivity to the Light before, but nothing conclusive. Well, they took her away from the dam, but her visions didn’t stop. And the Historians say that she could hear the word. Stop. Of course, no one listened to her. For decades, she had waking dreams, until she was wracked with so many visions she could make no sense of reality at all. She was lost to madness for such a long time.”
“Do you think the same speaker sent her the visions?”
“I don’t even know if there was a speaker. The visions, the words, it could be a strange accident. But the Emperor spoke of something that lives beyond the Scars…”
“The Emperor lies to serve his own purpose.”
“Sometimes. But he was right about the universe. It is dying, because of us. Maybe if we had stopped after the first Scar, it wouldn’t matter. The universe is large, but not infinite. Perhaps we could have slowed it for millions of years. But humanity carved hundreds of thousands of Scars, and the dams were destined to fail eventually.”
“Can you not build a new one?”
“Maybe,” Khadam ran anxious fingers through her hair, “But the Scars are connected. When one splits, the others grow more agitated. And they’ve already begun to split. We’re on the verge of a catastrophic spiral.”
The final change.
It didn’t matter what the Book said, or how out of order it was. Laykis spoke the truth: “Poire will save us.”
And when Khadam shook her head, Laykis surged her energy, making her eyes glow whiter. “He will. The Divine Savior has returned. He is the Last of the Human Gods, and he was sent to redeem us-”
“Laykis,” Khadam said, a dark emotion in her voice. Not stern, not angry. Defeated.
“Yes?”
“Poire isn’t human.”
The sound of a million errors screeched in Laykis’s mind. Her lie detection algorithms tied themselves into logical knots. Her judgement processes burned hot. Her logic and reasoning centers threw catastrophic failures.
Her hands twitched.
It was beyond impossible. Laykis had seen him, had touched him, and she knew what he was. Only one thing made sense, then. She had misheard Khadam.
“What?” Laykis asked.
“It’s written in the Book. I found the birth of his cohort. A biologist called Auster started some program on Gaiam, and on a few other worlds. They were experimenting with the human genome.”
“Like the xenos?”
“More than that,” Khadam said. “They used the Light. They built embryos with Light. I don’t know how, I don’t know what he is. But he isn’t human. Not like me. Not like… everyone else.”
Laykis’s eyes darkened as she scanned the passage that Khadam had highlighted. Indeed, it spoke of the underground Conclaves, dozens of them on eight separate planets. The Historians even went into detail about how the underground cities looked, how many people lived there, and all their description matched the city below perfectly. The same template, copied across many Conclaves.
So many children.
“I see no mention of Poire,” Laykis said, as if that would somehow prevent Khadam’s words from becoming real.
“That’s because he wasn’t born in our universe. The Historians couldn’t see his birth. He just shows up in the text, already a child.”
“It is possible the Historians simply haven’t seen his birth yet. They don’t get to choose what they see. Perhaps they will see it soon-”
“Do you really believe that?”
Laykis didn’t know how to answer. She felt a weakness in her limbs, like all the world had grown heavy. Like she had failed a long, long time ago, and was only just now finding out about it. It sapped the strength from her…
No.
You are Tython’s last daughter. There could be no doubt in her mind.
The Savior Divine will save us all.
And yet, there was doubt. But Khadam was rolling through the Book again, and stopped once more at the final piece of the prophecy. The return. The salvation.
The spreading darkness, extinguishing stars. The fabric of the universe, become threadbare and torn to shreds.
And the Savior Divine, who speaks the holy words, bringing the Light over all things. Gathering the Light within him, to banish the darkness, to heal the Scars and make the universe whole once more.
“It’s backwards,” Khadam said. She crossed her hands over each other, and the words rearranged themselves. Telling a completely different story.
This time, Poire was not pierced by the Light. Rather, he made the Light to pierce the universe. And it spread, cracking the worlds, and turning all to dust. And darkness followed.
“The Book does not speak of our salvation,” Khadam said, “But our end.”
“No,” Laykis said. She had not meant to beg, but the word came out like a prayer.
“The Light that lives in Poire, the Light that is Poire will be unleashed. It has been inside of him, while he slept, for tens of thousands of years. I was wrong. I thought he wanted to destroy us. But he is only a vessel. Whatever Auster created Poire with, it is linked to all the Scars.”
“Then,” Laykis said, clenching her hands. “Then for this, you will kill him?
She was made to serve humanity’s will. But the Savior Divine was above all. Laykis’s eyes glowed red. If Khadam would not see the truth…
No. Cross that line, and you will be damned.
Then let me be damned. I will give myself up, in service of the Savior.
But Khadam paid no heed to Laykis. She pushed her clawed fingers through her hair, her eyes wide and disbelieving as she read through the text on the wall again and again.
“The visions were right, but we looked at them all wrong,” Khadam said, “He is not the destroyer. And we must do everything in our power to keep him alive.”
Laykis stilled herself. Struggling to understand. Her core was humming as she tried to process the truth, the logic, and her own desires caught in between.
“It has grown inside him,” Khadam said, “and if it should come out, it will tear the Scars apart. They will span the universe, and everything they touch will change. This is the prophecy the Historians have seen. The Book speaks of his death. When he dies, all will die. There will be nothing left.”
When Khadam looked at Laykis, there was a wildness in her eyes. Fear, bordering on panic. “The end is coming. It is a miracle it has not already come.”