- [Pilot] -

Everything is pale, empty, white, clean… blank.

The man, or what was once one, floats there in the abyss that is full counter to raging darkness and opens its eyes.

— He opens his eyes.

Pilot looks around himself, slowly coming to his senses and then to his ‘body’, which is no longer the shape it once held. While his arms, legs, and shape still resemble those of a person, the substance is different. He is no longer flesh and blood.

Instead, he looks like a strange yarn doll, like a weave of thick, mouse-gray strings that come together into the shape of a person. Only his feet are stained black, as if marked. As a human, he is one and alone here, in this place.

“It is interesting to me,” says a voice that he does not recognize coming from nearby and yet very far away. Pilot scans the area, trying to find anything. But there is no terrain; there are no features. It’s just blank, flat, and empty.

But there is a new oddity. Spheres. A few colors fill the air, drifting idly like fairies. One is red, one is orange, one is mauve — and so on. A sphere for every color drifts in a circle, like a halo, around a silhouette that he cannot see because it is the same exact shade of pure white that everything here is. It’s like trying to look at a shadow on a black wall. The only thing that makes it distinct are the colors that drift around it. “Most people have many colors,” says the voice, as if noting some idle curiosity. “But you ought not to.”

Pilot can’t tell if it belongs to a man or a woman, a human or something else. He can’t tell if it comes from the ‘other’ or if it comes from everywhere all at once.

The orange light flies toward him, eagerly buzzing around Pilot like a curious fairy, before some force draws it back to the rest of the mass.

A sharp, long, lanky hand gestures out toward him — impossible to decipher, if not for the smallest of shadows cast down below it by one of the fairy lights that drift along the arm, casting a soft glow over the blindingly alabaster skin.

“Welcome home, my precious child,” greets the entity, slowly overturning its downward hand to face an open palm his way. It has many voices — a hundred, a thousand — and they all come together into one calm, quiet chorus. “You’ve fallen very far out of your nest, haven’t you?” it asks as Pilot approaches and sees that behind it stretch on twelve wings of purest white — again, only visible because of the colors cast upon it by the drifting orbs of many hues.

The entity tilts its head and then gestures very slowly. “This is the last corner of the true spirit world; what is left of its untouched core of it that the witch could not corrupt.” Two hands gesture around itself, then two more, then two more. Pilot can’t decipher which part of the entity are hands and which are wings, what are legs, and what is the rest of its mass. “And I am Isaiah,” says the voice in peace. “But you know this.”

Pilot walks toward the entity that he cannot get a sense of scale for. He cannot tell if he’s very close to it, or if its very far away. Its size never seems to change no matter how he walks, and its voice never seems to grow nearer or more far, louder or quieter.

“Isaiah,” starts Pilot. A hand stops him.

“Please,” it responds, waving the hand. “You may call me Father, God, or Master, as you wish,” says the entity quite humbly.

Pilot has already reached for his sidearm, just out of raw instinct primed into his actual soul rather than his physical body. A piece of him comes out, torn from his own flesh like a chunk of meat, and he holds it in his hands, aimed toward the core of the deity. “You were always quite the rambunctious one, weren’t you?” asks the entity, not offended, scared, or anything of the sort. Its voice never changes or deflects in tone. It sounds eternally like a mildly bemused, but content, parent watching their child prance around with a trophy that doesn’t actually mean anything but that they are still proud of them having.

Pilot aims the gun at the entity, the entity who was rival to Tango Prime — the witch of ancient history.

Isaiah is, by all canonical definitions, a god of the old world. In its own lore, it claims to be the one true creator, but in the teachings of the holy-church, it is simply one of many gods that grew too arrogant and powerful, leading to its fall and vanishing from the world.

“I don’t know what you want from me, but I cleaned up your mess,” says Pilot, holding the pistol steady. “Never interfere with my world or my people again,” he demands, the iron sights aimed at one head of a thousand. The orbs of many colors flit and dart around, agitated.

“You do not remember, do you?” it asks after a moment of silence between them, spreading its arms out in both directions — or in all directions. There are too many arms and directions to keep track of.

It holds out its arms as the orbs drift down them — each one a different color. They drip and run like water, like paint with many shimmering tones, until they puddle together and begin to form bodies. Things that look like men and women, each of the color they shine with, emerge and stand at the side of the god — angels, perhaps — would be the word the new world uses to name them. In the old world, the forgotten world, these beings were titled as ‘uthra’, they are servants to Isaiah, its helpers and workers. There is one for every color, and their floating and stretching around the entity give it coherence and shape as their vibrancy provides a backdrop onto which the pure white form can be cast upon.

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They look like him — like people. And like him, they all have a monotone shade of a single color that dominates the body. His is gray.

“What is your name?” asks the god simply as Pilot’s aim travels from body to body and curious faces float around him, some of them laughing amongst themselves, some of them talking, some of them watching in curious silence as if unsure if he was safe to approach or not.

“…What?” asks Pilot.

“What is your name?” repeats the heavenly power, its tone still never changing, never losing its patience or calm.

Pilot thinks, holding his head with one hand, his eyes narrowed down the gun as he feels like he should be able to answer the simple, primitive question.

He’s Pilot.

Pilot.

— Pilot.

He’s always been Pilot.

He grits his teeth, grabbing the shaking pistol with both hands. “What kind of name is that? It is a word, a profession,” asks the god in quiet contemplation, raising its head to look toward the above as countless more look down toward him. “That is what you do,” it explains. “You pilot, but what is your name?” it repeats.

And Pilot can’t give it an answer. He thinks back to his old life, to his past in that other world, and he can’t think of his name from there either.

It’s gone.

No.

He… he never had one, did he? He was always Pilot. He was born as Pilot. He was made as Pilot.

“You have gone beyond all of your brothers and sisters, my blackbird,” says Isaiah. “You were not taken to fight our war by fate or happenstance; you were delivered there by my hand,” explains the god gesturing to him. Pilot can’t remember; his head feels like its being cut. “You alone were capable of escaping through the cracks back outside to the world of the living,” explains Isaiah. “You alone were the only one of my precious children who could escape the confines of this prison and grow strong enough and useful enough to serve me as you have always done, since our first blessed meeting all of those generations ago when I created you.” Isaiah holds a thousand hands to its heart. “You have set me and us free.”

He is a spirit, a thing from heaven sent down to the worlds of the living in order to interfere and guide their affairs toward the whims of Isaiah. He is a thing of heaven, that has lived down amongst the living, in order to serve a greater purpose. He was not a man of flesh and blood until he was made one as a secret actor in a war between powers far above anything that fills the lives of the bakers, the workers, and the soldiers of the world. So much has been destroyed and lost. It will take centuries for the world tree world to begin to heal, let alone those in it who must now come to terms with what it means when they stop marching, when they have to lower their rifles.

Pilot’s hands shake, still clenching the gun, as his dropped head looks down between his arms toward the ground, toward his feet attached to his mouse-gray soul.

They are black, in contrast to the rest of him.

And there comes that laugh again — the same one he shared with the witch.

The man, who claims himself to be one and not anything else or greater, looks around at the spirits around him. Red, Orange, Mauve — and so many colors more — but all of them are distinctively one shade, with only Isaiah as a blank, empty whiteness. Each spirit is one thing.

But he himself, Pilot, is two.

“I don’t know anything about all that,” says the man of two colors, gray and black. “Maybe in a past life that was all true,” he explains. “Maybe I was something like that, something like you,” says Pilot, stepping forward but not lowering the gun. “But I’m a man now, a person, a human.” His black boots step forward and as he glances behind himself, he notices that they stain the ground. He leaves imprints wherever he goes, like ink stuck to the bottom of his soles, as it is, quite literally, the ink stuck to the bottom of his soul. Everything he’s ever done to get here, to do all of this, to fight the war that never ends, to save and help… he’s killed people, hurt them, and destroyed countless lives and in the same turn, he’s done the opposite. He’s helped, built, healed and fostered the recovery of so many lost spirits that within him is now no clear definition of a pure, heavenly soul like these spirits all around him.

As declared in that past life, he signed himself over not to heaven, not to God or any gods, but to the war that never ends — in this world or any other. It spans so many of them as it is a construct of the living soul, the striving for life and all it entails, it is the brutal ways of tooth and claw, but also the soft touch of a lover’s grasp or their breath on one’s neck at night. The war that never ends is fought on battlefields at home just as it is in the trenches, but both of them stain the soul just the same.

The ink of the contract claims him.

And he’s glad that it does. He’d sign it again in each and every life he is reborn into.

Man separates himself from animal and spirit alike in his mannerisms, in his behavior, and most fundamentally, in what he dons. The first thing a man does before leaving his home is to separate himself from the raw ground below him by putting on his boots. His wearing them wordlessly declares him as ‘other’, and proudly so. Mankind, elves, and all of the ilk do the same, as they are one family of creation with many offshoots, but they prove their unspoken bond in absurd, simple shared mannerisms that nobody ever really stops to think about. It’s just what one does — wear shoes, boots.

But it is not what animals do.

It is not what spirits do.

Uniforms, clothes, and all things like it are barriers, walls, that men of all ages unconsciously put on — put up — in order to separate themselves and their fate from the whims of nature and the heavens above, because from experience, they have learned that these are often folly. The man would rather stand there in his own way, his stance wide and his weapon forward, than to entrust himself into the hands of fate alone, because the man knows that he always has his own best interests at heart, because the powers that be — in their favor for their own ways — might not.

“You can call me whatever you want,” says Pilot. “You can do whatever you want here in heaven or wherever,” he adds. “But stay out of my world,” he finishes.

Isaiah looks at him with a thousand faces, each carrying just as many expressions as a hand softly reaches out for him, still open to take. “You are my child,” replies Isaiah. “And all worlds are my worlds,” it adds, never rising or falling in tone.

“Not anymore,” says Pilot, pulling the trigger without feeling, without emotion, without anything, because he is a gray man who feels nothing, save for a fleeting instant of pride as he fulfills his final duty to safeguard the domain of the men with black boots — and those who they spare from ever having to put them on.

A single crack of gunfire shatters the glass of heaven, and everything, everywhere, breaks.

And then there was nothing.