by David Beers
Nicki walked forward, meeting the dark man eye to eye. She saw that while a three dimensional body stood in front of her, it was made up of the blackest smoke to ever exist. Nicki knew that if she touched it, her hands would sink right through.
Except for the eyes. Those were his, and they stared right back at her—that endless gray which said it knew everything and cared for nothing.
“Go on then. Let’s be done with it all,” Nicki said, and she quit holding the gray back, letting it do as it wanted.
The First Priest saw the girl pass by him, listening as her name somehow echoed repeatedly all around him. He stared at her as she moved, not understanding how it was possible. Her body moved, but it left … traces behind. Entire ephemeral bodies frozen in time.
She went past him, though three bodies stood in a line in front of him, and one right next to his shoulder. Past versions of the girl.
Gray light filled everything, and she was the only thing the First Priest could see. Static covered everything, from the High Priest to the floor beneath his own feet.
Only the girl was visible. Only the girl was able to move.
The First Priest stood for a long time, listening to her speak to her father—at least the First thought that’s who he was. She kept saying she was sorry, and the First wanted to scream at the dumb bitch: “THEN STOP IT IF YOU’RE SO SORRY!”
He could do nothing, though, except listen and wait.
More time passed, and the First suddenly felt pressure increasing on him—another thing he couldn’t possibly understand. It was as if more gray static had somehow poured into the room.
The girl was talking again, though the First didn’t think it was to her father.
“All of you, you all want fucking something. And now look, look around you! Is this what you had in mind? Time stopped and everything around me about to be completely destroyed!”
Corinth, the First prayed, if you hear me, please deliver me. Deliver your faithful servant. I’ve always loved you. I’ve always wanted to be perfect for you. Please, please, please …
He continued his prayer, trying to block out the words behind him. He didn’t want to hear any of them. He wanted to hide in Corinth’s love and be protected and be safe and not have to deal with anything ALLAROUNDHIM.
He heard the wind first, a massive movement of air that ripped him from the panic gripping him. He heard it before he felt it, almost deafening in its oppression. He could think of nothing else; his ears popped and he felt blood leak down his neck.
The gray static started to move, slowly at first, but he saw it pulling by him. Heading to the girl behind him. It was the only possible place it could go.
Oh, Corinth, no! Have mercy!
The gray static grated against his skin as it moved, increasing in speed and feeling like sandpaper brushing rapidly across his entire body. It moved across his eyeballs, spraying pain over his whole face. The light picked up speed, the scraping worsening—yet the First couldn’t move nor scream. He could only stand inside the pain, the monstrous sound of wind whipping by his ears.
Gray static everywhere, and his skin feeling as if it were being peeled off layer by layer. Each second lasted 100 years, and the First finally understood hell. It was this, unending and forever. He had finally reached Corinth’s Punishment, and there was nothing he could do.
Please! PLEASE, MERCY! his mind shouted, but none came.
Only pain for the First Priest.
The ten seconds it lasted was unbearable, but yet he had no other choice.
And then, as if it had never existed at all, the gray was gone.
The First Priest breathed in, blood leaking from his ears and his flesh like raw meat. He screamed, and though he stared at the High Priest’s back, he saw nothing—no gray, no Priest, no room around him. He simply screamed, letting all the pain inside of him out into the world.
His voice finally trailed off and he began to see the room around him again. The High had turned and was looking at him—no, that wasn’t right. Looking past him.
“Where is she?” he asked.
The First didn’t know what he was talking about, nor how the man could even speak. The First’s mouth was frozen, the pain fading but still radiating across his body. His eyes felt like a needle had punctured them 1,000 times.
“WHERE IS SHE?” the High’s voice bellowed.
The First Priest started shaking his head in tiny, short turns—wanting to tell the High that he didn’t know. He didn’t know who she was nor where she had gone, nor anything else the High might ever want to know.
The High walked forward, his steps huge and unstoppable. The First moved out of his way, but only barely—the High’s mass caused him to stumble back as the man passed.
The First saw two men at the end of the hall; he didn’t know either of them, but both held guns.
The High stopped in front of the first. “Where is she? Where did she go?”
The man was bending over, his hands on his knees, clearly feeling pain too. The First looked to the second man, an extremely thin person, and he was leaning against the wall, barely able to stand. Everyone in the room felt the same as the First, everyone but the High Priest.
The High grabbed the man by his neck, ripping him up into the air. The gun clattered to the ground and the man looked down at his attacker, incomprehension across his face.
“WHERE IS SHE?”
“Put him down,” the thin man said.
The First’s eyes darted to him, shocked to see how close he’d gotten to the High Priest. The First hadn’t seen him move at all, and his hazy mind pulled up the image of an underwater eel. Slippery and black, traveling undetected wherever it went.
The High looked at the thin man.
“Put him down or I’m going to kill you.” He raised the gun, holding it straight out from his shoulder, and pointing it directly at the High’s temple.
The High’s face slowly changed, and the First felt his own mental powers coming back to him. He hadn’t noticed the High’s face, but it’d been a mask of unrighteous anger. Now though, staring at a pistol, it relaxed quickly. Scarily so. One moment he’d been ready to kill the man he held in the air, and the next, his face looked as it always did. Unperturbed. Uncaring.
He sat the man down slowly; the First didn’t understand where such strength had come from. The High was an old man, and flabby. Yet, the stranger landed on his feet with a thud.
“Move back,” the thin man said. “Back there with your friend.”
The First realized he was the friend, his mind still not fully up to the task of interpreting reality.
The High did as he was told, retreating slowly.
“Get your gun,” the thin man said to his partner.
The First looked at him and understood that this was the woman’s father. He’d seen the man’s picture in the dossier he’d put together.
“Now,” the thin man said. “I think I know who you are, and so killing you could cause a lot of problems. What I want you to do is get Pope Pius XX and let me speak to him. That’s first, and if you don’t do it, I will kill you. It might cause me problems, but I think I already have those, so another won’t be that big of a deal. Understand? Pope Pius. Now.”
The First looked at the thin man, seeing the High Priest’s preternatural calm matched in him.
A second passed and then the High’s eyes lit green. The thin man turned to the father who was picking up his pistol.
“Point it at him,” the thin man said, meaning the First Priest.
The father did so. The First didn’t move, only looked at the metal object that held death inside its barrel.
Everything holds death, he thought, perhaps his first coherent one. It’s amazing life goes on at all.
A minute passed in silence, everyone holding their position, and then a voice filled the room.
“This is Pope Pius.”
Rachel Veritros
The world’s historical record of Rachel Veritr
os ended at the Nile River. She was officially declared dead by all four Ministries 10 years later, but for the world, there had been no sign of her since she dropped below the river’s boiling waters.
Rachel did not die, however. Over the millennia, humans have believed a multitude of things about what happens when the body ceases creating cells. Heaven and hell. Simple nothingness as consciousness is extinguished. Reincarnation. The list could go on, but our purpose here is not to recount all religious beliefs, but rather to understand what exactly happened to Rachel Veritros.
She did not die, though her body did cease cell creation. And if that is the case, that the body no longer lives, but the mind does—is there such a thing as death?
That’s what Rachel wondered when she first crossed over … as she came to think of it.
Despite the absurdity of such thoughts, an entire stream of them came to Rachel the moment the Nile River exploded.
In that same instant, her mind expanded exponentially, so deciphering exactly how Rachel Veritros thought is not quite possible, although a basic understanding may be had.
Is there such a thing as death? If consciousness goes on, do we only have such fear of dying due to our cells? Our actual, individual cells. For it is them that do not continue, dying off and becoming one with whatever world they fall to. Are they the reasons we fear this so much, because they innately understand that when the body ends, they end? Are we so driven to keep living by organisms that aren’t us, but something separate—something that merely helps our consciousness move around in a physical reality?
The thoughts continued and it took Rachel a while to get a hold of them. They came at her rapidly, almost drowning out her ability to focus on any one thing. Eventually, though, she was able to focus and then realized …
I’m dead.
All of the thoughts from earlier didn’t matter when she got right down to it, because even though her consciousness had somehow survived, her body was no more. On Earth, her home, she was no more.
The most obvious question came then: Where am I?
Deep and pervasive fear took root as the question bred an answer. She remembered everything that had happened, going underneath the river, the war above, the Beyond coming to her when she closed her eyes. She remembered that singular, maddening question coming back to her—the one she couldn’t find an answer to before.
What does It want?
She had found her answer in the river, though. She found out what It wanted.
She remembered, and then she knew where she was.
Rachel Veritros had joined the Unformed.
Her mind grew still and unimaginable fear gripped her. For she, even if no one else, knew what she had done in that river. Facing death, understanding that to reject the Union would destroy everything her life meant, she had gone forward.
What she didn’t know, though, was that she would end up here.
Inside the Unformed.
In her mind’s stillness, she could feel It. There was nothing to see—at least not for her—but she recognized she was inside of Its mind, and that Its mind actually possessed a physical body. She didn’t know if it was the off-white orb she’d seen so many times, or if that was only a representation of It; either way, she had become a thought inside of Its mind, perhaps even an echo of herself.
Does It know I’m here?
Yes, It did. She thought It had simply treated her as a thought. Something that came and went, lived briefly, and then died in the recesses of Its brain.
Before, Rachel Veritros had thought she understood the Unformed’s vastness, but she’d known nothing. Now, less than a human’s synapse inside It, she understood she was nothing to It. The creature had swallowed her whole, brought her into Itself, and immediately almost forgot about her.
There wasn’t even any need to fear living here—at least no reason to fear It; the Unformed would likely never give thought to her again.
Time passed for Veritros, though that word is mostly a non-applicable concept. It is better, probably, to simply say she existed inside the Unformed.
Perhaps an example will help: for humanity, a hundred years passed, and then another hundred, and then another. Rachel knew nothing of years, and came to sit in the silence of her own mind quite easily. No heaven, no hell—nor any other human invention. There was only endlessness, and despite her mind’s expansion, for a long, long time, there was nothing to contemplate.
So, Rachel Veritros entered a period of hibernation.
She might not have ever ventured out of it, simply sinking deeper and deeper into the Unformed’s mind. Maybe she would have lost herself completely and become one with It.
Something happened, though, and it pulled her from her slumber. At the time, she didn’t know the reason for it, whether an outside influence sparked inside of her, or whether her mind had simply churned unconsciously until it hit on something.
Later, she would know with certainty what caused it.
Rachel Veritros awoke inside the Unformed. She wasn’t worried about bringing attention to herself, as it was similar to yelling inside a locked room—a room that occupied a house with a trillion other rooms.
She awoke and the spark inside her grew larger. This was the same woman who had first walked into the wilderness, then back into civilization, fostering a revolution and nearly destroying an entire planet—all to meet her master and then burn down everything she’d created. A woman unlike perhaps any to ever be born before, and even inside an infinite creature’s mind, her resolve and ruthlessness grew in ferocity.
The spark that woke her was a thought.
It will try again.
And then another.
Just like It did with you. It will try again.
Veritros understood the statement’s truth, and her hibernation ended. She had found another purpose, one as important as her last.
Rachel Veritros began to watch, waiting for the Unformed to move.
Time passed, though again, Rachel did not see it as such. She simply knew she was waiting for something, and she watched with a predator’s attentiveness. Her mind did not wander and her focus did not waver. She became humanity’s guardian, one they didn’t know existed and might not have deserved. She stood on a line, staring forever forward, and waited on the Unformed to cross it.
On Earth, nearly 600 years passed. Others might have gone insane in similar circumstances. An infinity of nothing, only sometimes receiving feeble traces of thoughts they couldn’t begin to understand from a creature that cared nothing for them.
Rachel waited, undeterred in the silence.
Finally, she felt it. The Unformed’s interest. It was distant at first, as if someone else was talking inside that trillion room house. Rachel felt it only because she had grown so attuned to the silence. The interest grew more intense, though, stronger and stronger until Rachel became slightly frightened.
She had never felt anything like it, not even when the Unformed had spoken to her.
There was nowhere to run, no barricade she could erect. She either remained on watch and continued existing … or didn’t. Those were the only two choices available to her.
The interest turned into will, and that almost broke her. She felt like a gnat flying underneath a waterfall, water pouring down on it and breaking its tiny wings, forcing it down into a river where it twisted and tumbled with the current.
Focus, she thought inside the overwhelming will. Focus and watch.
Gradually, she came to see what the Unformed wanted.
A boy. She couldn’t see his face because the Unformed didn’t view things in such terms. It was the boy’s essence—maybe his soul—that drifted down to her. As the Unformed’s understanding of him grew deeper, so did Rachel’s. To her, it was like smelling food cooking. She wasn’t going to eat the meal, but she knew a bit about it.
That’s how It chooses, she thought and then silenced her mind again, knowing that to think now would be to lose everything. She focused, needing t
o understand everything as clearly as possible if she were to have a chance.
The boy was younger than Rachel had been, but not as young as Abby. His age didn’t matter to the Unformed—Rachel wasn’t even sure It understood the concept of years. His mind’s maturity was what mattered, and Rachel realized that the Unformed had made this decision based on her. It wanted youth, something a bit more … untrained.
The boy was an orphan, and angry. Yet, she sensed love in him too, for his sister. Rachel studied everything, coming to understand the young boy. She saw what the Unformed did, and It wanted him. The boy was a survivor, and that was something Rachel and Abby hadn’t been. Rachel had turned into one, eventually, but she only learned that after the Unformed. This boy was practically born a survivor.
The Unformed wanted that.
She sensed innate intelligence, and an odd caring. Not the kind in which he would whisper a soft word or a hug, but the kind where he would lay down his life. It was either all or nothing for this boy.
Above everything, though, Rachel felt his anger. It ran through him like electricity, always an undercurrent, and always ready to explode if necessary.
He is an explosion, she thought. He is different than me, where I had resolve, he has fury. That’s why the Unformed wants him. The fury will drive him, propel him so that he can’t stop—ever.
The Unformed readied itself, and so did Rachel. An insignificant speck inside of It, her resolve had been set once again. She would find a way to stop this creature. No matter what, she would find a way.
Three
“I don’t understand,” Rhett heard Brinson say. “I don’t ….”
Her voice trailed off and she turned from Rhett to look out the front window. Rhett’s eyes were his again, no longer the Unformed’s gray. The other ships had fallen about 15 minutes ago, and Rhett had lowered back into his transport, then collapsed on the nearest chair.
No more gray strands dripped from his arms.