Villain

by Ivan Kal

  “How do I stop it?” Adrian asked.

  “You can’t, Adrian. It has already begun. We never intended it to be stopped. It can only be guided.”

  “It has to stop some time, or otherwise it would continue draining Sha even after you finished with your task!”

  “It will stop once the dimensional barriers are repaired. That is the only thing that will stop it.”

  Adrian looked at him in shock. Things weren’t supposed to go this way.

  Aranis grimaced, and Adrian felt him slipping, the same sensation he felt when Doranis and Anessa died, he could now feel from Aranis. The Enlightened looked him in the eye and spoke. “You need to guide it, Adrian, though I don’t know if you even can. It was always supposed to be me, because I was the best at manipulating Sha in this manner. But you have no other choice.”

  “You are tricking me,” Adrian said desperately. “You just want me to finish what you started!”

  “If only it were so,” Aranis said, and Adrian felt him fade. “Perhaps it is better this way, that it will be your choice.”

  He looked at Adrian with compassion, and regret. “Tell Ryaana… No. There is nothing to say. I am sorry.”

  And a moment later he was gone. Dead. Adrian stayed inside his mind space, his thoughts firing faster than they ever had.

  He couldn’t believe what the Enlightened had said to be the truth, but he also couldn’t take the chance that it wasn’t. He dropped out of the mind space and into the real world. Ryaana was standing next to him helping him up. Aranis’s body had turned to dust.

  “Get me to the weapon,” Adrian said.

  “What did he say?”

  “The weapon is active. He said that it can’t be stopped. He said to tell you that he is sorry.”

  She pulled him over to the pillar with a slow nod. “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know, but I will find out.”

  Adrian reached for the sphere, then put his palm over it.

  A moment later, his existence exploded into a brilliant light.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Year 718 of the Empire — Galactic Core

  The first thing that happened was his entire existence being filled with Sha, so much of it that he felt he was going to burst. It spread through the structure, all the Sha that the Enlightened had gathered over the long millennia of preparing for this moment. He felt the Sha state deepen, and a coldness seeped into him. He was going deeper into it, gaining understanding. He felt his senses expand. He was seeing the entire planet, the weapon, the Conduit and its power plants. The initial activation had required an insane amount of power in order for it to connect with all the relays, and now it was drawing power from the black hole, a pit filled with Sha and energy. There was so much of it that Adrian could barely look at it. His senses expanded to see into the fighting in the planet’s atmosphere, and he felt Lurker of the Depths fighting Loranis. They had noticed him, or just the weapon firing. Their fight had stopped, and they pulled away from each other.

  Then something inside the weapon triggered, and Adrian didn’t even know how to try and guide it. So far it was doing everything, just taking him for the ride. His Sha state trembled and the coldness intensified, to the point where it felt as if his entire body had frozen over.

  And then the Sha inside the structure exploded in a violent surge of energy and power. It burned him—he screamed, and he heard Ryaana scream next to him. The wave of power passed through them and spread around the planet. Lurker of the Depths screamed next, and a part of Adrian felt Loranis’s ship move away from the planet, then skim to safety.

  For a moment he wondered how she had managed that, but then it was no longer important. The wave passed through Adrian and found Moirai. It hit her too, but he couldn’t tell what it was doing to her. His body was burning from the inside out; his cells disintegrated, and his already weakened body ceased to exist, leaving only his armor. It fell to the floor, next to the one that Ryaana had been wearing. His daughter had suffered the same fate.

  But he was still here, and the Sha state pulsed inside of him deeper than ever before. With it came understanding. In one instant he was filled with so much Sha, more than even the Enlightened had been when the lifeform that they’d made had changed them.

  Adrian saw the entire galaxy, felt everything inside of it. His perception spread more and more, beyond what his mind could handle. To the neighboring galaxies, and further. He didn’t know how long it was spreading or how far he saw or felt—it was too much for him to handle. He didn’t understand, didn’t comprehend.

  And then the perception constricted, closed down, and he could finally understand.

  In an instant the Sha state provided him with answers. It was as if he could hear a voice that explained everything; he couldn’t grasp it, but he knew it. It was…it was the Song of the Universe that Lurker of the Depths spoke of, only it was not what he imagined. A will that guided the Universe… No, it was nothing so precise or grand. It was not God or fate. It was just there, a design, a guiding hand.

  Adrian realized that the People had died because their time had come to an end. They had changed themselves and extended their life, but their species had an expiration date, as all things in the universe did, except for those who reached further, became something more—like the Enlightened, and Adrian, Ryaana, and Lurker of the Depths, like Anessa. They were the ones who had earned something, not because of their race or technology, but because they themselves grasped it.

  But as his perceptions slowly narrowed down back to just his own galaxy, Adrian saw it.

  There, just next to their galaxy, he saw something. A bore, a sickly wound in the Sha. The Sha state, or the Song of the Universe, provided him with understanding. Something had ripped through; something had come inside their universe, violently ripping the barriers apart as it arrived. It hadn’t come from other dimensions, however, but from another universe entirely, from what Seo-yun had called a fully realized universe. The Universe tried to repair the damage, but it was unable to. And so it patched the bore, drew Sha from all around it, and the closest galaxy to the bore was their own.

  The Enlightened had been wrong. It was not life that had caused the damage, it was something else. Something that had come into their universe so long ago that perhaps the People had not even left their home planet yet at that time. He couldn’t tell the timeline, but he was certain that it was the root cause.

  The Enlightened had been correct. Life in this galaxy had exasperated the issue. Sha that was being used to hold the bore closed had been pulled closer to life, to the galaxy. There was so little of it still free, and that thinned the dimensional barriers.

  The Enlightened had been correct. Those barriers in the galaxy would not fail soon, and the cause wasn’t here. It was there, next to the bore. The damage was far greater than they had thought. It was failing, the scar was straining to get open again, and once it did, another universe would smash into theirs. There wasn’t time—it was going to happen soon. And he knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was the only place in the universe where this was the problem. Here was ground zero. Something had come into their universe and nearly broken it. A part of him understood that such a thing was not supposed to happen. Whatever had come through probably hadn’t intended it to happen. If their galaxy had been as all others in the universe, it wouldn’t have; if there hadn’t been so much life to pull the Sha from the bore, the Universe would’ve repaired the damage. Over many eons, perhaps, but it would’ve been. Now, there was only one way to fix it in time.

  The Enlightened had been right. The only way to safeguard the future was their plan. He hated them for that, but he understood what he had to do.

  The weapon was ready. He felt it begin to draw in Sha, and he knew that he had to act.

  He needed to guide it, needed to repair the bore and restore the dimensional barriers. There was nothing else that he could do. He could feel the life in the galaxy, every single mind, their hopes and
dreams, their fears. He knew them as well as he knew himself. So much power was filling him that he could, if he wanted to, rip the Sha from them in an instant. But he still didn’t want to do that. Aranis was powerful, but he hadn’t seen this, hadn’t ever been as deep into the Sha as Adrian now was. He hadn’t understood the truth. Their plan would work, but perhaps he could pay a lower price.

  Because now he understood what life in this universe was. Adrian’s body was gone, destroyed, reduced to atoms. But he was still here. In the instant when he had made the connection with the weapon he understood: all life in this galaxy was energy based. They were energy-based beings that required matter to live, to experience the world around them, unless they had control over the Sha. Their bodies were the vessel, the training wheels that they needed in order to grow. To mature.

  He found himself amused as he remembered what Seo-yun had told him about souls. They had been both right and wrong. What they believed to be the soul didn’t exist, not like how they imagined, but they were partly right in that all life was more than their flesh. He could feel Ryaana next to him, her energy. A part of him was keeping her there, preventing her from fading away. He knew that she needed a body in order to survive, but the weapon had burned it from her. Lurker of the Depths was in the same boat. Adrian reached to the orbit and pulled Lurker of the Depths, his energy, to the room with them. He didn’t have the time to worry about what to do about their state now, but at least they would be safe next to him.

  Then he reached through the weapon. The first thing he did was link with every Created that the Enlightened had in the galaxy. There were far more of them than they had originally thought. He ripped the Sha out of them and sent it toward the bore. He dismantled their ships, pulling the Sha from the biological ships as well. He found no energy forms inside of them, and he wondered why they didn’t have it while other life in the galaxy did—perhaps it was because they were all only altered lifeforms found on various planets, and the Created were completely artificial, but it didn’t really matter. He didn’t consider only beings with energy states alive. Iris didn’t have such a presence, and it didn’t mean that she wasn’t alive—only different.

  The Created were the army of the Enlightened, however, and he felt no remorse in killing them all. He then found Loranis, speeding away from the system, still in the Sha state, and he found he couldn’t touch her.

  Leaving her to her escape, he turned back to the galaxy. The Sha from the Created wasn’t enough—it was nothing. More was going to be required. Adrian could feel every person in the galaxy, he knew them. He saw entire races’ beliefs, their petty rivalries, hate, love, greed. Aranis had been right. Adrian could tell that the galaxy was only waiting for the chance to start warring again. Many were in the process of killing one another even now, those who had refused to join the alliance. They didn’t value other life, they didn’t care for others—but Adrian didn’t know if he could judge them solely because of that.

  In the end, he didn’t. He found the sickly and the dying, and he ripped the Sha from them. Billions, trillions across the galaxy died in an instant. And after he took the Sha that held their bodies together, he grabbed their energy states before they could move through the Sha. He didn’t know if there was an afterlife, or if passing through the Sha simply meant that you dissipated there. He didn’t know, but he needed power. Energy states were made out of the purest Sha, and he used it. He sent it to the bore, adding to the repairs.

  It was not enough. More was needed.

  He had to make a choice.

  He looked at the galaxy, and knew that he would need to kill more innocents. In order to fix everything and spare life everywhere, he would need the blood of the innocents. First he reached to the animals—he didn’t kill all of them, and he took only as many as he could without killing off or completely endangering the species. He felt every death, but he did it quickly, not giving them the time to even realize what had happened.

  He was mending the bore, and the Sha from the energy states was helping greatly.

  But it was still not enough, and he steeled himself.

  There was no choice. He couldn’t stop the weapon, and the bore had to be closed. The dimensional barriers had to be fixed. He had to choose. Could he condemn an entire species to death? Was there a race that was worthy of such a punishment? From what he could feel from them, he knew that there were: races that worshiped death and blood, that lived to kill others. But if he chose, it would mean that he had used his own morals and beliefs to make that judgment, and he was not the person that should choose.

  Instead, he reached across the galaxy, and prepared to pull.

  But then he felt the Krashinar. There were many of them, so many more than other races had thought, but the Krashinar alone were a part of the Universe’s design. They were the one race that had evolved on its own. They alone held none of the blame, not even indirectly. He felt the entire race, knew them. But he didn’t need to, as he had known Krashinar for a long time. There was no malice in them, no desire to take something that belonged to another. They wanted only to live in peace, to make friends and establish connections with others.

  He remembered when he had warned everyone about the threat of the AI, when he asked for help. Only the Krashinar answered him. They alone had trusted him and had given him the means to fight. Without them, he wouldn’t even be here, wouldn’t have been able to oppose the Enlightened, wouldn’t be able to be here at this moment, wouldn’t be able to mitigate the damage that this weapon was causing. The Krashinar did not deserve what he was about to do, and so he put them aside, leaving them out of what he was about to do. He reached through the weapon, and at random he pulled from everyone but the Krashinar.

  Sextillions died, and Sha filled the galaxy. He redistributed it, putting some over the thin layers of the dimensional barriers, and the rest he sent to the bore, closing it down. He needed more, and he pulled more from the galaxy. It was still filled with life, but he knew that to them it would not matter. So many had died, and he was still taking, until he had enough. The repair on the bore held only barely—the dimensional barriers were repaired, but it was thin, and he knew that the galaxy needed time to recover. He wondered what Anessa would think of him; would she understand that he had no choice, or would she hate him for killing so many? A part of him hoped that she would understand. She alone had known him, had loved him, and perhaps she alone could have forgiven him.

  Adrian was filled with power, and filled with an understanding that he couldn’t articulate. But inside his mind was knowledge that he had acquired over his long life. He had studied many topics, from shipbuilding to genetics, and it was to that knowledge that he turned now. Filled with the power of the Sha state, he reached to every race in the galaxy. He removed from them the ability to live forever—that was a side effect of what the People had done, and was never meant to be achieved so easily, and not without a price. He smothered their ability to use the Sha, as well—not removing it, however, as that would take from him the one thing he wanted more than anything.

  In time as the galaxy recovered it would return to its previous heights, but for now using it would be harder. Only the most skilled and the most powerful would be able to reach the heights that the best of before could. If they achieved the Sha state, they would be able to circumvent it, and perhaps this would serve as a push for others to join him.

  He looked across the galaxy, seeing it still filled with life, but less. He had taken a third of intelligent life, and more of the animals. He had taken many, and every death weighed on him, but he couldn’t bend. The weapon was shutting down, but he needed to do one more thing.

  With the power and understanding he still possessed, he pulled the matter inside the chamber he was in, and guided by his memories, the Sha, and knowledge, he rebuilt his body. He could feel the Sha state settle into him and he knew that he would always be like this from now on, touching the deepest parts of it—able to feel the galaxy around him more easily.
But his perception was shrinking, and he couldn’t feel the entire galaxy now. With the last of the power thrumming through him, he rebuilt Ryaana’s body and that of the Lurker of the Depths. He felt that they had been as changed by the power as he had been. They had been here inside the structure, and all three of them had been changed, had become something far more than they used to be.

  As the weapon shut down and he stepped away from the pedestal he took a deep breath. He felt more powerful than he had ever been, felt like he was a new person—and perhaps, after what he had just done, he was.

  “Dad?” Ryaana’s voice came from behind him, filled with horror. “What did you do?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Year 725 of the Empire — Galactic Core

  Adrian turned around, looking at his daughter, who had a strange look on her face. Lurker of the Depths stood next to her, and both of them were watching him.

  “The only thing that I could.” Adrian closed his eyes. “The weapon couldn’t be stopped. I had to mitigate the damage that it did.”

  “What did you do?” Ryaana asked again.

  “I repaired the damage,” Adrian said.

  But Ryaana didn’t need an answer, and he saw her eyes harden. “I know! I felt it all, everything you did. I screamed at you to stop. You…you killed so many!”

  Adrian blinked at that. He hadn’t heard anything. “If you know, then you also know that I had no choice. Would you have wanted me to let the weapon destroy this universe?”