by Daniel Huber
"Do what you will, guardian. I've no time to concern myself with frivolous matters."
Aazrio stood speechless for a minute, never having been anything but halted in his pursuits to put space between Quade and Trina. The Keystone looked up, his face disinterested, and the guard began to walk toward the door.
"I shall require complete seclusion, Aazrio and there will be no visitors accepted between now and tomorrow night. Is that clear?"
"Yes Keystone," Aazrio replied, ignoring the twitch of puzzlement that crossed his brow. "Whatever you wish."
Was that confusion Quade heard in the guard's voice as he stood, his ear against the heavy door of the Keystone's study? Quade clutched his chest with his hand, heaved heavy breaths as he leaned against the ancient wooden entrance. He had never heard Aazrio sound unsure of anything in his entire life. Perhaps it was only Quade who could see the entity that possessed the man who'd been more like a father to him than any other man in the world, but just from the tone in the guard's voice Quade knew that Aazrio was as mystified by Aushlin's behavior as Quade himself was terrified from it.
He needed answers, and fast. Before he had the mind to think it through, Quade bolted down the long hallway and was running down the curving decline of the spiral staircase.
CHAPTER 15
Quade flattened himself against the castle wall facing the open hills, a place that had, of late, become his place of meditation, where he could come clear his mind. His chest heaving, hands shaking with anger and disbelief, he spoke aloud, figuring that at this point he had nothing to lose.
"Emissaries! You said that you would be here to guide me so where are you now? Show yourselves!" He looked to the south, he looked to the east, but the voice came from the north.
"They always become so demanding once things begin to be revealed."
Quade jerked his head to the side, where the two emissaries walked toward him. He watched for a moment, spellbound, because though they walked instead of floating, which was their usual mode of transport, they also grew as they advanced, beginning as creatures no larger than a squirrel perhaps, and ending, once they stood before him, as the size of young girls, about a meter tall. They still maintained their color, and the glimmer of their respective gold and blue dusts flurried around them from behind, settling as they both came to stand still in front of him. Seeing them at such a height and standing so close to him, they seemed almost human were it not for their unusual skin tones, and Quade found himself unnerved to speak to them in the aggressive manner in which he'd planned. They both appeared calm for all the anxiety he was feeling, and that brought him back to his state of dismay.
"What's happening?" he demanded. "What's happening to the Keystone? What is this thing that no one else can see but me?"
The blue emissary-Echo if he remembered rightly-was the first to speak. "It is the thing we have warned you about, Quade. It is the beginning of the end for your world if you don't heed our word, and follow our guide. The plan we have told you of must be fulfilled and quickly, for this is only the onset for the destruction of all things."
"But what is it, this plan? You tell me these things and then expect me to interpret your ambiguous words! I will not have it anymore. Explain this to me, in a way that I can understand! Explain this evil force that has come into my world!"
"The confines of language is limiting Quade, and it is difficult to describe this entity with simple words. Countless worlds have fallen as its victim, countless souls have braved this battle and lost."
"Yours will likely be no different."
"Why do you say this to me?" He glared at the gold one, Mimic, the one who always carried such doom and hopelessness in her comments. "Say that I'm destined to set forth on this quest but destined to fail. Say that I must seek my fellow chosen, as though I'm living a legend that we tell school children! As if this thing I keep encountering were the same thing that threatens to end our world in the myth!"
"Ah, he finally faces the truth," Echo said, casting a sideways glance at Mimic then looking back to Quade. "Perhaps this legend of which you speak isn't really a legend at all."
"You feel ill whenever it is near," Mimic stared hard at him as she spoke. "And yet you still refuse to acknowledge the very thing your body is reacting to. You doubt our presence, our warnings, and yet all we tell you has proved to be true. We can guide you but you must be willing to heed our words."
"Why should it be me who goes forth in this task? What quality do I have that makes me the right one…to save our world!"
"We do not make these decisions, Quade. Those are choices of the gods."
"Quade, your destiny is what you've seen. Your power, the ability to see that which others cannot. You have gifts they have given to you alone. With these gifts the Chosen, when allied, can overcome this adversity. It is the way things are ordained."
Quade thought on this for a minute, tried to bring himself into what he reasoned would be the right state of mind to accept what they were telling him. He thought of Aushlin, how cold and strange his manner had been. He thought of Clea, remembered how his heart had skipped a beat when she reacted to his speaking the word P'cadia, this imaginary place from his dreams. He thought of the legend he'd grown up hearing, finding it hard to remember the proper way that the story went now that he actually needed to know.
"Tell me about this thing," Quade said slowly. "How does one defeat it? Assuming this is real, as impossible as it seems…assuming I can find my missing Chosen, assuming I can get Clea to come back, what is it that we will be fighting? Tell me so we might at least have a chance."
"How to explain that which cannot be explained without seeing?" Echo said this without really asking, as though she knew there was no way. Mimic added her typically abject commentary.
"How does one explain to a deaf person what it is to hear the song of a bird, or a blind man how it is to glimpse the colors in kaleidoscope?" She cocked her shoulder and cast a quizzical glance to him. "How to explain that which has not been experienced?"
Echo was looking at him with the same expression. "How, indeed?"
Quade felt a moment pass between them as he stared at the two creatures, and the silence around him was so heavy he almost couldn't speak. They both stared intensely, and somehow he knew that something was about to happen, a revelation…that would change everything forever. His frustration flared, but the determination for some understanding prompted him to demand an answer.
"Show me then! Show me what has come before."
He saw them both nod their head, and for a moment, all went black.
In an instant, everything was gone. Quade hadn't moved, and yet somehow he'd been moved. Moved to a place that was no place, where he stood on a ground that he could not see, looked up to a sky that was not there. He stumbled in his confusion, reaching to grasp anything that might give him a sense of place, but there was nothing. Nothing but emptiness, nothing to see anywhere that he looked around and so he fell to his knees. Terror rose within him, and he gasped over the words that tried to form in his throat.
"Where…?"
It was a helpless sound, echoed off of nothing, fell flat because there was no resonance, no grass beneath him, no trees or structures, no sky, no planet. Nothing for the sound to bounce against. As he gained the ability to again try to speak through his bewildered fear, a sound came from behind.
"This is the Beginning, Quade." It was the voice of the blue emissary, Echo. He turned quickly toward the sound and saw that she hovered over his shoulder, tiny again, like a bird. Such relief he'd never known, to simply see something, anything, amid that which was truly void.
"The Beginning of All, what there was before there was Any Thing."
"Take me back to Bethel," he said. "This isn't my place, isn't my time. I'm needed where I was before, that is where my life is. Take me back!"
"Your life awaits you Quade, but by your demand you wish to experience what has come before. This is the path you must take to grasp y
our destiny, to embrace your role."
"You must see to understand," Mimic had appeared over his other shoulder. "And understand to see."
"You're sure you can get me back?" He looked between the two. "Back home, once this is done?"
"Ever-doubting Quade, you must trust us." The two came to hover before his eyes. He nodded, still uncertain, but knowing he had no choice.
"Why the Beginning?" he rasped, then cleared his scratchy throat. "How does this bear on what's happening in my world?"
"There was a time, though it was eons ago Quade, when the gods were young and alone."
"They sought to create something all their own, though having never created, they had no guide to follow." Mimic drifted behind Echo, rotating gently as she hovered and as she spoke, and Quade found her movements more a comfort now that there was nothing else to see. It seemed to bring him focus, and assured him that he was still actually alive and not dead or trapped inside some dream. "What they created was crude and unrefined. It had no shape, no true substance. And for the time, it was their grandest accomplishment."
Something caught the corner of Quade's eye, and he looked up to see a distortion in the invisibility. The clear had begun to separate and from the nothingness all around there came a mutation. A rip became apparent in the vastness of nothing, a rip that started as a thin tear, spreading quickly across the panorama of Quade's sight. Suddenly a vibration began to sound inside Quade's head, an unnatural swell of magnetic warp, deep, bellowing.
"Oh, and Quade," Echo interrupted, "you might want to cover your ears-"
Quade didn't even hear her last word before the sound overtook him. It was powerful and foreign, reverberated within his head and rung deeply through his entire body. His own scream from the pain inside his ears and inside his mind was even drowned out from the sound that still swelled, howling and surging, an undertone beginning to ring through the earsplitting wailing, an undertone of a building shriek.
Soon after the sound came the sickness. A sickness like none before. The two together were more than he could bear.
"Shield us!" demanded Echo, and suddenly the sound fell silent. Quade remained on his knees, clutching his head and moaning softly. “This will silence the sound, but I am afraid it will do little for the sickness.” Echo glared furiously at Mimic.
"You always forget to warn them!" She slapped at the air and suddenly there appeared a blue handprint on the side of Mimic's face. "Why must I constantly remind you of how this part effects mortals?"
Mimic wiped her face angrily, collecting the blue dust off her cheek and throwing it violently into the air. "Why should it be me who remembers to remind them? Why does this burden fall on my shoulders?"
"Because it is you who likes to tell the tale. But you always forget the details!"
"Indeed, just me? Shall I remind you of the last detail you left out and what the consequences were of that oversight?"
“Who is that?” Quade ignored the emissaries’ bickering, nodded in the direction that he was staring in, now holding his stomach. A man had appeared and like Quade, he fell to his knees. As quickly as he appeared in the distance he disappeared, and a different man faded into view in a different spot. This pattern repeated itself again and again, each person having the same reaction.
“Those are others we have brought to this place in the past, to witness that which we show you now. Pay them no mind.” Men and women continued to appear one at a time, would quickly collapse from the effect of their surrounds and then disappear. Only one other man appeared and stayed while others vanished around him.
“And this all around me,” Quade said, “What is it I’m witnessing?”
"Behold, Quade, and see what it is that you heard a moment ago."
Cautiously, Quade glanced up at the sky, rolling his eyes to gain focus after the aural assault he'd just endured. What he saw was at first was a darker shade against the clear, ripping its way through the tear from whence the abominable sound had burst forth. As it developed it became a mist, then a mist that had shadow that became a cloud that transformed into a murky vapor. As it closed in from all around it was still in the unreachable distance, but it took up what seemed to be an enormous space, a space that Quade could hardly comprehend, it was so vast. It rolled and crept together slowly, and as it met itself it grew darker; first neutral and then gray. Then a churning became apparent and it was dense and gaseous. What would have been the sky if there were a sky to see, was filled to eternity with this unfathomable mist, a cloud that grew darker and denser the longer he watched, until it finally made Quade gasp in recognition.
"That thing!" he whispered as though it could hear. "The same entity that attacked me at the nexus, that surrounded the Keystone."
"The very one," said Echo.
"Get away!" Quade tried to stumble to his feet but felt unsure at the lack of visual ground beneath his feet. "It takes up the space of all there is! It's enormous! Get us away!"
"This is a vision of the past, Quade," Mimic said as she flitted around his head, distracting him from what might have been an attempt to escape.
"This is a vision of what once was, but it has long since passed."
"We are shielded now, from its destructive effects, the sensation you feel, you will only feel while you are here. You are merely an observer of what has been, and of course you can have no affect on what you will see."
Quade nodded. "The pain… it worsens…"
“Enough!” cried Mimic. “We’ve no time while here to dwell on your pain. In this place, you cannot stay very long. For if you linger you shall lose your way and not be able to return. In the eternity of time we have lost only one; we do not wish to lose another.” Quade glanced over to the one man who remained, who was now gesturing wildly and shouting to himself. Echo’s tiny hand brought Quade’s focus back and again she began to speak.
"The gods found a new joy in creating, and now that they had begun, they continued to hone their skill, continued to create." The cloud had turned black and inky, looked more like what Quade had seen in his encounters, only larger and more vast than anything he could imagine, so large and so overwhelming that he couldn't see it in one glimpse, took several passings of his eyes to take in the enormity of it. A sense of rage was beginning to manifest on the air, a sensation that revealed itself by a strange magnetic pull in the atmosphere, an unsettling static that crept straight into Quade's memory, making him very anxious. The shadows began to take shape as he watched, and the rage that filled the air was overwhelming. The shapes began to attack one another it seemed, one devouring the other in what appeared to be a hateful bid for power and space, a vengeful hate that made the air so heavy it was hard for Quade to breathe. The newborn SanFear swallowed one another with their loathsome gaping mouths, cannibalizing their own kind.
“Get me out,” Quade gasped, “Get me out of this place.”
He felt a pulling force, a transitional sense of time and space and once again he heard Echo’s voice.
"The gods eventually created things that worked off of one another, things that had balance and harmony, that grew and built on their own." As his bearings came back to him Quade felt a strange sensation of being turned, and suddenly realized that he had indeed been turned completely around to face another direction. From the clear nothingness that had surrounded him and had been slowly filled with the inky apparition, he now went to the blackness of deep space. "They created beauty, they created life with form that intermingled, that flourished and advanced."
There was no sensation of moving and yet Quade watched as he was drawn into this galaxy, a galaxy full of star systems and planets, moons and solar formations he'd never seen before in his travels or his schooling. They came upon a planet, large and orange and brown from their unmoving descent into its atmosphere. Suddenly Quade felt ground beneath his knees, though the dirt was of a glassy make up that he didn't recognize, felt completely foreign and unidentifiable. But there was sky above, albeit green, and strange
vegetation all around.
"The original creation of the gods was left behind as the gods themselves advanced. In its solitude, the creation began to seek a place for itself in the new worlds that the gods were creating. But they were not of these new realms, these new galaxies." Echo looked skyward and Quade followed her glance, and he saw the same apparition, ripping its way into the sky above, tearing through effortlessly, spreading like a dark blanket over the sky.
"I can't feel it now," he said as he stared.
"T’was only in the Beginning when the SanFear's numbers were so great that its power funneled from past to present." Echo twirled slowly as she spoke. "From here forward, it cannot affect you."
Quade could feel his face contorting into overwhelmed horror, but nothing compared to the scream he heard when the blanket, all at once, dropped from the sky like an inky cover and enveloped all that surrounded him. The next thing he knew, Quade was lying on the ground, wrapped in a protective fetal position. As he opened his eyes and unwrapped his arms from his head, he saw the emissaries both standing on the ground before him, staring impatiently.
"We told you it cannot affect you," Mimic said with a scowl. "This is long since past; now look and see what has become of this world."
Quade unfolded himself and rose to sit, looking all around him. There was no more grass, no more plants and trees. All around was char and smoldering, but there appeared to have been no fire. Simply a drain of life, of existence. And what lay beneath Quade where he sat, was a planet completely dead of all things that were once alive.
"How do they do this?" He asked, surveying the destruction, the emptiness. "How does a force like this occur, that has the ability to demolish an entire living planet?" There was no life, no movement, no sound, nothing to be seen or felt. Where a planet had once been, where there was movement and promise, there was now emptiness and solitude, a place devoid of any hope to ever spring to life again.