Nuri crawled on his hands and knees toward the doorway, hoping to close the portal into the realm of God before it consumed him.
Now, Colt continued. We open our eyes.
No! he screamed inside his head, focusing all his mental energy into that solitary negation.
But Colt opened his eyes before he could will himself away from the door again.
No! Please!
Suddenly, he was in the middle of space staring into the enormity of everything with all universes surrounding him.
Please…
For a moment, the sensation was similar to the one he’d felt when Colt transported him through the space between realities, and he realized that all along she must have been preparing him for this eventuality with subtle glimpses of the Divine Infinite to flex his perceptions into the correct focus.
The trouble isn’t finding the planet Prime, she explained. It is in changing yourself so that you can perceive what exists there.
He tried to calm himself against a swirling tide of voices and dark matter. Then, the spiritual rapture occurred. His personal Apocalypse. The Great Unveiling of Omega.
He is here, Colt gasped with an exhilaration unlike anything Nuri had ever heard. If he’d managed a word or thought in that instant, though, he would have sounded exactly the same. Perhaps even more awed.
Small.
Helpless.
An explosion of light engulfed his thoughts, flooding images of all peoples and all histories and all suffering and all ecstasy in one spasmodic tremor of reality that shattered him into a trillion pieces and then rebuilt him in one breath. His mind and body were aflame, rotating in furious circles of sentience that drove him into a greater insanity than any human creature had known before him. The true nature of God. A history of all things back to the creation of Time and all universes in the Big Bang.
I SEE!
He hadn’t known what to expect when and if he reached the Divine Infinite, but he’d imagined Omega as either a giant entity, a face as large as galaxies, or an eye gazing out on creation. This was different. It was all of those things, and everything else, too. Even with his adapted Hidria mind, he couldn’t process the information well enough to begin to articulate all he saw.
All of Creation. All of Time. Everything. Weaving in and out of his brain in complex algorithms he wouldn’t satisfactorily decipher in a billion lifetimes.
Every aspect of his being was transformed. His perspective on every detail of his life and the lives of those around him.
You know what you must do, a voice thundered through his head, filling his exposed soul.
The light rapidly receded. Reality began to settle back into focus. The images rearranged themselves into comprehensible flashes until all he could see was Colt’s face.
The Duri, she said as the ancient temple began to re-form around him. You must atone for your sins.
I know now, he replied. And I know why you are here.
She smiled at him. They were alone in the ancient temple before the wooden door again, but the sense of that Other presence was still heavy and electric in the air.
“We are one,” she said, taking his hand and pointing to the door.
Nuri nodded and rubbed his temples. His brain ached terribly but even that sensation was beginning to recede. All pain drained away again. When he looked down at his physical form, he saw that the faint blue-white glow had returned beneath his layers of skin.
“We are the first Hidria for a thousand generations, since long before the Duri began to use the trials,” Colt proclaimed.
He knew it was true, of course, now that he’d been granted insight into the history of the Hidria and their sacred charge.
“All others have perished, but you will return. We will return.”
The door began to open behind her and Colt’s face morphed into a skull with writhing maggots filling her eye-sockets. She opened her mouth wide to devour him, and then the door flung open and the temple faded away.
23
“He’s stirring,” one of the Duri Master’s attendants reported.
Disappointed, the Duri Master sighed and rubbed the crisscrossed scars on his cheeks in frustration. “Get the physician, then. We may need to treat wounds that won’t appear until he’s fully emerged from the vision.”
“Yes, sir,” the attendant bowed, then returned to the altar where Nuri’s unconscious body was hooked to dozens of computers and IVs.
“You failed,” the Duri Master muttered quietly enough so that the attendants wouldn’t hear him. “Pride dwells in the tongue of the dead man.” The words of The Divine Incendiary seemed to fit the situation since he’d been confident Nuri would pass the trials. Certain of it. Outwardly, at least. Nuri had been the most promising pupil in generations. One thing the Duri Master had learned about Nuri, though, was that his true thoughts were difficult to read. He suspected he’d carried many secrets in the years the two had shared a cottage on the mountain overlooking the village. Ones which would undoubtedly call his loyalty to the Duri Order into question.
It’s too late to uncover them now, he thought. But not many who enter the trials become Hidria. Almost none, for all that we know. He was doomed to fail before he started and it’s a result of my poor example.
Emerging from the sacred observation room, the Duri Master approached Nuri’s body slowly. The convulsions would come soon enough, he knew, signaling his return from the trials and communion with the human reality. It was truly sad that Nuri had failed, he thought again. He’d had high hopes for the boy they’d taken from the pleasure planet Dublokee when he was young. After all, if Nuri had joined the Hidria, he would have been an invaluable political and spiritual asset to the Duri Master. He had no doubt Nuri would advocate for him to the Divine Infinite when his time came, no matter his fanatical research into The Divine Incendiary prior to its prohibition. God would forgive him that sin, for all men were born sinners and died sinners.
That’s The Divine Incendiary talking, he realized, and quickly pushed the thought away. Sinners were to be abolished entirely, not forgiven. If he were ever to admit his transgressions, he would suffer the same consequences as those the Called cleansed on the rebellious planets.
As it should be, he thought dutifully, wary of the Divine Overseer who assuredly monitored his every thought to catalogue each sin. Once he reached his quota of acceptable transgressions, he knew the Called or Hidria would be sent to kill him. Judging by the way he’d lived much of the last decade, he figured they would be coming soon enough. He couldn’t afford any additional outrages.
His mind was distracted by these worries as he reached the first step of the altar, hardly noticing the open, glowing eyes of the body lying before him. He was distantly aware of the doctor and a few attendants rushing through the chamber to reach the body and try to ease it back to consciousness before it went into cataclysmic shock. This was not of any concern to the Duri Master, however, since Nuri’s life had already lost its purpose. Countless resources had been invested in him over nearly two decades, yet the order had nothing to show for it. He would be sent to the ranks of the main Called army and serve his term on the battlefield to atone for his sins, but he would die namelessly just like all other Called soldiers. If he was lucky, Omega would await him at the end of his toil, but it was more likely that he was bound for Tscharia. Grunts curried no favor with the Divine Infinite. They existed solely to keep blood off the hands of the Duri Masters who commanded them.
What wasted potential, he frowned.
It was a pity. Such a terrible tragedy. He couldn’t imagine informing the tribunal of his Duri sect, who would undoubtedly blame him for wasting such a prodigious talent as Nuri by approving him for the trials before he was truly ready.
Forgive me, Lord, he prayed as he began the involved task of disconnecting the IVs linking Nuri’s body to the trials through the Sacred Conduit: an opiate which was only available on one moon in all of the explored galaxy. It wasn’t my fault.
He reached to unclasp the mouthpiece regulating Nuri’s oral reception of the sacred conduit, but a cold hand sprang up and stopped him short, gripping his wrist so hard that he felt the bones snap before he processed what was happening and who was responsible.
“Nuri!” he gasped. His eyes were wide with shock and confusion. After that, the pain was too sudden and severe to voice, so he merely gaped.
In one blur of movement, Nuri swung the Duri Master around by his wrist, twisting him until bones jutted out from his skin into a point.
“I am not Nuri,” the entity on the altar declared. His voice was now two voices, the Duri Master noticed remotely. The familiar, male voice of Nuri and also a female voice. “I am not human.”
Then the glowing, blue-white creature that looked like (but was clearly not) Nuri drew the Duri Master in close so they both faced the onrushing doctor and his attendants. The creature tore the breathing apparatus from its mouth and a flood of cold breath prickled hairs on the Duri Master’s neck.
“I am Hidria,” the voices whispered.
The Duri Master’s eyes widened in terror and recognition, and then the transformed creature jerked the protruding spikes of bone upward into his throat and out the other side. Blood splashed across the altar, drenching the holy relics that had been placed around it to remind the Called of their solemn occupation.
Hidria.
The Duri Master died instantly. His soul vacated his body before he even hit the floor and the Hidria watched it go with distant curiosity. It was the first time that the reborn entity had witnessed the departure of spiritual essence at the moment of death and it saw merit in cataloguing the experience to understand the ramifications of its actions. And then, standing, the Nuri/Colt creature flexed its fingers and knocked the doctor and his attendants unconscious in a swirl of blue-white movement that was imperceptible to their human eyes. It dropped them ungently but ensured they survived.
The room was clear in a matter of seconds. The entrance to the ceremonial chamber stood wide open and unguarded, assuring safe passage through the facility up to the shuttle hangars. There was little need to heavily defend the altar room where the trials were initiated since all hostile forces would be detected well above the planet’s surface and, failing that, long before they touched down on the forbidden mountain. In the event of an attack, the security forces in the upper levels of the military outpost would have more than enough time to assemble a defensive strike-team and bring down the heretics before they desecrated the holy site. The Called presence on the mountain was therefore formidable, but they were wholly unaccustomed to monitoring the altar room or scouring their own ranks for attacks. Such heresy was unfathomable to the Duri Masters once a warrior was deemed fit for the trials. To be chosen for unique service to the Divine Infinite only to spit in the face of the Creator was the ultimate blasphemy in the eyes of the Duri, and none schooled in the teachings of the sacred faith would dare risk such abject damnation. Nuri himself had trembled at the very thought of raising his hand to a Duri Master or a fellow Called soldier once upon a time, but that had been well before the transformation. Well before he’d gazed into the essence of God.
When it was finished, the Hidria retrieved its clothing and weapons from the preparation room, then scanned the datapad of the nearest attendant for directions to the main hangar from the ceremonial chamber. It knew where it was to go next without receiving explicit instructions, but now that it had returned to Nuri’s physical body, it would need to physically journey to the destination or else it would be nothing more than an emanation in the galaxy.
The moons of Jupiter, it thought, still wrestling with the dual identities contained within its soul. Purification. The Order’s reach has grown far for them to risk an attack so near to Earth.
A long way from the Duri corner of the galaxy, to be certain, but a place where the tribunal clearly believed they could make a grand demonstration of their might to the Crown government. If successful, a colossal war would break out between the fleet and the Duri, one which humanity could scarcely afford with their hold on the colonies tenuous as it was. Called soldiers had already been dispatched to the site, it seemed. They would take the solar system outpost by outpost until they reached Earth, starting with Pluto and the outer dwarfs.
But Hidria would be waiting when they got there, and it would only kill the wicked.
Hidria, it echoed.
Before long, it hijacked the transport shuttle Nuri had ridden to so many cleansing missions and set a course for Earth’s Solar System.
I am not human, it thought one last time before drifting into meditative trance.
Colt.
The FTL drive roared to life.
We are Colt.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Williams is an author of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror who lives in Farmington Hills, Michigan. He has previously released four short story collections and five novels. For more information, visit www.JosephWilliamsFiction.com.
Also by Joseph Williams
Novels
The Hunt
Bunyan Undead
Furnace
Stasik I: Origins
Stasik II: Parin
Short Story Collections
Detroit Macabre
Swinging from Stars
Timbers of Fennario
Justify the Thrill
Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Page 26