by P. K. Tyler
“You cannot.”
“But I need to save the Fringlings!”
She sighs, appearing frustrated with me. “Please sit, so I may explain why you can’t return.” I do as she instructs, but my eyes begin scanning for a way out.
“Once a creature begins exhibiting signs of embodiment, they will evolve to their species’ full potential. Sometimes it takes years, but for others it takes only moments. It can be quite confusing, disorienting,” she eyes me gravely, “or horrific.”
A heat rises in my chest and colors my cheeks indignantly. I block out the comment of my horrificness, feigning attention as my new, impressive vision spots what may be an escape route. If I can just break the glass, I’ll be out of here in no time.
“I’m not blaming you for what you’ve done, Baylin. Honestly, I can sympathize. My embodiment came slowly over the course of a global war. First, my mind became sharper. I joined the military strategic force, then the science division, then the experimental weapons division. You can see where I’m going with this.” She smiles, but there’s something quite sad about the expression. “I helped to kill billions, and in the end, when my final ability was revealed, I destroyed my homeworld.” She sighs, taking a seat next to me as I’m drawn into her story.
“What happened?”
“The further my mind grew, made new connections, and connections to other minds, the more I realized what we were doing was wrong. We were the same species, the same hearts and souls, but we killed each other over petty things. Instead of coming together to solve our problems, we killed one another over them.
“I tried to usurp my government to stop the aggressions, prevent further idiotic, unnecessary loss of life. I became public enemy number one. When they realized I could read others’ thoughts, move objects with my mind,” she massages the center of her right palm, “or create nuclear fusion with my hands, they finally joined together—to kill me.”
I rethink my escape route as I consider her power. She could easily overcome me in my state, but what if she doesn’t want to?
Her gaze turns steely as it burns into me. “In defending myself, I annihilated all life on the surface of my world. It was not just my race, but countless other hapless creatures. I boiled the seas, scorched the ground, and made the skies toxic. That was when the Eonis found me, much too late to save billions of innocent lives. And you would do the same.”
“No—”
“You can’t lie. I can see every thought in your head, from now, back to the beginning of your life. You’re still considering destroying the Klekan as a viable option.”
“I just want to save Corina, please.” I kneel in front of Vorl, my hands clasped in front of my face just as I had pleaded so many times to the Klekan for food, or clean water, even my life. Now, I plead for my sister’s freedom.
Should I tell him? Though Vorl is silent, I hear her voice. My eyes lock on hers and I see a foggy image of explosions. Red, orange, and blue liquids stream together into one brown, putrid pool of blood.
“She’s already dead, isn’t she?” My voice breaks as a lump explodes in my throat. Corina, my only remaining family, my sweet sister, dead. Please don’t let it be true. Please, Vorl, tell me I’m mistaken.
She nods her head, “After you redirected the missiles to destroy their outpost, the threat escalated.” More images fill me, these are clear. I look down against my will and see the back of my own head, bloodied and cracked. I’m looking through Vorl, and she’s holding me. She looks up as the sky rains fire, more missiles. Her stare meets the Fringlings. Corina. She’s pulling on me, trying to get my limp body out of Vorl’s arms.
The missiles are close now, hundreds of them lighting up the night. I see Corina’s mouth forming the word ‘please.’
Please. She’s begging. What is she begging for? The return of her brother? Salvation from this imminent destruction? I’ll never know. The missiles are closer still, and a battery of fearful waves smash into me, driving me into an undertow of rage. Blinding white fills my vision as the memory concludes.
I wipe at my face, trying desperately to subdue the hot tension in my throat. My palms chill and the sea of devastation swallows me. I am alone amid a vast abyss of blackness seeping into my soul, filling every inch of my being, my shell. Every part of me is gone. Every reason I had to live is extinguished. Everything I was—is dead.
“No, Baylin. Stop.” Vorl’s eyes appear before mine, a look of anguish painting her face. “You’re right here with me, and it’s going to be alright.”
The numbness is beginning to fade away, fury rushing in like a tsunami to fill the gap left by Corina’s life.
“You.” My new power bends easily to my will, and she’s pressed against the wall. “You could have stopped them. You could have saved her!”
She takes a gasping breath, clutching her depressed chest. “That wasn’t my directive. Only you. I needed the newly embodied.” She squirms against my invisible hold.
“Why do you need me so badly, hmm?” I press harder, my palm tingling with satisfaction. She squeaks, raising her hand as if to plead as I had. I will show her the mercy she showed Corina, my Fringlings.
A cold, strong hand grips the back of my neck as a voice whispers, “I told you, it is too violent.” I try to move, but my body, my voice—nothing responds.
Vorl steps away from the wall as if completely uninhibited. “You didn’t give him a chance to let me go.”
“It wasn’t going to.”
“He would have!” Her eyes are alight with anger as the hand tenses on my spine.
“You didn’t.”
The room is silent as the dead of space. Vorl’s eyes water, her heavy panting now trapped in her chest. She didn’t stop? Brief flashes of hands gripping the throat of some foreign creature come to me with a flood of anger, and remorse. Vorl killed her initiator, a danger all the Embodied face. What would have happened if this thing with icy-cold hands hadn’t stopped me?
“Perhaps that’s why I had so much faith in him.” She looks down, avoiding both my gaze and my detainer's. Is it out of shame, regret, or something more sinister for me?
“Baylin.” My head jerks towards him and I catch sight of one massive eye hanging between two large ears. The High Lacron. “You cannot return to your world, and if you do not cooperate, we’ll have to destroy you. Do you understand?”
My voice is released to me and the words come easily, “I understand you’re all a pack of spineless monsters that delight in watching innocence be snuffed out!”
“Too violent.” The power of speech is stolen away again as curses tumble up my throat and crash in a heap at my tongue.
“You haven’t given him enough time!” Vorl exclaims.
“If we give him any more time, he could be well out of our realm of control.”
Completely unnoticed by the others in the room, Corina appears before me. A white glow about her elegantly clad figure creates a lovely aura in the room as Vorl continues her futile argument with the creature gripping my neck.
Don’t speak, just listen. Though I can’t speak even if I want to, I obey. They have me trapped in the center of the ship. Follow the light source, it will lead you to me.
Thoughts of how to escape this hold, this room, and the aliens before me swim in a molten lake of frustration. The two Eonis creatures continue the argument, which has slipped from my attention, and the grip on my neck grows tighter.
Be calm. I’ll create a distraction.
The room shakes violently and we all stumble, loosening me from the High Lacron's grasp. I trip forward onto the glass wall and command it to let me through. Astonishingly, I push through as easily as air, and it leaves a cold tingle on my exposed skin. I trace the zipping of electrons through the wall, hardly paying attention to the corridors in which I run.
“Where are you going, Baylin?” Vorl. She doesn’t seem angry, more confused as to why I’m running, where I’m running to. I ignore her, pressing on as I follow the puls
ing.
She appears in front of me and I sidestep, pushing off the wall to keep on track. “You can’t outrun us. Stop now, Baylin.” She’s right. If I can’t learn to move like she does, they’ll stop me before I can get to Corina.
The light ends in a throbbing epicenter, the belly of the ship. What if I imagine myself there? Can it be this simple? I picture myself next to the light source and a sudden, sharp pain shoots into every inch of me from my gut. I hear all things and see all things. Spanning from this time back and forward to the end of all time, from everywhere in this universe, the next universe, and the universe before. Omnipresence. Then it’s over. A fleeting interruption in the life that is mine. I’m standing at the center of the ship, the power source: Eternal Energy.
Baylin. The word isn’t spoken. It’s not a tool of language, but a living thing itself. The walls, floor, air, and space outside the ship all call to me in one voice, call my name. But I know where it’s coming from. My guiding light, my creator, the one who embodied me with its power, for one reason alone. I must destroy the Eonis and set It free.
“Baylin,” Vorl’s voice is present, the words much more here and now. It seems so long ago that she spoke to me in a cell of gray and glass. But it’s not so long ago, yet it is, when time is so malleable. “You’re losing control. Listen to me, you’re not yourself.”
“I am control.” How is it she doesn’t see, doesn’t understand? I am the past, the future, the present. I am her, I am Corina, I am the insect about to be stepped on five million light years away on a planet called Earth, from where my race heralds.
The room fills with creatures, all of which I know, all of which I birthed with a single thought millions of years before. My body floats on the electricity of the atmosphere; it’s near ecstasy. Raw emotion beats in my breast and I know the feeling of everything.
“For too long have you called yourselves my master, owners of eternity, yet you’ve never known my power. Know it now in your destruction, the end of all life.”
I raise a finger, spinning it counterclockwise. Black tendrils spiral in a wispy cloud of smoke, filling the space between us, me and the creatures that hold me captive. I am one with the Eternal Energy and every creature. I know the pain of creation, and destruction, all at once. I hear the universe crying out for a second chance, for a savior. Then I see Corina, and the Klekan, and remember who I am.
I’m not the Eternal Energy, I am Baylin.
No, we are one.
“Fight it, Baylin.” Vorl eyes me with a gleam of ferocity.
You must destroy them, and free me. It is time to begin anew.
There’s still so much good in the universe, so much that deserves to live. The pain is not all bad. I remember Corina playing with me in the sand pits beside our home. We were truly happy, and had no thoughts of fear or sadness. I can go back to that, I can go anywhere, anytime.
The good does not outweigh the evil. It is upon us to give new life a chance.
Not yet. My finger twirls clockwise, undoing the universe-breaking spell, the conglomeration of matter and antimatter, light and darkness, life and death.
“He’s doing it! You were right, Vorl.” The creatures whoop and cheer, pleased to be surviving another embodiment.
And then I remember Vorl’s embodiment. She destroyed her homeworld, massacred quadrillions of life forms I created, I bled for, I loved. I remember my own embodiment. I killed hundreds of Klekan when I could have escaped with my sister. I could have taken her to safety, but I chose annihilation.
My finger stops and I gaze at the universe ender as it licks and spits at the space around, craving freedom. I feel alone, a very singular oneness with myself. I know only Baylin’s pain, remember only Baylin’s past. But I also know the Eonis have been selling my kind and others to the Klekan. I know the Eonis hunt down the embodied and force them to conform, or be destroyed. I know they grow stronger with each embodied that joins their ranks, grow more powerful with each bit which is removed from the Eternal Energy, and placed in one of Its creations. How do I know this?
Because I gave you that knowledge, and you feel the emotion I am unable to. It is your choice now, Baylin. You have heard the suffering of this universe, and experienced more than your fair share of it throughout your life. Free me, destroy the Eonis and this universe, and I will start it afresh.
How can you know that you’ll be able to begin a new universe? What if this is all there is?
Silly young creature with so little knowledge of the way things are, I am all being, knowing, and seeing. I am everything and nothing. I know I can create a new universe because there has been an eternity of them before your tiny spit of sand in the sea of time. The embodied are created to verify the toxicity of the universe. Never did I intend for them to band together and subdue me, least of all to hold me captive.
The embodied are created to bring an end when an end is required, to feel the pain of the universe, since I cannot feel without you. When I embodied you, I became aware of your pain and fear, knew your hunger for power to save your kind, to end their suffering. I understood what pain was, felt the thirst for salvation. I became aware of all the verse and knew it was time to end it. And you know it’s time, too. Vorl also knew, but she fought that truth. She was in love with being alive, instead of alive to be in love.
You want me to keep swirling my finger counterclockwise then, and blink myself into oblivion?
No, I want you to do what you know is right.
Where is my true home? How did I come to be here?
Visions appear before me of Eonis ships descending the atmosphere of the planet Earth and snatching up the region’s population. A long line of terrans is where I originate. What would have happened if I’d been born there? Projectiles fly through the air, splashes of fire spurting out where they impact. The planet goes dark, scarred black. They’ll all destroy themselves in the end, anyway. The only difference is I would have brought their end, becoming embodied at the height of war like Vorl had been.
I think of the Eonis ships falling through the atmosphere to snatch us away for a price, all to the end of bringing about the embodied in situations they can control and monitor. Put them through strife to force the Eternal Energy into them, then abduct and slaughter them if they seek to bring ruin. All to prevent their own rightful destruction. How selfish and short-sighted.
My finger twirls counterclockwise and the hissing nothingness spreads with fervor.
“Baylin, no! Stop what you’re doing, you’ll kill us all!” The nameless creatures who filled the space around, awaiting my decision, now leap towards me with terror, reaching with all their strength to tear me down to the ground. But they can’t. The Eternal Energy envelops me in safety and their advances rebound, engulfing them in flames. It’s just me, Vorl, and our creator now.
“You knew this was the right thing to do, Vorl. Why did you let the Eonis rule over your conscience?”
“Because I was waiting for someone like you, as strong as you, who could develop faster than the other embodied, overpower them, and help me truly set things right. We can go back now, and right every wrong the embodied have ever committed.”
We can. I know I can use the Eternal Energy to transcend space and time. We can go back and prevent all the evil in the universe.
But you know that isn’t right. There’s a balance, Baylin, and this universe has exceeded its equilibrium. It’s time to end it.
Maybe it is. Time stops as I contemplate. It could be moments or infinity, it didn’t matter. Is it really over? Is there no hope for our wasteland to become fertile once more? Every moment of pain, fear, and hate bursts into my mind. Now, there is no doubt.
With a blink of an eye, I turn Vorl and the ship to ashes. The Eternal Energy bursts forth, spreading to the reaches of the universe and gripping hold at the ragged edges.
Just as I’d moved myself to the center of the ship, I imagine myself on the Klekan homeworld, right next to Corina, just the day before. I
grip her hand as bright red light overtakes the night around us. She gazes into my eyes, surprised and confused. How did he get here, she wonders. I seep into her thoughts, becoming one with her as the fabric of space-time starts to rip.
It wouldn’t matter where or when I went, the end would follow me there. I could have gone back to the very beginning, or a future far from when I unleashed the killing black matter; time would have ended as soon as I arrived.
As the universe collapses in around itself, all time becomes one time. All space becomes one space. Corina stares at me, knowing what I’ve done, and I feel the imminence of the end.
“I love you, sister. Forgive me.”
About the Author
Devoted to the written word from a young age, J.D. has always been in love with science fiction and fantasy. By high school, she was praised in her creative writing classes for ingenuity, and depth of plot and characters. Refusing to allow her love of writing be snuffed out by taking it on professionally, she moved into the world of video games by college. Now working as a Producer at a Boulder, CO based game company, she keeps authorship as her every-other-hour-of-the-day job. With one horror novella published and a science fiction action novel to be released in May 2016, she is determined to forge forward with her pastime passion.
To enjoy hilariously crude, yet insightful posts on self-publishing, and other fun tidbits follow Jess at
theastralscribe
www.astralscribe.com
Poseidon's Tears
by E.L. Johnson
Summary: An Atlantian girl witnesses the destruction of Atlantis and discovers what happens to the survivors.
Atlantis was not a big island, nor were we a particularly important people, but we worked hard and lived by the sea. One day there was a great rumbling beneath us, a trembling in the water and earth below. Suddenly, it stopped and we thought nothing of it. Then the waters drew back, back, a long ways. We did not know what to think but thanked Mother Ocean for her blessing, for she left many fish flopping on the yellow sands as she withdrew.