Chapter 49: It Stares Back

Gorgon, read the spattered yellow paint on the wall above the eye. Fitting, though I was a poor stand-in for Perseus. Drainage from a nearby pipe tinkled in my ear, bringing me back to the muted toll of the spherical white fires that once tempted me to descend. I was a sodden mess, my cape dripping with sewage, and my brow with cold sweat. I was grateful for my kinetically imbued hood, as it allowed my sweat to pass down the sides of my bony face, rather than pooling over my eyes, or fogging a visor, the malady of more traditional helms. I lingered for as long as I could before Abdiel raised his arbalest, leveling the muzzle brake with my skull. While I had no reason to fear death, I did fear pain, and there are few people who do not fear Abdiel. Even Patches was giving me a warning look. I turned my head back to forward, and took another step.

There are events so small and swift they could hardly be said to have occurred at all. These moments are unknown to all save themselves and the radiant soul who propelled them into motion, churning the universe against itself by the power of their infinitesimal scope and constancy. These racing and fleeting glimpses of the first matter all begin with a moment that is the quantum utmost, and in such a span I felt myself awakened. Jadus said V was omnipresent in his domain, and I knew him then to be not only of the Batch, but in the very same strain as myself. His power was my power, only in me perfected. You are their completion, Turk once told me. He may have once even known exactly what their opus was meant to produce, but the wear of ragged years and the hard light of Elvedon had dimmed that shining star.

My body is no different now than it was before, but I felt, no, heard, the whirring of an engine inside my mind. And I do not refer to my mind as the disembodied sprite of consciousness, but I felt or heard a disturbance from rest in the meridian of my brow, and then when I lit my spectral torch I saw not only a pale glow surrounding the things that were before then occulted, but I saw the granules of their substance, and the illusion of empty space was removed and I now looked at the very strata of being. Air had become a swarm of serpentine whisps, and sound too was a thing I could see, rippling around me with a warring of colorless waves. There were edges carved by the fields of light, the soldiers behind me had become a homogenous glob of meaty hydraulics and thin, filmy membrane. The walls were webs, the floor a net, the ceiling a topographic grid of microscopic stalactites. I felt my chest swelling of its own accord, my fists clenching with power that did not wait to be summoned, and I saw my breath as the steam from a bull's nostrils. All that was soon to fade, though, washed away by the unblinking stare of the gorgon.

Belial's hands clutched at void, Rouge Adept hunted a residue, and the abzu spread their net in a pocket of being that I traversed as a sleeper does a dream; being both present on their bed while drifting through delirium. And now I was seeing a doorway creak open while the gorgon's gaze began to engulf my form and determine its boundaries. My awakening rang loud and the doorway was flung wide, sucking me into it and flinging me onto a ground I could not see. I was no longer in the sewers of Thirty-Third Day. I cannot tell you where I was. But I have since returned there numerous times, so I will describe it to you as best I can.

To say I was in an ongoing plane of absolute darkness would be simple, or a field of intense light so blinding that I forgot the sensation of sight, and instead knew only pain, so willed my mind into a state of complete emptiness and invented new concepts for myself that were not dependant on such acuities. These would be simple metaphors, but they would only serve to tease you of the scope of my departure. There was no light, and no darkness, and no seeing, and no color and no shape or form or solidity or fluidity or gaseousness. There was no me, and so I cannot tell you how a single thing looked, but you are aware of such things and many others; things nebulous and shapeless, love and hate, reason and insanity. There was none of these things, but on such an abstract plane I stood, or lay, or through such a chasm I fell. Presence was about me, and within me, and I was a circumference of untrained awareness that expanded and shrunk and darted and divided.

I reveled in this at first. I splintered my thoughts and sent them abroad, eager for the brilliant truths they would bring when they returned. The ambitions of al-kimiya, the questions of the sufi, the delvings of astronomers, the cartography of the deep submersibles, the starting place of the nadis, all these things could be led to me and made a part of my whole, when whole and me again existed. And while sight was no longer a thing that I considered, it will suffice for our conversation now, to say that I became a million eyes that looked in every conceivable direction, and saw myself in infinite pixelation, and what I saw was abominable.

Every carnal aberration, every violent urge, every gluttonous desire, every slothful conceit, my fixation on corpses, the splintering of voices I try to strangle every time they emerge, and every other neurotic scourge embedded into the Batch, all these things were in congress, and I was so terribly, dreadfully, disgustingly lost, my pieces drifting away into oblivion, but none becoming less aware, just farther apart, and the other visiting fragments I looked upon were alien and they frightened me. Then, somehow, I saw Astus, dancing across pathways of conical lightning, ringing a gong he held from one hand.

Where he was a light in the darkness for our world, here he was a patch of nothing against the cylindrical roads. Seeing him brought knowledge of the physical flooding back to me and I was brought together with a crushing force that pulverized me, and I learned there that I am truly unkillable, as the bloodied mass of quarks my implosion created reshaped, and I saw my own lightning resume its course in the paths of digits and limbs. Then I fell and tumbled, and directions emerged in a nauseating blur. Silence woke me, silence and infinite white light that Astus ripped at with ursine claws.

I was as wet as when I emerged from the sea. I clutched at Astus. Who rings the bells, I shouted, shaking his shoulders urgently. It was a woman I held. She was small, but very strong, and she hit my jaw with an upward punch that knocked my head straight back. I swam through a grey mist, then a sea of flesh, then a cloud of charged ions that spread their filaments down like a man o'war until I felt solid ground beneath my feet. I was in a dimly lit room surrounded by blinking lights, but by the time I noticed these two vague details the girl sprang from the floor and struck me again. The mist, the flesh, the filaments, they came again more quickly, and when I settled in our native realm I did so above the ground. I fell through the floor, found the ceiling in the mist, and descended slowly, my form emerging into sight by stages so that she swung her fists at air, and then I brought my hands down around her head. For a moment I was tempted to manifest my fingers within her grey matter, but I decided against it, and dispatched her in a conventional manner.

The consoles were labeled in symbols I could not hope to decipher, despite the legion of voices screaming their words from three hundred years back, a memento from the void. There was writing spattered over many of the consoles, mostly in the same sloppy script as the word gorgon was above the sensor outside. As soon as I thought of Gorgon I looked back and up, and knew she was there on the other side of the wall. I looked down at my hands and remembered when Belial pawed at emptiness, and when Rouge Adept hungered for an apparition. I let the abyss speak to me, recalling every sordid fragment of my dark soul that whirled about when I had been pulled between worlds, and then I rose into the mist and thrust my hands into the wire riddled box where Gorgon dwelled. I probed for Gorgon's harness, only I had misjudged the coordinates, and for a moment I repeatedly tried and failed, each time clutching at something with give that emitted a terrible sound, until I felt the fibrous veins within the enemy's eye and pulled them loose. I could have opened the doors and greeted my comrades as a mere man, but I felt a surge of purpose and saw fit to elevate myself before them. So the doors opened, and before they could begin to file through, the White Shadow emerged from the rift.

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