Project: Ashes 006

 Chapter 4 continued

He moved the Alternator, no that wasn’t right, the Alternator moved everything else. Following the wide arcs of the script, dipping into the very essence of the portal, going deeper into the artful flourishes of it as it looped into itself, further into the letters, from large to small. This, was his art. There was movement and energy in all things. You first need to understand how they relate to each other, how they interact. Once that big picture has been established, you slowly sink into the details. Using the context of the large to guide you to the intricacies of the small.
The shadow of a memory was cast in his mind. The awe of the others at his art, how people said that this type of craft was the closest to “real” magic. He laughed. The Infinite Sky let him know that he had always loved this, how something so subtle, had the most spectacular effects. The fun he had not only doing his work but in doing it delighting others, returning to them a sense of wonder. The Young Trickster, a part of him that never was far from the surface especially loved how once understood, this art was the least in raw power, once you understood the flow and interactions, it did not take much force to push or pull the flow of things into a new direction, which the cascaded in spectacular ways to its new and intended form.
Yes, it was also possible to do that in a very subtle imperceptible way, but where was the fun in that?

He felt the totality of the portal and the room woven within, now connected to the alternator. For now he just followed with thought and motion the way it was now, turning around to Needs a Sense of Humour. He remembered some of her now. That face that constantly waited for something stupid to happen. The simple joy of making it fall apart into its nigh infinite configurations of exhausted annoyance. But that was a pedestrian joy. No the real challenge, was to get the most precious of prizes…

“Ready?”, he asked beaming at her.

There was “the face”. Lips a bit tight, one corner of her mouth pushing down enough to show her displeasure but making it clear that the situation did not warrant the effort to push it further. Her eyebrows slightly raised over tired eyes.

“Yeah… ready…”, Needs a Sense of Humour sighed.

He moved the Alternator, that was right now poised high above his head, pointing towards the portal, down and forward in a wide arc, which ended in a little flourish. Needs a Sense of Humour started rolling her eyes as he did this. But with the motion, the Alternator had changed the flow of the entire structure of the portal. The script glowing brightly, bursting on lightning paths into all directions. All the components started to glow indifferent colours, shifting into motion.
As they were enveloped by the shining parts, forming a shining dome above then, while turning into a transparent floor beneath their feet under which the main engine room was unfolding, he saw it, the greatest prize of all:
Her eyes had stopped rolling and where now wide, her favourite mouth corner had turned up into a warm smile and for a moment Needs a Sense of Humour was relaxed, enveloped in the joy of the moment.

“You are such an idiot.”, she said.

“I know. But tell me that this isn’t glorious.”

“It is glorious.”, she said shaking her head still smiling.


A few moments later they conversion was done. The Alternator, had disappeared again, melding with his being. While they both had to adjust to the strange and overwhelming view. Even he, who should have known better, felt how was overcome by a feeling of vertigo and disorientation.
Far below them he could see a gigantic spinning ring of light surrounding them. It was made of a countless number of tiny strands, that it spiralled out of it as it moved, slowly growing brighter and dimmer in a slow and steady rhythm.
What caused the feeling of unease was that they could see the ring at all. Here in the ‘control room’ it was made visible so that he could keep an eye on it as a whole, to always know in what state the whole of the machine was. It was also great for others to see it work, it helped them understand what was happening.
However the cascade spiral was a construct made to contain and stabilise the force of the universe. As such it was huge in a way that was utterly outside the capacity of any life form to comprehend. It was not infinite, it did not encompass all of reality, that was never the point and would have been completely outside of the abilities of Glorious Idiot and everyone else in the known universe. It was made to contain something and keep the things surrounding it safe and be able to draw enough energy to keep going for a significant amount of time on a cosmic scale. So it was large enough to contain several hundreds of galaxies within it.
Which is exactly what Glorious Idiot and Needs a Sense of Humour saw. The ring blow them wasn’t a representation, but the actual machine in its entirety, pulled together in a way by his art, that a single human could see all of it.
The shards and facets had not problem with this, they were blissfully limited in their abilities to understand at fundamental level what they were seeing, so that they could work with what they could comprehend and what they did know.
The Endless Sea and the Infinite Sky however were not so limited, they were there to take all in. Not this type of “all” though, this was beyond their capacity of the endless and the infinite.

“I feel like my soul is going to puke…”, she said. “And after that I’m probably going to puke out my soul…”

“I…”, he failed to come up with anything else for a while. “Look up. At the dome.”
He followed his own advice. The dome was also “transparent”, as one could look outside, it was ringed by a lush green forest above them a beautiful night sky. An illusion obviously. He should have known. But here was something that had vanished even from the Infinite Sky. He began to suspect the reason for this.
The illusory sky above him, calmed him. This was an infinity he was used to down to his animal core. There was an implication of the vastness of space, instead of a glimpse of its true expanse.
“No, really look up at the dome.”, he insisted, trying to find her in the periphery of his vision.

“I’m trying. But…”, she heaved, “Up doesn’t make any sense…?”

“Look away from the ring.”

“How?”, there was now a sharp serrated edge to her voice now. “It’s everywhere. It’s everything.”, her eyes growing wider.

“Just move your head around until you see something that isn’t the ring.”, he said, very careful to calm his voice.

“The rind is everywhere…”

“Your stupid thing!”, he said. “The dumb block of crystal you keep lugging around.”

“The Eternal.”, a spike of venom pushed through the panic in her voice. Hearing that he actually relaxed a bit. For a moment he was even thankful for how predictable Needs a Sense of Humour could be and that she really needed a sense of humour.

“Yes. That thing, that shows you all the threads of the universe. An counts stuff. And turns everything into lists and tables and arrays.”, he kept going.

“What about it.”, there it was that ever simmering ember of annoyance.

“Pull it up to your stupid face and look at it.”, he said.

“My face is not stupid.”

“You either should or shouldn’t look into mirrors more often, not sure what would be better for you. But look at the stupid thing already.”, he said, carefully stoking the ember.

“Why? It’s not like…”, there was a brief pause. “Oh.”
“I see.”, she said.

After a longer pause. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And keep looking at the Eternal or up into the sky above the dome. It will help you get used to the ring.”

“Does this always happen?”, she asked.

“I think it does?”

“I know, I have been here before. I know that this is one of the places where you are the most smug. This is like your cathedral of smugness.”

“I’m pretty sure this is the greatest thing I and…” he choked. “That we… that we ever made. There were others. There where so many others.”

Again there was a long time of silence.

“This is not the time for sorrow.”, she said, pulling him out of a deep dark pool into which his thoughts were sinking. “It will be worse, if we don’t keep going.”
“OK.”, she said her voice now calm and cold again. “We came here to see if your device is still working. Which it is,”, there was a slight waver in her voice. “So now what?”

“Now,” he said, the Cleaner taking over his mind, “I check the machine, while you find out what I need to do stop the universe from completely unravelling. Once things are stable again, we can go and look for the cause of this.”

“Right.”, she said, her fingers already moving over the surface of the eternal, every now and then grabbing a thread from around her pulling it through her device. “Let’s start with a bit of good news for a change. Your machine is actually overcompensating.”, she paused for a moment, “Heh… that also explains you wavy stick.”

That is not the kind of humour Needs a Sense of Humour needs he thought.

“But back to the important bit”, she said, “you can reduce the impulse and rotation of the cascade spiral significantly, that way the strands won’t fray as much anymore. You can use part of the energy to wrap the lose threads around the central ring and keep them there. At least I hope you can. And if possible store the excess energy so that we will have something to draw from later.”

He nodded. “Reducing the speed is no problem. Will need some feedback though as I will also have to adapt the impulse. I will also start introducing more helical torque that way we should be able to reduce the number of frayed threads too.”

“Perfect.”, she said. “Let’s get to work then.”

Project: Ashes 005

 Chapter 4 continued

Glorious Idiot had just walked into a massive portal sitting in the middle of a cyclopean wall that had flowed into existence right along side it and far above it.
Above her the ceiling was high, but high for a house were people lived, now moving towards the wall the ceiling had accelerated so far upwards that he couldn’t see where it ended, even though he had a pretty good look at it having lost his balance, now lying flat on the floor pausing for a moment to contemplate the nature of malicious irony and if he had been a bad person in his erased life. However a part of himself that burned as a strong beacon within his very centre told him that he had been a really awesome genius. He wasn’t sure if he should trust anything, even if it was deeply rooted in himself, that described it self with the words “awesome” and “genius”, but that fire sure was bright and warm.
So he got up dusted himself, looking at the portal that had defeated him during their first encounter. ‘Know thy enemy’, said a voice shrouded in shadows standing next to the beacon. His Reflector saw himself and his shards, knowing that he wasn’t like other people, people smiled and laughed. But well, all people apart from him and Needs a Sense of Humour woman were gone and he wasn’t. Oh and he was about to save the whole universe… with Needs a Sense of Humour together.

“And?”, asked Needs a Sense of Humour from behind him.

“Patience woman. I’m trying to get my bearings.”, he said feeling her rolling her eyes. He enjoyed that.

“In front of you,” she said, “that is the direction your nose is currently pointing, is a large portal. It leads to your swirly reactor. Open it. It is your door.”

He sighed. “Please, all of this is a bit perplexing, if I do say so myself. I recognise the door to the cascade spiral… generator… that word doesn’t feel right. I know it, like I know myself but like pretty much everything else I can’t actively remember anything about it. Of course if you, oh model of enlightened knowledge know more about this, please you go on and open it yourself.” He waited for an answer. It didn’t come. “I thought as much.”

He stared at the portal trying to take it in. It was absolutely massive, so much so, that he and his charming companion where reduced to motes of dust in its presence. The thing was probably round and along its outer edge it had a glowing inscription in a flowing run script that was arranged in wide elegant loops informing who ever was looking at it, that this was indeed a portal, including a helpful effect that shifted the colour of the script towards amber in the direction where there was a more human sized entryway, while shifting towards indigo when looking in the other direction.

He got up again studying the script. It did not tell him how to open the portal nor the smaller entry way that was pretty much in front of him. As he had been the designer of the portal it made sense to him that he would hardly print a nice and easy to understand instruction manual into the door it self detailing how to open it. What was behind it was one of the greatest engineering achievement of all time.

    ‘And yet look at you.’, thought the Scoffing Sage the part of him most of his other facets tried to silence. But they never succeeded. ‘In the end all you achieved was failure. At least there was the woman to save you.’
‘Bah!’, thought the Genius, who didn’t have time for this kind of negativity. “The machine worked. It is still working. Which is why we are here in the first place. What ever happened, the cascade spiral was not there to prevent it. It was there to save us in case the plan failed.”

He was pulled out of his thoughts by her voice. “How long to you need to stare at teh portal before it opens?”

“While I still know almost everything, I have forgotten pretty much everything.”, he said. Then falling silent again, that hadn’t made any sense.

“I know how you feel…”, she said. “Just follow your instincts. You spent decades building that thing. It is a part of you. Made it easy to pull it back. Just open that door how you keep opening that mouth of yours. No need for conscious thought.”, she smiled a thin smile.

He wanted to give her a well earned and lovingly sharpened answer, when he realised that in a way she was right. “He”, since his return, was this strange collection of amorphous voices, who were all him yet all different. But there was another presence no matter who was in focus taking the reins there always was the Infinite Sky above them its countless stars seeing all there was to see, showing him what he needed to know in its many constantly changing constellations. And right now the Infinite Sky reminded him of the Alternator. A handheld focus, not unlike the Eternal of the woman, but completely different. The Eternal was static, blocky and boring. The Alternator on the other hand was fluid, shifting and allowed him to move the world. She pulled at the threads of the universe, he set them in motion.

The Alternator appeared in his hand glowing in the deep blue of the deep ocean and the clear sky on a hilltop observatory. He raised it, high above and across his head pointing at the portal. He closed his eyes moving the Alternator around, feeling how it interacted with the portal until he felt just the right kind of resistance.
The Infinite Sky led his hand in a long circular motion which he made a little bit more dramatic than strictly necessary, setting in motion the mechanisms that held the portal in place.
He heard the voice of her behind him trying to vocalise a curse that died before it could be spoken, as the script on the edge of the portal began to shine, bright blue, flowing in strange curved paths inwards, engaging the machinery below it.
Billions of component parts rearranged themselves in three dimensions, passing through many falls paths and dead ends, that he had to carefully circumvent by directing their flow with the Alternator. A part of the portal moved in waves towards them forming  a tunnel around them. Closing them in pulling them towards the centre of the machine that was now being reestablished.  
“Yes.” He remembered now. It was not enough to open the portal. If one did that one would enter a gigantic work of art that looked like an incredibly complex machine, which didn’t do anything but shove energy around while looking mysterious and very stylish, the actual cascade spiral was hidden within the portal itself.

Project: Ashes 004

 Chapter 4 Engine

    “So,” Glorious Idiot said, “where do we go now?”

She just looked at him and blinked. “What do you mean where do we go now?”

    “Where is my… engine?”, he said fishing for the right word for his device. She just held up her Eternal pointed at it.
“Somewhere out there.”, she said. Seeing how Glorious Idiot’s face sank she quickly added, “It’s still out there. The things dissolve at the edges.”, ‘Mostly’, she added in her mind. “But here close to the centre, as you can see”, ‘and don’t look too closely’, “everything is very stable. So we don’t go anywhere, the engine will come to us.”

“OK. But we need a room for it. I know it is really large.”, he said.

“Look around you. Space isn’t the problem.”

“But should we put it here in the middle of your… what kind of room is this anyway?”, he looked around. “I mean, its really large, I can’t see the walls.”

“I’m pretty sure that for now there aren’t any. The room here appeared in reaction to me, hence the floor.” They both looked up to the high ceiling and its beautiful lights which were all clustered above them, providing them with an island of light.
“I think the ceiling just appeared so that light would make sense?”, she said.

“What about those?”, he said pointing at one of the many firefly’s flitting around them, most of them now exploring the dim twilight where the lights were slowly overwhelmed by the outer darkness.

“No idea.” Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that a number on her Eternal had blinked. “But that’s something we can wonder about later. We need your spiral-ator...?“

“Spiralator? That what not its name, but I like it.”, he grinned. “But that doesn’t change the fact that it needs a room.”

“Looking at you it seems that you don’t need my help for that. When I pulled you back I didn’t know how you looked, but there you are and you look… right… also I would never have chosen those clothes.”

“What? Why, I think they look really cool.”, he said looking at himself.

“You wear a cape!”

“Capes are awesome.”

She sighed. “And there we go. You made that. Not I. The ‘room’ here, reacts at least in part to what we think there needs to be. Not what we wish for,” she said casting him a dubious look, “but what we know should exist. So go ahead make your room.”

“You say that as if that was so easy, making this,” he held up his glass, “was hard enough. You are the weaver, I just make things flow.”, he said stretching out his hands making his constipated face.

“What does that even mean?”, she asked.

“What?”, he asked through gritted teeth.

“You make things flow.”

“I have no idea. It was just something that came to my mind and felt right.”, he exhaled and relaxed. “There are a lot of things that feel natural and right, but I don’t know why. I don’t know your name, but I know you.”, he paused, “I don’t even know my own name.”

“I can’t remember anything either. But my feeling tells me that, that is a problem for later.”, she held up her Eternal and waved it in front of his face. “What ever is left of the universe is evaporating. That we know. And we need you machine for that. Everything else, can come later. For example, what is the Ring?”, she choked, “And why can’t I hardly breath when I mention it?”

“I… don’t know. But I know that the Ring being broken is horrible, it fills me with utter despair…”

“Yeah, I know.”, she said, “I also know for some reason that you really love despair, so much so that you tend to take long and extensive baths in it. But this is not the time. Make, the room.”

“I tried! But look,” he waved his hand around, “nothing. You are the one who can bring things back, not me.”

She looked at him, at his waving hands, the waving cape, which most of her found horrible but an annoying minority really enjoyed. Her Observer and Investigators had started a wild discussion with the Boss keeping all other shards away.

“You are trying to force something into existence.” She shushed him with a raised finger, “Not now. I’m thinking. That doesn’t work and if it did work it would take exceptional amounts of power, no I don’t know what that means exactly either. But that’s also not the point right now.” She looked around trying to find something, anything that would help her find an answer. Not easy in a room that was mostly floor, ceiling and infinite space in-between them. ‘I wonder what it feels like to walk down an infinite space?’ Dreamer asked herself. ‘Not. Now.’ Boss hissed. Only darkness and the lights. The lights, she cocked her head again.
“Look up.”, she said.

“OK and now what?”

“Those lines of light that come form the big lights. They show us the way.”

“Kind of. I feel that that’s what they’re there fore. But this hardly helps us in a place filled with nothing.”

“You are such and idiot, Idiot.”, she said. “This place is full of everything, but without form.”

“Oh yes, silly me…”

“Which light would normally lead to your engine?”, she asked.

“One of the blue lines.”

“Well go on then, chose the right blue line and follow it to your room.”

He laughed. “Really, that easy. I just choose a random blue line, like that over there,” he said pointing at one line above him leading towards the circle of fireflies, he moved into the direction where the line vanished into infinity while looking back at her. “I follow the light a bit and then out of thin air…”

“Watch out!” she said.

“Wh…”, he walked into the massive portal in front of him before he got to finish asking his question.

Project: Ashes 003

 Chapter 3 Encounter

“They won.” Glorious Idiot said, “They won…”

“Yeah, I noticed.”, she said.

“But the back-up plan worked!”, he beamed at her. She wasn’t sure, could teeth glow, she and the Endless Sea were pretty sure that teeth weren’t sources of light, but Glorious Idiot’s grin was irradiating.

“For what, it’s worth…”, she said. His reaction, combined with her reaction told her that this had been Glorious Idiot’s plan.

“For what it’s worth? You saved the entire universe!”, he looked around again. “In a way at least. Where are we anyway? This place doesn’t look familiar. But it feels… secure?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. As far as I can tell it just appeared when I returned. It seems to be a mostly potential place that seems to crystallise when I interact with it.” The Boss had to push the Philosopher and the Explorer back with force. Both of them were fascinated by the idea of a place that became real by interacting with thought and the wishes of the sentient beings it interacted with.

“What if I interact with it?”, he asked.

“How should I know?”

“Hmm…”, he rubbed his chin, then looked at her, his eyes suddenly ablaze with a gleam that ignited a reaction in her she wasn’t happy with. He smilled, pointed with both hands to her and let him self fall backwards to the floor. She was alarmed, did he suddenly lose consciousness, had she failed to bring all of him back? With a floooomph sound he was caught by a big, soft comfortable chair.

“Niiice!”, he said, “It’s not just you, its both of us.” For a moment he seemed lost in thought. “I could really use something to drink right now!”, he exclaimed and started to stare. She thought that he looked slightly constipated.
“It worked!” he held a glass in his hand filled with a weird looking liquid the colour of a sunrise. What was a sunrise?

“How did you do that?”, she asked.

“I really, really needed a drink.”, Glorious Idiot said, “And this might just hit the spot.” He  took a bog sip. His eyes went wide and he started coughing. “Oh this is really strong stuff…”
After he recovered he took another sip. “ ’tis good though.”

“What is that anyway?”, she asked.

“I have no idea. I really like it though.”, he took another sip, this time only a very small one. “Ahhh much better…”

She rolled her eyes. It was typical for Glorious Idiot to have a drink at a time like this. The universe apparently had ceased to exist and the remnants of it where slowly evaporating and the first thing he did was summon a big gaudy chair and a drink…
She looked at her eternal, connecting it to the streams of… what ever the streams of of what made the universe the universe were made off, to the Glorious Idiot, his glorious drink and his idiotic chair. The device showed her that what ever he was sitting on was sadly not an illusion, but rather another strand, that had been pulled out of the repeating echo of what was left of the universe.

“That reminds me,” she said, “the silly spiral thingy… that was your thing, right?”

“Spiral thingy… Oh! The cascade spiral! That is a principle and it was kind of my thing, I build the… machine… the spiral device… the… I forgot its name…”, his face had lost all joviality, his brow was furrowed and he was squinting as if that would make is hazy memories sharper.

“Well I think it worked… see this?”, she asked turning the Eternal towards him, which started projecting the information she had reconstructed so far into the space between them. Glorious Idiot didn’t seem surprised at all by that, in contrast to her, at that moment she discovered another shard of herself called Brilliant 4 Hours to Late, Usually While Almost Asleep, Sometimes Under The Shower. A very good friend and often times companion of the sisters I’m A Failure and Why Am I Always So Embarrassing.
While the Boss struggled with the trio, the Observer pointed out that Glorious Idiot hadn’t noticed and maybe the investigation department should take over.

“So that in the middle is us?”, Glorious Idiot asked.

“Yes.”, she answered.

“And that shifty stuff all around?”

“Presumably all that’s left of the Universe.”

“Fascinating,” he said his eyes starting to glow again. “So the cascade worked… wait… was that a glitch in your programme? Something just happened.”

“That’s the reset. It happens in regular intervals. See that number over there? That’s how often it went through the cycle since I came back.”

“Forty-eight times? That’s a lot.”, he said.

“No idea. It might be. Do you see this colour gradient?” He nodded. “The deep blue stuff is still stable. But as you can see in the fringes and where the… strings?… are thinner how it turns slowly red? Look closely.”, she pointed at a part far from the centre where an out lying spiralling arm had split into several thin filaments, the outermost the deep red of a dying ember. As she pointed it came into focus and the picture expanded so that they could see it up close. ‘Yeah… it does that too…’, she remembered this time with a close to, but not quite zero amount of shame.

He looked closely. Before their eyes the outermost filament turned into little red motes, glowing one final time in a clear white light before dissolving into ash and then into nothing.

“Yep.”, he said nodding again. “The cascade spiral, takes all there is, siphons the energy of the annihilation, uses it to amplify what’s left of… everything and keeps it going for as long as possible. But something is always lost in every cycle, because…”

“The ring is broken.”, she said, her heart almost stopping, the warmth leaving her body, leaving her with cold terror.

He gasped, eyes wide. “The ring is broken.”

“What does that mean?”, she asked him, trying to get her self back under control.

“I have no idea,” he said his voice hoarse and breaking, “but I know it´s horrible.” Tears were now streaming silently down his face. “We were to late… This shouldn’t have happened.”

“No.”, she said, the Boss back at the front again, “Not everything is lost. The last resort, it worked. I am here. You are here. And all that?”, she pointed and the moving map, floating between them, “All that is still there. And we can save it.” She tried to remember someone, his name but almost everything about him apart from the knowledge that is was all his fault had vanished, so she decided to improvise, “Reprehensible Fuck, may have broken the ring, but with your cascade machine and my knowledge about the threads, we can bring back at least some of it back.”

“But so much has been lost already…”, he looked at the map in front of him noticing all the beautiful shining motes of light, which he had thought rather pretty only a moment ago. “I don’t even really remember how I am, or even my name… What if there isn’t…”

“Could you please stop?”, she said interrupting him, “You got your horrible chair and what ever it is that you are drinking there, right? Right now, its not the time to be a weepy idiot, it’s time to be a glorious one.”

“Yeah,”, he said, focusing for a moment, his face relaxing again. He stood up squaring his shoulders taking a sip of the burning but delicious liquid. “So where do we start.”

“The first thing would be bringing back your machine, I know this will help us pull things back into being. Then we can see who and what else we find out there, and with a bit more help, who knows we might be able to bring a whole universe back.”

“Right, let’s do that.”, he said now full of drive again. “Wait… did you just call me an idiot?”

“Maybe.”, she smiled.

Project: Ashes 002

 

Chapter 2 Somewhere

Returning to being was catastrophically easy.
It was also unimaginably hard.
Like climbing up a mountain, while the very same mountain came crashing down the slope of an even larger one.
Sorting through the strings to find those which were ‘her’ and not ‘other’ should have been harder thought the Investigator, but the Investigatrix pointed out that, she had done all that while she was still beyond time and space. Complexity, stress, deadlines, didn’t exist. There was only the clarity she brought into the void.
At first there was the chaos, the Endless Sea pointed out the parts she recognised and the shards decided where those threads had to go. There was no time. There was just a constellation of chaos, the work of her being that shifted it into a constellation of order.

    And there she stood, all parts of her that should be manifest in the idea she had of her fingers, ignoring the screeches of the Harbinger and the Sycophant, who intoned the million ways this would all fail. As she pulled, her body came together. That was hard at first, a lot of resistance to overcome to make all the aspects come together in just the right way.
The Boss had to throw the Bookkeeper, into the same hole as the Harbinger and Sycophant as she wanted to see and check how everything precisely came together. This was not the time to worry about spleen orientation. With a booming voice the Boss, summoned the Endless Sea and she washed away all the voices, her undertow pulling at the strings, with the slow but inexorable force of nature.
This was the hard but easy part.
The pieces began to fall into place, first like the first rain after a long draught, then like hail and finally like a rock slide.
That was the easy but hard part.

Suddenly she was crushed…
    …by her body coming back together. Everything had substance again. She never had noticed how many hard barriers she was made out of. One moment she’d been all and now she was this incredibly limited piece of meat.
    
    …by the air crushing her body from all sides.
The weight of it! And it rushing, pushing, breaking into her lungs. Making her gasp.
    
    …by the temperature. It was cold. Not freezing, just to cold for comfort. Now there was a skin, that hated the cold. Full of tiny muscles, each connected to a hair, which now where all pushed up in silent protest. The wave of cold pushed further into her flesh making her shiver. At least her bones didn’t seem to mind. They were just being heavy and unweildy.

    …by floor solidifying beneath her, and with it gravity, who brought its simple single minded order to the world. “No matter who you are, come into my embrace.”, it declared and pulled. All of her insides heard gravity’s call and followed it.

She tried to scream, but she only produced a gurgling sound as she pushed… a liquid? Out of her lungs and mouth. Water? No, raw essence, parts not her, but which she had used to prop her insides into the right place when she had reworked her being.
Now that she expelled it, part of it fell down and became fluid. Mostly blood, a good part of mucus, water, things the essence felt(?) it should be if it had just been expelled from a panting body.
Other parts drifted into the air. Became the air in the first place. Others turned into light. The light turned into a swarm of fireflies. Glowing? Alive? Flying? Firefly. It made sense. Others less prosaic pieces of reality banded together. Warm. Up not down. Shining. Light orbs. The latter split into two groups again, the once happy to smugly pretend as if they didn’t hear gravity’s passive aggressive suggestions and threats; and those who drifted further up until they reached the concept of the ceiling. Without our light, your dark would just be empty space. The ceiling disagreed but didn’t really care one way or the other.
From the ceiling lights, following another fading memory from the mind that had given them reality, parts of them coloured in warm red, soothing green and a bold regal blue flowed in tiny lines into different directions, implying paths, a layout, the shining raiment of a building.

Gathering her thoughts and shards and the Endless Sea, she focused on herself. She lay still twitching and gasping naked in a pool of viscous fluid. Naked? No, that couldn’t be. So the liquid still coating her turned into her clothes. Fitting her form. Comfortable. Growing armoured. Armour? Her sword and her multi caster returned, first to her hands, but that didn’t feel quite right so the melted and flowed to her hip.
But what was in her hand. She could have sworn it was her weapon. She focused. No longer wet, no longer cold, no longer in the dark. She was in a large black room, that didn’t quite come into focus. In her hand was… her weap… her Eternal, a book that was all books, a tool that was all tools. (Not all the Bookkeeper intervened, only a plurality of texts and tools relevant to our skills and undertakings, which could be put into a device the size of an Eternal… Poet, appeared and silently shook its head. ‘Oh, did I do the thing again?’, Bookkeeper asked. Poet nodded. ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ Bookkeeprs eyes grew wild, but Poet stopped her with a smile, put an arm on her shoulder.)

“That’s right.”, she croaked, in a voice she wished wasn’t hers, but most certainly was. “I am a war-scholar. I bring knowledge and wisdom, into the rising darkness of war and keep the light of science shining even in the darkest storm of ignorance.” That was part of the mantra. She hated it. (Poet laughed at herself, she loved the mantra. But Very Serious Professional was afraid that liking it too much would make her look like an idiot, who no one would ever take seriously.)

She stood up.
The boots she was wearing went from stylish to practical as she did so.

“Where am I?”, she asked.

Silence.

Inside her mind Observer thought: ‘This is a good question, but this is not the right time for it. There is one that is more important.’
Which one…?

“Where is everyone else?”, her eyes grew wild. The Endless Sea bombarded her with a stream of invisible pictures. Panic. Forced calm. The desperate plan. Ignoring everything around her being destroyed and one by one all of ‘us’ dying. She needed focus, because she was the last anchor. Glorious Idiot! His last words where… “Of fuuuuck…”, he had turned back towards her, the expression of utter horror slowly melting as he focused on her, smiling that crooked smile of his, that she hated to find so sweet, “…looks like its, all up to you now. I’ll start the cascade spiral. Good luck.”
“Fuck luck!”, thos had been her last words to him.
He had grinned, for a second the world had been normal.
“Right, you don’t trust in luck, you trust yourself. Success then!”
She had nodded.
He turned around.
A few moments later everything has unravelled.

“Glorious Idiot?”, she tried. Of course that didn’t work.

This had been part of the plan. The cascade spiral, god that name…, had been Idiot’s thing. That had done something, beyond buying time.
The Endless Sea, pushed the Eternal to the front of her mind.
She looked at it, activated it. Inside its crystal body a flow of lines appeared, a sign which she didn’t recognise but knew was hers in the middle of it. She was at the centre of a galaxy of strings rotating around her, not centred on her, but with her nested in its middle.
The strings drifted apart, getting entangled and annihilating each other or just fading away. They were moving along a rather simple path. But then she saw something strange. A glitch in the display? She focused on it the Investigator and the Investigatrix, both utterly focused, the first trying to see where the error in the system was, the other if she could see a pattern in the glitch.
“It happens in regular intervals.” The Investigator thought, adding a time stamp to the display. Super regular intervals.
    “It is repeating.” The Investigatrix thought, adding ghost images of former versions of the flow on top of each other.
She tilted her head to one side, her eyes narrowing as she focused on it.

The Investigator and the Investigatrix, both noticed it at the same time.

“It’s decaying!”, she said. Eye growing wide again. She felt her heart as it started racing again. The world around her, the Universe, was decaying and evaporating.

“The stupid spiral…”, this was the part Glorious Idiot had played. His device was keeping the last remaining strands of the universe together.
And she was the weaver.

She let the Endless Sea take over, trusting it to know what to do with the eternal to find the Idiot among the millions of dissolving strands. His sign appeared. So grandiose and silly… at least it was easy to find.
She adjusted the settings. Giving her a better idea of her own position, relative to her and where ever they were now. She started feeding the fragments of his thread to the Eternal, when ever she felt a part of his thread passing through her fingers, she stuck them into her device. Then the cycle began anew, and all the fragments where gone.

She screamed in frustration and nearly threw the eternal against the nearest wall.
There now was a nearest wall.
There was also a short flash of memories. A much younger her. Frustrated had thrown an Eternal and broken it. They aren’t that Eternal when thrown in anger against hard surfaces. Going on the long pilgrimage, working with holy artificers how ever took an eternity. As did her mothers lingering annoyance.

“Let’s try this again…”

And again.

And again.

Something red when bright on the Eternal. It told her that some major threads had now completely frayed and vanished from existence. After the next cycle the warning was gone. She looked for it. But that part of reality had never existed in this cycle.
She had to force many of her shards to silence.
This was an all boss moment. No other voices were allowed to have control now.

By now, the Endless Sea could collect most of Glorious Idiots strands, while the Shards could concentrate of piecing them together and building enough of a contiguous strand for her to pull. The timer on her Eternal had started blinking. 30 seconds until the end of the cycle. She should have enough… if not… well she hoped that it would not damage the Glorious Idiot to go into the reset half unformed, half manifest.
25 seconds.
She started a sub-routine she had written into the eternal, which kept the thread taut and spooled it in automatically in when ever it went slack.
20 seconds.
Now she had to wait until the thread was puled into the Eternal as far as possible.
15 seconds.
The Eternal started to struggle, starting to vibrate every now and then. She placed her fingers around the thread, felt it, synced with its rhythm.
12 seconds.
With the rhythm of the Eternal.
10 seconds.
Compensated for the intervals getting shorter and shorter.
8 seconds.
Here breathing, went in and out with the breath of the universe.
6 seconds.
And her heart followed.
4 seconds.
She focused her power on the thread.
2 seconds.
Let it flow into the the thread, anchoring in her self, the room around her.
1 second.
And pulled.

Project: Ashes 001

 Nothing

Pure existence is a strange thing. The entity not quite conscious, yet able to feel existed.
It didn’t know it yet.
It was just there and felt… nothing at all. There wasn’t the pull of gravity, nor did it feel the presence of its organs, the pulsing of blood. It wasn’t hot or cold.
Later, this moment would remain vividly in its memory as this was the first impressions that had left an imprint on its mind. It would also be something that was incredibly hard to explain. They would search for words to explain a time and a place where space didn’t exist and time if it flowed at all left no traces at all.
However the others she tried to convey her thoughts to, the ones who were as old as her, would all nod. They understood. They had been “there” too.

For now it, it had no concept of her herness just yet, felt its exitence on its most basic level. Which in a strange way set off a chain of thoughts, that stirred its mind along the long path towards conscious thought.
It discovered that it existed, deep down in its core, it know it was. It felt good. This space (?) was, safe (?) and resting was good. Why?
It stirred. But it felt wrong. She… now it had happned, without noticing “it” had become “she”, and stirring she felt should feel… different.
It was dark and quiet.
She tried opening her eyes. But there was no body to command.

“?”, she thought.
Everything around her felt safe, but utterly wrong.
The darkness was not an absence of light it was an absence of everything. She had no eyes to open. There wasn’t a body that could have held those eyes. She wasn’t suspended in anything. She floated because there was only her. Nothing else. Not even space.

“?!” she almost panicked. But didn’t which filled her with an abstract apprehension. Again her body failed her, by not existing. Thus her “shock” didn’t feel like anything. There was no skin for her to grow hairs from that could now stand on end. There was also no heart anywhere that could start to beat faster. Nor lungs with which to breath more quickly.

All of this “…is really weird.”, she thought. Having no eyes they did not grow wide in shock, as she discovered her voice. Her consciousness passed another peak. “Is this a dream?” she asked herself. She remembered dreams. She knew that there were two worlds. The “real” world and the “dream world”. Right now the difference seemed deeply illogical to her, for how could there be two realites, but one of them actually real and the other one just… an illusion? She also remembered / knew all along, that she always spent some time in the one world and some time in the other. One always following the other. She also seemed to remember that sometimes her mind, got trapped in the dreamworld. It happened to almost everyone… Everyone? There were other people in the real world… But no in the dream world, there she would always go alone… but the dream world was filled with people, often copies of the people she left behind in the real world… “What?”, she failed to say aloud.
She remembered the concept of insanity. But for some reason this twin realities thing was considered normal.
Where was she… a yes nowhere… and probably in the border-marshes between the alleged “real” world and the dream world. Sometime you could get stuck there. When the mind woke before her body did.

But… she had no body. There wasn’t even a space for her body to be in. It was just her, existing and knowing without context more and more things.
She should be in bed if she was sleeping… or on a sofa? Or if she had alooot to drink then maybe she was lying in the garden, between the bushes, in front of her house… Yeah hopefully not that… also that happened like once… during her young wild years. Which had been… not as long ago as she’d like to admit.
For a moment she felled vaguely ashamed, but then was distracted by the fact, that she knew things like what a party was, or getting drunk, she even remembered what having a head was like especially because it could lead to forms of pain that mad her wish to not have one.
“Well at least that’s sorted then…” she thought. Without a head? She knew that wasn’t possible. Also… houses, people lived there, parties, people went there. She remembered people. Those were others, like her but not like her. Friends, many, many, so many individuals that existed but she didn’t think or care about and enemies. Enemies where the worst. “Like…” and there was the problem, enemies like… who? Her presence knew that it should now be feeling something. The enemy thought was connected to a very small select group of other entities. But she didn’t remember any of them. Or any of her friends… Or her family. Another concept that came naturally to her but was as bewildering as the wakings world/sleeping world thing. Family was a peculiar mix of friends, enemies and a small but not insignificant number of people in a category she called “ah, yes… them… meh…”. No names. No faces. Nothing.

“Am I dead?”, she asked herself. Again, the reflex of fear, leading to nothing.
Something wasn’t quite right here though.
O.K. something was even less quite right  than everything else. She knew “If I’m here, I’m not dead. I survived…”
She felt a sense of intense relief and joy, which startled her disembodied mind so much, that it lost this corporal sense almost immediately again. Was that her body? No… if she was here, her body was gone.

Everything is gone.

That was a fundamental truth which overwhelmed her.

It was such an intense realisation, that as a reflex she stopped. She had stopped everything, apart from existing.
“Oh…”, it dawned on her when her consciousness dared to move again. Her mind split into two patterns. One that wondered about the concept of time. How long had she been still? Where ever she was if time existed, there was no way to measure it. Utterly fascinating.
Her other shard, was cautious but had the impulse to put the puzzle pieces together.
A third shard manifested, just appearing a noting, that she used to love to solve mysteries, puzzles, understand complex systems.
The second shard observed, that she was here, that she felt safe and that she was absolutely not dead.
A forth shard, a close friend of the seconds, appeared to point out that believing not to be dead didn’t mean anything. Shard two the Investigator and shard four the Sceptic started a lively debate about the definition of life and death.
Until the third shard the Observer reappeared to point out that they were drifting away. The Sceptic was told to go away and let the Investigator do its job.
 The Sceptic didn’t want to leave, as “taking shit for granted” as she put it was the perfect way to believe all manners of false bullshit.
The first shard the Philosopher was a bit sad to let her thoughts about the nature of time go, but took it upon itself to take care of the Sceptic so that the Investigator could continue doing its job.

“So where was I?” the Investigator thought, opening its mind to the Endless Sea, the Endless Sea had no voice, it just knew things, felt them, connected them, analysed them and whenever there was a need for something “She” knew, the Endless Sea would manifest it to the shard who needed her help. The Investigator were old friends and a good team.
The Endless Sea showed the investigator a lot of empty vessels. These should contain specific information. But the Sea had lost them, she was endless after all…

“The… horrible thing…!” the investigator said and the Endless Sea manifested.
There had been something incredibly dangerous and sinister and there had been “the Plan”, another empty vessel, bright and shining.

“So the plan worked…” the Investigator said.

“Yeah”, she said breaking in two so that she could talk the situation through with someone else. The Investigatrix said, “We seem to be alive; don’t even start…”, she said casting a sharp look at the Sceptic who kept mumbling in the background. “Which means the Plan what ever it was worked.”
The Endless Sea showed them, that this fit into the way the Plan was formed. It showed them a path that the plan had to follow and they were at the beginning of it.

“So the plan hasn’t been completed?”, the Investigator said.

“Hardly,” said the Investigatrix, “as you can see over there,” she pointed at the Sceptic, just waiting to be able to enter the fray again, “this isn’t really what I would consider survival.”

“I and we.”, said the Philosopher. “I was not alone. And all of us is I.”
The other three looked at the philosopher, confused.
The Endless Sea moved showing them a strange mirror, they all saw themselves and saw that they all were I.

    “Wait, so all of this is me…?” said the Investigatrix.

“I am, I. All of these are just my voices.”, said the Sceptic, who when she confirmed something removed and doubt. And the Endless Sea washed over them letting them know that this was true.

    “So we here, is me.”, said the Investigator. “But there are others, out there… we all worked on the plan. And it worked.”

“Partially,” said the Investigatrix, “we remain sentient,” the Sceptic liked that wording and smiled, “so that part worked. But we need to return. If we can’t return, this might be what… that other one the… glorious idiot…”, the Endless Sea showed them a vague shape and the knowledge of another person, close, a friend, a partner and always annoying but in a delicious way?

Another shard, the Seductress appeared for a second and smiled. The others stood for a second in awe, then sent her back to where ever she had come from. She gave them all a knowing look, went away yet lingered on.

“So the glorious idiot,” the Investigator said, clearing her throat. “We need him… er… we need to return and prove him wrong?”

“In a way,” said the Investigatrix who was back on track, “he said that one of the ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen’ scenarios would be, that we escape the cataclysm” that sounded way better than ‘the horrible thing’, “but are then lost beyond time and space.”

“Oh!”, said the Philosopher, looking around the nothingness, it was in. Not quite easy. As it was now both inside her own mind with all the other shards that was her and also in the not-place that was beyond space and time. “Fascinating. It is so incredibly simple once you are here…”

“…but try to explain that to anyone has not experienced this.”, the investigator finished her thought. “It is literally impossible to describe. I know now what it feels like that there is no space… but… all concepts I have can’t describe it.”
The Endless Sea disagreed. It showed her “beyond time and space”. The Endless Sea didn’t really have a personalty like the shards, but somehow the Investigator felt, that the Sea was a bit smug, for she understood this not-place perfectly even as it eluded the abilites of the Shards to describe it.

“Hey!”, the Investigatrix said, “We can contemplate all this later. I’m pretty sure that it is imperative that we return. We will have other people that we can talk this through with once we are back. Or if we fail, we will stay here and will have all of eternity to consider it.”

“Or to find out if there can be an eternity in a place where time doesn’t exist.”, said the Philosopher.

“Or try to find a way to show that time doesn’t exist or if it it is just me who, without having something to measure it with, who doesn’t know that time is passing.”, said the sceptic.

“Can time exist if you can’t measure it?”, asked the Philosopher.

“Good point,” said the Sceptic, “while we take it for granted, it is axiomatic in nature and it looks suspiciously like a purely abstract construct.”

“Enugh of that.”, a new shard appeared, the Boss, who got things done, “Time to follow the plan. What do we need to do now?”
The Accountant one of the Boss’s most loyal lieutenants appeared beside her, “according to the Plan”, the Endless Sea showed them the next steps, “we need to focus on our return, for that we need to focus our being back into reality.”

“And hoe do we do that?” asked the Boss.

“I’ll take care of it.”, the Professional said. “You all need to shut up,  and follow my lead.”

“Alright, your’re the boss.”, said the Boss.

The shard, Silly Potato giggled at this joke.

The professional didn’t even notice, she dove with both arms deep into the Endless Sea pulling out the strings that lay submerged within her, connecting her to herself and her self to the world.
Once she felt all the strings in her fingers, she started to pull. Herself together. And back into the Universe.