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.