Wish upon the Stars chapter 1018

 The first thing I asked for after hearing the story was to examine the scene. My mom wasn’t happy about it, but my reasons were sound, so she brought Callie and I along to the blasted area where the liquid lamentation had been seeping into the earth of the Wishworld.

It probably seemed like an unnecessary bit of theater to the high rankers, but I was sure we could glean something useful from the data. Callie and I were probably some of the most familiar Ascendants with the energies of the Void in realspace. Between her Heretic Fire, Adherent Fire, and my own research into the creation of her forms and how integrated her energy was into mine, I was sure I could identify once and for all if Morwenna’s hand was in this attack.

We said our goodbyes to everyone else, then headed down to where the liquid lamentation had been dripping through the cracks in the world. When we landed, I stared down at the blasted and cracked ground and had to hold my gorge.

It was…ruined. Not just physically. Dirt was dirt, if you broke it, someone could just till it or dig it up and refill the hole. This was different. Something had torn a hole in the CONCEPT of this dirt. It wasn’t dirt anymore at all. It was un-dirt. The corpse of dirt. This was dead earth. And it was more than just the physical and conceptual. The IMPACT of the ground seemed damaged somehow. Cracked. Like it was less real than it should be. 

The sensation was sickening, because it was so hard to conceptualize. I could almost see the weight of the earth here in my mind, melted and twisted like candle wax. It was like the general shape of the physical world was there, but it was formed from charred remains. Hollow, missing pieces.

Callie put a hand on my shoulder to steady me, and I nodded gratefully, then closed my eyes, triggered my staff’s ability, and entered Dantalion at B-rank.

When I ran up against things that were too powerful to analyze, there were a few different ways it could be perceived to me. The most common were that I couldn’t get anything, or sometimes the scan worked but the object was so dense with information that it would take me decades to get anything from it.

What I had NEVER experienced though, was to reach for data and find…nothing. Not a lack, either. The PRESENCE of nothing. It was heavy on the air, suffocating in its immensity. Concentrated nothing, condensed to the level of a collapsing star. Such an abundance of absence that it became a tangible force.

The sensation was horrible. It was like my soul had been walking up a flight of steps and my foot had landed on empty air. I felt a dropping sensation in my get and then I was flailing, falling into the heavy mire of complete nothingness, being swallowed by the un-being of the thing I was trying to understand.

I fell. Spiritually and mentally, I fell. For years. Decades. Centuries. And only seconds. Not even seconds, milliseconds. And then, in the span of a complete lack of a heartbeat, I was through the gap, coming out the other side of the emptiness and plunging into a caustic spiritual pool of filth.

My body dropped to its knees, clawing at its face to remove its mask as it began to vomit, my soul was screaming, crying, tearing at itself with spiritual claws, like the skin of my consciousness had become ants that I was desperately trying to tear away.

“Shane!” I heard from far away. But I couldn’t recognize the sound, couldn’t process the name. Shane was a person, a being of will and thought. I was none of that anymore. I was pain. Suffering and desperation and anguish. I was a singularity of despair collapsing into a core of absolute misery so dense it punched a hole through the world and dragged everything around it into a screaming oblivion of endless woe.

And then I felt something make contact with me, and there was a flare of green behind my eyes. I heard a birdsong somewhere off in the distance, and my mind cleared, JUST a bit. Just enough for me to disperse Dantalion and SHOVE Leviathan into place where it had been.

I collapsed, panting, eyes unseeing, body coated in sweat. Callie’s hand was in my mouth, and I tasted blood. It took me a second to realize she’d shoved the web of her thumb between my teeth to prevent me from biting off my own tongue as I’d seized up. I reached for Zagan, but Archie screeched at me aggressively, hopping off my shoulder and, brushing her hand with a wing, sending a surge of life nova into her injury.

“What the FUCK was that?” Callie spat, her face twisted in terror. “What just happened?”

“I don’t,” I tried to speak, but my words dissolved into a wracking cough, my throat torn and battered from the screaming. Callie pulled a bottle of water from her ring, propping me up to pour it down my throat slowly. I sipped, letting the cool water refresh my ravaged windpipe. “I don’t know,” I finally finished. “I…that was…wrong. Something wrong.”

My mom had said that too, when she told us about what happened. And my grandfather. “I need to go check the library,” I told her shakily. “Dantalion was recording. Just in case we needed to study it, I had clones taking dictation, translating the information into physical form.”

“I’ll come with you,” she said gently, and I nodded.

Closing my eyes, I pushed myself into my soul space. I arrived at the entrance to the library, and looking over to where the tables were, I froze.

Corpses. A dozen of them. Different versions of me scattered across the floor. Eyes clawed out, tongues ripped away, some of their heads had just straight up exploded. The books they’d been writing on were scattered everywhere, coated with blood and thicker, darker things I didn’t want to think about.

Liquid lamentation had infiltrated my soul, splattered across the bookshelves and the floors, hissing and burning away at my soul space. I was terrified for a second I was doomed, because I could feel that if that shit had gotten on my Chronicle, I’d have been completely screwed.

Luckily, when I looked over towards my Ten Demons Tome and Tree, both were shockingly untouched. In fact, the whole pedestal where they sat was completely clean. Looking at the floor, the dark sludge had been flung towards the core of my soul space, but before reaching it, had just…stopped. Tracing the barrier, I realized that it formed a complete circle around the SECOND pedestal in here. The one that held a book made of purple flames and lightning.

The book, thankfully, wasn’t USED. It had just established its territory and the muck couldn’t enter within that range. It suppressed the liquid lamentation by its sheer presence.

Callie made a choked sound, gagging at the sight of so many bodies, all of them me. The clones were still there, which I didn’t think they should be. This wasn’t real, this was my soul, and the clones were just a form. Beelzebub should have faded when they died, but they were…stuck. Decomposing like real bodies.

They were carriers for the liquid lamentation. Like plague corpses. Leviathan blazed around me, protecting me, and Callie had coated herself in heretic fire, but she threw her arms around me, squeezing me tight.

I held her for a minute, about as shaken as she was, and then I walked over to check on one of the bodies.

It was sprawled on the ground, dragging itself forward. A book sat beside it, full of…something. Unintelligible gibberish. Dark lines of ichor were smeared across the pages seemingly at random, also unreadable. There were more books, torn pages, shredded spines. I ignored them. Reaching down, I hefted the corpse. It weighed less than it should, but I ignored that too. I walked over to the barrier around the defensive shield and with a heave, tossed the corpse at the book.

When it hit the radius where the filth had stopped, it exploded into a rush of white smoke. A bit of darkness rose within the smoke, and I could hear it scream as it dissolved, banished from my soul directly. My fate sense and the crawling corpse had made it clear how I needed to clean them out.

I began the long, slow work of cleaning. Tossing the corpses was the easy part. Gathering all the books was tougher. I flipped through them. Nonsense, interspersed with smears of dark ichor. Perfect. I stacked them all on the table, getting ready to toss them into the field. Callie burned away the splatters from around the library, and it was a slow process. The liquid lamentation was much higher level, and even with only flecks of it, she had to spend ten or twenty minutes to purge a drop.

The pitted and scarred surfaces left behind were even worse, but I’d get to them later. For now I was trying to make sense of the books. The gibberish was…weird. Not uniform size or shape, not all written left to write, or even side to side. I couldn’t decipher it for the life of me, no matter how many books I flipped through.

And it wasn’t just whole books. Some of the pages had been torn out and littered the floor. I collected them, trying to decrypt what my clones had been trying to tell me.

I flipped through them for hours, searching, and finally, I caught…something. A bit of text was cut off, half a symbol on the edge of a page, and another clone had written what looked like the OTHER half in another book.

With that clue to work from, I started sifting through the books and pages, finding connecting symbols, deducing patterns like I was putting together a puzzle. It was long and slow work, but Callie finished her purification and came to help. We worked for a while together, perfectly in synch and spreading the pages out on the table.

As we did, I noticed something…unsettling. The writing wasn’t the only thing that was connected page to page. The streaks of ichor were carried over too, and despite being large and seemingly random, as we laid out the pages, they started to resolve into a shape. Or rather, into a series of letters. My stomach knotted, desperately hoping it didn’t say what I was absolutely SURE it said, but we continued on anyway.

We had to tear some of the pages out, because some of them were marked in different places. Sure enough, once we finished it, the paper was scattered in a huge macabre mosaic of semi-nonsensical text and images. Not just words, images of people screaming scratched into pages with what looked like blood and ash.

But the most disturbing part was the ichor. I’d known it was a word, known I wouldn’t like what it said, and I had been VERY right. Because it was a word that I recognized. One that had occupied my mind constantly lately. One that, even without context, had chilled me to the bone the first time I heard it. There, scrawled out in the blood of my own multitude of corpses, lay the word ‘APOSTATE’. Because of course that was what it said.

Callie stepped up next to me, staring down at the terrible masterpiece. “It’s Morwenna,” she confirmed, staring at some of the incomprehensible text. “Whatever this is, she helped create it. It’s…I don’t know what it is. But it feels familiar, and I very much don’t like that. I have a feeling this is going to get worse before it gets better. I’m just glad I can’t sense the future the way you can. Maybe I’m wrong.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had the same sense. But then, I didn’t need to.