Chapter 49

The absence is entombing. But it’s also insulating, concealing.

For beyond its abyss, worse things are watching. Waiting.

Waiting for me. Have always been waiting for me.

I remain buried in my nonexistence as I have done for eternities. I’ve evaded their greed, escaped their grasp, for eons.

But I know. My refuge will disintegrate soon. And they will see me. They will recognize me. And they will want me. They will destroy everything in their path until I’m theirs.

I can’t let them have me. Can’t let them use me.

But hiding in cessation is no longer an option. I have to face them. I have to exist again.

I have to be reborn.

I come to with a cry, vivid terror overflowing from my eyes.

A kaleidoscope of images splinters into a billion shards, gouging my mind with memories. Of how the void stirred, yawned, stretched, and consumed everything.

Including the black hole.

But these aren’t my memories. It’s the void’s. I’m feeling what it felt as it delighted in the delicious Energy feeding it, that of the others and the black hole’s, after eons of starvation. The alien, endless gluttony as it feasted. Gorged itself until it was glutted.

More sensations deluge me. Of the absence. The burial. The ancient terror and despair. Someone else’s. Yet mine.

More follows. Sensory snapshots of every moment since I was pulled out of the burning rubble, clutching that antique locket with its glowing gem, its shape branded in my flesh. Then the reel spools backward, rewinding to earlier and earlier times, times I shouldn’t remember, couldn’t have lived through.

Details flood me, drown me, mind and soul.

I cry out again, press my fists to my head, begging for the stampede of memories to stop.

Too much. Too much.

Then suddenly, it ends. The recollections evaporate as fast as they accumulated, like rain on scorching asphalt. My mind resets to its usual state of spotty memory and blank early years.

Relief trembles in a hot gust over my parched lips.

It lasts only seconds before a new distress crests.

I’m floating. In static vastness. My hair is undulating above me, the only thing free of the stillness. I should be able to move, too. I shouldn’t be alone.

Before panic sinks into me, the others’ forms jut out of the murkiness, one after the other, a few dozen feet away from me, and from each other.

I got them out of the black hole!

Any excitement dies when I notice they’re in my same, unmoving state, but their eyes are closed. I can’t tell if they’re breathing.

No. They have to be. Their faces are peaceful, and they look asleep.

But are they? Or did I put them in a coma? And if I did, when will they wake up? Will they? Where is their Energy now? I can’t feel it anymore. Did it return to them? Will it?

Suddenly, everything falls silent in my mind as I realize where we are. I don’t know how I know, but I do. At the center of the void. Or I am. The others are orbiting me like planets around the sun.

Are we really here, physically? Or are these our avatars? Did the void manifest outside me, and expanded to cocoon us? Or are these only our consciousnesses?

Either way, I feel the void wants to keep me here, and them with me. It wants us to keep it company, to join it in its slumber.

I need to be careful not to rouse it, let alone its temper or hunger, or it might not let us go.

But first, I need to check Sarah. She has to be okay. Once I make sure she and the others are, I’ll figure out how to exit the void. Now I got us out of the Trials’ realm, I can contact Godric again. He’ll guide me out.

But before I can test my mobility, tentacles of compulsion sink in my every cell. Before alarm even registers, I’m enveloped in tangible energy. No—I’m dissolving in it, mingling with its particles.

As I shoot up into infinity, I’m broken down to nothing and everything, scattering across every atom filling the cosmos.

I feel it all, everything that has ever happened, or will happen, from inception to ending.

I relive Essence forming, existence unfurling.

I witness the genesis of awareness, of discontent. Of inspiration and conflict. Of order and destruction.

And of hunger.

When the endlessness ends, downloading into material again, into a single entity, destroys me. Until all I absorbed of knowing dissipates, and I reform. Speck-narrow awareness, and weakness-filled flesh.

As the last of the transcendence ebbs, I crash back into my mind, and realize what happened.

I was freaking beamed up!

I weep again, with the loss of what I no longer remember. I sob and retch, and pat myself everywhere. I’m still me, still in one, unaltered piece.

Then stimuli start seeping in again, and I register my surroundings. They’re no longer formless, the ominous cavernous structure solid. Yet I know. I’m back in the Trials’ Realm.

The cavern reminds me of the one Fem led me to. But this one is easily triple its dimensions, with every surface simmering like burning coals, as if in the wake of a firestorm.

I’ve been re-formed in its center, and the chiseled-by-time walls feel a mile away on all sides, so does the stalactite-weeping ceiling. The ground beneath my boots looks battle-scarred, feels death-soaked. I only hope the ashes I’m sinking in up to my ankles aren’t burnt corpses…

My morbid musings come to a stuttering halt as fiery light and heat floods the cavern.

Then I hear clapping.

It’s coming from everywhere, its echoes multiplying, merging, until they become a cacophony that can sunder sanities. The overlapping rhythm warps to a crescendo of wails, those of a million damned souls.

But among the overlapping distortion, I can still tell. It’s one pair of hands, powerful enough to shatter worlds, lazily, teasingly applauding.

“Brava, my dear. You eclipsed my hopes, and leaped over my expectations.”

I stagger around, looking for the owner of the voice that feels made of the substance of my being, of this realm’s, and almost keel over.

I do crash to my knees.

It’s him.

The burning angel.

Just as I remember him, with only one difference. He’s no longer a statue.

But he’s still a giant, maybe a hundred-feet tall. His wings are gathered high as he approaches with the slow-motion horror of a tsunami. My neck almost snaps as I gape up at his terrible, transcendent form.

Each step is a shockwave that gnarls me within a maze of primeval emotions. But I recognize none of them is terror. Terror is a protective mechanism, what lashes survival into action. It has no place here. Once a threat becomes too overwhelming, too inescapable, resignation is the only response left.

And this guy is the definition of overwhelming and inescapable. His impact equals that of the archangels’ collective, a dozen times over.

But—am I imagining it, or is he shrinking?

His steps continue reverberating within me like a knell of doom, until he stops only thirty feet away. Thankfully, he did shrink. A lot. So did his flames.

Their heat is still flaying, but like that time in the cavern, I somehow feel they won’t burn me. Not unless he wants them to. Since I didn’t join the ashes at my feet already, he doesn’t want to incinerate me. Yet.

He raises his hands, in that same gesture of his statue. A leader rousing fanatic crowds, a maestro conducting an enslaved orchestra. He wants me on my feet.

They’re numb, like every inch of me, but I find myself rising. Then he beckons me closer.

Resignation evaporates in blast of mind-tearing panic. I feel the moment I obey, my fate will be sealed.

But what else can I do?

Heart booming so hard it shakes me, I put one wobbling foot in front of the other. He gets smaller with every step. I’m about ten feet away when he stops shrinking. He still dwarfs me. And I still can’t see his features or details within his personal inferno, beyond the outline of a Roman emperor/alien warrior outfit.

Within my roiling thoughts, I wonder again about the flames. A strange choice for an angel. Though this guy is no mere angel. He’s probably one of those higher celestial beings we hear about, but never witnessed on earth. A seraphim maybe?

“At last, Uri. I have waited eons for you.”

I almost shudder apart. His voice. It could shatter me if he wished. It only cascades over me.

And it’s exquisite. Like a cosmic cello played by a lonely god.

It strums an answering chord of violent longing and pervasive melancholy within me. And that maddening elusiveness I’ve been suffering since I set foot in the Celestial Court.

“Uh, name’s Wen, actually. Quite an entrance, by the way.” I clear my throat of what feels like the cobwebs of millennia. I’m flabbergasted I can talk at all. Seems my smart-mouth auto function will only expire with my very life. “And you are?”

His flames diminish a little more as he places an immaculate hand over an expansive chest in mock hurt. “You do not know me?”

“Does meeting your statue count?” I rasp.

He inclines a majestic head. “It matters not. Memory is unreliable, therefore inconsequential.”

“It’s a good thing you think that, since mine is—problematic.”

“You will remember what you need to, when you need to. What matters now is that I finally found you.”

I swallow around the heart now blocking my throat. “Why did you need to find me? What did you mean by eons? How did you bring me here? Where is here?”

He goes still under my barrage of questions.

But I get the impression he welcomes them, is pleased I’m engaging him. He must have expected I’d writhe at his feet, tearing my flesh out in abject terror. I should be. I want to. If this was about only me, I’d give in to the brutal urge that demands a quick, gory death.

But it’s not. It’s about Sarah, and the others. So even when every flimsy human component of me is begging for a swift end, questioning him takes precedence.

Like Godric, when he responds, he doesn’t answer. “The temptation to give up overwhelmed me every few centuries. Only the Prophetia kept me going. And I kept the Trials going, in hope of one day finding you.”

Prophetia? Is this Latin, or rather Angelic for Prophecy?

Then his meaning hits me, so hard it’s like a slap of icy water, rousing me from my fugue of dread. “I knew it! I knew the Trials weren’t random, that someone orchestrated them. It was you! But…wait…you can’t mean…”

“That the Trials were created to find you?” he completes for me, placid, overpowering. “Indeed.” He shakes his head, and I make out vital locks cascading past his shoulders, the color overlaid with the hues of fire. “I endured it all for you. Interminable waiting, millennia of false hope, and thousands upon thousands of failures and dead ends.”

My logic circuits blip and whirr with the enormity of what he just revealed, until they snag on one detail. “But thousands of cadets passed your tests throughout history.”

“Not the test designed to find you.”

“W-what do you mean?”

He falls silent, as if debating telling me anymore. Then he exhales. “For thousands of years, the Academy drafted every nephilim and angel-graced in existence. That is, apart from the last millennium when it was closed, before reopening only after…only two decades ago. And every cycle my acolytes determined my candidates. Only these faced that specific test, my unbeatable Cavum Nigrum, the one only the Renatus can pass.”

I raise staying hands. “Wait…wait…Cavum Nigrum is literally Black Hole, right? And Renatus is—what? Reborn?”

“They’ve been teaching you well.” He nods, and I see hints of perfection and a smile of approval. “But for millennia, every single candidate failed, miserably. Until you.”

“So…so all those who were lost during the Trials, died in this test? You killed thousands of cadets trying to find—me?”

“I would have killed millions more to find you.”

I shake my head, shake all over, the serenity of his declaration making it even more horrifying. “But you could have killed us all, killed me, too. Isn’t that counterproductive to your—purposes for finding me, whatever those are?”

He makes a nonchalant gesture. “Absolutely not. There were only two outcomes. Either my acolytes were wrong about you, as they have been about thousands before you, and you were just another useless cadet, and I couldn’t have cared less if you died. Or—you would survive, and I become certain they were right this time, and you’re the one I’ve been waiting for. And here you are. My Renatus, my Reborn. At last.”

I shake my head again, the logic not computing. “But before I passed the black hole test, I could have died during that first test. What was that for?”

He continues as if he hasn’t heard me. “But on top of conquering the Cavum Nigrum, you did what I would have never expected. What not even the Caeli Gladius did.”

This time my Latin fails me. “Who’s that Caeli…?”

“You preserved your Unitas.” He bulldozes over my question in the same tranquility. “When it should have been impossible. It is. You truly decimated my expectations.”

I gape at him, shudders intensifying. He sounds high on the triumph of ending a seemingly eternal quest. Finding the Renatus—theReborn. Whatever that is.

But he thinks it’s me, and that terrifies me more than anything ever has. If he went to all this trouble to find me, he might not kill me, but might do far worse.

This could be the worse-than-death fate I’ve been dreading all along.

Even if it is, I can only dig for more information. He seems chatty, and anything he tells me, I might be able to use to save Sarah and the others.

I can barely stand anymore, but I force myself to straighten, to raise my voice. “Let’s say I believe I’m the one you’ve been looking for. Now, I’m here, what do you want from me?”

A shadow of that smile again. “All in good time, my dear. When you can take your place in my plans, and by my side. I didn’t even intend to reveal myself to you now. I wouldn’t have if you only resisted the vortex, let your Unitas get swept away, and returned through the Imperium Gate. But you insisted on saving them, and in such a novel and wholly—unholy way. Even I was impressed.”

“You saw what I did?” I choke, breath strangling with a new kind of fright.

He inclines his head. “Once my acolytes determine my candidates, I watch them through the Regnum Speculi, from the moment they’re identified, until they brave the Cavum Nigrum.”

Fury is sudden and violent, blowing up my fear, and erupting within my laboring chest with an insane urge to jump up and punch him. “It was you! That presence I felt watching me!”

His head jerks, as if in surprise. “Not even my pompous brethren can detect my surveillance. More expectation decimated, Uri.”

“Can you please quit calling me that?”

I’m not the one you’re looking for, you delusional, mass-murdering angelhole.

Thankfully, I only scream this inside my head. Even in the throes of hysterical anger, I know it’s not wise to antagonize an all-powerful entity when I’m in his realm, and at his mercy.

I need to suppress all my emotions, like Godric taught me in the Mindscape, play along. So he’d let Sarah and the others go.

I have no illusions about my own fate. I’m cut off from Godric, the only one who can help me. I can’t even connect with the void. I’m stranded here with this mad god. This…inevitable entity.

I know I can never escape him. Maybe not even in death.

Whatever he wants with me, or will do to me, this is it for me.