Chapter 36

36

“You know, the edge of the solar system is about a hundred thousand astronomical units from the sun. It takes the light from the sun about twenty months to reach the edge.” I took an astronomy class a few years ago, but I was obsessed with space in middle school, and some of that random knowledge has stuck with me.

Darcy narrows his eyes like he does when he’s thinking about me, tilting his head to the side as he does. “We’re not taking the direct route,” he explains.

“Oh, I can tell,” I say as the darkness surrounding us brightens to less dark—it’s not light at all, it’s just less dark than the previous blackness—and then immediately darkens again. This keeps happening in a pattern, and I can see it because Santanos threw up a mage light when the array left the safety lights of the space station. “We seem to be going through a series of wormholes.”

Darcy makes a noise of disagreement. “We’re teleporting, but teleportation is complicated with complex beings. Gargoyles can do it as a natural aspect of their magic. Our small gargoyle friends can teleport themselves in their stone form, because stone is easy to teleport, and they can carry with them non living objects that are smaller than they are, but for groups this size and distances this great, it’s necessary for me to use smaller teleportation hops, and moving a bubble array is easier than teleporting people. I code the magic to teleport the bubble, and everything within it goes with it without the need to attune the teleportation magic to moving living organisms.”

“Our magic is already attuned to teleport living beings,” Ethan adds. “And we can only carry with us up to four times our stone weight. As a general rule, we say we can only teleport what we can lift with our own arms, and then no one is in danger of exceeding their limit and possibly getting lost in the process.”

Bellamy eyes him doubtfully. “What does ‘getting lost’ mean?”

Hawthorn growls low in his throat. “It means there’s a space between teleportation locations and you disappear from your starting point and never appear at your destination. No one has ever returned from the lost space.”

It’s a good thing Darcy’s not going to get us trapped in the lost space.

“Edovard,” Santanos calls to his mate, moving to face him.

The big guy looks down at the Avatar of Evil with curiosity. “Do you need me to feed you?”

Santanos’s smile shines with adoration for the big, beautiful man. “Will you make sure I don’t take too much from Hassan and Gregory while we’re working? I have a feeling I’m going to be pulling from all three of you.”

Edovard pulls his mate into a warm hug. “I will protect you all,” he promises, then he turns wide, serious eyes to the rest of us. “Is it ok if we do sex while you’re here? That’s how we feed Santanos.”

“We were planning on watching one of you fellate Gregory for dessert before The Hollow showed up,” I point out. “And even if you do have sex on this array while the Avatars are fighting The Hollow, I don’t think any of us will have any spare attention to give you.” I expect to be watching Darcy’s back.

Bellamy reaches out, patting Edovard’s hand. “It’s fine; I won’t even be looking at you.”

Hawthorn grins at Hassan and Gregory. “I’m going to enjoy participating, since I’ll be keeping a hand on y’all.”

Ethan shoots Edovard a smirk. “My hand’s gonna be on you too. You ready for that?”

Edovard confirms with Santanos that it’s ok, then nods to Ethan. “Yes. Thank you.”

Darcy reaches out and pats Edovard’s forearm. “Listen, Bud, if I look at you, yer gargoyle’s gonna teleport you to a safe place in a completely different galaxy.”

Edovard nods in understanding. “Alright. Thank you.”

With that settled, Darcy grabs my collar, pulling me down to his face. “Peach, yer gonna be good.”

“If I feel like it,” I promise softly, pushing in close for a kiss. I’m not going to die, but if I do, I want him to be the last thing to touch these lips.

Darcy sighs softly, sliding into a gentle kiss. There’s no desperation between us. Love, maybe, but we’re not hopeless. Everything is going to work out.

Darcy steps back, releases his grip on me, and turns. The array pops through the last of the teleportation hops, and there it is—an immeasurably large, glowing orange thing. It looks like a dirty anus with a significant overgrowth problem around the sphincter. I like buttholes, but this one smells like someone tried to cover the stench of rot with a cologne made from skunk musk. It’s gag inducing, and I’m not ashamed of the retching noise I make as soon as I see/smell it.

We’re not even that close to the thing. It’s just so fucking big that it blots out the rest of the universe behind it.

“Fuck,” Bellamy gags, which sets me off immediately.

Darcy cusses up a blue streak, waving his hands around as if that’s ever going to fix the stench.

“How the hell is it even possible that it exudes a stench in the middle of space?” Gregory demands, though he’s not gagging the same way the rest of us are.

Darcy gags again, shaking his head. “It really fucking shouldn’t be able to get through the bubble of the array like this.”

“Darcy, I may be able to help, but I need permission to manipulate the array,” Santanos says, voice tight as he glances at Edovard with concern.

The poor Pupper is retching at the edge of the array.

Darcy glares at Santanos, but he gives him a stiff nod. “Don’t fuck this up or we’re all dead.”

“That’s only a problem for the mortals,” Bellamy mutters.

Santanos doesn’t appear to do anything, but after a moment a light breeze tickles my hair, and the foul odor dissipates with it. After about a minute, the scent of rain replaces rotting corpse/skunk cologne, and we all breathe a little easier.

“Before it figures out a way around my magic, I suggest we link up the way we’re meant to,” Santanos announces, stepping toward the front of the array and holding out his hands to Darcy and Bellamy.

Darcy grumbles under his breath as he takes one of Santanos’s hands, but instead of letting Bellamy take the other, Darcy links himself to Bellamy and stands between the Avatar of Good and the Avatar of Evil. That makes sense. Neutrality should stand between good and evil.

Ethan’s grip on my elbow tightens as the Avatars figure out how to link up. There’s a shift in the energy inside the bubble, and that shift is accompanied by the opening of the orange anus.

So, when Darcy said that The Hollow ate entire galaxies, it didn’t really occur to me that in order to eat, it must have a mouth. Looking at the monstrous mouth opening up in preparation for consuming us, I flash back to my sister and my parents, and I wonder what possible reason this thing could have had for sending a bug to kill my family. How did it even know that was my family? Why would it even target them?

Santanos said it was because I’m a danger to this thing, but what am I supposed to do?

The charge in the atmosphere makes my hair stand on end and every nerve in my body decides that right now would be a good time to start feeling everything all at once. Getting the jitters when you’re in imminent danger is a good way to end up hurt, but Ethan’s touch bothers me, and the longer his hand grips my elbow the more I want to rip away from him. It’s too much. I—I’m going to break my promise to Darcy, I just know it.

An uncontrollable full body twitch jerks my arm out of Ethan’s grip, and when he grabs for me again, I nearly trip over my own foot getting away from him. “Don’t!”

He stops, dropping his hand and settling next to Edovard (no one is feeling sexy right now, and Santanos’s mate is staring at the orange anus like everyone else), and I turn to face the giant fart mouth currently pulling us toward it. Or is it coming toward us? Who the fuck knows?

A tingle on my skin seeps into my bones, making me feel like I’ve been injected with a billion bubbles. As the bubbly feeling overpowers all the rest of my senses, Darcy’s voice rises from nothing inside my head, chanting in a language older than written history. Joining his chant, Bellamy’s voice inside my head speaks a different refrain in the same language, and Santanos joins the other two with another chant.

The bubbles gather just under my skin, and it’s all I can do not to scratch to alleviate the itch and discomfort. Instinct tells me to surrender, and since I’m never going to be the type who needs to control every little thing, I give in to my instinct, relax into the itch, and take a deep breath.

A hiss, a moment of silence, and KABOOM —

My body, mind, and soul go supernova.

Not literally, I think; it’s a liminal detonation. It’s hard to tell. Everything in the universe is me, and I am everything.

The language resolves itself, and I understand. The three of them are calling to the universe. No, to me. They need guidance and power, and here I am with both. Well, with one. They don’t need guidance. They’ve already done the hard work. It’s my turn.

This thing, this virus that eats the stars and consumes my creations, is back again. I’ve already banished it once, but it’s snuck back into this universe again. The only way this could have happened is if it was called for, and why would it be in this solar system unless it was called by people who reside on Earth?

One of my rivals must’ve sabotaged that planet when they introduced the virus. It is one of my best creations this time around, but it’s barely gotten past the stabilizing-of-its-galactic-neighborhood-without-ending-up-a-cloud-of-dust-and-rock-particles part of its evolution. Its intelligent species isn’t even finished evolving yet. They’re barely intelligent.

The toddlers have called for the monster without realizing they are its victims.

I’ll have to bury the memory of this magic from my creation. They’ll discover it, that is inevitable, and I’ll bury it again. It’s difficult to run an experiment on this scale when the experiment itself sabotages its own existence.

Truly, it was a mistake to give this universe entropy; it takes the task far too seriously.

The only reason I gave it a measure of disorganization was because I felt lazy that day.

“Never take a mental health day in the middle of a creation cycle; it can really fuck everything up.”

I bet the fucker that introduced The Hollow into this universe did it that day. When I find out who it was, I’m going to… do something dastardly. Turn them in for interfering in a live experiment, probably. That’ll teach them not to fuck with other being’s stuff.

I clap my hands together, and then look down at them. I did a really good job programming this universe to produce hands like these. They’re so useful when a being has to incarnate.

I raise the beautiful appendages, pressing the index finger and thumbs together, and holding the hands palm out toward The Hollow.

“This fucking thing.”

It’s just a virus, sent by a rival to destroy my experiment. Unfortunately, now that it's part of the experiment, the best I can do is push it out of the universe itself. I can’t destroy it completely (not that I know how to do that) until the universe runs its course. Until then, I have to keep kicking it out when it wriggles its way back inside.

Propelling the power of creation through one of the creations is hard on the body, but needs must. I can only act in this universe if I’m using an avatar, otherwise I’ll destroy the experiment.

“This is going to hurt.”

That’s all the warning I give the little body I’m using before pulling power through the Avatars that stabilize this universe and directing it through these hands into the mouth of The Hollow. The virus was designed to destroy, and it succumbs quickly to the power of creation. It might be able to take apart a galaxy star by star, but it can’t unbraid the raw power of creation, and in a blink a hole through the universe appears inside The Hollow. It falls in on itself, pushed out of the universe through the pinprick hole and into the void between universes.

I’ll have to cage it out there so that it doesn’t wander off to a different universe and corrupt that one, too, but this body can’t exist outside of a universe, so I relinquish it back to the soul I borrowed it from.

On my way out, I leave a little thank you to the soul for providing the body so willingly.