048.006

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Empyreal

Graveyard of the Immortals

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For all that the Endless Expanse was a hell to mortals, it was, at least, a pretty hell. No fire and brimstone, obviously. Just the fractal iridescence of multi-faceted towers and buildings, all standing tall over what appeared to be an infinite chasm. Looking at it through those portholes that Irulon had developed did not give the city of the Throne the justice it deserved.

Everything was just so much more here in person. The towers were unfathomably massive. From all the windows she had looked through, Alyssa would have expected them to have been nothing more than skyscrapers. Something analogous to Earth’s tall structures. But the truth was drastically the opposite. She was pretty sure that some of these towers wouldn’t fit on Earth. Others were needle thin. Literally needle thin. Probably smaller, actually. The fractal nonsense of the Endless Expanse made things look normal. And if she walked in the right direction, it actually felt normal. But then she would walk through some section of this place’s reality that wasn’t normal, find herself torn apart, only for her to reassemble herself and find herself half a planet away from where her previous footstep was. Or in another tower entirely. Or just out in the middle of nowhere, relying on her own power of manipulating reality to keep from falling into the Endless Expanse’s endless abyss. Or, more likely, into another bit of fractal nonsense that would kill her and throw her reassembling remains into another section of this nightmare realm.

For as pretty as the constantly shifting iridescence was, Alyssa was pretty sure she would have preferred a fire-and-brimstone hell. She would probably have still needed to fix her body with every inch she moved, but at least it would have been a boiling-skin fix and not a torn-apart-into-component-atoms fix. She was pretty sure that not much at all was left of her original body. It was disturbing to consider, but her soul was the only thing that was holding together in this place. She was likely just reforming a new body around her soul every time she moved.

Her companions, on the other hand, seemed to be handling this place much better than she was. For Tenebrael, that was a given. This was essentially her native home. Tenebrael’s movements through this place only served to reinforce that. It didn’t matter where Alyssa ended up. Tenebrael was able to move to her instantly. Apparently calculating all the constantly-changing shifts in reality instantly in order to traverse where she needed to in the most efficient and optimal route. What would compress Alyssa into a tiny pinpoint and fling her to the opposite side of the universe would serve Tenebrael like it had been designed to do so. Calculating a path for Alyssa to take, on the other hand, was apparently a much larger issue than an angel could solve.

Kasita, however, was at least keeping herself together without issue. A part of that was probably that she wasn’t in her real body. Alyssa didn’t know where her real body was at the moment, some parallel Endless Expanse or the world on Nod or somewhere else entirely, and she really hadn’t had the time to think about it for more than a second at a time. Kasita would still end up in strange places if she wasn’t careful, but Tenebrael could at least carry her around without bad things happening.

Alyssa, at the moment, had found a relatively stable spot on the edge of one of the towers. A balcony, seemingly made of a sparkling crystal, without any railing. Her vision was spinning, her stomach churned, her head pounded, and none of it had anything to do with her body being torn apart on the regular since coming here and everything to do with these stupid towers and their stupid height. She was doing her best to stare at the wall and not look down, but the way this stupid fractal place worked, she ended up staring off the edge anyway.

“Who designed this stupid place!” she shouted to no one in particular.

Tenebrael didn’t have an answer. She just shrugged. She didn’t even give some generic response like ‘the Throne created it.’ Alyssa had some sneaking suspicion that this was the true nature of reality before the Throne was used to create the rest of the universe. A chaotic nonsense-land where nothing proper could exist without being torn asunder. But she didn’t bother mentioning her unfounded suspicion to the others.

“I’m more worried about the Seraphim,” Kasita said, looking around constantly as she had been doing during the last ten minutes where they had to chase down Alyssa every time she moved as little as a single inch. “Is it not following us?”

That was the one upside of this place. The Seraphim hadn’t followed them. Or, if it had, “I’m unpredictable to the Throne, right? Maybe me moving around even a little—which is a lot in this place—has thrown it off our track.”

“It can’t track us just by looking for our souls?”

“I don’t know about Tenebrael, but I can barely see your soul and you’re right there… I think,” Alyssa said, squinting to her side. There could be some more fractal rifts in between them that meant she was actually on the other side of the universe from her, but didn’t know how that could possibly make any difference when her sight put her right next to her. Then again, when she created a portal from Illuna to Lyria, Alyssa had been unable to see Irulon and Companion’s souls just by looking through the portal. And when Companion had come through, their soul link stretched way off into the distance instead of just passing through the portal.

Were the portals some facet of this world’s fractal nonsense? That actually made a lot of sense, knowing what she did about them, how Tenebrael moved through this place so gracefully, and why they were so difficult for her to create even after learning everything else she had managed to learn. Maybe Irulon and Companion would…

Well, they would probably have a lot of problems in this place as well.

Alyssa’s head was pounding too much to really give the topic any serious consideration, so she just continued answering Kasita’s question. “Whatever these buildings are made from seems to block my sense of souls. I noticed that the few times we were separated. And I can’t see any souls out here like I could while on Nod.”

“You haven’t realized?” Tenebrael said with a sad smile, resting a hand on the balcony’s railing… which it didn’t even have. “You should be familiar with the construction material.”

“Familiar…” Alyssa was a step away from the wall and wasn’t sure if moving toward it was safe, so she didn’t have the option of touching any with her bare hands. There was some under her feet, but crouching might just move her enough to cross into another fractal tear in reality, which would require another twenty minutes of searching before they found a stable area. However, unless there was something special about touching it, she was pretty sure that she didn’t recognize it at all. It wasn’t stone, brick, wood, or metal. More of a crystalline substance that gleamed with a golden iridescence that looked kind of like one of those cars with an overly-showy paint job. Chameleon paint, she was pretty sure it was called.

Now that she was looking closely, the crystal wasn’t actually smooth. It was all made up of diamond-shaped bricks. Small bricks. Small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. There didn’t seem to be any mortar holding them together, so there was probably magic involved.

Diamond-shaped crystals. It hit her the moment she realized just where she was standing.

Even though she was staring at a wall, she didn’t even have to turn her head to see the omnipresent Throne a short distance away. Angels fluttered about, currently ignoring the intruders. They went about their tasks. Most were presumably Principalities, here to carry their collected souls to the Throne.

“They’re souls?”

“The housing for souls, yes. The actual soul itself has been removed for whatever processing they undergo within the Throne.”

Each one could fit comfortably within the palm of her hand. The wall was thick. The length of her arm at least. Possibly more with how the fractal nonsense of this world worked. Just a section of the wall as tall as she was had to contain thousands of those soul crystals. That was just one small section of an impossibly large tower. Not only was it wide enough to possibly be a planet all on its own, but it was so tall that it might as well have been infinite. She couldn’t see the bottom, in any case. And no matter how many fractal wormholes she stumbled into, she had never stumbled to the bottom of one of these towers. There was always more to go.

A billion trillion was probably too small of a number to count all the souls that must have gone into this place. She couldn’t even count how many towers there were, let alone their size.

Alyssa wasn’t quite sure why she found herself irritated that the Throne was using souls as a construction material. These weren’t even real souls. Just the compressed containers used for transport. But something about the whole of the Endless Expanse essentially being a graveyard for every being possessing a soul to have ever lived was… disturbing. Especially given the sheer number of them.

People died. It was just what happened. Maybe it was a good thing that their final remains were being used in these monuments to their lives instead of forgotten completely. Once she sat on the Throne…

Would she stop it? Could she stop it? It wasn’t nature that she and Tenebrael were rebelling against. It was fate. The right to choose how and where to live without a little black book deciding everything. But could the Throne change the very nature of being mortal for everyone? Was that even a good thing? Thanks to some extremely boring college classes, she was well aware of philosophical views on death. How it was the one unifying facet of being mortal, the one experience that every human—and being in general—would share. The existential time-limit that forced people into action instead of procrastinating under the assumption that they would ‘eventually’ do whatever it was that they wanted to do. But at the same time, death was essentially the greatest tragedy of being mortal. So much left incomplete. So many separations. The fear of the unknown after death…

Alyssa just about stumbled into another fractal rift, feeling dizzy. These questions were so far beyond her pay grade that she wasn’t even sure that she should be thinking about them. Besides that, it could be that the Throne was not as omnipotent as the angels claimed. Even being connected to it, she couldn’t understand the full scope of what it could and couldn’t do.

Conundrums of philosophy could come later. There would be time so long as they lived. At the moment, the greatest impediment to Alyssa, Kasita, and even Tenebrael’s lives came in the form of the Seraphim. The Seraphim that only took orders from the Throne.

“How do we get to the Throne?” Alyssa asked, narrowing her eyes in what she suspected was the direction of the dominant tower. It was a bit hard to tell because that tower was in her line of sight no matter where she looked.

“I know how I get there,” Tenebrael said. “Getting you and Kasita there is probably not as easy.”

“Can’t you just fly up to it and sit down?” Alyssa wasn’t completely positive that she liked the idea of Tenebrael being in charge of literally everything, but she was definitely better than nothing at all. At least Alyssa and Tenebrael had mostly aligned goals.

“It’s surrounded by Seraphim. Although we’ve only got the one after us, I can’t imagine the rest will remain idle when someone looks like they’re about to take control.”

“What other choice do we have? Sure, that one isn’t chasing us here, but I don’t exactly like the idea of living here for the rest of my life! I can make food and water, sure, but I can’t move more than six inches away from where I am for fear of being torn apart again. I can’t even recline up against the wall!”

“And there is no guarantee that this spot will remain as stable as it is. You might get torn apart just standing there if you wait long enough.”

“Exactly!” Alyssa sighed, looking away from Tenebrael and back to the Throne. “We should at least get closer and see what we can see. Maybe Kasita can spot a hole in the Seraphim defense line like she did in adrift. Then you can slip through, take control, and tell them to stop attacking us.”

Kasita shrugged, an action that resulted in part of her arm disappearing for a moment—not that it seemed to bother her. “I don’t think I’ve ever been sick before, but I have seen humans become ill and I think being here is making me nauseous for the first time in my life. But maybe I can try?”

“We need to get there first.”

Both Alyssa and Kasita looked to Tenebrael, who just frowned.

“Don’t ask me. I can get you there, but you’ll go through all that dying over and over again, possibly hundreds of times. And you might slip out of my grasp again during one of those times. Finding you every time you disappear is not as easy as I make it look.”

“Aren’t we already there?”

“Does it look like we’re there?”

“No, I mean…” Alyssa trailed off, trying to figure out how to phrase it. “You’re always going on about how the Throne is everywhere and everything. Even now, I literally can’t look away from it. So just… aren’t we already there, we just can’t recognize it or something?”

“I think you’re getting a little too metaphysical for someone who still has a physical body.”

“No. No. I think she has a point,” Kasita said, looking around. “Maybe the two of you can’t sense it, but I think she is right. Part of the reason I feel sick is because this world is overlapping on top of itself. Overlapping over and over and over and over again. All the movement we’ve done through this place hasn’t felt much like moving at all. More like… different parts of the world have come into focus while others have faded out. Sure, there’s been some movement involved, but I don’t know. It’s strange…” She trailed off for a moment, looking at her hand. Without even moving it from a few inches away from her face, it faded in and out. And only her hand. The rest of her stayed right where she stood on the edge of the balcony. “Huh. I guess if I had to compare it to anything, it would be like that place we were before.”

“Adrift?”

“If I had more practice, I could probably move around a little better.”

Like adrift… Alyssa had a lot of practice moving around in that place, but… The Endless Expanse didn’t feel anything like it. For one, she could feel things, there were sights, even a slight smell of crisp morning air. But maybe that didn’t matter. Moving about in the world of adrift… wasn’t actually moving. There was no concept of time or distance. Just a strange feeling of being. Hard to translate properly to the real world.

Even if she closed her eyes and tried to shut out all sensations of touch, smell, and hearing, she could still feel the real world around her. There was air, after all. She couldn’t shut that out. She had to breathe.

But maybe she was looking at it from the wrong point of view. It clearly worked for Kasita if her hand disappearing was actually her moving part of herself off to elsewhere. Even now, opening her eyes, Kasita was staring intently at her hand, watching as it faded in and out. Tenebrael watched as well, eying both mortals with undisguised curiosity.

Moving through adrift wasn’t moving so much as it was pulling herself metaphysically closer to something else. Here, if Kasita was right and the world was overlapping on top of itself, everything was already physically close to her. So could she do the same thing? Picture herself taking a seat on the Throne to translate herself toward it like she did imagining pinching her own cheek?

Not feeling any different, Alyssa opened her eyes, about to ask Kasita how she was managing to make her hand disappear…

Only for her to find herself somewhere else. The balcony was gone. As were Kasita and Tenebrael. In their place, a library of books, scrolls, and even crystal slates. It went on as far as Alyssa could see. Even if she had binoculars up at the moment, she was sure that all she would see would be the shelves of the library.

The library wasn’t all that was around. There were angels. So many angels, Alyssa couldn’t begin to count them. Most had two wings, but several—especially those near the shelves—had four. And, in the very center of the room, six-winged angels surrounded a raised dais.

With only an instant to look, she would have said that it was made from gold. A throne, ornate yet simple, grandiose yet reserved. It put every chair she had ever seen to shame, yet she could only see it as a chair… at first. The longer she looked, the more she… saw. The Throne wasn’t made of gold. It was pure divine magic. The light of Tenebrael and every other angel made up its core, except without the filter of an angelic being transmitting it. It didn’t blind her, thankfully. Possibly because it wasn’t emitting that divine magic as light, against her eyes, but light against her soul.

Looking even closer, she could see it. She could see the thing she was connected to. The burning machine of countless gears and cogs. The wheels of reality and the engine of all things.

The Throne.

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