048.004

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Empyreal

Parallel

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“Tenebrael sure looks less impressive than I originally imagined.”

“Excuse me? I’ll have you know that I can look very impressive if I want,” Tenebrael said with a hefty huff. She spread her wings just a bit. Enough that Alyssa might have thought it was just a natural and unconscious reaction caused by small shifts in her posture were it not for the fact that Tenebrael was a deeply unnatural being. An angel didn’t make unconscious movements. While Alyssa had long assumed such a thing, for some reason, she simply knew it to be true now. “Alyssa tends to find those kinds of things tiresome and I think my halo light hurts her eyes, so I don’t bother most of the time.”

“Ufu~ So considerate of us mere mortals. Or is it just Alyssa you’re considerate with?”

“Just Alyssa,” Tenebrael answered quickly and without a moment of hesitating. “The rest of you can’t normally see me, so why bother? And on the odd occasions where mortals can see me, even for a brief period of time… well, I have to appear my best. Don’t want rumors spreading that Tenebrael is a slob of an angel.”

“Fu~ Thought so. All the stories I’ve heard of you paint you in a much more… grandiose picture. Though, from the way Alyssa talks, you are quite enamored with her.”

“Can you blame me? She is the first person in a few thousand years who can actually interact with me. You would not believe how droll the centuries get with no one but yourself and uptight angels to talk to. I don’t even normally talk to them. In the last few months, I’ve spoken to other angels ten times as much as I had in the past thousand years combined.”

“I thought there was another angel that you were friends with? A certain Iosefael?”

“She had her own assignment. I had mine. It was actually boredom and my friendship with Iosefael that led me to Alyssa in the first place. And we’ve been together ever since.”

“Well, looks like Brakkt has some competition.”

“Competition? Please. We’re not even playing the same game. I have infinite patience. I’m not constrained by time. As such, I am quite content with our current relationship.”

“But if you don’t—”

“I would appreciate it if you two would not talk about me as if I am not here,” Alyssa said, tone deliberately harsh. Tenebrael at least had the decency to look embarrassed, calculated as that expression must have been. Kasita just grinned like she knew what she was doing the whole time.

It was weird. The two of them were just chatting away like old friends. An… eerie sight to see. Tenebrael wasn’t making a single mention about the fact that Kasita could clearly see her. Aside from pointing out that her eyes were now glowing, Kasita wasn’t even bringing up the fact that she was clearly connected to something divine, whether that be the Throne or Tenebrael, Alyssa wasn’t quite sure. Her eyes were glowing white like Tenebrael’s, but it might simply be because of familiarity with Alyssa’s glowing eyes.

When Alyssa first connected to Tenebrael, she had asked about her eyes and got the answer that they looked like Tenebrael’s because Tenebrael’s eyes were the first that she had seen. It was why Alyssa expected her own eyes to still be glowing like that even though she was connected to the Throne instead of Tenebrael this time.

A compact mirror appeared in Alyssa’s hand. She barely had to think about it, unlike how it had been before where it took at least a little concentration. Butterflies started fluttering around her stomach at the thought of looking at herself, worried at what she might find. What if she had messed up in fixing her body? Or what if the Throne was changing her in some other way than simply making her eyes glow?

She chanced a look… and just about sighed in relief.

Her eyes were different. More like Fela’s eyes with small jets of fire coming from them, except this fire was pure white. Divine light. It wasn’t burning her hair or eyebrows, or skin for that matter, which was a nice consolation to the rest of her body feeling like it was constantly on fire. Given the similarity to Fela’s fiery eyes, Alyssa had to wonder if these jets of flames were more of the mind-makes-it-so aspect of why her eyes looked like Tenebrael’s in the first place—which they did again, under all that fire. Perhaps imagining the Throne as a giant burning machine subconsciously influenced how her eyes would look while connected.

“Kasita…” Alyssa said, tearing her eyes away from her reflection to focus on her friend. “Are you feeling alright?”

“Quite well, actually.”

Alyssa, who was still having to periodically refresh her body to keep from boiling alive, was a little skeptical of that answer.

“I was having a lot of trouble getting out of that place we were in,” Kasita said a little softer. She held out her hand, clearly asking for the mirror, though she didn’t mention it as she continued talking. “I think I took a little piece of it with me when something yanked me out. That was you, right? I was getting real scared when you disappeared and I couldn’t escape.”

With no reason not to, Alyssa handed it over. “I’m glad what I did worked… but what about your real body?”

Kasita didn’t answer for a long moment, choosing to stare into the mirror. She focused intently on her own eyes. The color changed from white to blue then green, though the glow remained. After a moment, they turned back to white as she slowly lowered the mirror and looked back up. “Real body?”

“Connecting to the Throne is putting stress on her body,” Tenebrael said, looking back to Alyssa with that same concern riddled over her face. “She needs to cut herself off, but she is being stubborn.”

“I’m fine. I can handle it. But I just want to be sure that Kasita can handle it too, I know she…” Alyssa turned to properly face Kasita. “I know you don’t feel pain in the same way that normal people do. I just want to make sure that you’re alright. Can you show me your real body again? I know you don’t like—”

“I like being me. That thing isn’t me. But it’s alright. If you’re worried, I don’t mind showing you.”

“Thank you.”

Kasita closed her eyes. Her body shimmered. The mirror fell through her fading fingers, landing among the grass. A pinhole opened up in the parallel world, just for an instant. A moment later, Kasita’s real body was sitting on the ground. Though sitting was an… operative word to use. Kasita’s true form was something resembling a ball of living tar with legs. Four legs, to be precise. Each leg was made up of the same tar that made up the main body, twisted around each other into narrow tentacles. It constantly moved and squirmed, even while the body as a whole stood still. A field of static clung to it, making it look like something that climbed out of an old and faulty television set.

Deep within the ball that made up the core of Kasita’s body, Alyssa could see glowing light. Divine light. It hadn’t been there the last time Alyssa had seen Kasita in her true form. Hard evidence that Kasita was definitely not creating a realistic illusion of divine magic to make her eyes glow. Looking at it now, Alyssa was more certain than ever that it was not Tenebrael’s magic that she was looking at. It felt too familiar. The Throne itself was leaking out from those cracks in Kasita’s body.

Unfortunately for diagnostic purposes, Kasita was not human. Alyssa had no idea whether or not her body was in danger or if it was handling the Throne’s power as easily as Alyssa handled Tenebrael’s power. She wasn’t emitting steam and boiling sweat from her body, but for all Alyssa knew, that animated tar wasn’t really liquid at all. It was probably some magic construct that didn’t even have sweat glands. Kasita didn’t drink water or eat food after all. She subsisted on magic.

“What do you think?” Alyssa asked Tenebrael.

“I think she is handling it better than you.” Tenebrael said, hovering a little closer. Reaching out a finger, she poked Kasita right on top of the ball of tar. Clearly agitated, Kasita skittered a short distance away, moving around Alyssa to put something between her and the angel. “A lot better than you,” Tenebrael finished. “As far as I am aware, no non-human has ever connected to an angel before. It makes sense that she would be able to thrive with that power in her given that she is essentially magic given intelligence through the infusion of a soul. Even her real body is far less physical than yours.”

“So she’s fine?”

“Well, I didn’t say that.”

“Honestly, I feel fine,” Kasita said as she shifted back to her usual body. Her real body compressed itself down, slipping through another pinhole in the universe. Which… really made Alyssa curious as to where it was going. Kasita’s real body normally sat around in this parallel universe while her usual body was out and about in the regular world. So was it the opposite now? Alyssa didn’t think that Kasita could do that. She had said before that she was completely unaware of this world… but now she was walking around and talking like normal? Surely she would be aware of it now…

Maybe it didn’t matter. The entire situation was abnormal at the moment. The important thing was that Kasita was fine and Alyssa hadn’t accidentally hurt her.

It let her breathe a small sigh of relief.

“Should we head back to the regular world?” Alyssa asked. This world was fairly empty. All Alyssa could sense were a few gaunts, more mimics off in the distance, and a few other species that she didn’t recognize who must all interact with this world in some way. There were dangerous things, but Kasita could presumably avoid them. On the other hand, if her real body was back in the real world, there were all kinds of predators that might decide she looked like a tasty snack. Even something like a fox might try to take a bite out of her.

“You’re right,” Tenebrael said with a slow nod. “Mortals really shouldn’t be here at all.”

“Is it dangerous?” Alyssa asked, suddenly worried that the only reason she was surviving here was because she was constantly fixing her body.

Though that was probably the only reason she was alive at the moment for other reasons.

“Not particularly. It just shouldn’t be changed very much. Mortals—humans especially—have a habit of changing things to their liking.”

“But Kasita normally lives here, doesn’t she? In a way, anyway.”

“The things that do live here aren’t the kind of things that would interact with the environment. This place needs to be preserved as it is. It is… something of a backup of Nod. A template for how the world would be if only time and nature acted on it.

“To be honest, I don’t really know what it is for beyond that. Though I am the effective god of this world, I didn’t create this place. It already existed when I was assigned to be the Dominion for this world. I presume the Throne would have used it if ever there was an emergency, but I can’t imagine anything that would actually give cause to use this place.”

“What if a meteor hit and wiped out all life?”

“I doubt it would come into play even then. If the Throne didn’t want all life on a certain planet wiped out, it wouldn’t have created the conditions to form said meteor when the universe was first created. Besides that, this parallel world would be struck by a meteor at the same time. Unless, of course, that meteor was somehow sent by humans, in which case it wouldn’t hit here.”

“Then what if the humans in the real world launched an Armageddon-style mission and knocked the meteor off course?”

“This world would still be struck, but the real world wouldn’t.”

“Hmm… That’s… kind of scary.”

“Don’t look at me. I don’t know anything. You’re connected to the Throne. Maybe you can figure it out since, as you’re fond of saying, you don’t have my restrictive programming.”

Could I? She had been so concerned with everything going on that she really hadn’t had a chance to explore the link between herself and the Throne yet. Aside from being able to see souls far more clearly and just knowing how to fix the problem with Kasita’s soul, she really didn’t notice much difference between now and when she held Tenebrael’s power.

“Before you start thinking about things too deeply, let us get back to the real world. If you break this place, I’ll be a little annoyed. But you can do whatever you want in the real world.”

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Breaking a world that had no purpose seemed like the perfect use for it. But… Tenebrael was technically the boss. Alyssa just nodded her head, watching from the corner of her eye as Kasita did the same.

Tenebrael stepped forward. She spread her wings wide and cocooned them around both Alyssa and Kasita. “Hold on tight,” she said with a smile. Before anything could happen, her smile slipped as she looked to Kasita. “Would you switch to your natural form once again?”

“I teleported with you while in a guise before.”

“Yes. But that was from Lyria to Teneville or Nod to Earth. Pretty short distances. This one is across an entire planar existence, which is quite far if you knew how to calculate it. And you are occupying space in two separate planes at once. Who knows what kinds of problems that would cause.”

“Alright. Alright. I understand,” Kasita said with obvious irritation in her voice. “I could probably get back on my own, you know? Figure out how to work this magic and…”

She didn’t give Tenebrael a chance to respond before her form shimmered. The four legged form of Kasita popped out, curling its cohesive tar legs around Tenebrael’s waist. Which looked quite strange. The legs clearly didn’t have bones in them. They stretched and squirmed. Alyssa tried not to mind it—that was Kasita, after all—but she could definitely understand why Kasita might prefer to be just about anything else. The way her body moved was undeniably unsettling at a very primal level.

Tenebrael didn’t mind at all, not even as one of the tendrils curled up and around her shoulder, resting against her neck. She just smiled once again.

And, once again, Alyssa felt the shifting of the world around her.

The smell was the first thing that hit her. A cool morning dew off the grass had a crisp scent completely unlike anything else she had ever smelled. It was soothing and refreshing. The sounds were no longer muted as well. She could hear things causing splashes in the water of the lake. And, when Tenebrael’s feathery cocoon fell from around her, Alyssa got her first in-person look at…

A six winged angel, floating above the lake.

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