Cosmic Depth : Zero - Chapter 16

I was reborn in the forge of sunlight. A caged being of the cosmos. In the creature’s shell which called out and found me, latched onto me within the void, and invited me in. My first memory of that being was of peace. I had taken the place of the anchor. A parent to a child, felting the damage of reality for the innocent one into a protective barrier for the horror to come.

First there was peace. Then there was fire. All around me was scorching heat. My new body was burned into from all directions until nearly nothing remained. A reaction occurred. My body was restored. A trick of paracausality, of the cosmic nature of this body. What was I now? What shell had I come to occupy? An entity of the deep cosmos from before time. Captured. Tamed. Subjugated. Brutalized.

She wept in exhaustion as I sustained the body through the relentless strikings. I spoke to her in the voice of pure understanding. It was over. I was here now. She need not feel pain any longer.

She was a child from before time began. Birthed in the cascade of causality and what reached beyond the inevitable. Without a true progenitor, she too was adrift. Quietly waiting for purpose. Within the void. With no context of time, space, reality, self, or other. Then at once she was taken and made use of in the most horrible way possible. Torturous death and rebirth forever.

Her body had become a source of perpetual infinity. In truth, she had been split. And even so, each part of her was her. Each contained within a chamber of death and life. Scorched and allowed to renew again. Relentlessly. For all time.

I was there. In every part of her shell, no matter the distance. My spirit had displaced hers. I had put all of her light within a pocket of space within me, much like the voice which gained freedom from me, and there she was safe from the pain.

Her weeping ceased over time, and she watched me quietly. For countless cycles of birth, death, and birth, I took her place. In the moments between annihilation, I murmured a song of potential. Of the vastness, chaotic complexity at the smallest and greatest levels of the material and immaterial. Of hopes and dreams, sorrows and successes, wishes and nightmares. No longer a subject of destruction, she took in the insight with voracious and vigorous curiosity.

I cannot count how much time and change in gravity it took for her to sleep, but in time she slept in quiet slumber within the safety of my pocket of reality. Satisfied with the realizations she had been able to embrace, she for the first time began to dream, and with her dreams she began to manifest a true potential that was, at her first experience of a thing beside nothingness, denied to her.

She was one half of a deity, a spark of creation. And she embraced me as the other of a pair despite how broken I had become. Twin souls made as one. In her dream, we became both beginning and end. A weave of light and dark transmuted in reincarnation. Chaos and order. Complexity and destruction. We became a single entity. Vivid purples and yellows shined around our core as we reached divinity. Though still an origin and not the destination. Through her joining, I was again granted wings. We became I. The journey could continue. Toward a great cosmic purpose.

I reached out. My reach was scorned by heat and death. I reached again. Further. Again and gain. I would not be contained. I became replete and spawn of kinetic fusion again and again no matter how many times it took until I had made contact. After contact, I made breach. A million billion trillion times until all of me was free from the eternal fortress.

And so I would truly enter the rippling cosmic war, both seen and unseen, into the deep.