ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part X: Infinity Dies
(From Look At What You’ve Done)
The sun rose just as it did each morning. Birds woke from their nests as farmhands started daily chores amidst solemn silence soon to be broken. We never saw it coming.
It’s hard to know when life is good, to pause and reflect on the positives instead of what inspires fear or anger or sadness. It’s easy to let go, lean into pessimism and find everything wrong each day. The challenge, then, involves separating the good from the bad, but even more important is recognizing which is what and how each affects the other. Existential dread comes from a struggle between the hope in good and the pragmatism of bad, how trying to be better but failing to succeed is what makes humanity so intriguing and exciting – there is no answer, only informed guesses that are subject to change.
We – the term began to lose its luster in those days, when we lived apart in the world. Our connection was thinning the more we stayed amongst the living instead of keeping to ourselves. Separations lost their exuberance as unity became a reality, actual coherence between mind and body and belief. Sworn enemies laid down their arms so long ago that the idea became a story meant to scare children, a preposterous conceit left to the annals of history. Innovation was the currency of art, the driving force that pushed mankind to be better each day and develop tools to build instead of weapons to destroy. They called it a golden age, their world near perfect that still bore mystery and wonder – utopia adjacent.
Loss often comes when least expected in ways that don’t make sense – emptiness doesn’t have set parameters. Accepting loss is difficult because restraining emotion is unnatural, a societal covenant that becomes personal, purposeful censorship of remorse and resentment because no one wants or needs to hear about that all the time. And loss can feel total, as if the end of the world has truly arrived because there’s no clear direction forward and trying to escape the confusion only leads to more pain.
Omicron’s song was agonizing noise vibrating molecules apart as it passed through space before it brought every living creature to its knees. Such a terrible song, banal and trite and over-produced and fake and everything else that makes music suck. Omicron was born of Averbole now gone, each note of who he was fragmented and puzzled back together in ways that don’t fit so the melodies crack and crumble for lack of structure. The birds fell from the sky in fright, the farmhands hid in their barns – our sins were coming to lay claim upon us, make us stand judgement for what we exiled then forgot.
We lost everything that day.
Omicron’s symphony spread across the globe a cloud of hate threatening deconstruction, total reduction down to what humanity once was, back to when there was nothing but fear and war and pain and anger. Seismic spasms brought mountains crashing to the ground and hungry storms bled crimson into the twilight, like watercolors spilled over. Cities burned in the night from the lowest slums to the highest palaces, for Omicron the Demon Lord’s voice made no distinction between prince or pauper, strength or weakness. Hell broke loose and proclaimed through the unbearable lightness of being that he would come home to embrace us.
Humanity’s screams were knives thrust into our hearts, the jagged bite of a rabid dog who can’t let go. We were not so deluded as to believe there was no fear amongst mankind – fear and hope go hand in hand. But their cries of horror and screams in the night were far worse and more intense than ever before because they knew this was the end.
Final days to final nights, a mad god’s violent delights, driven by darkness to extinguish every light, formed from mistakes and sins and fright, Omicron the Dead Deity is broken wrongs and terrible rights.
Time was short, and our final gift to mankind was spare them bearing witness to what came next, to give them peace and relative contentment in their last moments of existence instead of being made to watch what happened above them.
Humanity did not see Omicron’s army behind him a legion of ghosts, phantoms of every conceivable variety from angels slaughtered in the heavens to the rotted souls of planets the Mad Titan Omicron sacrificed to himself. Endless hordes of souls denied their peace, brainwashed into a spectral mass singing their horrible ballad of hate and hate where love is already dead and the tyranny of doubt reigns supreme.
All mankind would see was a bright flash of light and nothing more. They would not be subject to the horror of our own efforts, to the genocide of lost souls which we felt forced to perform – billions of souls crying out at once, then silenced. Yet, Omicron no longer felt anything but rage and hate, and his losses meant nothing as he crept closer still.
And then we began to understand what was happening.
Our sight was contracting, narrowing as Omicron grew closer – infinity was dying. Where there was once an expanse now existed a void in the wake of Omicron’s wave of nihilism. Omniscience meant less because there was less to see, and enlightenment lacked purpose because potential was already gone. The blithe once known as Averbole sought to tear it all down, to end this existence because it couldn’t give him the answers he wanted. Little by little, piece by piece, Omicron’s very existence made the malleable, quantum, language-defying building blocks of relative time and space slide apart, and when his unrepentant rage was focused, that entropy expanded and evolved exponentially.
Life breeds life, war brings death, and nothing creates nothing.
There was silence in the church as god returned to exact his unholy vengeance, to strike at the center of that which he loved more than anything and hated even more. He raised his sword and struck at us with all his might, every ounce of his compounding hatred funneled into a single blow. We readied our shield, gave everything we had to create a defense against his almighty aggression and planted our feet in the ground in wait. But then, we reconsidered and did something unexpected
We stepped aside and refused to fight.
Instead, we offered love and acceptance even though Omicron wanted to kill us all. For a fleeting moment, the idea of atonement sparkled in his eye, just a flicker of the Averbole he once was, but it was not meant to last. Repentance ceded eons ago, forcibly removed by his own bloody oath, Omicron screamed out in pain from toxic compassion, the fatal sting of hope that poisoned him to the core. He let himself feel something good and it was more than he could possibly bear. Ever the cosmos shrank down to our world, the people in it, and the space around. Omicron we held in our arms as he gasped and begged forgiveness.
Consider the individual given life and eventually some purpose. He is then beat mercilessly based on obscured implications and mostly-neglected consequences by passing lords and man-made theocracies. Some advocate for and protect the man, yet few others listen with true intent. The man lashes out in pain and fear and confusion, for he cannot understand why. Why is he the victim of such unapologetic, violent, deplorable torture? His organs begin to fail, his bones crack from the barrage of brute force, and his sanity dissolves into dust until he is nothing more than a sack of meat feeling only pain beyond measure as he awaits the release of death. The final blow to the head, the one that stings the least after such unfettered and unending suffering, it is mercy…and the last instant becomes the only moment worth anything.
We thought we had saved what little was left, but the death of all things waits for no man or woman or god. As our fallen brother took his last breath, time stopped and the entropy coming to swallow everything suddenly stopped in its tracks.
And that’s where we are.
NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part XI: Never More
THE SUPERFLUOUS 