Chapter Twenty-Six – Until We Meet Again
A World without Misery (Interitus 1: Book 0)
Chapter Twenty-Six – Until We Meet Again
As he stared over the southern shore of his island,
Caelicola said, “I think I knew from the start that this was never about mercy.
As much as I hate to admit it, he was right all along. Hatasuko is the only one
who could ever save this universe from the monsters I created. My existence has
only been a burden. I’ve poisoned this world with the power of creation, and
now I will be devoured by that same poison. I have ruined everything; I was a
curse from the start.”
On a ship that he created a short while ago, Caelicola
had sent his family away from the fourth isle of Aether. He now stood alone on
the shimmering rock which was marked with a large square of flat stone, revealing
the place where he had launched Hatasuko into space. Caelicola glanced up and
watched a sea of dark clouds roll across the steamy sky. As the darkness
consumed the sky, the starlight disappeared, and so a shadow fell across the
ocean. He shuddered and dropped to his knees as he realized that he would never
know the location of the Interfecti. In the past, he could stay away from them
because he could see them with his omniscient eye, but now he had given away
this power. When the dark clouds swallowed the stars in the sky, Caelicola
could not even see his hand in front of his face. He created a bright flash of
light with his left hand, and he used it to search the dark seas for an
Interfectus.
“Even if I can no longer see the monsters, I know they’re
closing in. I can feel them closing in. They feed on my fear. They feed
on every human life they devour. If they were to arrive now, if they were to
storm my island and take my life, then the powers of omnipotence would be lost
forever. I’ve been so useless that this world wouldn’t know the difference; I’ve
never once changed anything for the better. Omnipotence must fall into the
hands of someone who can save this world, and there is only one man who can
save it now. Hatasuko was always the one; he is the one meant to become God,”
Caelicola announced to the silent sea as steamy waves rolled ashore.
While creating a steady light from his left hand,
Caelicola walked across the island toward the cave. He wanted to use
omnipresence to teleport there, but he was too afraid to use it without having
omniscience to steer him; it would be like flying blind. It was for this reason
that he chose not to teleport onto Hatasuko’s spaceship and transfer the rest
of his powers; he had no way to know its exact location. Without omniscience to
show him the universe, omnipresence was virtually unusable.
When Caelicola reached the mouth of the cave where he had
hidden his family from the world, he lifted his right hand to the sky and
activated the power of creation. A large asteroid materialized directly above
him, and since he upheld it with the creation of energy, it did not immediately
crush him. The asteroid’s interior was a churning cauldron of electrochemical
energy, and therefore it was the perfect holster for his powers to exist in a
disembodied state.
Caelicola first pumped the power of destruction into his
asteroid, directly into this pool of unstable energy. Once destruction was
gone, he next severed omnipresence from himself and infused it with the
cauldron of energy. His final power was that of creation, and in the process of
transferring it into the asteroid, he triggered a cataclysmic creation of
energy. Therefore, at the same time that Caelicola lost the power of creation,
he also launched the asteroid into the sky at an extraordinary speed.
The recoil of this catastrophic launch was so powerful
that the shockwave blew Caelicola to shreds. The fourth isle of Aether crumbled
and collapsed with a deafening crack. The volcano beneath the island instantly
erupted. The asteroid shot through the sky so quickly that its shockwave
diverged the clouds, creating an artificial eye in the storm.
And though he could barely move, think, or process any of
the information he received, Hatasuko watched Caelicola die in the massive
eruption. Waves rolled across the ocean from the shockwave; the lava was so
bright that it could be seen from Bones City. All of Agrideī quaked from the
recoil of Caelicola’s final endeavor. Across the land, every tree swayed, every
street shook, and every house rumbled. Many frightened people screamed from the
suddenness of this worldwide earthquake, but their screams were soon drowned
out by the anguished shouts of the tempest.
Every
lost scream announced misery into the abyss as usual, but their hopelessness
resounded louder than ever. The broken souls in the tempest came to understand
that they would never have their justice. The Interfecti would never fall at
Hatasuko’s hand, and so their loved ones left behind were still at the mercy of
the shadow demons. Though he was too overwhelmed to think clearly, he could
still find the words to say the one thing that gave teeth to this misery.
“This is all my fault,” Hatasuko whispered to the empty
steel walls of his spaceship.
As his ship shot through space at a rate somewhat close
to the speed of light, Hatasuko tried his best to drown out the symphony of
anguished screams. But when he turned his attention elsewhere, he realized that
the eye of omniscience was just as heartbreaking.
Misery
ran rampant, both in Agrideī and the other worlds in the endless sea of stars.
From his hollow steel shell, Hatasuko watched people fight and kill each other
in countless places. He heard desperate cries, the screams of children, and the
hushed prayers of victims. He was forced to watch and hear their endless misery
just as the tempest had always done to him, but this felt viciously different.
The tempest had always been an amalgam of voices and memories, but the sadness
was condemned to a past which could not be rewritten. The tempest had always
been a call to forge the world into something greater. However, the eye of
omniscience showed him the present and not the past. He was forced to watch
countless present tragedies, but he could not do anything about any of them.
“All I see is sadness. All I hear is misery. The beauty
of the present is that it’s supposed to be malleable; we’re supposed to be able
to change it for the better. But all I can do is watch without intervening. The
all-seeing eye of omniscience… this is truly the ultimate curse.”
Hatasuko tried to look away from the tragedies and watch
the giant asteroid which chased him through space. He knew that the other
powers awaited him in this asteroid, but it would be thousands of years before
he could access them. The asteroid traveled slightly slower than the spaceship,
and they both barreled through space toward a blue planet which also had
humans. Hatasuko could see his trajectory with his all-seeing eye, and he could
tell it would take nearly two thousand years to reach the blue planet. He could
not do anything to make it happen faster. After all, the power of omniscience
could not do or change anything. It was simply a transference of information
which would never switch off.
“Vaida, I wish you could hear me. I wish my words could
reach you. I wish you were with me. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to
accept any part of this,” Hatasuko muttered, and his words echoed quietly off
the steel walls.
As if it were purposely trying to torment him, the
all-seeing eye of omniscience showed him a house on the blue planet. The house
was on fire, and smoke plumed from its roof made of straw. People scurried out
from the house as quickly as they could, desperately running away from the
searing flames, but a young girl was trapped inside. Fire had engulfed every
wall. The flames closed in around her, but she could not accept that this would
be her death. As badly as Hatasuko wanted to somehow swoop in and blow the fire
away with a swing of his sword, he was just as powerless as her. The young girl
curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth, crying her lungs out as the flames
began to lick her skin. Her cries turned to screams as the flames quickly
consumed her flesh, and her screams were soon silenced by her fiery death.
“I’ve never felt this broken; I don’t think I’ve ever
felt so alone. Is this the price I pay for challenging the natural order?
Perhaps I’ve flown too close to the stars. I had a dream to save this world,
but somewhere in chasing that ambition, my vanity let me believe it was
actually possible. I really let myself think I could do it. I really let myself
believe it was my destiny. I really let myself believe that this world could be
saved, and that I could somehow find something other than misery. I let myself
believe things could be better.”
With a heavy sigh, Hatasuko opened his eyes and glanced
around his hollow enclosure. Aside from the systems which ensured that he would
have enough air and food to survive the journey, the spaceship was practically
empty. The only items were those that he had when the ship first enclosed him.
His sword, Vaida’s sword, and his sheath all drifted aimlessly through the
spaceship. His half-empty bag of rocks floated with little movement.
“The Astrodeus body does not deteriorate with age, so I
will survive this journey unless I take my own life. But I cannot take my life—not
when all of omnipotence waits at the end of the journey. This means that I am
condemned to this space for two thousand years. Cursed to watch tragedy, cursed
to be unable to stop it. This is my penance for chasing my dream, or for lying
to myself and disguising a dream as destiny. It is a matter of actions and
consequences. I sought to make a world without pain, and now I cannot see or
hear anything else. I’ll walk alone on this dark path, reaching blindly through
the shadows for the power I sought all along.”
Adishina asked from the edge of the tempest, “But is that really a good idea? If chasing
omnipotence is what put you in this place, perhaps you’re better off giving up
on your dream forever.”
“After I lost Vaida, I came to accept that I had nothing
left to lose. In a way, it really takes the sting out of all this pain. It’s
not like I lost the chance to be with her. All this time, ever since the first
day I decided to chase the Interfecti, I only had one thing to live for. You
know what that means, don’t you? I’ve gambled my whole life on this. The
only way I can make up for everything I’ve lost, the only way I can make any of
this sacrifice worth it, is to somehow grab ahold of the same thing I’ve been
chasing all along. To tell you the truth, I don’t actually believe that I can
withstand two thousand years of anguish—at least not with my sanity intact.
This is a hopeless dream; it has always been a hopeless dream. By some
cruel twist of fate, after all the time I’ve wasted and all the friends I’ve
lost, my dream seems more hopeless now than ever before. But I’ve gambled too
much to stop now.”
“How depressing for
you. But maybe there’s a way you can use it to your advantage. If the amount of
misery in the universe is somehow constant, then perhaps you will absorb it all
like a giant sponge. If you soak in all the world’s misery, there will be
nothing but happiness left for everyone else,” Adishina suggested.
“Maybe. Besides, it isn’t like I have an alternative.
Whether or not I’m chasing omnipotence, I’ll be trapped in this steel shell all
the same. I’ll be forced to watch every tragedy with omniscience; I’ll be
forced to hear every lost soul since I’ve been touched by the darkness. It
wouldn’t change anything to give up now.”
“Perhaps you’re
right. Although you’re the strongest man in the world, and I was the frailest
little girl, you and I are a lot alike.”
“How’s do you figure?” asked Hatasuko.
“Running away was
never an option for either of us.”
Hatasuko sighed, but he chose not to reply. Despite
Adishina’s attempt to keep his head organized, he could hear disdain dripping
from every word she spoke. She had hated him ever since he killed her father
with black fire. Though her animosity was a punishment, it was nothing compared
to the other consequences of Hatasuko’s array. At first, he thought the
downside was that Harvey and Spencer had learned how to use it for themselves. But
after he left, the knowledge of the array slowly spread from there. A few
citizens of Lumipyla had seen Harvey harness the array of black fire, and they
all remembered the symbol well enough to draw it on scrolls from time to time. Still,
no one else had used it on another human so far. Hatasuko tried to concentrate
on them while he watched all things in the universe.
“I won’t be here forever,” Adishina said from the edge
of the tempest.
As Hatasuko watched moons and planets dance around stars
across the galaxies, he heard an onslaught of voices screaming from inside the
tempest. He listened closely, still desperately searching for Vaida’s voice in
the chorus of shouts. He still could not find her.
“Why is that?” Hatasuko asked, speaking openly to the
hollow spaceship.
“Even in the
tempest, we are all still evanescent. At the moment of death, our bodies and
souls become detached, and we lose our memories in the process. But death works
differently if done by an Interfectus, because our lost souls are locked inside
the tempest. All of our memories, every shred of identity, our souls themselves—they
are all thrown into this swirling abyss. It is rare, but some of us can
reassemble ourselves. But over time, as the Interfectus feeds on the life force
we once had, our voices grow quiet. If the Interfecti were to stop bringing in
new victims, then over time, the tempest would eventually fall silent. I am not
exempt from this. Even if my spirit’s assembly can somehow stay together, my
voice will still fade with time. Or maybe, our voices just grow eternally
hoarse from screaming. I dread the day of silence. I don’t want to completely
disappear. I don’t think I ever accepted my death to begin with,” explained
Adishina.
A hopeless sense of dread rolled through Hatasuko as he
thought about the voices in the tempest falling silent, since they were the
only friends he had left. As his all-seeing eye watched several stars slowly
fade and go dark, he could not help but realize that it was a celestial analogy
for the way that Adishina would eventually fade. The stars flickered through
space like the fireflies in Lumipyla.
Hatasuko spent weeks trying to focus on planets and stars
flying through space, but his omniscient eye continuously showed him tragedies
across the universe. Everywhere life existed, tragedy was inevitable and plentiful.
Even in worlds of only unintelligent animals, Hatasuko watched the brutality of
nature from a new perspective. In all these worlds, a carnivore could only
survive by catching, killing, and eating the body of a weaker creature. It sickened
him that this same story replayed across the universe, and that in a sense,
humans did it to themselves so freely. Even Agrideī was cursed with these
murderous instances.
But since Hatasuko could not protect anyone now, Agrideī was
left vulnerable. Everyone who ever dared to fight the Interfecti was gone. At
first, this felt unfair to Hatasuko, but as he examined nature with his
omniscient eye, he came to realize that this was normal. Nature proved to
punish those who fight against the natural order. Those with bravery are more
likely to die because of their decisions, and therefore the world only kept
those who avoid confronting danger. So as the Interfecti attacked Agrideī, the
onslaughts only became deadlier. No one could protect them. People were slaughtered
like never before. Hatasuko watched every gruesome murder, and then he heard
every screaming soul as it was forced into the tempest.
The
only sense of solace came from the growing infrequency of Interfectus attacks.
As time passed, they seemed to happen less and less often. When the cities
fell, people scattered the plains in smaller numbers. An Interfectus could not kill
enough people in one attack to justify the cost of energy.
“I wonder… if I’ll ever be able to make this feel okay. I
wonder if I’ll ever grow used to the agony. I wonder if I’ll ever make another
friend. I wonder if I’ll ever be happy again,” Hatasuko whispered to the silent
spaceship.
“But Hatasuko, you
are not alone. You were never alone.”
Hatasuko visibly jolted because he was so startled; this
was the first coherent voice he had heard in a very long time. As he drifted
now through the empty enclosure, he looked all around for the source of the
voice. He quickly realized that the voice had come from inside his head. It had
come from the edge of the tempest.
“Wait, who is that? Are you… are you in my head?”
Hatasuko asked.
“Hatasuko, I am not
just in your head. I am with you. I have been with you all along. You were
never alone! I am there all around you.”
“Vaida, is that you? I’ve been listening to the tempest. I
searched everywhere! I haven’t slept. I haven’t dreamt.”
She answered, “I
am already with you, my love. I am the force that pumps the blood through your
veins. I am the breath that fills your lungs even now. I am the whisper in your
head that lulls you still to sleep. I am the tear that’s dripping from your
right eye. I am the tremble you get whenever you are nervous. I am the stars
you watch drift through the sky. I am quiet, Hatasuko, quieter now than ever
before, but I am not silent. I am all around you. I am embracing you right now.
Nothing could ever hold us apart. There is no such thing as distance.
Even if we are millions of miles away, even if I lost my body on that day, I
never once left your side. I love you so much that death itself cannot separate
us.”
As the spaceship flew past countless worlds and their
shining stars, Hatasuko held his breath and felt a warmth on his skin. As his
tears lifted from his face and drifted through the air, he cracked a trembling
smile. He could hear the blood flowing through his veins. He could listen to
the whisper of air as it entered his lungs.
He admitted, “Even with my eyes on the whole universe,
you’ve always been the very first thing on my mind. I never stopped waiting. I
have seen worlds end in fire, but I have seen scenes of untold beauty. I have
seen a syzygy; I have seen the stars and planets align. I have seen moonlight
dance across the oceans of a distant world! I have seen more than any man ever
has. But I couldn’t appreciate that beauty until now. Vaida, you’ve brought
life to my empty world! I missed you. I missed you so much.”
“And I missed you,
my love. I missed you more than words could say. I longed to taste your lips,
or feel your fingertips, but now I don’t have to. I am with you now, and I will
stay with you forever. From now until the end of time.”
As he drifted through the hollow spaceship, Hatasuko’s
back bumped into the steel wall at a low speed. He remained there as his body
trembled. His eyes flooded with tears.
“Without you, and all this time I’ve been fighting, I
just felt so weak.”
“But
Hatasuko, you don’t have to have a steel heart. You’re allowed to hurt, you’re
allowed to cry, because in the end your wounds will heal. I know that this path
has been hard, and I know that this world has hurt you; you know more misery
than anyone else. But that’s okay, and do you know why? Because you’re stronger
than anyone else! You are stronger than anyone who ever lived. Even when you’re
hurt and crying, you fight through the storm. You fight to make a brighter day,
like you’re chasing the starlight in the sky. You are the greatest man who ever
lived, and you are the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Vaida said
with her shy voice.
“I used to think that nothing ever goes my way. Even now,
I’m terrified. The future and the present haunt me even more than the past. But
now that I have you, and now that I know you’re beside me, I feel like my
strength is coming back. I feel like I have a strength that was never there
before. I think I can see it again—the dream you saw all along, the dream I
lost long ago! I can feel the promise of a better world like it’s beating in my
chest. I am stronger now than I was yesterday, and tomorrow will be a brighter
day.”
“Keep
chasing down that burning star; it’s always been a part of who you are. And no
matter how quiet I am, I will always be with you, even in the darkest storm,
even on the coldest night. I promise you, Hatasuko, that no matter what
happens, I will stay with you beyond the edge of time. I will always and
forever be by your side.”
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