When it resolved into a visual experience that he could recognize, he was the priest. He knew it without having to confirm. He knew he was the Third of Second. He was on grey soil out in space. The terrain was uneven, and the horizon curved too much and ended too early. This was smaller than a planet, or even a moon. He was on an asteroid.
Fear crept up his spine, frying his machine-made neural pathways. It was primal; this fear made no distinction about its victims. This fear could fill a consciousness until its self-image was lost.
Brenvalo raised his head; he had no problems in this merciless cold vacuum. He generated his own heat with his reactors. His body was built to function in all conditions with ultimate sovereignty. The asteroid that he’d anchored himself on was rotating wildly on its indecipherable trajectory. It came upon light and dark at roughly equal intervals, gradually alternating between them every few seconds.
He tried to make a sound, but nothing came from his lips. He wasn’t in control. The priest was. This wasn’t an experience he could control; this was a recording. In the darkness of space beyond him, he felt a presence. The creeping paranoia of being watched by something was palpable. Brenvalo had no frame of reference as to what could make a Red Priest feel this way.
Something swept above him in the darkness as he lay flush inside a crater of this small asteroid. He wanted to stay hidden in the shadow of the crater. He was trapped with nowhere else to run. He was being watched and hunted.
The asteroid rotated on its axis, briefly illuminating the crater. Brenvalo’s heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t comprehend the scene that lay before him. His entire field of vision was filled with other asteroids of varying sizes, ranging from moon-sized to pebble-sized. That wasn’t what shocked him. Scattered in this asteroid field was debris of ships, as much as there were asteroids. Even now, they were being slowly decimated by the tumbling rocks. He counted seven ships, one as large as a supercarrier looming way behind all others. If he ever knew anything, Brenvalo knew his ships. It looked like a supercarrier, but it was much older—a pillar from even before the golden age. He couldn’t place it accurately in a time period.
There were rumors that the Final Empire spread 10,000 light years. AUM had only rediscovered up to the current frontier of 7,200. The Final Empire had their mandate of heaven at the time, an agreement with all its colonies to contribute towards territorial expansion by at least 1 light year per year. While it perished by the end of the 7th millennium, it was no secret that they had capabilities and resources to overshoot their goals. His next question was the location. He couldn’t tell which asteroid field this was.
He made an educated guess about this being beyond the frontier simply because all progenitor ships were extremely valuable and were recovered at enormous costs in preservation projects by the galactic elite. All progenitor remnants within the 7200 light year bubble had been accounted for. They went to extreme lengths in those recovery efforts. Something in this condition in a relatively easy place like an asteroid field would have been collected centuries ago.
With all of that context, the next thing he began to notice was even more horrifying to him. It was what this priest was hiding from. He, as a regular human, wouldn’t have been able to see it to be afraid of it, but he was experiencing the same thing the priest did. He ‘saw’ it, a shape at the center of the debris, coiling in on itself in a slow, menacing dance. Brenvalo couldn’t tell what it was, but it was alive. It was several times the size of the pillar ship, and it was too fast for something of that size. He had very few examples to explain it to himself, and none encompassed it fully.
He knew for certain he couldn’t have seen it if he weren’t a priest. He would have seen a huge, inexplicable empty space in this asteroid field. It reflected no light; there was no glimmer like the surrounding asteroids. Whatever it was made from absorbed all light that fell on it. In its outline, it was uncannily agile enough to avoid bumping into asteroids nearby. It had a mesmerizing movement pattern.
As soon as the priest faced it with the tumbling rotation of the asteroid, the coiling halted. It had noticed him from thousands of kilometers away, through a cloud of other asteroids. Brenvalo felt the rush creep up his spine. The priest didn’t have a heart that could beat, but he felt pulses through his brain, waves of sheer panic. Out of options, he extended his clenched fist at the coiling, dark thing. This was his assigned task.
The beam he fired wasn’t enough to harm something so big. It was for targeting. He was here to pinpoint its location. As soon as his orange klin beam hit its center mass, the thing began to uncoil. A white glow came from his left, illuminating the entire asteroid field. His mind was fast enough to notice the asteroids being decimated against that light, eroding themselves to smaller pieces, and those ejected pieces to ashes. The light reached the thing, and it was a black line in space against an intense white background. The intensity of the light grew in milliseconds, reaching maximum output. Moon-sized asteroids were wiped out; the light carved a colossal cylinder through everything. The priest launched off the asteroid to relocate somewhere else, as the black line grew towards him at an alarming speed. It was engulfed in the searing light, yet its darkness prevailed, defiant in its own destruction.
It was darkness that was black enough to incite fear in a Red Priest.
Liera had to get out of her body in a mighty hurry. She had pushed it too far, and the coming nausea nearly made her throw up that fine, nutritious feast that Calan ate. Luckily for him, she managed to hold it down. He only felt a low grumble in his stomach when he returned.
"Hey! I'm not done!" he complained, suddenly finding himself back in Liera's body. It was odd, he thought the ball had to be next to her for that to happen, but one moment he was having fun playing with lasers and the next he was on the bed with a plug at the back of his neck. The way they switched, Liera wasn't there to greet him, but the scary man was.
"Really? What were you doing?" Varul humored him, with a more pleasant expression than he had been wearing before.
"I was drawing a thing! Now I'm here. Do you have lasers so I can finish it?"
Varul chuckled. Of course, he had lasers. He had the biggest weapon in this galactic sector. "It's not safe to handle lasers with this body, little guy."
"Crayons?"
Now that was something Varul didn't have.
"You might want to see the lobby wall," Liera told Varul as she came into the room and picked up the rectangular module. Varul followed them out. It took a lot to shock a red priest, but Calan managed it with sheer audacity.
The lobby wall was one giant artwork that he drew with the lasers. He had wisely used a corner to practice his strokes, which was all messy lines and blobs, but the rest had so much more intention. His drawing became competent from left to right. Varul The Second had never thought of this as a thing that could happen. He was so far removed from any children and their shenanigans to even begin to comprehend this. He watched it in stunned silence.
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"You can take down the wall, just give it to me. I'll have a place for it in the cargo bay," Liera told him, unable to measure his reaction. He was looking at it with his arms gathered at his chest, wearing an unreadable frown.
"That's Lira and me," Calan showed them excitedly. Two stick figures held hands in the middle. "That's you, mister priest," a gigantic stick figure. "...and your friends," even larger stick figures. "and your big ship,"—it was behind them all, a mess of lines with a gigantic circle in the middle. "And this little ship,"—for some reason it was smaller than the stick figure he drew for Varul.
"And on the corner, what is that?" Varul asked. It was a big circle divided in the middle.
"Episome 3, it's where Mom and Li is," he showed them a small scattering of lines around a smaller ball inside it. "They're exploding all day."
Liera expected him to be more emotional over this; this saddened her even with her abysmal neurobit score. She thought he would find it hard to talk about his family, but this was better than the alternative. He didn't think of them as dead, as long as the time loop continued. He just wasn't old enough to comprehend the implications of a time loop. She ironed her resolve to solve this for him.
"This bad man beat me in the dark, though," he showed them a jilted-looking stick figure with one circle for an eye. "It's fine, Lira and I beat him back!" he was happy. He stepped away to admire the drawing himself.
"You know what, at this point, I'll keep it," Varul nodded appreciatively. This was unexpected due to several reasons that Liera knew about him.
She wondered if he changed this much because of reintegration? The Varul that she knew was ruthless. That was the reason why they worked together in the past. He was reliable, forged in countless wars, and he was merciless in enforcing God's will. Was he this sentimental simply because he slept in his body for a while? She couldn't tell if this was good or bad as a Red Sect Sovereign, but it went on her list of things that she could exploit. Today's arrangement hadn't exactly gone the logical route she preferred; she had too much rage in her heart when she saw his tears.
"Yes, this is fine. I'll keep it; my brothers will appreciate this. I know the Fifth and the Third will," He smiled pleasantly at Calan. "Maybe even Anarul, now that I think about it," he mentioned to Liera. "I'm sure he'll find it very amusing that I kept this."
It was a self-centered reason, as she expected from Varul. He wanted to entertain, be likeable, and clever among his replicants. He wanted to show off his unpredictable taste to his brother. She didn't personally know Anarul, but his reputation was more tasteful and refined than Varul's. He had written several books in his time and painted artworks that still hung in the grand halls of the Illuvium Temple. Varul was always about wars and winning them. Surely they had exchanges and criticisms of each other as brothers. He sounded like he wanted to prove something wrong. This was fine by Liera. Calan had provided him something of value, and with that, he had become memorable.
"You've changed, Varul" She told him. "You make friends easy now"
Varul smiled. She had to lay on that praise to validate him. She had to tell him his audience had grown by one with her addition, leaving the possibility of their interactions open for the future.
They left Varul in front of the picture, still admiring it with a smirk on his big, stern face.
Commander Brenvalo came back to himself. He was all alone on the table. He had sweated so much it looked like someone threw a bucket of water on him. His heart was racing at a speed that it had never done in his adult life. He was a passionate man, a trailblazer who got up to a lot of excitement in his life.
What he had just experienced was more than all of it combined, multiplied by hundred. It was an inhuman adrenaline rush. Not the kind that you get when you fear for your own life. He had been in hundreds of those before. This was much larger than that. He feared for all life that he knew and didn’t know. He feared for his children’s children. He feared for everything he had ever been alive for. Whatever he saw in that priests memory was anti life and it was stronger than anything he could think of.
“Ah, you’re back.” The priest raised himself off the corner and placed his strong hand on his head, tilting his head to take a look at it. His sharp orange eyes danced through every micro expression, and he gathered the data that he wanted. “That, my rebellious friend, is fear. It will kill us all.”
“Wh-“ He couldn’t even remember his language. He’d spent a lifetime in that memory. “What the hell was that!”
“I don’t owe you an explanation. But now, maybe God’s light can reach you.” The priest let go of his head. “My brother fixed your leg while you were gone,” He stepped back, pointing at Brenvalo’s new stump of a leg, amputated above the knee. The priest’s memory had doubled as anesthetic. “He didn’t like that I showed you, but I think it’s good, because you couldn’t see the Light before.”
The Third walked out from the room. “If you wish to harm the Red Sect after seeing what you saw,” he said over his shoulder, “I won’t stop until I extinguish your bloodline.” It wasn't even delivered as a threat. There was no tone change and he was smiling pleasantly over his shoulder.
Commander Brenvalo tried to move off the table very slowly. Although they fixed his leg, he didn't have anything to stand with. There were no prosthetics or exoskeleton, or even just crutches. The implication was that this was all they needed from him—to stay where he was put. Hours passed, and Brenvalo remained on the table, unable to get himself down safely. He would have felt insulted and pathetic if he was the same man. He was not. He didn't even want to get off the table anymore. He was trembling from head to toe.
"Who's in here?" He heard a woman's curious voice beyond the closed door.
“A bad man that tried to kill us,” the robotic voice of the red priestess echoed, “you can go to sleep now. It's been a long day."
"H-hey!" Brenvalo shouted. “Hey! I just want to talk! Please!”
The door opened. The ball hovered in slowly. He would have been afraid of it if he hadn’t seen something far worse just hours ago.
“Yes, what do you want to talk about?” asked the priestess, hovering close to him. The ball momentarily inspected the bandage on his leg and flipped up at him.
“I, um,” Brenvalo swallowed, trying to find the words. He had no way to describe what he saw. In a way, this is perhaps why the priest didn’t care about showing it. No one would believe what he had to say. “The priest, he showed me something,” he readjusted. “T-there is something beyond the frontier! They fought it! It was…”
“Calm down, you’re making less and less sense,” Liera pointed a spindly arm at his leg. “You don’t have to play any more games, you’ll be relocated to an illuvium sanctum as soon as possible.”
“There was an animal! Something huge! There was a progenitor ship! They found it beyond the frontier! They fought it! It’s fear.”
“Uh? Well, I’ll leave you to it,” she dismissed him and turned around. Brenvalo lurched madly. He grabbed the ball with all the strength he had. The leg brushed by the edge of the table and he groaned in pain.
“Y-you don’t have to believe me, please.” He slapped the back of his neck. “Please, see for yourself! Please, before I forget! They met something out there!”
Liera freed herself by flying backwards, but she hovered closer when Brenvalo fell off the table with a painful thud. A spindly arm extended from the ball, and she plugged it into his brain-dive port.
It took less than five seconds for her to process it.
“I see, interesting,” she remarked, unplugging from him. “I understand that you’re feeling an unusual amount of fear. The memory was too corrupted to reconstruct, though.” She hovered back. “From what I gathered, he showed you something he experienced?”
"Y-yes! He was scared. What could make him so scared!"
“Not a lot,” she admitted. ”If it really happened, I’d like to know too, but it’s too corrupted, and I can’t rely on your words.”
“I’ll, I’ll write it down, please. Listen, I apologize for everything.”
“That’s now how that works.”
“That’s fine. Punish me. But tell me, priestess,” he begged, “how do I see God’s light? Please, I need it. I can’t live with this fear.”
“You can’t. If God wants you to see the Light, you will. We can see it at our discretion; we can’t take you with us. There are no shortcuts for the faithful; it wouldn’t be fair otherwise."
“Then how should I live!”
“Whatever it is that scared you so much, it’s not here because you’re currently where God’s light can reach you. You can rest assured the Red Sect will do everything to keep it that way.”
“I-I am grateful”
“Again, that’s not how that works, Commander,” she clarified. “The priests are not fighting that darkness for anyone’s gratitude. They’re doing it for God.” The ball retreated and opened the door. “If you get in the way of that, you will be vanquished. The Red Sect cuts both ways. There’s nothing shielding you from that same rage that is keeping the darkness away.”