HIM AT THE

Back when the laws of physics applied, Light was the fastest thing in the universe.

We knew it in the form of Gentle sun-rays, the cooking of a microwave, scorching Ultraviolet. Wavelengths of varying extremes. Ageless Massless packets of electromagnetic energy packed within bundled photons, hurtling and oscillating through space at some-hundred-thousand miles per second.

Much has changed since those simpler times but atleast one thing remained a constant, which was the uncertainty of the universe around us. Light could flood every astronomical unit, bathe the celestial highways until the vacuum of space crackled white and the planets burned to balls of fire. The Lord could descend from his heavenly throne and scorch every inch in his holy fire and the secrets of the Universe would still be withheld in selfish, cruel spite.

With the death of everything and the birth of the Antumbricane, the Universe has not buried itself under secrets immerurable, beckoning the seekers of secrets and knowledge. Rather it has stopped pretending to abide by the arbitrary little rules we tried to impose upon it. It has chosen to take off that thin mask of sanity and reveal its true face atlast.

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It was impossible to tell where I was when I eventually woke up. I opened my eyes and for the briefest of moments thought I had gone blind. No, the world has. The world has become nothing but an empty void. I felt no limbs, no connecting appendages capable of any coherent locomotion, and I was stuck in place.

My first half-baked guess was that I had died in my sleep. Quickly the raving terror that came with such a realisation overcame my overwhelmed conscious and I panicked. My eyes darted wildly in search of light and ghost shakes took over my nonexistent body and I think if I had a mouth I'd be screaming.

I tried looking up and down, but couldn't tell what direction I was facing. It took me a while to realise the very concept of direction was meaningless at this point; sensations of weight, temperature, smell, taste and touch have disappeared. My mind has been forced to exist in a plane of existence where those properties no longer applied, and it only barely functions underneath the crushing weight of absolute silence. There is nothing here for the senses to perceive, and my mind comprehends this by shutting them down completely. So I was alone. Overwhelmed by the loudest silence, suspended in unfeeling dark.

But then I see it. My senses of sight reactivate and I see it ahead. A tiny ball of light in the distance. It flickers and fluctuates in intensity, but in the absolute darkness of the void it was like a blazing sun to my eyes. The fear vanished. I was suddenly overcome with an irrepressible sense of childlike wonder.

Then steadily it grew, bloated in size like the inflation of a rubbery balloon, then there was a strange sensation of slow movement, unable to tell if I was moving of my own volition or the rubbery light-thing was pulling me. My form began to orbit the little ball of light in a curious parody of planetary apsis. What limping vestiges of my conscious mind scream to reach out and touch it. For a while I drifted around the periphery of the star in ireful periapsis before I succumbed to the impulse. I reached forward, numbly acknowledging how my locomotion had returned, and clasped the thing in my hands.

The second I made contact with the orb of light I felt again. Like the dripping water of a half-opened tap, my nerves came forward then flooded back into myself, and with it came the greatest pain I was sure I'd ever experience.

It was the pain of having something incomprehensible touch my bare skin, of each harsh waxy finger and burning stroke eliciting fire across skin and flesh. I couldn't pull away, I was frozen in place, subject to the pain. There was a horrendous agony like I was being burnt alive in a bonfire and yet despite the life-scorching temperature I still thrashed and lived. Through the all-encompasing agony I saw through hazy eyes that the light had grown brighter.

It took no time to realise it was coming from me.

I had set alight. My marred skin was being stripped away by flailing, huge flames, scorching down to malnourished muscle to underdeveloped bone. My biology was being annihilated on a cellular level. Trillions of cells were burnt, their carcasses twisted into new incomprehensible forms. My body writhed and sobbed as it was forced onto an evolutionary path it didn't understand.

I threw my head back and screamed through a changing throat. Then, slowly, the agony turned to calm. Then understanding. Then pleasure. The overwhelming transcendent pleasure of evolving beyond the human form, of beating entropy itself. The pain was still there but it was being dulled by the existential joy that enraptured every waking moment of my new existence. I felt myself shudder, and then I was moving again, flying I think. Not on my own volition, but rather my body acted interdependently of me, now.

I flew faster through the void, the darkness receded like frothing waves on the shoreline, giving way to asteroids and stars and Planets orbiting those stars. I had become living Light. My path was pierced through lurching gas clouds and infant meteor belts, smashing planetoids in my way, oscillating across planets in moments, smashing alpha particles and beta particles and things never to be known to science.

I witnessed the death throes of stars as they swallowed up their satellites. I listened to the birthing pangs of galaxies as they shuddered and died then rebirthed in my light.

I redistributed myself across the cosmos. Every inch was bathed in brightest light. Life-seeding illumination consumed bare bunks of rock, morphing them into Gardens of Eden, bursting with scrambling, flying, crawling, grazing life. What few corners I didn't touch, strange new forms of life germinated independently. Flowers bloomed in the light, Fungi festered in the dark.

My reach grew. I went farther and farther across the Universe, dragging the hated darkness kicking and screaming into myself, illuminating the unreality into the reality. Felt myself going faster and faster, distorted by manifested willpower and incomprehensible pseudo physics. I reached and went and propelled myself through the vacuum of space, Until space itself collapsed under the speed. I didn't stop for something as ephemeral as space. Instead I tore through it.

My reality spanning body had assumed a physical form, standing on the cusp of the brightest place I've ever seen. Affluent streams of nebulae and stardust roiled and frothed and expanded across empty space, stretching for light years across the cosmos in all directions. Reality was a maelstrom of color so bright and impossible that my own light was effortlessly smudged out. Drowned into unreality.

I fell onto metaphorical knees and wept nonexistent tears at the illuminated beauty of it all.

Somewhere between pathetic sobs, the stars began to split and fold on themselves. Nebulae Streams roiled and bubbled until they burst like blossoming fungi. That beautiful miasma of color dimmed, shuddering and dying and the world began to be plunged back into that hateful void. And there it was. Standing atop a monolith of dying stars was THEM.

In an eternity and an attosecond they bridged the thousand-light-year gap between us both. Then there was a sensation of being passed atom-by-atom through a screaming star. Then the star winked shut and reality shattered apart.