Imminution

... This is just too weird to describe. It is the continuation of my short story miniseries 'epic sci fi/fantasy' attempt which just evolved into a multi-part commentary on perception and reality.

I couldn’t speak, not like I once had. However long it was, however long I had been in the company of the creature which was most definitely not a god but could only be described as our Lord, it had been long enough for my lips to fuse in a strange evolutionary adaption. My jaw cemented to the sockets below my cheek bones. I had chosen to focus almost solely on the symbols introduced to me by the Chancellors. It was my choice, my preference to speak with the markings, transcending sounds, exporting communication through the air and showing my meaning via images pushed to the other’s mind. That conscious path sent me into this change. I worried about hunger and the need for air. I sent the question to the Lord but it was dismissed as ridiculous. I was told there were other ways to get nutrients. I wasn’t exactly excited to discover them.

When I felt this, the stiffening of my mandible, I quickly realized the cause. Before my audience with this Lord came to happen, I would never have conceptualized it. The connection between cause and effect would have been wanting. I only knew the correlation because of what I had been taught when I didn’t know I was learning. Whatever I did, whatever pattern I followed, my body would alter to facilitate it. I began to move in exaggerations of normal actions. I exercised every aspect of myself. Physical and mental prowess grew. I grew. I was never questioned by God on why. He knew.

The Lord identified itself as male. He spoke of his family and his past and his people. He showed me more and more of this room he called his ‘collection’. It was a vault. Those things, held between time, were people. They weren’t all my people. God, or whatever his name once was, had been traveling through a larger amount of space than I knew was possible. He acquired creatures. He looked for intelligences and features that appealed to him. He confessed as to not knowing exactly why. The ability existed as did the desire. With no negative argument denouncing the positives it was enough of a compelling argument to send him forth.

The world which spawned his people was no longer livable. It was a natural disaster they couldn’t avert. Their sun changed its phase. In a string of expansion and consolidation it had first charred the surface of the planet and then reverted to a cold, unwelcoming hermit unable to sustain any species. I had my doubts with the explanation. I believed it happened, I couldn’t deny the images he showed me. I watched the mass of plasma and gas erupt and turn to a glutton, then repent. What I couldn’t understand was, with all of his power, a feature explained to me as average to every other member of his people, how they lost through impotence. They abandoned the place and every other thing, taking only a select amount of beasts and vegetation. Each individual voyager was given their own ship, a vessel in which I stood, a transportation which my people had assumed to be a castle. His great carrier crashed on my world ages before the jungles he would cut back transformed to the deserts I knew and understood.

He had come from the sky. He did create the cities. By his will, we became masters of the lands he entrusted to us. But he did not create us. We were never meant to be there.

Hidden away beyond the archetypes used to change the first four Chancellors and the oddities I hoped would only be possible in exhaustion induced nightmares were the tubes holding the ‘prodigies’, sixteen people, suspended in the prime of their lives, taken from wherever they had once called home. They were the entire start of my civilization.

I don’t know if there are any gods, Jeiveive. To a plant, I’m sure you were godlike. To what you once were, I was divine.

In this room, he was different. He was contemplative. There was a new side that he hadn’t shown. Or perhaps I didn’t let myself see, for fear of destroying his accepted exaltation. He loved these things. They were more than toys. They were children. Everything they were was reliant on him.

He was like a mother but one undeserving. He stole them from their lives. It made me colder just to imagine it. What had they left behind? What had he taken from the others who loved them more than he ever could? I knew he had never considered that.

He saw them as I saw my plants. Worlds were gardens and children were simple seeds. Transplanting wasn’t something that required great forethought. It didn’t necessitate a consideration for emotion or connection. It was science. We were science.

People were not science.

My reply flew from my thoughts without a filter.

What is above you?

He didn’t change his actions. He still stared one creature in particular, a long, slender thing without legs. Its head was very much the ones replacing his hands.

Nothing, for now.

He turned to me, continuing the same far off gaze. He wasn’t looking at my body. He wasn’t looking into my eyes or focusing on anything present. There was something beyond that moment, something he was waiting for. I knew it and, at the same time, couldn’t quite grasp the specifics. It was me. He repeated his words, adding new cuts, altering not the ideas but the execution.

Not yet.

In his broad chest, reflecting from the mortal covering I understood to be permeable, I saw myself. I saw what he was waiting for. I saw why I could never return. It was the Fifth Chancellor. I was not the energy form as the leader of the North. Nor was I like the East, an ever changing mass of limbs and mismatched parts formed by the dark and the soil of the world.

My arms were long. I looked faster, leaner yet stronger. The rest of my body was difficult to see. I reflected and amplified every light, returning my environment back onto itself twice over. My face was simplified. I could see where my mouth had once been. I saw the elongated tips of my ears and the brightly emitting golden light of my eyes. Brighter than those orbs were the small streams of sunlight falling from them.

I cried for the death of what I once was. I cried for this new life, for all things taken and changed. This was no ascension.

Author's Note

I'm not expecting many people to enjoy this miniseries. Not that I think it's poorly written or not entertaining... It's just not up everyone's alley.