Chapter 240: Vastness! II
A Leap of Faith!
There is a moment before every leap of faith where the mind offers all its reasons to stay.
It lists the things that could go wrong. It measures the drop. It reminds the body of every limitation it has ever learned, every wall it has ever struck, every time the ground proved harder than hope. The mind is very good at this. It has kept countless beings safe and small and exactly where they started.
But once a being ignores all of that and leaps anyway, something happens. The limitations it spent its whole life believing in turn out to have been drawn by its own hand. The walls were never walls. They were lines, and the leap crossed them, and on the other side of the crossing the being discovers it was capable of far more than the careful mind had ever allowed it to attempt.
Damian took a tremendous leap of faith!
---
He appeared in space.
His body floated there, listless and weightless, turning slowly in the dark, his hand still reaching out toward the endless expanse that had pulled him here. There was no ground beneath him and no sky above him. There was only the vacuum, vast and silent and absolute, stretching in every direction past anything his perception had yet learned to hold.
For a moment, it tried to kill him!
He felt the suffocation first, the sudden absence of anything to breathe, his lungs reaching for air that was not there and finding nothing. He felt the constriction, the terrible pressure of a body that had been made for atmosphere finding itself somewhere atmosphere did not exist. Every part of him seized. It felt as though his existence was about to come apart, as though the vacuum would pull him outward in every direction until there was nothing left to pull!
That moment lasted exactly one moment.
BOOM!
Then every cell of his body screamed in euphoria.
His existence began to acclimate to the vacuum, and the acclimation was not a struggle but a homecoming. The Mana in this place was extraordinarily pure, purer than the dense Mana of the Cradle, purer than anything the Lands of Stone produced, and his body drank it in. He no longer needed to take air through his nose. Every part of him seemed to breathe at once, his skin and his bones and the verdant tattoos across his arms all drinking in the vacuum of space with a joy that ran deeper than relief. It felt as though he had been holding his breath his entire life without knowing it, and only now, in the dark and the silence, had he finally exhaled!
He breathed!
He felt like he had returned home.
And his connection to THE Primordial Source began to buzz and expand, stretching outward as though it had been waiting for him to arrive exactly here. As though space itself was the beginning of an endless road, and the road led toward THE Primordial Source, and he had finally found where it started.
Words bloomed before him in the dark.
|You have arrived at the location where your lifeform can truly thrive.|
|The vacuum of space is the starting point. It is the road and the pathway that leads toward where THE Primordial Source is clustered.|
|The further you explore the vastness of space, the closer you may come to THE Primordial Source itself.|
...!
His entire lifeform was screaming in euphoria.
In that weightless dark, he began to move, and the movement was free in a way that nothing on the ground had ever been. He drifted, and then he willed himself forward, and his body answered the way a fish answered water, turning and gliding through the vacuum as though he had been made for it and the Lands of Stone had only ever been a shore he was waiting to leave. It felt grand. More than grand, it felt natural, the most natural thing his transformed existence had ever done.
He moved through the dark, and then he turned his head to look back at where he had come from.
OH!
The Lands of Stone hung behind him.
He saw it whole for the first time, a massive glimmering spherical object suspended in the black, stretching out so far that his eyes could not yet find its edges. It was enormous beyond anything he had imagined while standing on its surface, beyond anything his perception had suggested while it swept across thousands of miles of geography. And it had layers. He could see them faintly, structures within structures, depths to the domain that he had never known were there, and even now his perception spread across it and still did not cover the whole. The entire Lands of Stone, every empire and every tribe and every Sacred Mountain and the River of the World and the Lands of Demons and the frozen empire of ice beyond the chaotic sea, all of it was a single glimmering sphere hanging in a dark that dwarfed it completely.
He had thought the Lands of Stone was the vast and endless land.
It was a grain.
HUUM!
And then, thousands of miles away from his position, his existence buzzed.
His perception had found something, and that something had found him. He felt a pair of eyes, and then many, many eyes, all of them turned toward him, all of them gazing at him with utter incredulity and shock. He turned toward the sensation, and his Primordial Perception resolved what it was looking at.
A spider.
It was massive, its body a deep obsidian purple that drank the faint light of the distant Lands of Stone, and it floated upon a vast meteorite, a landmass of dark stone adrift in the vacuum. Its form was enormous, larger than the floating landmasses of the Ancestral Celestials, its eight legs spread across the meteorite with a grace that something that size had no business possessing. Pale markings traced patterns across its carapace, patterns that looked almost like writing, like stories told in a language older than any tongue the Lands of Stone had produced. And its eyes, many of them, clustered across the front of its great head, shone with an ancient intelligence as they fixed on Damian floating in the dark.
When Damian looked at it, words appeared.
|Anansi. THE Guardian.|
...!
Looking at this being, Damian felt something he had not felt in a while.
A small measure of caution.
It was faint, and it did not approach fear, but it was there, the recognition that the thing in front of him was not like the Ancestral Celestials he had brushed aside, not like the demons or the Murderous Saint or anything he had yet encountered. This was something else. Something that belonged to the vacuum the way he was only beginning to learn that he belonged to it.
In the next moment, Anansi began shooting toward him.
The massive spider launched off its meteorite and crossed the vacuum toward Damian with a speed that made the distance between them collapse, its many eyes euphoric now rather than merely shocked, and its voice traveled across the empty dark that should not have carried any sound at all.
"Haha! Our Amenta Lands of Stone have produced another Stellar Lifeform!"
WAA!
"Another one! Another one!"
Comments