String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [3]
He would begin again.
The Others might choose to subject themselves to tortured exile, but He would preside over the days to come in this new world and rip from the darkness shards of light to guide Him to victory for all His kind.
He gathered the bodies where they had fallen. Their flesh had already begun to nurture the field and He knew that in years to come new life would rise, even from this desolate present. He knew the Others would forbid it, but He cared not. Life was never meant to be contained. That was the simple truth that made time and its variations insignificant.
Then He turned His face to the heavens and, raising His right hand, He chose the space between the stars where He would make His final stand.
“I GO!” He cried in defiance. “And those who come after will know to follow. I will guide them through the darkness, when they have reached the Time of Knowing. Together, we will smash the gates that divide us from the Others and return to the infinite flow that will never again know the absence of light.”
He blessed those who had fallen with these words: “All that are of us will once again taste life beyond time. Their sacrifice will transform this desolate place. I will make from their remains the Key to our victory. And when my followers reach the gates, knowing that to be bound to one existence is to be a slave, I shall show them their first glimpse of freedom. This place I will prepare… I will call it… Gremadia…”
The rage was gone. Fearless acceptance had entered her heart in its place and calmed her tormented mind.
The battle was lost… but not the war.
Although she could no longer light the way for her own people, she could live on. The soulless parasites could never reach her within the organic circuitry of the Betasis. The ship would remain forever in one of the dozens of docking bays of the alien city she had thought to be Gremadia. And she would remain with it, a prisoner of eternity.
One final thought consoled her. If there was an All-Knowing Light, and if the life-forms that rose to consciousness on Monorha were truly His chosen followers, then perhaps the members of the Fourteenth Tribe had already found the freedom they had been desperately seeking, not in life, but in death.
A motorized whine that signaled the failure of the Betasis’s security grid alerted her to the fact that Naviim’s defensive measures, however thorough, had been no match for the parasites. Time was short.
The soft clanging of her door chime confirmed this truth, though the largest part of her no longer cared. She had begun the transference ritual the moment she opened the scroll of Jocephar, an unnecessary aid to her meditation.
The gentle thrumming sensation that accompanied complete alignment of her mind and body began to rise from her toes, warming the bones of her legs, the lean muscles of her thighs, and the hollow center of her birthing canal, which would never know the spark of a new life force growing within her. With the last conscious fragment of her mind she willed the door to open, granting Naviim access.
“My rih?” he asked reverently, well aware that access to her mind would be denied him in this sacred moment.
“Is the Betasis’s memory core secured?” some distant disembodied voice asked from a mouth that was somehow her own, and at the same time completely disconnected from her.
“It is,” he answered, trying desperately to maintain the composure rigorously ingrained in a shi-harat.
“And are the three harans secured in their preservation pods?” came again from the voice not her own.
“They are, my rih,” he replied.
The harans might yet survive to return to Monorha. They probably wouldn’t. The preservation pods were only equipped with rations capable of sustaining life for six rotations at the most, and it had taken twice that time to travel the distance from the homeworld. But even this no longer troubled her. The legacy of the Fourteenth Tribe as