Chapter 2: Veins of Gold (Patreon)

Before he could even call out, the door to Rowan’s room slammed open and she appeared, wild-eyed and looking ready for either fight or flight. 

“What is this thing floating in front of my face? And what does it mean the world is ending?”

“Did you get the vision?” Elliot gasped out, realizing he was short of breath. Had he been screaming?

“You mean the giant blue magic text box?” Rowan replied, her voice becoming higher pitched with every word, eyes fixed in front of her. “Yes, I have the giant blue magic text box. What the hell is going on?”

“No, I mean…” Elliot stammered, still reeling from the visceralness of the leviathan. It had almost wiped away his initial surprise at seeing the message. He tried to drag his focus back to what was in front of him. “I have no idea. I would have assumed I was cracking from sleep deprivation if you weren’t seeing it too.”

“I knew you weren’t getting any sleep!” Rowan practically shrieked.

“What does your box say?” Elliot asked, “Have you tried touching it?”

“It says stuff about a Loom, and the world ending, and danger, and ancestors or something, and no, I haven’t touched it.” As soon as she finished speaking she reached out a hand.

“No, wait!” Elliot shouted, lunging forward, but it was too late, she was already waving her arm around in roughly the space that the blue box would be taking up if it was the same as his own.

“Ah!” she yelped, leaping backwards and holding her hand to her chest as if it had been burned. “Should I not have touched it? What’s going to happen?”

“Did you see anything? Like a hallucination that you were somewhere else?”

“No,” she said, looking at him with wide eyes. “Are you hallucinating? Oh God, I really need you to not be hallucinating right now.” 

“I’m not,” he replied quickly, “just a weird thought.” Don’t make her panic. Stay calm. “This message, I really don’t know what it could possibly be. It’s like some weird VR tech, but obviously that makes no sense.”

“What if the government put VR contact lenses into our eyes while we slept?” Rowan asked.

“That’s––” Elliot paused, about to say that it was ridiculous, but then realizing with a growing sense of dread that he couldn’t think of a single more plausible explanation. “God, I hope not.”

“I’m checking.” Rowan turned and ran for the bathroom. “The world ending part had better be a metaphor, I have the RoboBoston summit next weekend!”

Elliot put his head in his hands, and tried to take deep breaths. He had to think. He had to dig deep, and be a calm adult who could handle this crisis. And in that moment he realized he was certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was a crisis. There were all sorts of relatively benign explanations he could invent, from accidental drug ingestion to experimental hologram technology, but no part of him believed it was going to be something like that. The vision had been too real, too visceral. Something big was coming, something scary and beyond anyone’s ability to understand.

Then the shouting started. It began slowly, with what sounded like a heated argument down the street, but as if those shouts were the cork from a bottle the yelling soon spread. Elliot winced. The fact that he could hear this much commotion from inside the apartment meant it was a lot of people doing a lot of shouting. He checked his phone, googling “strange blue text box”, and immediately forum posts started popping up.

His heart sank. This wasn’t an isolated event at all. Tens of thousands of people, at least, had seen the same box, and everyone seemed to have gotten the same words. 

“I can’t find anything,” Rowan said, popping back out of the bathroom. There was water all over her face, and Elliot realized she must have been scrubbing at her eyes for over a minute.

“It’s not just us. There are tons of people posting about it already.” He tossed her his phone, open to the largest thread on the subject he’d been able to find.

“Oh, wow,” she whispered, scrolling down. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know, but I think we should start getting ready.”

“How do we get ready when we have no idea what’s happening?”

He took another deep breath. “I think we need to assume the world might really be ending. We need survival gear.”

“But how could the world end? None of this makes any sense.” She had started pacing up and down the room, brow furrowed, clutching one of the throw pillows from the couch to her chest. “Who sent us the message?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it,” he replied grimly.

“Everyone in national security must be freaking out right now, unless they knew this was coming.” She dropped the pillow back on the couch. “What if it’s aliens?”

“God,” he muttered, “the fact that ‘aliens did it’ is among the most believable ideas we’ve had so far is ridiculous.”

“What if it’s good aliens?” she asked, her features briefly morphing from stress to intrigue. “It could be an Arrival situation. The world ending could just mean, you know, capitalism is being replaced with space welfare.”

“Maybe,” Elliot replied guardedly, thinking of the vision. “We didn’t keep any camping gear, did we? My stuff is mostly in storage.” He spared a longing thought for the waterproof matches now hidden in a facility across town with many of the other possessions he’d had to clean out to make space for Rowan.

“I don’t know. Oh! I’m going to call Emma. I bet she has a blue box.” She ran back to her room.

He pulled himself into a cross-legged position and tried to plan. What made sense? What could he possibly do to prepare? Nothing felt useful. Gathering basic rations was the most broad-purpose activity he could come up with, but so much depended on what was going to happen next. Did it even make sense to gather anything together, or was the ideal plan as simple as trying to get a few hours of sleep? 

A loud knock on the door interrupted his disjointed thoughts.

Rowan popped her head out of her room, phone up to her ear. The knock repeated, louder.

Nobody should be knocking on their door. They had moved in only a few months ago, didn’t know any of the neighbors, and generally kept to themselves. Elliot had no time to connect to anyone, and Rowan was busy with her own friends.

He rose from the couch, tightness building in his chest. Calm down. You’re just freaked out because of the hallucination. It’s going to be a neighbor worried about the giant magic blue box, obviously, not anything crazy. 

Pausing in front of the door, he glanced back at Rowan. She was frowning.

Just open it. Stop being weird.

He flicked the lock, and pushed the door open. Pain spiked at the back of his head, the same exact spot as before the vision.

Outside, the world was gone. 

Instead of a beige-carpeted hallway with faded gray walls, all he saw was a sea of chaos. The apartment stood at the edge of a metaphysical cliff, past which the entire world had become an endless blue-white fog. Massive clouds shot through with faint flashes that could have been lightning roiled off into the distance as far as he could perceive. Here and there thin gold lines coursed through the expanse, like arteries through flesh, and on some of those lines there were figures doing battle.

The conflict had multiple fronts, each on a different line of gold. Peering at the nearest, Elliot couldn’t tell if it was as close as a few hundred feet away or far enough that distance lost all meaning. It was like the vision of the minnow; he was somehow seeing the world in front of him with more than just his eyes, and it felt as if the scope of his perception had widened so drastically he couldn’t even comprehend the change.

On the closest path the figures were at least humanoid, if not human. They were clothed in various colors of light, and stood tall enough to have sprung from myth, wielding weapons that looked like swords and spears but felt like war and storms and glory. The attackers came from below. They were almost formless, composed of the all-encompassing blue-white fog, and as they advanced it seemed like existence itself was weighing down on the defenders.

Below, far, far below, something colossal climbed.

Elliot shuddered. It was happening again, but where the hallucination of him as a minnow had felt vivid, and he’d known it carried meaning, this felt like cold-hard reality. He touched a hand to his cheek, feeling the flush of adrenaline, and shuffled slightly to the side to prove to himself that he could move.

To the sides, at the far edges of his vision, light pulsed softly. 

What the fuck is happening?

He took a deep breath, gripped the doorframe as tightly as he could with both hands, and leaned his head out through the doorway. His eyes widened.

A golden net was being woven into existence. It was titanic, and despite the unnatural skewing of his depth perception, the scope of it was obviously planetary. Every strand used in the weaving could have covered a mountain range. It seemed to be forming a sphere, slowly stretching around a central point.

“Who is doing this?” he whispered, eyes widening further still, “how is this possible?”

He spun back to the conflict, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The glowing humanoids on the lines of gold were fighting viciously, destroying the blue-white figures by the thousands for every one of them that fell. Despite their advantage in skill, they were still falling, while the endless horde beyond pressed in without seeming to diminish at all. The defenders were beating a slow retreat, every backwards step bringing them closer to the massive net of light.

They’re trying to protect it as it forms. But what is it?

The blaze of gold was bright enough to make him squint as he peered down, trying to make out what was at the center. There was something, something blue and green, something massive in its own right. With the size of the surrounding light-weave, it had to be planetary as well.

He choked, understanding coming in a rush. Earth. That’s my goddamned planet.

Once he saw it, it was obvious. The glittering water, the white clouds covering brown-green terrain; it was the world. And the golden net was racing to encircle it, edges practically fraying as they extended out, much less present than the golden paths running through the fog.

But why? What’s happening?

As he looked back at the battle, he felt a sinking sensation. Warriors engaging in a fighting retreat, defending against the onrushing tide. A construct of light struggling to encompass Earth. A colossus rising far below, too terrifying for him to fully take in.

These people, these figures of light, were defending his home. And they were struggling. Step by step they were being pushed back. Toward his world, toward his apartment, toward Elliot.

Toward Rowan.

Then one of the figures turned. Seafoam-green radiance haloed their distant form, with facial features suddenly jumping out in sharp relief as if Elliot stood just a few feet away. Harsh cheekbones, deep blue eyes, no ears he could see, not-quite-human. The figure seemed to see him, although Elliot couldn’t interpret the expression on their face, and then they made a swift tossing gesture in his direction before turning back to the fight.

Elliot had a sudden sharp urge to cry out, in thanks or in plea, but before he could whatever had been thrown closed the distance between them and the door swung closed with a sharp snap.