The Last Human IV - 32 - In the Forest of Eternal Light (Patreon)

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In the beginning, there was the end. And the end and the beginning were one, and the same. 

And in the end a people gathered, as they were always meant to gather. The dead danced with the living, and the living mourned the not-yet-dead, and the unborn were celebrated, and all the people moved in their eternal circle.

But they were watched by one from outside the circle.

The people were not made of earth and clay, but of lightning and color, and they pulsed across a dark world, and brought light to the dark places. And they gathered, as they were always meant to gather. And their civilization grew and shrank and grew a little more, until the dark world pulsed with streaks of color which knitted unto themselves like loops of yarn without beginning or middle or end.

And Poire watched them all.

He hadn’t meant to find these strange life forms from another universe. He hadn’t even known he could see into universes beyond his home. Indeed, Poire had only been watching his own people through the seeing pools. He was slipping back and forth through time, watching the Scars appear one after another, when he discovered he could follow the Light into the Scars. A single thread of Light led here, to these people, and their strange, circular existence. 

In fact, all the threads of Light led here. Why?

Poire, who could only experience linear time, watched their budding civilization gestate on that dark world. Early on, he could still pick out individual streaks of light among the whole. They were alive, he knew this. But he also thought they were intelligent. Not merely natural phenomena, but beings with minds (or something like minds) who made choices of their own. 

Even when they gathered, and the individual streaks became waves of color and light, they still resembled the shape of a single being.

Then, they grew.

Like neurons firing across synapses, or lightning leaping out into the sky, they overflowed their world—and reached out to the heavens. Steaks of light became bright veins, which siphoned matter from the nearest celestial objects, and calcified into structures that always had been, and always would be. This was how they grew their arms like the branches of a great tree, a forest of trees connected by ten thousand twisted trunks, each unfettered by gravity or any physical laws that Poire knew.

Gone were the lone streaks of intelligent life. Finished was their endless dance. They had gathered, as they were always meant to gather, into one. This living colony branched across its universe, devouring matter and storing energy and giving itself life. 

And when those branches came to the edges of its universe, the being called Anu stopped.

For a time. 

It focused its growth inward, making use of every particle within its grasp. Breathing its self-replicating intelligence into every single cell. Yet it faced an insurmountable limitation. Anu’s life was an eternal circle, yet the matter it could eat was finite. 

When it devoured the last molecule of matter, Anu went within itself, and dwelled there for an endless age, until, at last, a new branch extended from the tangled forest of Anu’s gnarled body. 

This branch was different. Where the others shone with every color—brilliant greens and fiery violets and brooding reds and a black so bright, it almost shone white—this new branch was the color of nothing. It would have been invisible to his eye, if not for the shroud of Light surrounding it. 

The branch touched lightly at the void. It cut a hole in nothing. A Scar. Like a root seeking nourishment, it plunged into another universe.

This universe was nearly empty. Ancient, Poire thought, given how few stars glittered in the void. Or maybe this universe had never quite started at all, and only a few embers survived its creation. Against this dark background, the Scar blazed with Light, but the Light evaporated into nothing. For an age, the Scar did not grow, for Anu’s form could not contend with these alien physics. 

Not at first. 

More branches formed, and carved more Scars, until this new universe was pitted with brilliant Scars.

Then, the Scars transformed. 

Poire had seen the beginning of this process before, when he first went to Cyre, and the Scar had begun to split. This time, he saw it from Anu’s side. A new limb rose from Anu’s form. It was sheathed in arcane, geometric plates whose every face shone with radiance. Streaks of Light speared out from the root and  clawed fractal patterns at the corners of the Scar, before breaking through. 

Like bolts of slow-moving lightning, it entered this new universe. It split and split again, connecting each smoldering Scar to another. Then, like a hammer smashing glass, the new universe shattered. Ghosts of matter jumped out of place, leaving behind their material forms. And in that split moment of change, Anu surged in, and devoured everything. Everything.

Primal terror sank into Poire’s heart, chilling his blood. He felt that he should flee. Even though he was only a watcher, his whole body screamed at him. He was a speck. An atom. Nothing. And the ruination of this moment was so vast it swallowed all other thoughts. 

But Anu was not finished. After this universe, it already hungered for another. Its branches quested anew, tearing more holes in more planes. Searching, learning, adapting its shape and essence before, finally, feasting.

In one universe, it discovered an ancient and powerful civilization that had stagnated in long eras past. Billions, perhaps trillions of xenos—trillions of specks—living contented, messy lives. It ate them all.

In another universe, it found a sparse, slow-living civilization who prided themselves on their understanding of their universe. They had even, Poire was surprised to find, discovered how to link multiple points of reality together. Like the Gates. They knew and loved their universe, and spent their lives carefully exploring and testing the boundaries of their own reality … until came Anu. 

Remains of failed civilizations scattered a few universes, but most were empty, or built upon laws so strange that Poire couldn’t decipher them. Anu stalled as it puzzled over how to adapt to these laws, just as it had with Poire’s universe. But always, the outcome was the same.

Anu only ever grew larger. And as it grew, as it turned more matter into itself, the speed of its growth increased. From the seeing pools, Poire sat and watched Anu, hoping for a sign that its growth might slow. 

But Anu gathered, as it was always meant to gather. One day, he realized, there would be nothing left but Anu.

One civilization tried to escape. They sacrificed so much to gain the secrets of interplanar travel, but they lacked Anu’s endless adaptability. Its grasping branches merely reached into the pockets of existence in which they hid, and scraped them clean. 

Some fought back, and some even succeeded in cutting away the smallest branches, or blocking up the Scars. But Anu had grown too vast to be killed by a thousand cuts. To any threat, Anu responded by shoving more of its vast, brilliant branches into these universes. The more they fought, the faster came their doom.

Anu’s great golden trunks swelled with matter, reaching up and around and into the infinite. Trillions of branches thickened and sprouted new limbs, shedding hosts of shape-changing spores which melted into the fabric of existence and burned sizzling Scars into the void. Entire realities were caught and captured and held in dewy bubbles that covered Anu’s branches, adding to its vast stores of nutrients and knowledge. Is that where I am, right now? Poire wondered. Do I exist only in one of those bubbles?

Anu was beautiful and wondrous to behold, but how much beauty and life had it devoured to create itself? All those myriad peoples, all those unknown realities were gone, and gone forever. Perhaps Anu had preserved some small reflection of them, but who should it share these reflections with?

Poire sailed above and beneath Anu’s vast canopies, and bathed in its eternal, terrible glow. Then, he came across something strange: a cluster of branches which grew like the roots of a plant shoved through a narrow hole.

Every other universe had required only a handful of branches for Anu to devour—even the most vicious defenders had been snuffed out by a mere overgrowth of Anu’s limbs. Yet, here, hundreds of limbs converged as they attempted to eat into a densely packed cluster of Scars. Where all the other limbs swayed and grew with a snaking movement, these branches were frozen in place, as if something had halted their advance. Black veins ran back along their lengths, carving like jagged serpents towards Anu’s forest.

Poire went closer. He could not tell where or when this place existed, at least not on this side. So, he pushed through one of the Scars. 

Dark space. A familiar shape, floating in the void. A tell-tale series of black metal discs locked together in the shape of a blossoming flower, capped with rising black towers which shed serpentine bolts of blue energy. 

A Light dam. 

Compared to the other side, the threads of Light that quested toward this dam were pathetically slender, and even their twisting movements were slow and weak. He was here, again, where he had first entered. The beginning, at the end.

Poire felt her gaze, before he shifted his vision. A familiar face stared back at him from the observation deck of the dam.

“What are you?” Emorynn asked. “Why are you doing this to us?”

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