Chapter 253

253 Hello Darkness

After what seemed like an eternity, Eva opened her eyes and picked herself up off the ground. She stumbled as she did so – her entire body felt as sluggish as her mind. She tried to shake the haziness away, though it didn’t seem to want to go away. It instead lingered, even as she tried to look around.

Despite her fuzzy, unfocused vision, she could tell that she was in a hangar on Helios, though it was somewhat smaller than normal. It seemed nearly claustrophobic at times, even. The walls seemed to expand and contract, as though the whole thing was breathing.

Before she could wonder why, the sound of heavy thrusters boomed above her. And when she looked up, she saw that the Spirit of Amelia was dozens of meters high above. The hangar’s bay doors were wide open, and Amelia herself was flying out.

Eva reached out and cried, “Wait! Wait for me!”

But she wasn’t heard, and the ship kept on going. It exited the hangar gracefully, then blasted off into the inky darkness of space.

Eva’s heart pounded in her chest as feelings of loneliness and abandonment crept into her. She knew that the rest of the Ravens would never leave her behind, and shook her head in utter disbelief. It was as though she was trying to shake off the impossible.

The realization dawned on her that she was in a state of dreaming, and that this was perhaps her worst nightmare.

Then the hangar bay doors began to close up. As it did so, the shadows around her creeped ever closer. Alarm immediately shot through her, which cleared her mind just a little bit. As she spun around and sought out some way out, found that she was surrounded by darkness.

And once she was utterly covered in it, understood what was actually happening. This wasn’t just a bad dream – this was Godeater. It had come to say hello.

.....

She tried her best to calm her heart, but it wouldn’t stop beating loudly. She felt it bang hard against her chest. In the end, she decided to let it do its thing. After all, as long as it kept beating, it meant that she was still alive.

From nowhere, a point of light appeared far in the distance, as though she was deep inside a tunnel. With no other options, she took a step towards it.

As she did, that point of light grew larger and larger. Or, perhaps, closer and closer. It seemed less like she was moving towards it, and more that the tunnel entrance was moving towards her. Its light became blinding to her as it neared, and it seemed as though she was blasted directly by the sun.

The darkness retreated away from her, far from view, in a matter of seconds. The light flooded her all around, but ebbed as her eyes grew accustomed to it.

And then she was bathed in light in the blink of an eye. Eva lifted her arm to shield her eyes from the brightness, but kept her eyes squinted so that she could still see.

Her dilated pupils shrank to a pinpoint and absorbed everything all around.

She found herself on a grassy green planet that was beautiful and Earth-like. Surrounding her were rolling hills, thick woods, a small river. There was even a city in the distance.

Eva would have found it all utterly beautiful if not for the fact that everything was marred by war. The hills had been blasted apart, and craters marred their surfaces. Smoke billowed out of the ashen and burnt woods. The river had all but dried up, and the only thing that trickled down it was an unknown mixture of bloody muck.

The city was bombed out and wrecked. Whatever beautiful skyline it once had was reduced to jagged and broken ruins that jutted out of the ground.

Worse, there was no-one around. There wasn’t a single person in sight. Not even a single animal. There wasn’t even a single corpse.

The only thing here was nothing.

For whatever reason, that unsettled her much more than if she saw millions dead all around. She lightly wrapped her body with her arms to comfort herself.

Despite all the devastation on the ground, the sky was an utterly stunning mix of light blues, violets, and pinks. It seemed the only beautiful thing on the planet itself. After all, if there was a massive war here, the sky should have been covered in ash and smoke.

Instead, the sky was clean. Relatively speaking, anyway.

Something told Eva that this was Dendrus. Or rather, what it would be if it hadn’t been absorbed by Godeater. Realizing that, she decided to put one foot in front of the other, and began walking. To where, she didn’t know. She simply let her instincts guide her.

And over the course of minutes, or hours, or perhaps even an eternity, Eva walked across the surface of the war-torn planet. Wherever she went, she found that its surface had been completely marred by conflict.

There were craters and blast marks and bullet holes everywhere – in the ground, in the trees, in walls and buildings.

“This is hell,” she said to herself as she looked around.

Then, she stopped dead in her tracks as she gazed off to the side. There, the ghostly shape of a person in impossibly long black robes stood on a hill. It seemed to be staring at the dead city in the distance.

While it stood there motionlessly, its robes fluttered slowly in a wind that didn’t actually exist.

Eva felt her courage sink as she looked at it. She was absolutely certain that it wasn’t there a moment ago. It suddenly appeared out of the blue.

“Godeater,” she muttered.

It seemingly turned towards her, as though to face her. But she couldn’t place its actual form – it shifted paradoxically, as though it was a multidimensional being squeezed into a 3-dimensional world.

To her, it seemed flat, yet impossibly deep.

When it reached outwards, in her direction, her heart thundered heavily in her chest. It was as though it was threatening to break out of it. The desire to fight it rose up in her, but knew there wasn’t anything she could do. If she touched it, she would have been swallowed by it.

Regardless, she tamped down her fear and took a step forward. Her body shook helplessly from the raging adrenaline that coursed through her.

“Why’d you do this to Dendrus? Tell me!” she demanded. “Why’d you destroy everything?”

The shadow didn’t respond. Instead, it continued to reach out around her with spindly, bony arms made of shadow. Its body spread outward rapidly, as though it aimed to blot out the sky.

Everything inside of Eva told her to run, far far away. But another part of her told her it was useless. And because of that indecision, her body instead froze on the spot. She could only watch helplessly as Godeater swallowed up the sky around her, and trapped her in a bubble made of itself.

She found herself once again covered in shadow, but not for long.

Whatever it was that Godeater had enveloped her with, changed. Images appeared all around her of children scratching their heads, animals with their heads angled curiously. At the same time, her mind was filled with ideas and thoughts that matched those images – that of confusion.

Eva was taken aback – did it not know what it did? Or does it not understand what destruction is?

“You killed all those people!” she screamed. “You devastated an entire planet! Tell me why you did that! What was the purpose of it?!”

She was surrounded by images of clocks, and of fingers tapping on chins, or scratching heads. Then a sense of realization swept over her, and she was bombarded with a fresh set of images and ideas.

Eva watched as people cleaned a variety of things – themselves or animals or buildings. Some were on their hands and knees, and scrubbed at the ground. At the same time, thoughts of showering and bathing filled her mind.

But not the kind that was leisurely. It was more clinical and methodical.

It dawned on her that it didn’t see its actions as destroying – it saw them as sterilization.

The images around her shifted, and the ideas in her mind changed. This time, she was surrounded by images of various bacterias, molds, and mildew. They consumed whatever organic thing they came from, and grew.

She was flooded with images of cancerous cells as they ate into healthy cells. More and more of them spread and destroyed everything along their path.

Then there were images of primitive people as they swarmed into a neighboring tribe. They annihilated them with sharp wooden spears and knives made of stone.

That tribe then grew and evolved into a bustling medieval town in the span of a few seconds. It became a busy town filled with people and activity. They crawled all over it like ants.

The town spread out and consumed more of everything around it. Over the seconds filled with millennia, it turned into a vast metropolitan city that looked much like a scar on the once-beautiful grassy ground.

It was noisy, and leaked waste everywhere. And it was filled with organisms that continually spread and grew. Just like the bacteria and mold and cancer.

What was even worse than that was that it eventually butted up against another cancerous city, and the two organisms fought against each other. Both consumed more and more of everything around them, even as they burned themselves in the process.

The image zoomed out, and as it did, revealed multiple conflicts like this, all over the planet itself. And it kept going out further and further. More planets, all filled with destructive, all-consuming conflict. Their surfaces were marred by fire and ash.

She saw entire solar systems enveloped in war. Some had planets that were torn apart so violently that they were fractured to their core. Huge chunks of rubble were ripped from their bodies and flung into the space around them.

Whole swaths of space burned as countless wars were fought all over it. Humans and Drogar were in the mix, and destroyed everything in their path. Not just them, but dozens of other species that she had never seen before.

Certainly not in this galaxy.

Each and every single one of them cut at each other’s throats while they burned everything else around them.

While the images and ideas and thoughts swirled all around her, Eva didn’t sense a hint of passion or anger or even remorse from Godeater. Only a need to clean it all up.

“And so what?” she said. “I get there’s a lot of death and destruction, but we have to fight for our lives! That’s what defines life itself! This struggle, this conflict! Not just between each other, but inside of us!

“And out of that struggle comes incredible beauty! People we love, and places we adore. None of it would be possible if you erase it all!”

Godeater retracted back to the form she found it in – some humanoid shadow. It simply stood there and observed her, as though it was trying to understand.

Eva was immediately filled with thoughts of “inside”.

Before she could react, a tendril shot out at Eva at lightning speed and pierced her through her chest. She was shocked senseless by it, and looked down in horror as it began to spread all over her body. She tried to scream – and maybe she did – but she didn’t hear anything at all.

Everything began to fade as Godeater covered her completely, her vision, her voice, her everything.

And then, she woke up.