Eden's Gate

Chapter 35: Through the Gate and Back Again

Kaitlyn wasn't sure how she knew she had gotten to the other side, but she had. The burning rope disappeared, and the five souls of her friends started to regain a slightly hint of their color. Good, they would be okay. She stepped out of the beam

She was immediately overcome with an unpleasant, eerie sensation. It was like she could only barely breathe, and the air itself was trying to crush her. Some sort of energy thrummed through the air. She felt like the ends of her hair were getting singed, but when she checked it seemed fine.

They had appeared in a large, golden room, shaped pentagonally with a hole at each of the five directions. Four led to darkened tunnels, and one was a window out over the city below. Kaitlyn watched as the glowing cracks on her skin faded, just in time for her to see that the scar in her stomach had also been glowing, so bright it was visible through her shirt. The cracks thinned out as they got further down her arm, but they were bleeding now. They'd probably form scars too, on the bigger ends - she could feel the worst of it on her back and shoulders.

"No," Eliza said. "Nonono, this is...this is impossible."

Kaitlyn ran over to the window to see what Eliza was talking about.

The light that hung over the world was strange and unpleasant. The three suns of red, blue and yellow mixed together to create a pale purple-pink glow. Kaitlyn didn't have time to contemplate how uneasy the alien light made her, because she could see that the city was in ruins. The tall pillars she had seen in the Arctic were here, but they had been blasted, destroyed, toppled and rotting for unknowable amounts of time. Long enough, at least, that they were buried deep in the green dust of the planet.

"This...this can't be. It's only here, it has to be only here."

"I'm afraid not," came the voice of Mrs. LaBeaux.

Kaitlyn twisted around and saw Mr. Lepus, with an elegant willow tree mark glowing green on his forehead, stepping out of the black vortex. Kaitlyn's jaw went a bit slack.

"How - how did you...what is..." Eliza stammered, unsure of where to even begin.

"Hush now. You want answers, I will give them to you."

Mr. Lepus walked over to them, his usual bouncy movement replaced with a steady, deliberate gait. Mrs. LaBeaux had taken him over and was controlling him, but how she did that was beyond her.

"The Elder Things are dead. They have been for 500,000 years. Every last one of them, I suspect."

"Wh-hen!? How?!" Eliza demanded.

"The wars. They lost them. They spread so fast and learned so much that they made many angry. There are other beings who thought they owned the places they made colonies, other things that thought only they had the right to their powers. They made many enemies, and those enemies followed them. The colony you found on Earth was one of the last that still stood."

Eliza was trying very hard not to burst into tears as she heard all of this.

"But surely, they all can't have been killed in these wars?"

Lepus shrugged, "It wouldn't be unthinkable that there may be one or two more holdouts somewhere. Genocide is a very difficult task. But those pockets have lived in fear and have nowhere near recovered from the slaughter. Further, there was one more complication. Wars may have wounded the Elder Things, but it took their own arrogance to kill them all."

Mr. Lepus turned and walked towards one of the openings in the room they had come in, and Kaitlyn realized she could mentally hear something coming from that direction that she did not want to hear.