The Core: The Dark Enemy

22. The Designer

I stared off into space for quite a while after sending the Leva King away. The tiny snake-dragon form they originally gave him was cute and hardly a representation of what a massive and deadly entity he had become over the ages. This image of deadly dominance was put even more to the test when I managed to summon him, only to have his cute and adorable little form be spitting mad at another trespass he said that the Last Engineer had made against him and his kind. It was like he was a tiny kitten hissing at an offending feather toy. Getting him to recount what had upset him so much was spotty at best. He said that, for the longest time, the Last Engineer had been trying to study, kill, and dissect his fellow sibling creations ever since he had arrived in this dimension. The Last Engineer was cunning and had no moral reservations when it came to obtaining power over the denizens of this dimension.

Such proof of evil was displayed with the Leva King's latest encounter. The Last Engineer had done the unthinkable. He had used his only true weakness against him.

He had created what appeared to be a Leva hatchling and had sent it to follow the King. It had even been made to sound like a child too!

I had stopped him at this point, needing clarification on how, if the eighty-eight creations had to fight to the death at the start of their lives, how had he managed to have children? His explanations were the result of spread, or in his case male and female offspring that were tied to him. He just had to sacrifice parts of himself to create the first Leva female that was bound to him so that they could have hatchlings.

It was all rather interesting and eventually led to the story of how Leva existed in our dimension, of how he had sent his offspring away after losing his mate in a devastating attack. He had known that sending them away would gradually deplete their energy, making them into ghosts of what they were originally capable of if they managed to feed off of the richer energies of this dimension. Though weakened, they would always be stronger than most of the creatures of my home dimension, able to live in the inhospitable depths of space and to grow into truly formidable Leva with time.

Hearing his story made me realize several things, that perhaps the parasites that hung around stars weren't originally from our side. They might have hitched a ride with the Leva and ended up making a home wherever they had migrated, seeing as how they ate the essence of life, just like all of the denizens tended to do here.

In the end, I had been forced to let him go back to what he was doing, as he was so sure that the Last Engineer was involved and would seize upon any weakness that he could find. He was positive that if there was one test, then there would be more on the way. Personally, I had a strange gut feeling about the encounter.

I couldn't argue with the logic of the Leva King, that it might be an attack by the Tela Engineer but it also could have been my people trying to reach me as well. I promised him that I would give him some time to get to a secure location before summoning him back, needing to have him perfectly calm before I picked his brain and perhaps revealed that he had, in fact, truly encountered Sublimis, a distant offspring of his.

If my hunch was correct he had encountered her in swarm form and subsequently destroyed her before she could say anything. If anything the Leva King seemed to have PTSD and I could only imagine it had everything to do with losing his mate, all contact with his children, and being alone for so long. I would try to be tactful and wait until he was calm.

As for how I summoned him... let's just say that I had a deeper understanding of how things worked and I now knew that I probably didn't want to have anything to do with some of the other concepts that were just laying around in orb form.