FALAHA'S JOURNEY: A Spacegirl's Account in Three Movements

Episode #37

I no longer complained that I had been given the most boring task anyone could think of. And I was happy Mother was the only person who ever heard me complain about it. Thanks to that, this thing was kept a secret.

I've been feeding this monster for a long while, softly altering the trajectories of close orbiting stars and watching them being shredded by strong gravity, adding more matter to the huge accretion disk. The Shard gained mass quickly, and more distant objects were now within its reach to be pulled out of their orbits. It dragged all those stars and nebula fragments, spinning, as glowing dust and gas orderly swirled in. All that surrounding material was coming in at a slight angle, giving it even more angular momentum to work with and the rotational energy equivalent to the energy given off by a billion stars burning for a significant portion of their lifetimes.

The Shard at the center of this supermassive galaxy was extremely massive to begin with when I came to explore it. Soon it became the most massive shard in this remote galaxy cluster, but not unusual enough to draw attention to it—these events would not be seen too far away too soon. And I chose this desolate place carefully. I also mapped and linked several other active galactic nuclei I could find, just in case this one would not be enough. But those were rare and creating too many relatively close to each other could have caught the curious eye of someone nearby.

My reasons for these precautions were different then, but everything came in handy in my current situation.

However I looked at the Shard, it reminded me of him—hunger was Shaamta's true nature. And just as these once powerful but now helpless objects were disappearing within the Shard's guts, anyone who dared to cross his path was consumed to feed his darkest need.

Both of these majestic creatures were now truly worthy of each other.

The bright cosmic reality dissolved and returned me to the vivid panorama beyond the glass of the sphere elevator floating up and the matters at hand. The bubble was rising among the giant towers, weaving a web of trapped and reflected sunlight, spanning down almost to the ground from the circular megastructure in the mesosphere, with its upper towers stretching into orbit on the other side—the Halo City of Dakha, the residence of the last remnants of the Lael. An unpleasant date awaited me here, as I was paying dearly for my stupid mistake.

The world seemed so different, so... deep. The colors—the sky, the landscape—were shifted... extended into strange parts of the spectrum. I wasn't seeing through my own eyes.

Who am I?

I caught a glimpse of my hands: dark-skinned female hands covered in black ornament, delicate and graceful, with long fingers and black, sharp claws. Nevertheless, they belonged to a much more powerful body than any of our kind. Not Danna hands, for sure. Not my hands.

Who is this?

The immense corridor beyond the gates greeted me with dreadful silence and emptiness, and signs of devastation—panic had broken out here not so long ago. I could feel numerous presences of people, both civilians and surviving members of the Armed Forces, and the sticky feeling engulfing this whole place—pure animal fear. Was there even a way to save any of them?!

At the end of the corridor, bathing in the bright warm light, in the middle of the hall stood the person whose presence alone was responsible for this wave of terror. And if it wasn't for the several dismembered bodies and the pools of blood at his feet and all over the hall, he'd look like a regular visitor.

"Ah, there you are, my love." He turned to me with a routine greeting. "I was getting a bit impatient."

Swallowing my own fear, I slowly approached him, carefully avoiding stepping on pieces of the dead. Even the tallest of the Lael barely came up to his hips, so none of them, however armed, was a match for him. Neither was this entire planet, despite all its technology and weapons.