Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights

CHAPTER 16: The Departure

Chapter 16: The Departure

Elsewhere

Simultaneously

Far away, the keeper of the Lighthouse stood up.

There was no sound, but there was an echo of the stranger's pain as she was struck by the Reaper's scythe. The echo traveled far beyond time, beyond space, beyond every boundary known to mankind... it was a ripple through the waters of the multiverse, a ripple that expanded out and out and out at the speed of thought, until the keeper felt her agony just as fresh and raw as the stranger herself did.

No...! The keeper's eyes searched across the worlds for the glow of the stranger's life, saw it waver from an unfathomable distance.

No, not you too...! Please... please, you have to get up!

There was no answer. The stranger's glow dimmed.

Two hands slammed the crystalline interface set in the console in front of the keeper's chair. When they withdrew, the gleaming surface was marred by indentations in the shape of those hands, as if it were nothing more than soft dough. The Lighthouse responded to its keeper's outburst in an instant... a substance like liquid diamonds filled the indentations and solidified, leaving the console smooth as glass once more.

The keeper's hands could once reach across galaxies in mere heartbeats. They could once reshape the tempero-spatial dimensions like clay, build life from mere atoms, unleash the fury of God... but now, with the stranger's life in jeopardy, the keeper's hands could do nothing but break the interface in helpless frustration. Even that was undone in seconds. It was futile, pointless.

As pointless as continuing the struggle would be, should the stranger die or be taken. As pointless as their struggle was in general, really... against an unkillable madman with one of the fundamental forces of nature on his side, what good would fighting possibly do? Even if the Three could be gathered safely here, even with the Three and all the greatest champions of the light on their side, how could the war ever be won?

There was a simple answer to that: it couldn't.

The current war was an extension of a conflict older than time: day versus night. Hope versus despair. Light versus dark. In a thousand eternities of battle, the light was always supposed to win in the end, every time...

Not this time.

This time, the dark would win, because it had all gone wrong.

It's all gone wrong. Heaven help us, thought the keeper. It's all gone wrong...

The hands that once rivaled God's clasped together in prayer. It was an act that many might consider hypocritical, even blasphemous: the keeper of the Lighthouse seeking help from a higher power when there were no powers higher than the keeper... or at least, that was the way it used to be.

But the keeper had not always been stationed at the Lighthouse. The keeper had not always called the Lighthouse home...

Long, long ago, once upon a time, the keeper's hands had been nothing more than human. And once upon a time, long, long ago, the keeper believed in something greater, something higher... Perhaps not the same idea of "God" that many humans favored, but something close enough.

It was to that entity, to that higher power, whoever or whatever He, She, It, or They were, that the keeper prayed... if He, or She, or It, or They, were even there. It was a desperate plea, a tiny message in a bottle tossed into the fathomless oceans of the multiverse.