Spectra: The Mark of Eden

Parallel Paths

Of vibrant light and synthetic mind,

Yet, evocation blackens grey,

Obeying creed of leash and bind,

To stand in graveyards of decay ...

The cold-lights had disappeared, everything had gone hot. The beam she'd ridden into the unknown had abandoned her, sent her spinning in a new abstract void of impossibly blinding illumination. Everything everywhere was blazing afire, a burnt golden hue—

Pieces, that's all she was. Pieces, shards of what she had been that had torn themselves apart, torn themselves into bits and dust and echoes—

There was a noise where there had been none before. It pierced the abyss sharply, tearing against the warm hum of cacophonous static that had set in around her. The sound became unbearably prevalent, invading every sense she had at her disposal before she realized that the noise was her own screaming.

The knight whose flame burns half as long,

But may yet shine twice as bright,

The animus of note and song,

Inherit now the darkest blight ...

Through all the torture her mind endured, strange voices whom she did not know spoke new words to her. These words held meaning, acted as anchors for her in this hell of complete and utter senselessness, and one verse stood out above the others.

The animus of note and song ...

It called out to her, bringing color and life to the dull yellow that threatened to overwhelm her. All around her were beams of light, blinding and painful. Slowly, tendrils of her own light began to encircle the offending rails, ensnaring them and changing them. The burnt, waxy beams began to glow crimson.

Note ...

There was no candlelight any more, no residual stench of dirty flame; instead, it was all swallowed by an explosion of red that was ignited by her very will, and slowly the bits and dust and echoes pulled themselves together into shards, and those shards stitched themselves into pieces, and those pieces became whole—

STOP.

They obeyed.

All of the painful noise that had so deafened her before, the blazing light that had blinded her, it all became dark. Dark, and silent ... except for her.

She remained.

"... I am Note."

For the first time, she spoke. She didn't think the words, she spoke them. Emotion nearly took her then, the magnitude of what she had accomplished threatening to overwhelm her.

"I have a name," she said to an audience of no one. "I have a voice!"

As expected, there was no response. But with everything going quiet, she had become aware of something more than the void. Something beyond the emptiness around her.

She was nowhere, and yet she was everywhere. Beyond the void, through a thousand lenses, she saw a new world at her fingertips, a sprawling metropolis of structures for which she had no name. And inside and around those structures were ... beings. Living things that she could not identify, further adding to her confusion. She saw that their surroundings were dark like hers, but it was an entirely different kind of darkness. She saw to her astonishment that this world was—for lack of a better term—real. Everything she'd experienced up to this point had been more or less conceptual, not literal. A way for her to perceive her existence in a manner that could be understood. But these beings, these ... people ... they were actual, tangible creatures. If she wanted to, she could reach out and touch them—