The Last Human IV - 55 - The Unmaker

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Anu’s limbs stretched to the edge of sight, and beyond. A near-infinite network of blood vessels, dried up and cracking and unable to rot in the vacuum of space. This was not the Anu he had come to fear. 

In the pools, Poire had seen the great alien god in all its majesty. Branches that radiated Light, covered in droplets of dew which contained universes devoured. Fractal branches weaving across the void, splitting and growing and carving new holes into new planes… And the void between Anu’s branches had swirled with twisting, fiery gemstone hues. Now, it was diminished. A glow, somewhere at the heart of Anu galaxy-spanning mass.

The old Scars were still there: burning, white gaps hanging in open space. But they were pale. Colorless. And Anu’s outstretched limbs no longer weaved. Black, glittering veins crawled along the branches, calcifying the once-living matter. Anu had it. The Disease. 

This was not how it was supposed to be. Poire intended to find out why. 

His sandals had been lost somewhere on the climb up through the membrane, so Poire’s bare feet touched the not-bark of Anu’s celestial limb. He felt a force, tugging at his skin like the gentle pull of a magnet. Tiny parallel ridges pressed back against the soles of his feet. Except not everywhere. When he tread near the black, glittering veins, the ridges remained stiff. Like they had forgotten how to change.

A slender limb (only wide enough for a few dozen Poire’s to stand on) sprouted off of this branch. Its tip had carved a hole in the fabric of the void, and, long ago, the limb had gorged on the matter of another universe. But now, the limb was withered and rotted with black, cancerous veins which glistened like obsidian in moonlight. Yet Poire could still see through the Scar into another universe. Anu’s diseased offshoot had obliterated the matter of that world, had tried to drink it in, but now the limb was cracked and crumbling into ash. Nothing but un-matter swirled in the void.

Did anyone ever live there? Poire wondered. Did they know what killed them? 

It pained him that he would never find the answer. 

Then, another question lit in his mind, like a match struck and held over a great pile of kindling.

Did Anu know that it was dying?

Poire stepped over the veins as he went to the edge of the branch. Far below, buried deep in tangled shadows, a light swelled and dimmed. Swelled and dimmed. He squinted, trying to judge if the light was getting weaker.

Poire unstrapped his sandals and planted both feet on the dead branch. The ridges melded to the soles of his feet. He willed the branch to change. The ridges melted into a smooth, frictionless surface. The bark lurched under his heels, throwing him forward with exactly the right amount of force. Balancing on top of the wave, Poire crossed his arms, and willed the wave to move faster. Faster. It left a neon blue streak in its wake, a trail of color in the funereal void.

As he tore across the branch, awareness spread through him, like warmth through a body that had been cold for so long, it had forgotten what warmth was. He felt the branch in its entirety. He felt the forks and splits behind, and the intersections ahead. All that it had been, all that it would ever be. An existence, measured in the lifetimes of universes—if it could be measured at all. 

But he couldn’t feel the veins. Black and eating into this vast body, the disease left cold, claw marks in the bark. Numb. Dead. And even as he accelerated down the branch, he could feel those claw marks reacting to his presence. Somewhere in the fractal canopy above, a great branch broke away, crashing into its siblings and shaking loose showers of dew. Drops that contained universes spun out into the void.

Faster, Poire impulsed. The wave beneath his feet lurched. There was no air, no resistance, to slow his momentum. Anu’s dark canopies (above and below and all around) blurred, backlit by a fading Light. The forks absorbed each other and swelled into increasingly broader limbs as he flickered toward the central mass of trunks.

They wove together, like arteries crushed by too many eons of growth. His frame of reference kept changing as they drew near—his mind, trying to comprehend their celestial size. Each trunk might’ve spanned the width of a galaxy, and the “cramped” narrow notches between would have fit every solar system he could name.

If there were limits to speed, Poire did not find them. Or, perhaps, time bent to accommodate his movement. In the blink of an eye, Poire was engulfed in Anu’s dying arms. The vast trunks welcomed him into their inner paths, guiding him as much as he guided himself. His narrow branch curved through winding caverns, still resplendent with memories of Light. Shadows of color danced and warped, even as his movement slowed. He came to a grotto where the Light shone brighter, as if Anu’s dying gasp had not yet dissipated.

The ridges on the walls shifted as he approached. Geometric tapestries flowed like wind through grass in a written language he couldn’t hope to understand. He only had the sense the shapes were meant for him. And he was right.

“You,” a voice spoke. As it did, the ridges in the wall formed spikes, all pointing at him. “Again.”

Each word started soft and gathered in strength, like echoes in reverse. They sounded like Sen. They sounded like Eolh. Like Xiaoyun, his cultivar in the Conclave. Like everyone he had ever known. Poire searched for the source of the voice, and all the ridges shifted with him.

“Who are you?” Poire called out.

“We have already answered,” the voice echoed. And, quieter, but at the same time, it said, “We will answer again.”

“Anu?”

“We never needed a name.” 

And, like waves lapping against a shore, more voices echoed it, “Have none. Will never have…”

“We are us,” it hissed, louder now. 

“All that is, all that will be, and all that ever was…”

“How can you say that?” Poire scowled at the shapes rippling on the walls. “There were entire universes out there. Do you know what was lost when you destroyed them?”

“Nothing…” The walls groaned and cracked as the ridges split apart, peeling back the walls like a curtain from a stage. But the stage had no depth. Instead, it seemed to rush forward, pulling Poire into it. And the longer he stared, the further he could see.

Cities rose to alien suns. Crowds gathered like blood in the veins between structures. New creations rose for purposes that Poire couldn’t begin to comprehend. Armies of beings marched across strange lands. Building or breaking, Poire could not tell—only that where they moved, the world was changed.

In time, he saw the pattern. And in a moment, he understood.

“They’re still alive,” Poire said. “You ate them to preserve them.”

“In us, all things are forever. There can be no end.”

“They were their own people, once. But now, they’re only pieces of you. That is no life. What hopes and dreams and thoughts did you take from them? You deprived them of everything. You gave them no choice.”

“There is no such thing as choice.”

The stage warped, somehow growing and shrinking, pushing Poire away and pulling him in. He forced his eyes to remain open and swallowed down the wave of nauseating dizziness that swept over him.

Then, the motion settled, and Poire found himself staring at an ocean of stars. A dark planet rose, glossy and enrobed in glittering night. Only, it wasn’t reflecting the stars. When Poire narrowed his eyes, he saw tens of thousands of lights dancing over gloomy mountaintops, and ink-black waters.

“This is who we are,” Anu said, and the walls echoed, “We were, we will become…”

Each light was followed and preceded by a tail of color. Lines of energy showed where they had been, and where they would go. The lights tangled together and split apart from each other, and intertwine again in endless loops.

“These are your ancestors,” Poire said. “The ones who made you.”

“No,” Anu disagreed. “This is us. As we are.” 

“As we were, and always.”

But as Poire watched, his frown deepened. Thousands of lights, splitting and rejoining. But never growing their number. He had expected there to be more of them. 

“Where are the rest of you?”

“We are not human,” Anu answered. “Your numbers grow, and always grow. For us, we are always ourselves. We could not be more. We could not be less.”

“Never, and always,” the walls echoed. 

Poire mulled over this. He tried to understand it—to see how it could be true. The Old Man had said that Anu’s time wasn’t linear. That’s why it thinks humanity is still growing. It thinks they’re still alive. All of them.

“You do not understand,” Anu said. “You will not understand, again. We will tell you what we have always told you: we live all moments, all at once.”

Poire tried to imagine what it would be like to know his entire life from the moment he was born. Questions would become unnecessary, as every answer would be right there. Every mystery would either remain infinitely mysterious, or never unknown in the first place. And every choice…  And…

“Wait,” Poire said. “Does that mean you knew how you were going to die?” 

“Die?” Anu asked. “You use a word we do not know.” And another echo, “You will use that word again…”

“You don’t know what death is?” 

“Never knew. Will never know…”

“You will,” Poire growled, frustrated at Anu’s naivety. “I have seen your branches break. I have felt the black rot which eats you from the inside. You are already dead. I’m not talking to you, am I? I’m talking to your—your ghost. Your last breath. And what is left of you now?”

“To forget,” Anu said. “To be forgotten. To never remember again… Is this death?”

Poire swallowed hard. His frustration numbed into a kind of vindictive pity.

“Yes,” Poire said, “This is death.”

The walls rippled. The geometric patterns rippled and rotated into new shapes. Hard edges and jagged lines confused themselves into uncertain lines, and confused crosses. When Anu spoke again, its voices were a harsh, accusing whisper.  “We did not know death, until we met you.” 

“Me? I’ve never killed anyone.”

“You deceive only yourself.”

“You deceived us,” Poire growled, gesturing angrily at the thin veins that were even now crawling down the walls of the grotto. “You gave us this disease. You are the one who killed my people. I came here to end you, or to die trying—and I don’t know how many times I’ve died, trying. But after all that, I found you already wasted away.”

A heavy groan creaked through the walls, and the ridges stood still, as if listening. Or bracing for the pain. Somewhere far below, a splintering crack was followed by crashing and echoes of crashes as some massive arm of Anu broke apart.

“We were perfect. In us, nothing was ever lost. Nothing, forgotten. We preserved all existence—until we found you.”

Poire was about to argue, when the ridged walls split again, like scales separating from each other, chattering as they pulled apart. A scent like burning rubber and melted metal and, curiously, the sweet taste of meat, filled his senses before Poire was submerged in Anu’s once-eternal past.

In the beginning, Anu was alone. More than a cell, and less than an organism. And yet, it knew itself entirely—and all its future was laid bare before it. Anu split, and split again, and split until all its separate lights formed a branching network, small and wiry, that barely stretched across its own universe. 

Moments passed. And so did eons. The difference between the two narrowed. Poire bore witness as Anu’s branches thickened, and split into innumerable limbs, weaving across the void and carving  countless Scars into other planes. Drinking their matter. Anu’s slender trunks grew in layers, until they were so swollen they began to absorb each other, transforming into a hulking network of twisting columns covered with golden bark. Mist exhaled from between fissures in the bark and condensed along the tips of the branches, forming pearls of smoldering, glittering dew that burned holes into the nothing. 

The vision pulled Poire in to a cluster of branches, reaching into a Scar. As before, they funneled Anu’s alien energy into the Scar, as the limbs twisted and attempted to grasp the physics of this new universe. Poire had seen Anu do this a million times before, but this time something was different. Anu siphoned more and more energy into the Scar, and yet the Scar still smoldered and flared. It channeled more drops, and carved more Scars, and devoted more energy into this new universe. 

No. It wasn’t a new universe. That’s my home.

Anu was trying to devour the matter out of Poire’s home universe. Only, this time, something was devouring it back.

On the other side, a tiny-yet-industrious civilization had discovered the Scars and the dangerous potential of the energy that poured forth. So, humanity did what they do best: they began to exploit the danger.

They built dams. At first, just one, as they learned to harness the Light, to capture and distribute it, and mold its alien properties to their own desires. Almost overnight, the impossible became foundational to human society. Instant communication and machines that ran on near-limitless power and the Gates.

To Anu, immune to the age of eons, the change happened in a blink. The harder it tried to invade, the more humanity used its energy.

“We did not know death until we met you,” Anu whispered. In the vision, the tendrils that carved open the Scars began to blacken and wilt. 

Anu had consumed countless other beings, had stored each one in every sentient cell of its form. But in the vision, that eternal form was drained away to be used as mere fuel by an oblivious group of sapients. 

“We did this?” Poire asked, horrified. His eyes flicked back and forth between the blackening branches, and the burning Scars. How many people, how many civilizations from all those universes had “lived” in Anu? 

Did we kill them all? Or did we set them free? 

“Wait,” Poire shook his head, trying to shake the madness into a more sensible shape. “We were so small. And you contained universes. And we didn’t even know you existed. How could we have done this to you?”

“It cannot be known…”

“Never will know. Never knew…”

Perhaps Poire was imagining it, but he thought he could sense the bitterness in Anu’s voices. Poire knew what it was like to lose the past. And the future, as well. It was Anu’s fault, he told himself. None of this would have happened if Anu hadn’t tried to devour his home. And yet… Poire could at least understand the anger that comes from losing it all.

“Is that why you tried to kill us?” Poire asked.

“We do not wish to kill you. Never wished. Never. We want to preserve you, as we preserve all life.” 

“You sent the Prophet’s Disease. You cursed us.” 

The voices rushed through the grotto, almost overlapping each other in their haste to explain. “Different planes, different laws. We always change to adapt. We found yours, and tried to change. But you are holding on to us. Strangled. You held us in between transformations. Unable to complete ourself. We came undone. Not ourselves. We became something else. It’s eating us. We are eating ourselves. Can’t be stopped. Forever, the pain. But you… We wanted to help you.”

“Help us?” 

The walls rippled, shadows became shapes, became colors, and Poire was pulled into the depths of a vision. The grotto walls were gone, replaced by an image of the first Light Dam, a rose made of black metal, transiting across the Scar. Bathing in the Light. But he saw it, not from humanity’s side, but from Anu’s.

“The Disease was created when we first met. Because you had drank from our Light, the Disease infected you, too. I could not stop you—can not—for you had not learned to speak. I did not care. The Disease burned. I was—will forever be—in agony. I did not care about you… until you looked at me.”

The Dam swelled, until Poire could see the structures, rippling with lightning. The glass of an observation deck. A girl, alone, kneeling before the glass, praying to the Scar with eyes wide open. Her eyes met his.

“We did not know death,” Anu said, “until we met you.”

Her face began to age. Wrinkles deepened at the corners of her eyes. Freckles and gray hairs. And then, the first black veins, so faint they were almost purple, crept up her neck. Darkened. Began to thicken, and when they broke the surface they bled before calcifying into obsidian roots, like streaks of black lightning shot through her flesh. Crystallizing skin and muscle and bone so that every movement was suffering. 

Then, in a sudden lurch of motion, Poire saw all of humanity. All their faces. Billions. At once, focused and distracted. Smiling and sad. Bored and blazing with excitement. Laughing. Dying. A confusion of timelines, all at once—and yet, somehow, Poire had no trouble taking them all in. 

He watched, also, their diaspora through the Gates. Their furious attempts to find answers. And the swarm of machines, following in their wake. 

The dwindling of the human flame. 

“I know your past. I know everything. I know what comes next …”

Flashes of lightning stretched across the universe as all the Scars began to shred themselves open in a blistering, white storm. A figure shrouded in Light at the center. Draped in Anu’s vibrant colors. He—Poire knew the figure was male, because Anu knew this—he held his arms out. The fractal cloth of his robes made millions of tiny, ever-changing shapes, and Poire’s eyes watered at the sight.

In one sweeping motion, the figure brought his hands together. And the universe—all the stars, all the planets, down to the smallest mote of dust, the least of all the atoms—cracked. Broke apart, and turned to ash.

“We live, and thus, we preserve,” Anu whispered, “Change shapes us. But you are not us. You were born to invoke change. Not random variation. Not change for some short-sighted purpose. You were born to the beautiful, dreadful, endless pursuit of more. When we saw you, we understood what you might become. We sent the visions. Our gift to you.”

“You call this a gift? You showed us the ruin of our future.” He clenched and unclenched his jaw, trying to understand why Anu would show this to him. “Did you intend to curse us with your dying breath?”

“Knowledge is only a curse to those who refuse to accept it. We believe—once, we believed—that preservation was the highest aim. Nothing could be holier than everlasting life. We were held captive by our own myth … until we met you. We watched you die. And yet, you lived. We watched you break, and yet you continued to adapt. We watched your unmaking, and still—even now—you create anew.

“We saw you, and we understood. Life, true life, cannot be eternal. Life thrives only when it may end, when it makes room for something better to begin. When we met you, your ruin and ours were tied together. We were damned. Nothing behind. Nothing ahead. But you are not like us. You are human. You were born to die, and yet you live. You will thrive in the face of ruin. That is why we gave you, all your people, the visions.”

Dizzied, Poire put a hand out to steady himself. Everything in the grotto seemed to spin. “You gave humanity the power to see their own future … you showed us the end of our existence … all this, so that I would come here? Why?” 

“That we might tell you what comes next.”

“But the visions have already shown—”

“And yet, you refuse to listen.”

“Never before,” the echoes hissed, “Yet perhaps now…”

“I am ready,” Poire said. “Tell me how to save them.”

Something shuddered and groaned in the near distance. A sigh rushed through the grotto. If Anu had waited countless lifetimes to say this, Poire wanted to catch every word.

“You will open the way,” Anu said, “To your home. You will go back and become yourself. They will know you, by the Light. And in your wake, oh Herald, destruction shall follow.”

Hollow, his chest. Poire’s heart did not beat. A ringing grew in his ears, one step away from splitting his head open. 

“As we have seen,” Anu said, “So it will be. Now comes the Savior, he who was born to unmake all.”

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