Let There Be Light: Sc.01 [Part 1: So They May Shine]


                                            >Light.

                                            >Soft, gentle warmth reaching down from a flawless blue sky to caress your face.

                                            >You sit up, then stand.

                                            >A vast stretch of rolling hills surrounds you, grass rippling in the breeze as far as you can see.

                                            >The sun is canted at an angle suggesting mid-afternoon. You orient yourself accordingly, and start heading what should be due east.

                                            >You have no idea where you are, or how you got here, but if you don’t find water-

                                            >”So you are finally awake.”

                                            >A calm, motherly voice sounds inside your head and from all around you, shimmering the grass with her words.

                                            “Who are you? Where am I?”

                                            >”Where you are is for you to decide. I have prepared this place for your arrival. It can be whatever you desire. As for me-”

                                            >A swirl of smoke coalesces into a form on the next hill forward from your own. Smoky grey against the sky’s bright blue, flame-orange against the emerald grass. Equine in silhouette, but with avian wings, and a long, slender, upward-curving horn thrust out from her head. Her mane and tail are the smoke from a night’s campfire, filled with drifting sparks and twinkling stars.

                                            >”You may call me The Empress.”

                                            “Oh. Uh. Wow. Hey.”

                                            >You hesitate for a moment. Empress? What are you supposed to do around royalty? You’ve never met one before. At least, from what you remember, which is nothing, at least about yourself.

                                            >You perform a jerky, halting bow.

                                            “Er, Your… Majesty?”

                                            >You look up, even still bent over, which you realize too late is probably a breach of etiquette.

                                            >But she’s smiling at you, warm as the flickering flames of her neck creating her mane. “You may rise, Nameless One.”

                                            >You do so, but meet her smile with a confused grimace.

                                            “How did you know?”

                                            >”You are not of this realm,” she says, starting to walk towards you with a smooth, elegant gait. “I suspect-” she hangs on that word, as if it’s as foreign to her as a name is apparently to you- “that you are some sort of projection, an instance of a different being. Perhaps it jealously guards its own identity, and is loathe to share.”

                                            >She never broke her pace, and never left the ground, but has crossed over a hundred feet in just the span of that sentence, without having dipped into the valley between her hill and yours. She seemed much larger than you in the distance, but her eyes are now exactly the height of yours. “I know even less about whoever that may be than I know about you, but I accept their [Emissary/Gift/Kin] with gratitude.”

                                            “Their what?”

                                            >She tilts her head. “Hrm? No matter. I apologize; I am still wrestling with your… limitations.”

                                            “What do you mean my limit-”

                                            >Your eyes dart to what you assumed was a crown, but see it is in fact a halo of sorts, a great ring of light suspended behind her head, perfectly perpendicular to your axis of vision. Its points are twelve crystals of infinite complexity, six large and six small, spaced evenly. Your eyes less lose themselves to them, and more are sucked in by force.

                                            >The space within the ring is similarly flat, but contains within it the entirety of the three-dimensional cosmos, you realize even as it everts to envelop you.


                                            >Before you is a colossal being. What was a body is now a framework, twisting bundles of flaming filigree binding together all of time and space, the patterns they sketch across The Empress’ infinities fractal in their complexity and beauty.

                                            >Her mane does not contain stars, it creates them; what appeared to be comforting flames reveal themselves to be forges of stellar creation, the smoke they expell vast nebulae, the stars twinkling through them really being born within.

                                            >To look through her body is to see past filaments of dark matter, along which are strung the stars of uncountable galaxies. The distance between her chest and hips is the span of the universe, with the filigree-fire tendrils of her skin and dark matter-energy spars of her alien skeleton terminating at each of those hips in impossibly large black holes, consuming all light.

                                            >Her head leans down towards you, driven by invisible muscles contracting and rippling the fabric of reality.

                                            >Her mouth opens, slight at first, a rictus grin of teeth that rend matter into energy, before widening to reveal a tongue that reverses the process, a wave of subatomic matter tapping the roof of her mouth before slamming into the floor of a gaping maw that leads to perfect oblivion, yawning before you, threatening to swallow you, lips of raw radiation crashing against each other around your tiny, fragile form-

                                            >”-p”

                                            >Light. A flawless blue sky, interrupted by the sights and sounds and smells of a summer’s night campfire, as her mane drifts around her face and its concerned expression.

                                            >”Stop.”

                                            >What should be the ensuing silence is anything but, ripped and sawed by your staccato panting. You’re shaking so bad that you’d already fallen over, sitting on your rear, only trembling arms barely keeping your head from the grass below.

                                            “Whatwasthat whatareyou pleasedonthurt-”

                                            “I have assumed this form for your comfort. Please do not try to see past it.”

                                            >You look into her eyes. Larger than your own, but not particularly out of scale. Okay the glowing is a little strange-

                                            >-vast rings of pure solid iron, each encircling a nova, heated to incandescence by the emissions of those dying stars-

                                            >-but fine, okay, no more than meets the eye. God it.

                                            >You mean, ‘Got it.’

                                            >Right.

                                            “Alright. Sorry I just… I had no idea.”

                                            >The concern does not leave her face, but she once again adopts the warm smile she greeted you with, and lowers herself to the ground beside you.“Do not apologize. I am sorry I cannot do better.”

                                            “No, it was terrifying but… Awesome. In every sense of the word.”

                                            >Her smile widens, this time chasing away the last of her worry. “Thank you. Take your time to recover, but we have much work to do.”

                                            “Work?”

                                            >”As I said; I prepared this space for you. I wish to make it your reflection. Together we will create a world to your specifications, so you may leave your mark on this realm. I have all of the cosmos as my plaything, but this piece of it is yours.”

                                            >You lower yourself to lay your back against the grass to think about it, basking in the sensation of the cool grass and the warm heat of The Empress’ mane.

                                            >An entire world?

                                            >Of your own?

                                            “Why me?”

                                            >The Empress blinks.

                                            >“I am sorry?”

                                            “I said why me? How am I so special as to earn this right?”

                                            >The Empress pauses for a moment, considering. Then, “Because, Nameless One, there is nobody else. You are the first living thing in this realm, but I would not have you be the last.”

                                            >Nobody.

                                            >Not even, you realize, her. If you’re the first, she didn’t count herself.

                                            >You’re not sure what your face revealed of your thoughts, but she must have noticed. “Come now, do not think like that. Perhaps you were sent as my, what is your concept of this. My muse.”

                                            “Fine, then. But I can only grant you concepts from my… wherever I’m from. Real or fantasy, but probably not really mine. I’m not that creative.”

                                            >”This is acceptable. Perhaps even preferable.”

                                            “Alright. On one condition then.”

                                            >She draws her head up as you prop yourself back up on your hands again, but she doesn’t stand, staying with you at ground level. “We will hear it.”

                                            >”It will be your world too. If I give it form, you give it function. A piece of your power, the slightest sliver, distributed across it and among the creatures it hosts. I want to make a world of magic.”

                                            >She smiles once more. “Consider it done.”

                                            >She looks to the sky, then closes her eyes.

                                            >Nothing happens.

                                            “Uh.”

                                            >Silence.

                                            “Hello? Your, uh, majesty? Highness? Imperial whatever?”

                                            >She does not stir. “Yes,  Nameless One?”

                                            "What’s up?”

                                            >”Ah. You cannot perceive the process. Will you allow me to alter your sight for a moment?”

                                            “Is it gonna scare the shit out of me again?”

                                            >”I hope not.”

                                            “Hit me.”

                                            >The ground falls away around you, leaving you on a hemisphere of dirt. The air is encapsulated in a shimmering dome of force. Beyond is not chaos; that’s as far from the truth as possible. But it is order on a scale so immense that no sense can be made of it.

                                            >The universe as a machine.

                                            >Clockwork and pneumatics and torsion-flexed frameworks ticking and turning and moving in impossibly precise ways, exact forces applied over incredible distances, a contraption of dull iron and shining gold and iridescent bismuth and silvery osmium, illuminated by the fluorescence of every noble gas.

                                            >You may be the first living thing in this ‘realm’ as she called it, but only by a strict definition.

                                            >The ‘realm’ itself moves as if alive. A living machine.

                                            >The Empress’s eyes are still closed, but you can see through her lids somehow, those glowing-hot metal irises now gears, cogs imparting force from her mind to the outside world.

                                            >You follow her ‘gaze’, and can see a piece of this machine in exploded detail.

                                            >Pinions and spiral springs and toothed masses of every size and shape are suspended out from a void, a missing chunk of the great machine.

                                            >Fires of every color surround pieces, reshaping them, or replacing them entirely.

                                            >When The Empresses’ work is done, she puts together the new sub-assembly, and you can see it has three rhomboid voids.

                                            >From the halo behind her head drifts three of the twelve crystals, one of the large and two of the small, dropping those that remain to her from six each to five and four. The ring breaks, now simply an arc, tapered at its ends where no crystals remain.

                                            >Those freed crystals insert themselves in the gaps in this sub-assembly, and The Empress places it into the gap she removed its predecessor from.

                                            >The vision fades, and she opens her eyes, looking back to you. “It is done.”

                                            “Did that hurt? I hope you didn’t weaken yourself at my request.”

                                            >”Infinity less a fraction is still infinite, Nameless One.”

                                            “Ah, I guess so. Alright, I’ll be your muse. Another request, though.”

                                            >”Two, now? Do you not deal honestly?”

                                            “No, no! This is just a courtesy, I guess. An exchange. I don’t want to call it a binding, but back home we’d talk about dealing with fae and-”

                                            >The Empress’ blank stare is enough to put you back on track.

                                            “Okay, uh, to the point. You call me Nameless One, like an epithet. And you yourself only by a title. It feels kinda weird, being honest. I’d prefer if I had a name, but I know nothing about myself. And I’d like something to refer to you more casually, if we’re going to be working together.”

                                            >”What do you propose?”

                                            “Well, if I’m going to stop being nameless, I need you to give me a name. And I’ll give you one. It’ll be an abstract sort of connection between us, but it’s still a connection.”

                                            >She stares at you, but not blankly as before. You recall those gears in place of her once again smoothed irises, turning with thought.  After a few seconds, “Okay. You may go first.”

                                            “Alright. I’ll call you, hrm. You’re all of space and time, and everything between everything is… black. I’ll call you Noire. Black, but it’s also a musical term back home. A quarter note. The base component of common time, like your components of your, uh, realm. And most importantly,”

                                            >You grin.

                                            “It’s short.”

                                            >She inclines her head, smiling. “Yes. I think it is fitting.”

                                            “Alright, your turn.”

                                            >”As you say, short is sweet, and I appreciate the complexity of multiple meanings. Nameless One, you are then Anon. Anonymous shortened, but also a moment. A moment of time, of space, a moment of another being, sent to me.”

                                            “Anon. Yeah, I can do that.”

                                            >”Good.” She stands, then turns away from you, her smoky tail whispering by, enveloping you for a brief moment – heh – in passing. “Then stand, if you can. Let us begin shaping this world.”