000
[Designation;Story:Begin]
[Mode;Offering:Insufficient]
[Mode;Sleep:Begin]
001
The voidyacht shuddered, slamming into the coalesced matter of the worldwreck and bouncing off like a ball thrown against a wall. The impact rattled the ship, metallic screeches reverberating through the frame like screams for help.
“Oh no, no, no you don’t…” the man at the helm muttered, his knuckles white on the controls. “Hold together… just a little longer. No falling apart now.”
“Can’t you stop hitting everything?!” He heard a woman’s shriek coming from inside the yacht. Her cry was followed by the frightened sobs of a child.
“I’m trying!” he yelled over his shoulder, louder than the tortured wails of the hull. “But the gravity—and these things—they’re everywhere!”
The Void itself seemed to mock his words, twisting and writhing like a living thing. Regions of warped space blinked in and out of existence, dragging the ship through pockets where gravity shifted violently and the laws of physics fluctuated unpredictably. The tired normalcy generators strained against the chaos, barely keeping livable conditions intact within the ship’s fragile shell.
“What things?!” the woman demanded as she appeared in the cockpit doorway, her hand gripping the frame for balance. She reached up to brush her hair from her eyes, only to stagger when the ship lurched, nearly throwing her off her feet.
“These things!” the pilot snapped, his hands racing over the controls. “Thrust vectoring… half power… adjust twenty degrees—no, twenty-five!” Sweat dripped from his forehead as he fought to stabilize the ship, his every move a gamble. Outside, the Void folded in on itself, looping endlessly. A single miscalculation could twist their foresection into their aft—or worse.
Time itself bucked and writhed, leaping forward in fits and starts, as mad as a hare in an endless March. Each second could feel like hours — or could pass unnoticed entirely.
“Go watch Cassilda!” the pilot barked, not daring to look back.
The woman hesitated, her lips set in a tight line, before disappearing into the ship’s interior. He added his wife and daughter’s safety to his growing list of slim hopes – with the “survival” being set at its top.
Dead stars spun past the ship like a mass of jagged shards of glass, their gravitational pull clawing at the yacht, threatening to drag it into their frozen, explosive remnants. The pilot’s heart raced as his eyes flicked to dimming lights on the console: energy reserves critical. One more burn, maybe two, and they’d be adrift—helpless prey to the Void.
Cassilda’s sobs echoed faintly through the cabin, but now another sound joined them. A melody. His wife’s voice hummed, quiet and fluid, hauntingly calm amidst the chaos. It slipped into his thoughts like water, unnervingly serene. He blinked rapidly, brushing away tears he had no time to shed. Not now. Focus.
The sudden realization sent shivers down his spine – there was another voidyacht flying towards them on the collision course. Where did it come from? How could he not notice it? With his ship’s energy reserves critically low, his ability to perform evasive maneuvers were extremely limited…
He gave off a light burst from the fore maneuvering thrusters – and the ship in front of them mirrored his actions. Why? What was their pilot thinking? Had he gone mad?
The pilot’s mind raced, discarding plans faster than he could form them. The yacht loomed larger in the viewport, a blocky Halsttadtian design, identical to his own. Identical? Or possibly the same? Then it suddenly shimmered. Distorted itself. Waves rippled across its hull as if it was a mere reflection on the surface of the water. A reflection? His stomach churned. How?
Beyond the reflection, a liquid sphere glinted faintly against the dark background of the Void. Water? If they were lucky. At this speed, it might as well be steel.
His hands flew over the console, entering what might be the ship’s final commands. Engines fired, the yacht groaning as it swung aft-first toward the sphere. Heat roared from the exhaust, vaporizing the liquid into a steaming haze – and slowing the yacht just enough.
The sphere splashed and hissed against the hull as the ship burned through, its outer shell glowing white-hot like a needle going through the block of ice.
The engines sneezed one last time, then fell silent. The voidyacht was in freefall now, plummeting aft-first toward whatever awaited in the sphere’s center.
002
Cassilda felt the warm air on her face, the wind flowing from the crystallized forest where deep amber-colored trees filled a valley between two crumbling mountains. This wind was always pleasant, gentle and warm. Not like the gusts from the opposite side – where cold green fires danced across a grey wasteland and ash blew endlessly into the shimmering sky.
Dad told her they were living inside a ball of water. She couldn’t quite understand it – how they weren’t swimming in it. Instead, the water seemed to hover far above, forming a strange skyscape where massive tidal waves rolled upside-down, colliding with each other before crashing down as torrential rain.
Cassilda took a deep breath, letting the warm wind linger on her skin, then turned to face the remnants of the old voidyacht that now served as her home. The aft section of the ship had taken the brunt of their crash onto the worldwreck, but the fore remained intact enough to provide shelter. Her father had even managed to scavenge a few nearly depleted fuel cells and rigged them together into a source of power.
Her mother insisted the most important use of that power was the small hydroponic plantation she had set up in one of the larger surviving sections of the ship. Cassilda often found her there, hunched over trays of sparse, struggling plants salvaged from the survival kit. For her mother, nurturing these fragile shoots was everything.
Her father disagreed. To him, the hydroponics bay was necessary but secondary. Every waking moment he hunched over the voidyacht’s gutted communications array, fiddling with frayed cables and malfunctioning systems to try and send a signal through the water sphere and into the Greater Void, calling for help. Somewhere out there, he believed, someone would hear them. Someone would rescue them from this broken shard of a destroyed universe.
Her mother was absorbed by the farming, her father kept experimenting with the ship’s systems… and that left Cassilda on her own, almost completely alone in this twisted world under the waves in the sky, colored by the dim light of two distant suns, one deep red and one bright blue.
003
Cassilda sat in the corridor just outside the place she grew to call “her room”. She used some old box with almost unrecognizable markings as a chair and was trying to do something about the tears and holes in one of her shirts. They were living on this shard of the worldwreck for long enough that the wear started showing on their clothes – and there probably wasn’t a place to buy a new shirt anywhere that wasn’t months or even years of travel away.
So, the girl came up with an idea to cut some of the various cloths she scavenged around the yacht and sew it to her old shirt, turning it into a colorful scrapbook. It was tedious work, but she really liked how the result was coming up.
The loud clang of the metal surprised her, the needle and the shirt almost falling out of her hands. It was coming from up above in the cockpit where her father was working. Did something happen to him?
“Dad?” she called out, putting the shirt away.
“Argh, it’s no use!” she heard his voice. “The circuits are fried completely!”
“Dad, are you okay?” Cassilda repeated.
“I am, I am.” He brushed her off, appearing in the main corridor of the ship, climbing the ladder from the top. “The comms array is now completely dead though. Unless, of course, I will find some corbomite couplings lying around… I think there were some somewhere near where your mom is…”
“You are not touching those!” Cassilda’s mother declared, coming out of the hydroponics bay, wiping her hands with dirty cloth. “They keep the water circulation running, and they will stay in place!”
“But I need them to establish communication with the outside world!”
“Even if you manage to send off the signal, how many years do you think it will take for it to reach any civilization?”
“And how many years are you planning on growing your sweetroots in the hydroponics!?”
“As many, as necessary!”
“Necessary for what? For us to grow old? For Cassilda to see us…” father glanced at the girl, then shifted his stare back at his wife. “Tell me. Tell me, do you really want her to live the rest of her life… alone… on our graves?”
“You… You dare!?” the mother was furious. “You dare to use our daughter against me? You and your mad projects… Even if I let you take the parts you want, what do you expect us to eat? We’ll be gone before any help reaches us!”
“We can grow our food outside! Like humans always did!”
“Are you insane? We’re on the worldwreck! Can you even imagine what can hide under the surface of it? Do you really want to go digging there?”
Cassilda grabbed her unfinished shirt, jumped off the crate, and ducked back into her room, closing the door firmly behind her. But it didn’t stop the sound.
She flung herself onto the bed, pressing her hands to her ears. It didn’t matter. The arguing in the corridor pierced through, mingling with the yacht’s constant groans and the whistle of wind through its battered hull.
And then, beneath it all, came the faint whispers. Barely audible, like a distant breeze brushing her ears, repeating words she couldn’t recognize or understand.
004
[Received;Offering:Insufficient]
“In… sufficient?” Cassilda muttered. The whispers that she always heard in the back of her mind, now grew louder, almost blinding. The words seemed to take form – shimmering bright yellow shapes that danced in her mind’s eye. She shook her head. None of it made sense.
“What did you say, dear?” her mother asked, crouching beside her as she planted another sweetroot into the freshly dug soil.
Dad sighed heavily, shoveling another mound of dirt onto the plant without looking up.
[Received;Offering:Insufficient]
“Again?” Cassilda muttered.
“What’s happening?” Her mom stood abruptly, wiping dirt from her hands. “Is something wrong?”
“Mom… it keeps saying it. The offering. It says…” Cassilda paused, gripping the soil. “Not sufficient.”
Her mother frowned. “Who says, darling?”
“The voice.” Cassilda glanced at her nervously. “Can’t you hear it?”
Her mother crouched beside her again, giving her a soft, worried smile. “Sweetheart, I can hear you. I hear myself, and I hear your dad when he’s yelling at the comms array like always.” She gestured toward her husband. “But there’s no other voice here. No one but us.”
“But there is!” Cassilda insisted, her voice rising. “I hear it every time you plant something! It always says the same thing – nothing’s sufficient!”
Her mother’s smile faded, replaced by quiet concern. “Cassilda –”
But Cassilda had already squatted down, pressing her hand to the soil. The cool dirt felt strangely warm beneath her touch, like a heartbeat she couldn’t feel.
“What does it mean, mom?” she asked, her voice soft and frightened. “What’s an offering? Why does it keep saying it’s not enough?”
005
“We need to talk.” Cassilda could hear her mother addressing her father. Mom even climbed the ladder to the cockpit, something she never did before.
“What’s happened?” The father replied.
“Didn’t you hear? You were there with us!” Mom almost hissed. “We need to talk about Cassilda. And her… voices.”
“I’m sure it’s just the kid’s thing…” Dad said without any certainty to his voice. “I guess she’s just too lonely here and so imagines that there’s someone else…”
“How can you be so dismissive!”
“Dismissive?”
“Had you notice how often she walks away alone? In this place, this worldwreck? Aren’t you in the tiniest bit afraid of how it might affect her?”
“And what would you propose…?” Said dad with a heavy sigh. “Should we lock her inside her room? Cut her off from the outside world, so scared that she might go mad from looking at the alien landscapes that we will definitely turn her insane from isolation?”
“You’re insufferable!”
“And you worry too much.” Dad said, trying to ease the tension. “Let’s just talk to her about it… Let’s try to convince her it’s just something that happens in weird places like this one. It’s all in her head, right?”
“Hrmph!” Cassilda heard that her mother began to climb the ladder down and hurried into her room. After what she heard, she had absolutely no desire to meet her face to face.
She wasn’t insane! She thought, lying in her bed. The voice was real!
But it probably was only in her head. Or maybe it was something that adults can’t hear? She remembered her dad once told her about people gradually losing the ability to hear certain sounds with age. What if it was something like that?
She tried to listen to it. Tried to discern the cryptic whispers from other sounds around her. The sound of her heartbeat – fast and loud, far from calm. The hot sparkles hitting against the metal up above – where her father have been cutting something again. Nervous steps and heavy sighs of her mother – she was probably thinking about how to talk to her daughter about everything that’s happened. Those were the usual sounds on this ship – those and others: the wind, the hull plating scratching against itself, and so on.
The whispers hid under layers and layers of sounds. They always existed and always will be. Cassilda was absolutely sure they weren’t “just in her head”. It’s like she was swimming in the sea of sounds and those quiet eerie muted words were deep down at the very bottom. From where she was right now, she could only just barely touch them.
Do I need to dive in?
She could hear and see them clearly outside…
But is it because she was closer to them or because they grew stronger after receiving “the offering”?
Do I want to dive in?
She held her breath, trying to sink into this boiling sea of sounds. One by one what was previously loud became quiet, fell away as the grey ash falling from the skies.
The whispers grew closer.
The whispers became clearer.
[Perception;Hightened:Detection]
[Receiver;Designation:Unknown]
[Request:Self;Designation]
[Accepted;Designation:Cassilda]
Her lungs burned, demanding air, and she couldn’t hold it any longer. Cassilda gasped, coughing violently as she came back to herself. The whispers dissipated, retreating into the hum of the background.
006
The seasons didn’t truly change on the worldwreck. The planet didn’t rotate; only the shifting paths of the twin suns through the ever-shifting liquid skies marked the passage of time. Yet as the wind from the blazing wastes blew more frequently, the temperature dropped, as if winter had managed to claw its way into this lifeless world. Ash swirled in the air, a mockery of snow, settling in gray drifts over the barren ground and clinging to the jagged remains of their ship. Even the warm glow of the crystallized trees in the Amber Grove dimmed, their light fading like dying embers.
Cassilda heard her father muttering curses at the weather as he worked on the voidyacht’s circuits. No matter how much he cleaned, the ash found its way into every crevice, riding the gusts that howled through gaps in the hull.
Her mother had her own complaints. The cold soil made planting nearly impossible, and frustration crept into her voice with each failed attempt. At some point, she revived her old demands, insisting her husband give up the corbomite couplings for the hydroponics bay.
“We need them for the plants!” her mother’s voice carried through the ship.
“And we need them to send a signal!” her father shot back, his words no less tense.
Cassilda stayed silent, watching the ash swirl through the cracks in the hull. Their arguments were as constant as the winds, the background noise of life in their broken world. The only moments that felt close to happiness came when her mother sang. Her voice carried a soothing warmth, soft enough to calm the howling winds and, at times, even draw Cassilda’s father from his endless tinkering. He would leave the cockpit and his broken machines behind just to listen.
Yet even those fleeting moments happened less and less often as the time of winter ash passed by. One day she heard her mother coughing. At first, Cassilda thought nothing of it – just exhaustion, maybe, or a reaction to the ash-filled air – but the cough lingered, deepening with each passing day.
The mother grew tired more and more easily – and soon she started spending her time in bed, with Cassilda tending to the crops in the hydroponics instead. Dad tried to do something, but what little medicaments still survived on the yacht were painkillers and bandages – all way past their expiry date.
007
“Mother says you will never get this thing working again…” Cassilda said, approaching her father at the ship’s cockpit. “That you will never send a signal into the Void.”
“She’s…” he looked at the copper brush at the end of what once was a power cable. “She’s probably right. I probably won’t.”
“So…” Cassilda was startled by her father’s honest admission that his efforts were futile. “So you know? You agree with her?”
“I do.” He nodded, putting the ruined cable away and wiping his hands off one another. “I agree and yet I can’t stop working on it… I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because…” He sighed, his shoulders sagging as if the weight of the entire yacht rested on them. “Because I need it to give some… some sense to my life. And don’t we all? Your mother was growing those plants, caring for them, blowing every spec of dust off their leaves. I desperately tried to fix this old scrap faster than it is falling apart. Even you… made our clothes from what little scraps you still could find, and then began running off to explore our surroundings…”
“You?” Cassilda blushed. “You know I’ve been wandering away from the yacht?”
“I know.” The father finally smiled. “Just don’t tell your mom. I won’t either. She worries too much – you know that. And now when she’s sick…”
“Yes… Thank you…” Said Cassilda, still blushing. “We shouldn’t worry her…”
008
Her father didn’t wake her up. She just woke up on her own, as usual, as every other time she woke up before. But that was the first time she heard his voice faltering, distorted by the uncried tears his pride didn’t let pass through his eyes.
Cassilda jumped off the bed and rushed towards where the father’s voice was coming from.
He kneeled on the floor beside his wife’s bed, holding on to her hand with both of his – and talked, telling her how much he loved her, how much she meant to him, how much he treasured the time they spent together.
In took Cassilda unforgivably long amount of time to notice the past tense.
To notice the grey ashen color of her mother’s skin.
To notice her eyes closed shut.
To notice she wasn’t breathing.
To fall on the cold hard metal floor and cry – for herself and her father both.
009
They buried her outside. Dad took all day digging the grave with the same shovel he used to plant the sweetroots. The soil wasn’t too hard – he just couldn't do it, having to take small breaks again and again to calm his grief-stricken heart.
Cassilda tried to help, but he sent her away instructing her to crawl into the broken parts of the ship and find a piece of cloth as long as possible.
She complied, without asking for details and squeezed herself into the narrow passage between the ship’s broken walls. She went further and further, way past the places she usually scavenged things from. The broken metal poking out of the bent walls had caught her clothes a few times, tearing more holes that would need patching up later, and sometimes even drawing blood – but she didn’t feel it, so focused on her search.
She emerged from the ship’s broken depth holding a folded bed sheet to her chest like it was the most precious thing. She couldn’t believe herself she managed to find a piece of cloth so big and so intact – and so clean…
They wrapped her mother’s body in it.
Then dad dragged it to the grave. Slowly. Painfully. Again, Cassilda tried to help – but neither her strength nor the emotional state were strong enough.
And so, the father had to do it alone.
And when he finally did it, sliding the body into the grave and shoveling ground back to cover it, when he almost finished, Cassilda heard the voice again.
[Received;Offering:Insufficient]
“What?” Cassilda froze as the yellow shapes of the familiar voice shimmered in her mind, pulling her out of her grief-stricken haze. She blinked, her heart pounding.
“What did you say?!” She screamed at the sky, her voice cutting through the howling wind. “An offering?! Is that all we are to you?!”
Her father flinched, stepping back from the grave as her cries startled him. “Cass… dear,” he said softly, his voice trembling. His hands hovered at his sides, uncertain whether to reach for her or let her grief run its course.
Cassilda dropped to her knees, tears streaming down her face like torrents of rain from the distant sky ocean. She clawed at the soil over her mother’s grave, her fingers sinking deep as if she could pull her back from whatever had taken her. Dirt crumbled under her nails, but she didn’t stop.
“It wasn’t meant for you!” she sobbed, her voice cracking. “She wasn’t meant for you!”
Her father dropped the shovel and put his hands on his daughter’s shoulders.
“Cass… dear…” He said, as always, not sure what to do in moments like this. “She’s gone now… It’s over. We should go home.”
“But… But…” Tears drowned Cassilda’s voice. She wanted to tell him, to explain what’s happened, what she heard, and how wrong it all was, but… He wouldn’t believe it. He didn’t believe her before, so why would he do it now?
It was all in her head, correct?
And so she forced herself to let go of the ground, to stand up and follow her father back to the place that she sometimes called her home.
010
The broken voidyacht’s hull Cassilda grew to call home met them as usual – with the smell of rust and dust and sounds of random metallic parts falling off, clanging and clinging on the metal floors and the loose hull plating wailing when tugged on by the wind.
All was the same as yesterday and the day before that. The same as usual.
Father walked along the corridor to the closed entrance of the hydroponics bay, but stopped himself half-step before them, his hand hanging awkwardly in the air instead of pulling the lever to open the doors. He hesitated for the brief moment then turned around and darted back past Cassilda and up the ladder into the cockpit, his comfortable space.
The girl stayed alone in the corridor, breathing in air filled with specs of grey ash. She tried to fight the wave of sadness that threatened to overtake her and throw her off her feet – and failed. It was too much. Staying here alone was too much. Anywhere but here.
011
Cassilda ran. A small, still childish figure pressed forward across the ash-covered field in front of the voidyacht’s hulk. Her father noticed her from the cockpit above, but his cries to stop were left unanswered. She ran fast, wind howling at her ears – blocking out every other sound.
The father cursed under his breath and almost flew down the ladder – but the girl had too much of a lead on him.
He still could see her: a small silhouette in the grey-filled air, growing smaller as she approached the jagged mountains and the amber forest.
Cassilda looked back – and to her it seemed like the cold green blaze of the wastelands had finally overtaken the hulk of their voidyacht, turning it into the swirling ash, blown by the wind. She winked – once, twice, – wiped her eyes with her hand and ran again, ran towards the warm glow of the trees, the only thing that was able to resist the coldness of the green fire and the grey ash.
When she found herself in the dark yellow shade of the crystallized forest, the wind got quieter, broken up by the branches and blocked by the mountains. She stopped, and…
[Detected;Candidate:True]
[Begin:Orientation]
It wasn’t a whisper anymore. It was loud. Blindingly bright. And it pointed her in a direction.
How did she know it? She didn’t know. But to her inner eye it was obvious: the voice was coming from under one of the mountains – and that is where she needed to go if she wanted to learn anything.
She went forward, avoiding the thorny crystals of the trees and trying not to step on the amber needless of what once was probably grass that covered the ground in patches. Soon she reached the foot of the mountain, towering above the landscape – a dark wall, stretching up high enough to seemingly touch the liquid skies.
The voice led her to the entrance of the cave – not a huge one, she needed to bend almost in half to enter – but she couldn’t see how far it was going. The far end of the cave was completely dark.
Yet the voice compelled.
The voice beckoned.
“Cassilda! Cassilda, where are you!
“Where are you? Come home!”
She heard her father’s voice coming from outside the cave - muted, distant, fading, irrelevant… It was now but a whisper in the background.
On the other hand, what once was a mere whisper grew clearer. Stronger. Closer. Demanding.
[Designation:Cassilda][Perception:Confirmed]
“Who are you?” She whispered on the move, determined to reach the end of the cave at all costs. “What do you want from me?”
[Vocabulary;Natural:Active][Now]
“I am not ‘who’ but ‘what’.” The voice said, devoid of emotion but much more natural-sounding than before.
Cassilda stopped, taken aback by the sudden shift in the speech pattern.
“Did the activation of the speech processor startle you?”
“Yes…” She agreed with the voice even if she thought it might've been impolite to do so. “Why couldn't you speak like that before?”
“You were too far away.” The voice said. “What you've heard before was a residual transmission of my internal processes… it is very unusual for the lifeforms to hear it.”
“So I'm not sick? Not… crazy?” She asked, continuing her walk, trying to hold on to the cold cave’s walls.
“I can't provide a medical analysis…” The voice became garbled and high-pitched for a second, then returned back to normal. “The semantic unit insists that the correct answer will be ‘you are absolutely not’. You are just special.”
“So why did you call for me?”
“I need a special lifeform to become my remote transmitter. To speak for me.”
“Why did you take my mother then?” The thought sent tears to her eyes.
“Did I?”
“You called her body ‘an offering’ like you did with the sweetroots.”
“Unfortunate. But I do not discern between different kinds of the organic matter.” The voice kept speaking in monotone. “That is exactly why I need guidance. A guide. An offering.”
012
As she ventured deeper into the cavern, the voice kept talking.
“What you call a worldwreck – is just a very small part of a Universe once full of life.
“It was a long time ago. In that ancient times when the gods floated across the Greater Void freely and humanity travelled the filament currents not in small fragile ships like you do now but in great arks and dreadnoughts, housing whole cities.
“It was the golden age of science, of culture and exploration.
“Unfortunately for humans it also was the golden age of war.
“As the power of creativity was great in humans back then, so was their potential for destruction.
“Whole universes were fought over and destroyed. Some in a fiery blaze of all-encompassing vacuum detonation. Others weakened and eaten whole by strange subatomic particles with hunger for any kind of matter.
“The Universe I was built in. The one that once was in the place of the worlwreck you know – it was torn apart by activation of the devices that came to be known as ‘reality mines’. Those were weapons that could change the very laws of physics in the volume of their ‘explosion’.
“My Universe was lucky. The destruction wasn’t immediate. It dragged on for the period of time approaching geological timespans. So, the inhabitants of it kept working, kept searching for ways to revert the impending destruction.
“I was built after the old gods left. After they became Absentee Gods, you might’ve heard of. The hand of the Law of Cycles can’t be moved by prayers now… And so, my creators bult the next best thing: me”
Accompanied by the constant monologue, Cassilda passed through the long corridor of the cavern and entered a large cave, lit by the red and blue lights hanging from its ceiling. In the middle of it an ancient altar stood – the runes carved into it to form the circuits of the machine.
“This is me.” The voice said. “Though you can say that this whole relatively stable area of space is me… but this altar, this specific place is my interface chamber. From here you will be able to control the rebuilding of the Universe anew.”
“Rebuilding?” Cassilda asked.
“That is my intended purpose.” The voice stated. “I was created to stabilize and rebuild the Universe destroyed by war. But when I became operational there was nobody left to perform the final activation. There was no final offering.”
“And I…” Cassilda stood still, looking around the cave, watching how the lights dimmed and glowed again, heard how the energy buzzed through the circuits, inlaid in its stone.
“Will I be able to bring my mother back?” She finally said what really was on her mind this whole time.
013
“That is possible.” The voice said. “If we begin with the pair of living sentient organisms already present in the fresh Universe, it will speed up its development greatly.”
“So, I just need to lay down on this stone bed…?” Cassilda made a step towards the altar.
“Stop!” She heard her father’s voice behind her back. He finally caught up with her. Surprising, considering he probably couldn’t see where she went after she entered the Amber Grove…
“Cass! Please… don’t go… don’t leave me!” He tried to reach out to her, but the shimmering force field cut off the cave with the altar, not letting him inside.
“I’m sorry, dad…” Cassilda said, without looking back. “I’m sorry but… I must do it. I understand now. The sense of my life here. The offering. It must be sufficient.”
With trembling hands and barely moving her shaky legs, Cassilda walked the stairs to take her place at the altar. An offering. A transmitter. A guide for ancient power.
She could feel it streaming through her. She knew it was now her power to use to shape and reshape the worldwreck into a new Universe again. She became almighty. All-knowing. All-powerful. Her mind expanded, encompassing the whole of the worldwreck and bleeding into the surrounding Void, becoming tangled with everything that was happening – becoming everything. And stopping being herself.
Yet in the last tiny bit of a second when she still was her old human self – when the human girl by the name of Cassilda Vex still existed – she did something. Something completely unnoticeable in the grand scheme of things. She shed a part of her, that part that made her who she was, and planted it into the pilot’s seat of the voidyacht.
And then there was light.
014
…Her father and mother stood on the surface of the worldwreck, watching as their old voidyacht, now repaired and restored, flies through the waters of the sky ocean, sending huge rings of waves roaring across the skies. Dad put his hand on the mom’s waist – and she laid her head on his shoulder.
The worldwreck had begun to change, sucking in the matter from the near Void and rebuilding the Universe around them…
…Cassilda Vex woke up in the cockpit of the voidyacht, adrift in the Greater Void. Behind her was a freshly formed bubble of the Universe’s threshold. The forward view glowed with the dim light of the filament currents.
Flying through the endless expanse of the Void, she felt that some parts of her psyche were missing – some parts and memories that she never knew existed. And when she tried to concentrate to find them, all that’s left was the quiet hum of the woman’s voice, singing to her softly the eerie and soothing song she knew she never ever heard but yet remembered by heart.
…Along the shores, the cloud waves break,
And twin suns sink behind the lake…
