(no subject)

[freosan]

When he wakes, he blinks several times and lifts his hand to his face to check before believing that his eyes are open. It doesn’t make a difference; he sees the same thing, either way. Closed or open, the world is black and silver, glowing lights like streams of stars in the sky and complete blankness. He can’t see colour. He can’t see shape. Just these lines.

Some of them bend inwards, and he hears a voice. “You’re awake.” It sounds familiar, somehow, and contains more pain than he can bear.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. Will someone please answer me, now? What. Happened,” he asked. Whatever they’d done to him – or he’d done to himself – he still didn’t know anything.

“You’re her,” the voice says. “You’re the new Kaos. Congratulations.” The voice is bitter, and has a trace of an accent.

“McClintock?” Solan asks in astonishment.

“It’s Infinity. Keene McClintock was… a placeholder. An incarnation waiting for a soul.” The voice is carefully blank. The lines bend into each other further, as if he’s trying to hide inside himself. Solan shakes his head.

“No, he had a soul, you just blasted it out of him. Like a river versus a creek,” Solan says. He doesn’t know why he knows that to be true, but it is.

“He was always me. I was not him, but he was me,” Infinity says.

“Whatever. How am I Chaos?” he asks, not willing to get into a fight with the man, not while he’s still getting used to this new kind of sight.

“Kaos. It’s a name. It’s given to the angel of Aquarius. You’re her reincarnation, but you’re special.” Infinity laughs. Solan is sure he’s not amused. He’s never spoken to someone completely broken before. Looking in his direction hurts – even the lines around him twist in ways that make his mind ache, and he can’t close his eyes.

“What, it gets worse?” he asks. How could it? This… was bad enough, did he have to have something more?

“She’s gone. That star was her creating the new lines of fate that closed the universes. But her – everything that made her her, all the personality, all the power, it’s gone. Twenty millennia and she dives into a star,” Infinity says. His voice sounds faraway and the lines – of fate, Solan supposes – drift in and out of focus. “But… she sacrificed herself for us. She was a fighter to the end,” he says. He sounds proud, but distantly so.

Solan stands up in a flash, needing the wings – he has wings now! Not again – to balance, or he’d have fallen flat on his face. “Idiot! She did no such thing,” he says. He can’t see, but he can remember her face. Somehow, he’d known. He had at least one memory of hers.

“And now you’re insulting her memory?!” Infinity’s lines are stronger, now, and brighter. They twist in shapes that remind Solan sickeningly of nooses.

“No. No, you guys are doing that fine on your own. She never sacrificed herself for a bunch of tradition- bound idiots.

“She did that for herself,” he says. He remembers the peace, and the calm that had settled over her mind as her body died. “Yeah, it helped you, but that wasn’t what she was trying to do. She was escaping.”

“You didn’t know her,” Infinity says, low and dangerous. “I was with her for ten thousand years. Don’t tell me what she was trying to do.”

“I AM her. Don’t tell me I’m wrong. I remember. You only knew her for ten thousand years in space. I knew her for four weeks on Earth. I saw her change.”

He knows he’s glaring and expects Infinity is too. If it comes to a fight, he’ll lose. He can’t quite figure out this kind of vision yet, and Infinity has generations of experience. But the other man – other angel, whatever – hasn’t even moved, though he’s gotten more intense. Maybe he really has lost his mind.

Something bends just to the left of his field of vision, such as it is, and he turns toward it. Another area of warp in the grid…

“Kaos, you’re awake. Thank goodness,” the voice says. It’s a girl’s, or a young woman’s. One of the angels. Maybe the purple eyed girl from before.

“My name’s Solan, dammit,” he growls.

“That’s… oh, but Infinity hasn’t told you? You’re not human!” She sounds thrilled about this, way too happy for Solan’s taste. “You’re the next angel Aquarius, Kaos’s reincarnation…. Surely you noticed the wings!” she says. Solan sighs – her voice makes his ears hurt.

He ignores her and steps forward, trying to find the door through which she’d come, and runs into a wall. “….Fuck. This isn’t gonna be fun, is it?”

Someone is right behind him suddenly, keeping him from falling over backwards. Someone a lot taller than that angel girl was.

“You should stay in bed.” Infinity.

Solan pushes away from him, his wing clipping the wall again. It hurts, but he ignores it. “Don’t fucking tell me what to do.” He puts a hand on the wall, follows it until he finds a doorframe, gropes around for the door handle. It’s hard enough to balance with these things on his back without being able to see what he’s doing, too. The lines are getting on his nerves, and he can’t shut them off.

“He’s right, though, you’re in no shape to be up and about. You’ve just had a transformation, you don’t have Kaos’s memories…” and there her voice goes sad “…and you’ve, um, lost your sight… I’m so sorry about that, but we couldn’t heal it, you were still human when it happened…” she says. She does sound genuinely sorry, but Solan doesn’t really care what she feels like. He isn’t even a hundred percent sure these people have human emotions, so why should he bother trying?

“Whatever, you didn’t care until I turned out to be useful, so let’s skip to where you tell me how I get rid of these things - ” he flaps the wings, almost lifting off the ground “- and I go home?”

Her lines freeze, like she’s been shocked into silence. “But… how can you want to do that? We need you here, there has to be an angel of Aquarius…” she says, the rising panic evident in her tone.

“As far as I’ve heard, the last one gave herself to make sure you didn’t need her, so I don’t really see the problem,” Solan says. He finally finds the handle, only to find that it’s locked. “Open this door, will you?”

“You shouldn’t go out, either. Stay here and we’ll take care of you,” Infinity says.

Solan snorts. “Yeah, sure. You can’t threaten my vision anymore, so if there’s any new and exciting torture you’d like to come up with please, tell me now.” His right eye itches; when he goes to rub at it he feels where the raven cut him. It’s a smooth scar now, not the scabbed mess he’d expected it to be. “How long was I out?” he asks.

The girl answers, though Infinity moves as if he’d like to. “Only a few hours. We healed the cut – oh, Bianca is better, by the way. That’s the lady whose knee you broke. She’s forgiven you,” she adds, as if she expects him to care.

“That’s good,” Solan says. ‘Will you please let me out of here?’ is becoming the question on his mind, but he doesn’t want to start begging. He doesn’t think it’d work, or he might, but as it is the remains of his dignity won’t let him debase himself for no result.

He leans against the doorframe, momentarily defeated. Infinity moves closer to him again – it’s strange, when he looks down at himself, he can see the way he warps space and the way Infinity warps space, and then how the lines bend in the space between them. He feels Infinity’s presence physically as soon as the two distortions begin to touch. Were he not busy panicking, he’d find that very cool.

As it is, not so much. “Kaos…” Infinity starts. Solan cuts him off with a curt, “It’s Solan.”

“Solan, then. You’re her reincarnation, even if you don’t want to admit it. This is your destiny. You should accept it,” he says. Solan is beginning to hate the sound of his voice. He moves away, slightly, still keeping one hand on the door. He doesn’t want to have to search for it again.

“Oh, I’m fine with the reincarnation thing, but I’ve never believed in destiny and I’m not planning to start now,” he says. Though the extra appendages and the brand- new type of vision seem to disagree with him.

Something shrieks above him and he looks up, instinctively, to see a tiny and very… dense, apparently, shape bending space. He barely has time to register that the sound is familiar before the eagle lands on his shoulder again.

He hears, in his head, a deep and scratchy voice say something to the effect of ‘Destiny believes in you’. He shakes his head, and the eagle flaps its wings, knocking him in the temple.

“That hurt,” he tells it. The same voice grumbles an apology.

“…Is this eagle talking to me?” he asks.

The girl’s voice is tinged with surprise. “Yes. He’s your companion. He’ll tell you what you need to know,” she says. The voice in his mind – the eagle on his shoulder – comments that at least he figured it out eventually, I’d thought it would take longer. He gives it an annoyed look, to which it butts its head against his skull.

“And now we’ll leave,” Infinity says. “You have a lot to learn, and this is the best place to do it,” he adds. “Goodbye.”

The warping that indicates his position becomes extreme for a moment, the lines almost touching, and then they abruptly straighten out again.

“Please, study well. The eagle will read to you,” the girl says. “Goodbye, Kaos.” He turns his head away from the motion of her transport. It makes him uneasy to watch the lines bend like that; he has a feeling something bad will happen if any of the parallel sets ever manage to touch.

He’s sure they’re gone, since he’s also sure, instinctively, that nothing – nothing living at least, he remembers running into a wall he hadn’t even suspected – could hide its presence from him. He slams his head back against the wall and slides down it, closing his eyes though it doesn’t make any difference. The eagle squawks its annoyance and launches, leaving painful gashes in his shoulder.

He wonders if she sees like this – no, saw like this. She was gone. He’d seen her death, and a more spectacular death she couldn’t have hoped for. Had she seen, before she died, the same starless, gridless blank space that had been filled by her star? She must have. He’d been her, in the dream where he’d killed a man.

It must have been… the guy who’d been Infinity before McClintock was. Solan hates thinking of him like that, the guy must have had a real name rather than a title, but he doesn’t know about it because Vega never thought in names. Probably why she couldn’t remember her own – if he were named ‘Kaos’ he’d try to forget about it too.

She was named Kaos. What the hell kind of name is that for someone who could be as still as rock when she wanted to be? For that matter, what kind of name is that for anybody? And Infinity is just as bad. He wonders what the others are called. Someone had mentioned a Bianca; that’s a fairly normal name.

Names are fucking important, and it annoys him to see them handed down. The quintessential, Platonic ideal of the name defining the person, he guesses. He isn’t having it. His own name…. means soul seeker, if he remembers correctly.

He can’t remember if that’s irony or not. Pretty nasty, either way. He gets a sudden chill.

No, he is not a fucking placeholder. He’s him. Which is not a deep and meaningful statement in most contexts, but it’s all he’s got to hold onto with his vision twisted and his number of limbs increased by two, so he does.

He hears something along the lines of ‘relax, kid, you’re going about this wrong’. His eyes snap open, not that it matters. The eagle’s voice bothers him, but more so…

“Was I thinking out loud? Shouldn’t do that,” he says. The eagle replies that he wasn’t, it’s just that he – the eagle – is empathic towards his owner.

“Oh, great, you can read my mind?” he asks. The eagle tells him something about the difference between empathy and telepathy, and how he’s only able to get the general trends of Kaos’s – glare – sorry, Solan’s thoughts, not the specific words or images. So if he’s thinking about identities – which he is, right now, and very intensely – the eagle can feel that, but can’t figure out who he’s thinking about.

“But you could tell I was coming to a wrong conclusion, is that it?” Solan’s getting sick of asking questions. He doesn’t think he’s had a truly normal conversation in ages. Something trivial, not about hallucinations, magic powers or the fate of the universe. Something in which the words ‘wings’ or ‘flying’ didn’t come up even once.

The eagle replies that Solan’s thoughts were headed to the conclusion that Solan and Kaos were distinct people, which isn’t a fact. Solan backhands the creature.

The eagle lands on his shoulder again, muttering words of disapproval.

“Yeah, okay, I shouldn’t’ve his something a tenth of my size. Fine, sorry. But you’re wrong, and I’m planning to prove that to you,” Solan tells him. He sounds like a whiny kid. Great.

The eagle tells him that he’s misinterpreting things. According to him, not all angels have a name when they get their wings, and they take on the title as their real name, but most don’t. Infinity is just doing it because all his memories of being McClintock have been absorbed by his memories of being an angel. Solan won’t have that, so technically, he could even pick a new title, if he wanted. It happened all the time in the old days.

“And old days for you guys must have been really old.”

Yes, the eagle tells him, the eagle himself was born almost a thousand years ago. Once angels get to a certain level of power, they don’t die, just get killed.

“Like she did,” Solan muses.

No, she killed herself, which is different. For one thing, all her powers were put toward that spell.

“Yeah…” Solan drifts off. Though he knows the eagle can still feel his thoughts, he can’t stop them coming; he’ll just have to learn to live with it.

Or not live with it. If he’s stuck here, suicide is definitely an option. Solan doesn’t believe in Heaven or Hell, and now he knows that reincarnation’s real… but wait, does that mean his soul would still be stuck here? He is, and apparently he’s got the same soul as Vega, which makes his brain hurt but is probably true…

Far, far away, in the network of lines, he can see a place where the straight parallels are warped, just a little, as well as curved; like a paper- clip bent straight – actually the first, irrational, thought he has when he sees them is that he’ll never see a paper- clip again. The second is more profound: that must be the star she made. It’s repaired the lines with hardly a break, and even as he watches he can see the bends smoothing out.

She gave all her power and all her memories for that, but it wasn’t for anyone else. It was for her. She just did it in a way that let it help others.

It was very neat. The way that she’d killed herself ensured that her future incarnations aren’t going to be burdened by her memories, or her powers. They’ll just be burdened by Solan’s. Whatever they’re going to look like.

He wishes he could turn the lines off, but he can’t. Whatever direction he looks in, there are bends in the framework, lines converging at infinity… he wonders if he can see to the end of the universe. Maybe. But he can’t walk around a room without running into walls.

The eagle tells him that he’ll be his eyes. He’s got better ones than most humans, after all.

The eagle heard that? Interesting. Or maybe just picked up on his general tendencies again, or maybe got the violent sense memory. Solan rubbed his forehead. He had a bruise for sure.

The eagle informs him that he’s also got a very interesting scar on his right eye.

“Interesting how?”

Because she had it, too, and so have all her predecessors.

That is interesting, and Solan doesn’t like it at all. It makes the whole thing seem more real in a way that the wings couldn’t hope to. Wings and seeing through walls are new, and impossible even though they’ve happened, so his mind isn’t letting him think about them all at once. Scars happen all the time, and come to it, he does remember Vega’s scars. Very well, actually. She would’ve been frightening enough without them but they did add an extra something.

“Wait, I thought the whole point of this was that she wasn’t gonna pass anything on to me,” he thinks out loud.

No, the eagle told him, just no memories or powers. There are certain established things that identify each angel – like the colour of their wings. Solan’s, by the way, are white, just like… Vega’s were.

That annoys Solan again. He’d thought it poetically fitting that she’d gone out in a blaze of glory in the truest sense. Instead, he finds that there are still pieces of her hanging on – to him, and isn’t that a disturbing mental image. He fingers the scar again, and feels his skin crawl.

He looks at the endless space around him, filled with depressions and warped places, and turns his head away from the deepest bends, trying to find something that looks blank. It is a futile exercise.

**************************

In another place, in a part of the palace where few have walked in many years, a group of angels gathers.

He is among them, but not among them. They shy away from him as if he could break, and he thinks in fact he might, should any of them touch him. He’d rather that he, too, could blast himself out of existence – but she wouldn’t want that. Whatever that boy who claims to have her soul says, she died saving them. He must live, in her memory.

So he will. Without another purpose save to watch, their enemy defeated, he will live remembering her. The others sense this, he thinks, and don’t try to engage him in the conversation centering around how they will keep their space sealed, and what precautions they can take to make sure they do not attract another enemy, and, most painful of all, how one angel could build that kind of power all on her own.

“In a past lifetime, she made a study of chaos. That’s when she finally figured out her name… She could have easily built that into her power,” someone comments. He hears the words as if from a long way away. It’s a man’s voice, but he doesn’t look up to see who spoke, or bother to identify the speaker.

“Yes, it’s possible, but she was still not that powerful magically. I can’t understand where she got the energy to create… that thing. It’s not even a proper star, it’s much too dense, it’ll implode any day now,” a worried woman’s voice says. The leader. She’s the only one who’d use proper as an adjective and mean it, and the fact that he can think this even now makes him mad at his brain.

“We have a lot of energy in us, you know. It builds up, over the reincarnations. It’s like a fission bomb… you know, the ones that the humans came up with a little while back… split the atom open and everything gets caught in the blast.” Male. The weather angel? He’s the one interested in technology, the rest of them just kind of ignore whatever the humans do. He could look up and make sure, but his head feels very heavy, and his feathers are in his way anyway and so he’d have to move his wings. He doesn’t want to; doesn’t want them to see his face.

Don’t they see that it was because she gave everything she had? He knows he’s the one who memorizes things, chants and totemic spells and ancient arts rather than simple elemental attacks, but that spell… it’s the strongest one an angel can use, and so it rips all one’s power out of one.

If he remembers correctly – of course he does, what is he thinking – the star was a kind of side effect. The real purpose of the spell, originally, was to give all one’s power away. Powers that did nothing divided in two bodies became deadly when combined into one. A death wish power- up, the weather angel called it once.

She’d been smart, to figure out what the side- effect of all that energy would be; he feels an immense pride in that. The ancient texts say things like ‘outpourings of light’, and since this was back in the days when such spells were common, the group as a whole has few memories of the time. The leader, the red- winged lioness, was the first to understand what they were doing to themselves, so she has a few, fuzzy memories. His fighter had none, and she still understood the spell better than he did himself.

“What should we do with Kaos?” asks the wolf- girl. He knows her voice immediately only because she always growls when she speaks. “Cosmos said… said that he didn’t want the wings. How can that be?” she asks. She sounds pleading, like he feels. He knows she’s always wanted to be more angel, less animal, and can’t comprehend why anyone would not want wings.

He can’t, either. Even if her memories are gone, her reincarnation should still have some of her fire, her need to fight. He can’t sense any of that from the boy. It bothers him, to see him looking so like her and not like her, staring at him from sightless eyes. No, it hurts him.

He vaguely remembers that he recently had the ability to empathize with people. It’s gone. The memories of his recent human life are overpowered by the memories of thousands of years of fighting. The human life is ephemeral, and therefore unimportant. Angelic life is a constant.

Unless one of those spells is used. They’re talking about it now, and he can feel them trying not to turn in his direction. They’ll want to ask him, of course; he knows this kind of thing. His familiar, the black goat, is standing in front of him, heading off questions. He can leave her to deal with it, she knows him well enough.

He drifts off into daydreams, thinking of the past.

Not ten minutes later, he hears a voice inside his head. It’s not any of the several familiars which lean against walls or flap circles through the air; it’s not even a telepathic call. It’s something that fills his head, leaving him feeling he has no room for his brain, and his personality is being pushed out through his eyes.

It makes him sit up sharply, causing the others to look up at him in surprise. He runs the words through his mind again.

It says, Our time is coming to an end.

He looks up, around, but sees no one who could have spoken. The other angels look at him as if he’s grown a third wing.

“Did no one else hear that?” he asks, sharply. He’s used the old speech, by accident or reflex, because that’s what the voice had used. Only the lady lioness and her sister, the raven- girl, understand him. The wolf- girl and the weather angel look baffled. The healers – the dark one with her white wings thankfully restored now that he is back and the pale one, the young mother – glance at each other and try to translate.

“Sorry. Didn’t anyone hear that?” he asks, in the newer tongue this time. They look more comprehending, but no less confused.

“We heard nothing,” the lioness says.

“Someone said… in my head. ‘Our time is coming to an end’,” he says, and he’s aware how it sounds, but they all know not to discount such events.

“What was the sound of it?” the dark healer asks. The hard question, of course.

“It was… imposing,” he settles on, after searching for a better synonym for ‘big’ for a few moments.

“A voice that filled your head?” the raven- girl asks. He nods. She and her sister glance at each other.

“Him,” they say in chorus.

The word generates more excitement in the group than a single pronoun should be able to. It’s deserved, though. ‘Him’. Thirteenth of the angels, the unnamed member of the zodiac, comparable in this place to the Cat in its own galaxy, He garners respect just by existing.

He shakes his head. “Why would He speak to me?” he asks, though he knows he won’t get an answer.

“He is mysterious,” the lioness says, and that’s as good of an answer as he will get. “‘Our time is coming to an end.’ I don’t like the sound of that,” she continues.

“He’s always right, isn’t He?” the pale healer asks, timidly. She’s young, and she hasn’t regained all her memories of Him. But she’s right. He confirms this, out loud.

“It’d be stupid to ask what that means,” the weather angel says, twirling his rainstick – a bad nervous habit, it must be pouring someplace on Earth – as he speaks. “But what the heck. It’s not like there’s no threat now. Just because that one hole’s sealed up – I mean, we’ve been fighting them for yonks. The rip only came a few hundred years ago, and we were necessary then. They’ll come back,” he finishes, the rainstick swishing.

“Perhaps not. We’ve killed five of them. Perhaps they won’t come back until they will not be a threat.” The dark healer looks frightened at her own words, but she says them with her usual smooth grace. Whispers float around the room.

The lioness speaks next, and what she says quiets them all. “…Perhaps it is time that we move on.”

*************

Solan breaks out of his reverie when the eagle shifts on his shoulder, cutting the skin again. He curses, but his heart isn’t in it. He’s becoming steadily more troubled by his new vision. It wouldn’t be so bad, wall- hitting aside, if he could shut his eyes somehow. But it doesn’t work at all. He thinks he might go insane very soon, if he hasn’t already. No. Don’t try taking that mental path, it won’t lead anywhere nice.

The eagle shifts again, telling him that she had long had that sort of sight overlaid on her vision, for the last eight millennia or so. He doesn’t know why she’d gotten it, only that once she had it’d taken her a lifetime to get used to it.

Solan feels something strange behind him, and looks around. He doesn’t see any bending, or at least not anything new, and he imagines he must look strange staring at the wall, so he turns around. Then seven points in front of him bend inward and spring out again to almost their previous positions.

He pushes the eagle off and stands, sliding up the wall this time to keep himself from running into anything.

“Kaos?” he hears. A deep, female voice, slightly familiar. The one with the black hair, maybe. And, he remembers, the black wings.

“For God’s sake. Solan,” he says, exasperated.

“Solan, then. It’s necessary that we speak with you,” another female voice says. He doesn’t know this one. It sounds more controlled and older. He thinks it’s coming from the one who casts the deepest impression on the lines.

“Right, then, go for it,” he says.

“Oh, you’re bleeding!” he hears, from a direction in which he hadn’t thought there was anyone standing. She barely made any impression at all, just a tiny ripple of distortion as she ran toward him. He only just manages to keep from jumping when she grabs his shoulder. Man, that’s… okay, fine, weird. It’s like she’s almost there… but not quite, and then when she touches him, the conflicting senses get in a fight.

The eagle comments that he’s sorry about the claw marks, but he thought his owner would be tougher than that.

“You’re not helping,” Solan mutters at the bird. Did they all come with razored appendages? He wonders how many fights Vega was actually in, or if she just got beat up by her pets all the time.

The eagle fluffs itself – Solan can feel it by his ankle – and doesn’t dignify that remark with a response.

“Please relax, it’s easier to heal you when you’re not on the defensive,” the girl says beside him. Solan sighs and tries to keep still. It seems to work, because he feels something, like a ripple on water, touch his skin, and then the shoulder doesn’t hurt anymore.

“…Thanks,” he says, after a brief pause to consider. “You were saying?”

She backs off, and he loses focus on her. The one with the deep impression is easier to focus on, so he does. Her distortion shifts slightly; he expects he’s staring at her. No wonder Vega had seemed like she was looking through him all the time, if she was trying to focus on this.

“We’ve been discussing this, this event…” the controlled woman says. She sounds like she’s deliberating every word. “And we’ve come to the conclusion that, though you are an angel, you are also human…”

“I think it’s the other way around,” he says, with as much politeness as he can conjure up – which isn’t much, under the circumstances. The eagle taps his foot with his beak, and he kicks it very gently.

“…Very well. Since you are who you are, and these times are what they are, our hand has been forced.” Solan hadn’t thought people actually talked like that. It probably comes of having been alive since… whenever.

“You’re… something different. Something, we think, the universe needs. It’s not… I’ve ruled this world since the my Age, ten thousand years ago. You are, your sign is… different,” she tries to explain. Her nervousness, and the edge to her voice, are echoed in the vibrations of the lines around her. He wishes he could see her face. He wants to know what the woman looks like who talks like this.

She continues. “This is difficult, as I’m sure you can tell. My angels and I, we’re going somewhere else,” she says. “It’s time.”

Solan waits for her to continue, but she’s paused, and he can feel a new tension in the air. Maybe they’re waiting for his reaction, since he can’t see anyone moving. “Am I supposed to know what that means?” he asks.

Infinity – he doesn’t know how he knows it’s him, but it is – is standing uncomfortably close again, and it’s he who speaks next. “She would have, but as you keep reminding us, you’re not her. It means…” he’s interrupted.

The woman with the voice like raw silk speaks. “It means that the lady my sister is finally going to get her ass off the throne,” she says. “It means that it’s time to bring in the leader of a new age, and that’s what you happen to be. Kaos, or Solan or whatever, Angel Aquarius.”

Solan’s whipped his head around to look at her – she has almost as intense a presence as the woman he realizes must be her sister – and he’s sure he’s staring in complete shock. They take pity on him.

The girl with no presence, the healer. “We’ll all perform the same spell she did. The final spell.”

The woman who reminds him of his mom, her words slow and deliberate. “We’ll transfer our powers to you, and you’ll take the throne.”

The man whose every word is accompanied by the soft sounds of rain. “Our reincarnations will show up on Earth.”

The girl who growls out her words almost desperately. “In four or five thousand years, you’ll find us again.”

The woman with the voice that sounds like singing. “You’ll bring us back to the castle…”

The boy who sounds like a choirboy, perfectly innocent and perfectly solomn. “…And you’ll start a new age.”

The leader speaks again. “You are willing,” she says, like it’s not a choice, and he knows with sick certainty that it isn’t.

Solan stares at the depression that marks her place in the universe. When no further information seems to be forthcoming, he flips his wings open, and wraps them around himself.

“I’m not a fucking angel. I don’t need this. I don’t see to the end of the universe and I don’t have wings and I’m not anyone’s leader and what do you want from me, anyway?” he asks. He starts out snarling and winds up shouting, back to the wall like a cornered animal. He can’t tell where they are, and the wall isn’t visible so it’s not helping much. He curses his new eyes once more.

“Denying the reality isn’t going to help you,” the motherly one says. He finds himself really, really wishing he could just snap and start hitting people. He can’t. It’s not him. Maybe he’s more like her than he wants to admit.

The eagle tells him that this is normal, that even Leo – that must be the leader’s sign – started out not wanting the responsibility. The bird takes off and lands on his wrist, this time, and Solan is surprised to find that it’s being gentle.

It screeches at the others, telling them that they shouldn’t drop all this on him at once. Solan agrees, but wishes the eagle would’ve left out the bits about him being just a kid. He was having a perfectly logical and adult freak-out.

“It’s your duty. You have no choice,” Infinity says, and if there’s one thing that was guaranteed to make him snap, that was it. Solan launches himself – and the eagle – at the depression that marks Infinity’s presence.

He’s not as strong, but the other man’s not expecting it, and Solan manages to clock the angel in what he thinks is the jaw before he gets his wing grabbed by someone who distorts reality like a black hole.

This won’t do, the person says. Solan’s fine with that, he’s looking horrified at where he’s fairly sure the person’s hand is and wondering why he’s not just being sucked into that density. It’s terrifying. It’s like… it’s like… there aren’t words for it, just pathetic metaphors. Standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, only take out the Colorado River and replace it with the Milky Way. Diving into the ocean and losing sight of the sun looking into the depths.

The other presences, around him, may as well be insects for all the distorting they’re doing in comparison. The single presence drowns out all others like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet.

Don’t be afraid, Solan. I know it’s shocking, but you will note I’ve not killed you all yet, it says.

“Yeah, and how long will that last?” Solan asks, slightly alarmed that he’s just been sarcastic at what is for all intents and purposes a gravity well.

So long as I don’t have to exert any more power. Will you try to kill anyone if I let you go? it asks. Solan shakes his head abruptly, annoyed. He’s not murderous, dammit, just pissed off.

You should attend to Capricorn, the voice says, and it takes a moment for Solan to realize that it’s not directed at him – which is good, since he’s pretty sure he couldn’t figure out which direction Infinity was in even if he wanted to help the bastard. He’s lost his wall somewhere in the scuffle and now, as far as his vision is concerned, he’s standing on nothing in a vast and mostly empty black void. His only consolation is that he can’t possibly get lost in relation to that presence. He wonders how he missed it before.

I keep half of myself outside of the universe at most times, to avoid accidents, the presence says. Solan feels a pair of wings brush by him as one of the healers – he can’t tell the difference anymore, they’re the same tiny fireflies compared to the bonfire in front of him – makes her silent way to Infinity. He ignores it. What’s going on in this realm is much more interesting.

Leo is right, you know, but she missed one thing. You weren’t born under any Earthly sign, it tells him.

“Don’t start with this, again, I’m not fucking special,” Solan says, spitting the last word like a curse. “And I was born, on Earth, on February seventeenth. She’s right, I’m Aquarius, I’ve already got too much crap going on, don’t give me this.” His eagle screams death at the presence, leaping back to his wrist, and he pets it gently on the head, pretty sure it’ll understand when it should launch.

You were, indeed, born on February seventeenth as far as the Earth was concerned. However, you weren’t conceived nine months before that date, but twenty-three years after it, it tells him. He gets the nasty impression that it’s laughing at him, though he’s not sure how, since he also gets the nasty impression that it’s not got a mouth – it’s only nominally human-shaped, he’s sure. Taller, for one thing, by about six feet. And the fingers are unnaturally long.

“What.” Solan is completely lost for words. Even that one wasn’t so much an attempt at communication but an instinctual plea of confusion. The eagle refluffs its feathers, and Solan feels a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“Really, Lord. He’s just had the Lady’s announcement dropped on him, do you think now is the time?” It’s fucking Infinity again. Solan’s about to hit him for a second time when he realizes that the man’s defending him, sort of.

The presence’s voice turns grave, not that it wasn’t already the most sobering thing Solan had ever heard.


And that is the end of ending 1. The next bit will jump back in time a bit and rewrite. I like it better.