Page 141 of The Surviving Sky
IRAVAN
They were immortal once.
They had lived for millennia.
Consciousness had been a game, easy to manipulate.
They descended, tookform, in the manner of a child playing with a new toy.
They separated and scattered their minds, in the manner of a river breaking its tributaries.
A beast, a plant, a mountain, an ocean; these were thesame—amere sheath to hold them, an affair withsubstance, before unity occurred as it always did.
A million million years with other immortals of their kind; that was their sublime existence.
Communication was thought, it wasbeing.
They were so evolved that the very idea of language was primitive. They were so ancient that the very idea of death was amusing.
Tied to the planet, they had beencreatedwith the memory of their own death; they had shifted through little deaths, taken new forms. Complete with their immortal essence, they had always beenthemselves. What was time to such a being? It meant nothing.
And then theydiscerned…
Something within such meaningless time.
A moment of catastrophe when the dimension of their existence would disappear, when the planet would melt into the sun; a million short years, in what was a mere blink to them.
Terror spread. The terror of non-being, ofin-existence.
This would not be death. This would beerasure.
It could not be changed; it could not be controlled. They had only ever controlled their own consciousness, after all.
A solution rippled through their kind, a radical answer.
Mutilating the earth would be the cost of survival, but it was a small price to pay; it would not betheirpayment. There would be no return from what they intended, but it would be a life, and life was always preferable to death.
And so, they changed again, this time in finality; to become creatures of fewer dimensions, limited in perception, reduced in lifespans but immortal still; they transformed, into something lesser, yes, but at least they would be themselves.
Shatter.
The agony was surprising; excruciating.
Shatter.
They hadn’t accounted for this separation.They…they?
S-H-A-T-T-E-R.
And the earth shattered with them.
48
IRAVAN
Iravan screamed and screamed, unable to stop.
In the vortex, he fell blindly, the truth of clarity splitting his mind. In the Deepness, his stream of golden light winked out; darkness surrounded him wherever he spun. The mountain collapsed under his feet in the Etherium; he was buried alive in an avalanche of rock.
