Chapter 13: A Million Candles Burning

 

Slowly, the shadows of the moon extract themselves. It is older than the universe itself, and it hasn’t really had a chance to look at a meteor impacting an inhabited world before. It looks with dispassionate curiosity. The meteor isn’t all that large, all things considered. If the earth is an egg, it is no larger than an apple seed. That is, of course, more than enough. You only need something roughly ten kilometers in diameter to turn a planet into a molten rock, after all. You could snugly fit that between the ground and the stratosphere. 

It impacts, and Sammaël curiously circles it, watching the ripples wipe out cultures and countries and eventually all of civilization. Some who look up just at the moment of impact see the stars go out and feel a sense of strange, unimaginable dread come over them, though they don’t know why. 

The wall of fire crawls across the little blue marble, and then it stops. Sammaël knows why it’s stopped, and it is mildly curious about that, too. It can see the clumsy way in which the little thing wrangles with time, the way space and everything outside of that curves and bleeds over. It sees the little fractures across reality, of possibilities bleeding over into each other, and it wonders how long this will continue before the planet, across all of time and possibility-space, collapses in on itself into a statistical black hole, everything happening all at once and not at all at the same time. 

Not long, at the very least. But the little creature knows that, surely? It’s a part of Sammaël, after all, even if it seems to have become its own at the moment. Sammaël takes a closer look. It sees the entity. Sam, it calls itself. No. She calls herself. It wouldn’t be fair to get it wrong. Sammaël is amused. This is, across all of time and space, mostly unheard of. The average sentient creature can not grasp the concept.

Then time begins to spool back in earnest, and Sammaël once again observes with mild interest as buildings rebuild, ashes unburn and bodies de-explode. The wall of fire moves backwards to the point of impact, and the meteor ascends. This is what Sammaël truly wants to see. The tear in reality briefly unfolds across Squeemp, and the meteor gently slips into it and disappears. Sammaël follows it across possibilities for a moment, but whatever is happening out there isn’t nearly as interesting. And down there, on that little ball, at the moment of Abraham Douglas’ death, Sam is about to wake up. And she’s hesitating. Now this is interesting. Sammaël leans in close. You should too. 

 

Sam floated in the nothing, the nothing before waking up, when unconsciousness is a blanket slipping away. But Sam was not an ordinary person, and her consciousness wasn’t either. She held onto the blanket, and looked into the Darkness, which has less in common with regular darkness and more with the traditional abyss. The biggest difference is that the Darkness screens its calls. Sam stared into the Darkness. It stared back. This wasn’t going to keep working, was it?

No, the Darkness seemed to say, although it didn’t say anything, of course. It isn’t.

So, what then? Sam thought. The world was falling apart, on a bigger and bigger scale. Reality was beyond fraying, it was tying itself into knots to keep from turning into spaghetti. If she kept repeating the same pattern, it was only a matter of time before she was just a pair of eyeballs in a bowl of soup, bubbling up letters to talk. She was going to have to do something different, this time. 

Yes, the Darkness didn’t say. You are.

But what? She looked up, although ‘up’ was a ridiculous concept when you were floating in the nothing between sleep and dreams. Up there was Sammaël. Her original identity. The One she came from. She wondered if it could see her and how different it was from her now. Was she her own person, or was she a small aspect of a larger creature? And would it be best to return to it, after all? She’d caused all of this, hadn’t she?

Yes.

She thought and tried to imagine the universe, all of it, and found herself failing. Okay, fine, this meaty human brain didn’t have a way to easily conceptualize it. That was something she’d learned to accept, but she knew how to do this when she had thought herself into being aeons ago. She’d start from scratch, if she had to. 

She imagined a dot. No dimensions. A point. Points were easy. Every entity could be represented by a dot. It was both every dimension and none. It was the zero and the one. Then, a line. Infinite points adjacent to each other, on one axis. A line, going from somewhere to somewhere, infinitely long and infinitely thin. 

One dimension. Then, another line next to the first. And another, and another. Infinite lines, adjacent to each other, until there was a plane, perfectly visible in her mind. Planes were easy. You could draw stories on them. Write on them. They were easy to imagine. 

Two dimensions. Still very easy. So stacking planes on top of each other was also easy. Stacking them above and below until this infinite plane covered every conceivable corner of the imaginary space. This was now imaginary space, stretching up, down, left, right, forward and backwards. Space.

Three dimensions. This was where things got tricky. She reduced space to a point. For ease of imagination, she turned the point into an apple. All of space. As an apple. She imagined the exact same apple, one unit later. In the same space, but still different. All coordinates the same, except the fourth. The apple, but a little older. She imagined it older and older, rotting and falling apart, and then younger, becoming first red again, then green, and then turning into a bud, then nothing. Then, she imagined every point next to each other. A line. Time. 

Four dimensions. She took a deep breath. Now she had to go quantum, and going quantum was one of those things that was usually a bad idea unless you were an interdimensional horror from beyond the bounds of reality. It never ended well for superheroes and action heroes, after all. Across all of time, there had been trillions of quantum particles, existing in superposition until they collapsed. And every one of them could have collapsed in a different way. Every single one branching off from the original line. Every single one adjacent. Parallel. Infinite lines, next to each other. Creating a plane. 

Five dimensions. Sam stood on the time plane and looked up. This bit was easy, at least. The universe was built on numbers, and all those numbers were reducible. The distance between atoms. The strength of covalent bonds. Up and down, infinite planes made of infinite timelines, and almost all except the one she was on mostly useless. If the universe had been slightly different, it would’ve been incapable of life. Sometimes even incapable of fission, or forming planets. But they were there. Spacetime. 

Six dimensions. She took a deep breath. Floated in the void for a bit. Now she had to get… conceptual. Weird with it. But it was fine. She’d done this before. Sure, back then she’d eaten concepts alive, and they had been a tasty cheat-day treat, too. Now, she wasn’t even sure about chocolate. But she could do this. Couldn’t she? 

Yes, the Darkness implied. You do.

All of spacetime existed. In a single point. An apple in an apple. No, that didn’t help. A hypercube. A cube extruded from itself in every possible direction. Slightly better, but useless. She tried, instead, to imagine a field. Now, she imagined one next to it, but where concepts were slightly different. A tree in a point in space and time. The same tree, shifted across all axes, and then… then just one more. An idea. The tree not growing apples, but pears. Then oranges. Then nuts. Then pineapples. Bananas. Carrots. Potatoes. Further. Trees growing smaller trees. Every conceivable concept. Growing on a tree. And then all of them in a line. Every concept. As fruit on a tree. All in a line. 

Seven. 

Then, every concept instead of every concept. Lines adjacent. A plane of concepts. Everything that could be. Everywhere. All at once. 

Eight. 

And then, everything that can’t. Up and down. Infinitely. 

Nine.

Squeemp. 

Sam realized she’d been holding her breath, which was a hell of a feat when she wasn’t even technically breathing. But the idea made sense, now. She could see it. The nine base dimensions. And now, the fracture. But it was going up, wasn’t it? Space itself seemed to be fine. Space falling apart was usually a lot of nothing. Nothing and nuclear fission. 

This was different. The cause was time. And that was simple to pinpoint too. There was a tear, across reality. Someone had ripped it like a cheap cloth, and now the whole thing was bleeding in on each other, and it wasn’t going to last much longer like this. And Sam knew she had done all of this. She had rewound time, that first time. Not as Sammaël, who was all-present and powerful. Sam, before she’d known she was Sam, limited by a frail human body and a frail human mind to go with it. She’d shattered reality, and it was killing her over and over again. She was at the center of it. She was going to have to fix it. 

Yes. 

She was going to have to go back. Back back. Not just in Time, or Space, or Squeemp. Reduce all of them to a point. Go a step back. 

Ten dimensions. But she couldn’t do that. 

No.

But someone else could. 

Yes.

She looked into the Darkness, and Sammaël looked back at her. Had it always been so… terrifying in its formlessness? It didn’t scare her, because she knew it. And she’d conceptualized herself more than half of the way there, and she was even a little proud of that. 

I have no need for Pride.

“I do.”

Interesting.

“I need to fix this.”

You can not.

“I have to.”

You can not.

“Then you do it!”

Why?

“Because I want to stay here!” Sam said. 

You exist to listen to music.

“I exist for me!” Sam shouted. The Darkness was quiet for a moment. 

You are Sam. 

“Yes, I am.”

You would like to stay.

“I would.”

You broke things.

“I-I did.”

I will fix them. You know what that means.

“I… I don’t,” Sam said, to her shame. She couldn’t think that high, not anymore. There were too many layers of reality folded in on one another up there. Time² was too much. But not for Sammaël.

You are me. You will not. Will not have been. Never have been. 

“But…”

I will repair the damage you caused. I will undo what you did. Be your own.

Sam floated in the darkness for a moment. Thought about what Sammaël had told her. 

“What will I do?” Sammaël flowed around her and suddenly she was scared. Suddenly, she was no longer a piece of the whole, and the whole was so, so much bigger, space and time and so many more she couldn’t even begin to conceptualize flowed around her like a raging river, a cacophony of sounds unheard and colors unseen. 

Do what you will. You are free of me.

Then it was gone. And there was only Sam, floating in a cold, empty, terrifying void. Well, not entirely empty. There was something there. A string. Something connecting her to something out there. Something with which to listen to music. 

 

Sammaël swims away. It might not have a need for Pride, but it is not emotionless. While it might deny so furiously, Sammaël is a little sentimental. And it does like music.