Revelations End

They waited.

Space and time flowed and changed around them like swift ocean currents, yet they stood above it all; unmoved, watching, keening for the sign that would unleash them to do their master’s bidding.

The planets moved in their clockwork dance, stars flared and died in the dim reaches of the void, but they stood untouched, ethereal and immune to the ravages or concerns of time.

They waited.

Life swam and grew, bred and died, flickering like a candle flame against the deep black of the velvet night. On some untouched plane, the warmth of that life washed across them, their senses turning to its whispering touch, and they moved imperceptibly closer, brushing the veil between existences. They reached out to but didn’t touch that warm life; the gossamer barrier allowing only whispers to pass between, a breath to escape and be lost in the wind, leaving a gnawing hunger drawing at their being.

They waited.

Light grew and danced across the blue orbs surface, at first flickering then constant, spreading until the night side glistened like a web caught with the dew of the morning. The air and water were lined with trails of movement, splitting the clouds, linking the landmasses.

They waited

Light diminished. Darkness spread across the globe in creeping tendrils. Blooms of blinding incandescence flared in its wake sporadically before growing blackness smothered them once again.

They waited.

There was no ‘I’, there was no ‘we’, there was only existence and patience. For what they did not know, but all were suffused by a surety that they would when it was time. They had served for time beyond reckoning and would serve when time no longer had meaning, and the concept of impatience ran from their being like water, alien and unknown.

They waited.

Another light grew in the void, indiscernible as a pinprick against the black tapestry, and yet this drew them. Larger and larger it grew, its light suffusing even through the veil, imposing on their consciousness with a sense of the truly ordained.

Its impetus drew them closer still, the veil stretching as they were pulled softly towards that other, tantalising existence. As the light brightened, so awareness grew, substance took weight, thought took form, and thought bore consequence.

They waited

‘I’ was born, became aware of the “We”, a host gathered across space and time. The weight of form was flexed, still permeable, malleable… but as the light blossomed and brightened solidity grew. New sensations flowed along new nerve endings, touch registered touch, sight was focused and interpreted.

The veil began to fray, the barrier between planes dissipating.

The light grew stronger. It too gained form, detail, as its perspective diminished. It rolled through the heavens, ribbons beyond imagining stretching behind it, gaseous emissions writhing on the blank canvas. Roaring in silence, it tugged at them, pulling at the new forms containing their being, drawing them through the veil, ripping it asunder.

Time became meaningful

They tumbled in its wake, awkward in their new skins, drawn inexorably towards the blue gem in its path, new-born, powerless. It streaked ahead of them, tumbling mountainous ruin filling the sky. Convergent trails flew at this behemoth; conflagration lit its surface, and it became three- smaller than the whole but with speed unwavering.

Shimmering corona dazzled newly formed and opened eyes. The blue planet grew around the revolving mountain, growing, growing as they sailed closer. A stream of incandescence before them, fire in the sky, before fire lit on the planet’s surface in perfect flower, raging winds chasing the clouds from the sky, showing them the prize unobscured.

They surged.

A pounding in their chests, a rushing stream through new bodies, a fire in their eyes to match the deadly bloom below. Purpose unbound. Gathered and hale, they looked on the ground below with covetous sight.

In time they dived to join battle.

Book 1

Abaddon

“…and though we are not now that strength

which in olden times moved earth and heaven,

that which we are, we are.

One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate,

but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield….”

Ulysses, Alfred, Lord Tennyson