The Last Legends of Earth
Page 50
But he was alone. They were both alone in the cold and the dark—as all life out here had always been. And by that he knew he was alive.
Saor stood silent and unbowed before the boiling mass of molten rock that had been his palace, under the luminous orbs that had been his kingdom. He was given now to the void, standing alone and proud.
Lod turned away from the black shadow, stunned by Saor’s isolation. Fear chilled him. Dazedly, he stared out at the great, vacuous reaches beyond his solitude. This was the abyss. Into this chasm, all life emptied. Here, everything came to nothing.
*
“Locked into place,” Genitrix announced. A small laugh echoed from the chief machine intelligence in Gai’s receptors only. “Love is tricky, is it not?”
In the silver interior of her Form, Gai breathed deeper. “We’re set to go? What about Dreux?”
“That’s been compensated for. We will arrive on the range minus a few hull panels but otherwise intact. At your command, we can go. The geometrodynamic resonance is at its peak.”
Gai listened to her own bloodbeat throbbing like the pulse of a flame with the expectation of returning to the range victorious. She sighed herself free of the fear that had driven her and the losses that had held her back. A strange nostalgia for the dark of outer space glimmered in her.
Genitrix chanted:
“Time is a changeling in the belly of the void, a weird child that takes the place of nothing. Going nowhere with its images, it plays with itself in the womb and dies being born.”
“Let’s go home,” Gai whispered.
Genitrix activated the magravity thrusters. In an instant, the scattered modules of the Rimstalker ship reassembled, contracting to an invisible, inward-spiraling flash at the edge of the universe. And where there had been worlds hung against the splendor of the galaxy, there was nothing.
***
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Table of Contents
The Last Legends of Earth
Foreword to the Second Edition
Tractate of a Timefree, Spacelike Domain
If Zero Could Shut Its Mouth
COSMOGONY
Age of Light
Genitrix
Lod and Saor
Zotl
The Tryl Age
Traces
Primeval Worlds
Pages from the Book of Nothing
THE ORACLES
The Body of Light
Age of Knives
Ras Mentis
Cage of Freedom
Echoes in the Time-Well
Ordo Vala
The Age of the Crystal Mind
The Magus of Cendre
The Mask Is Strange, However Like
THE SAGAS
The Foundation of Doror
Ieuanc 751
Age of Dominion
Fruit of the Storm-Tree
The Fugitive Lords of Hell
Loryn
Torso Before the Cave of Riddles
The Rust Age
Sword’s Wanderings in Chalco
NIGHT OF TIME
Glyph Astra (Annals of the Overworld)
2000 Doror
2050 Doror
2100 Doror
2150 Doror
2200 Doror
2250 Doror
The Ghost That Hatched His Havoc as He Flew
Dream Is the Transparency of Death
Age of Phantoms
In the Seventh Age
Fire’s Cold Thoughts
Ghost Worlds
Valdëmiraën
Home in the Nightmare