478. Exotic matter, 3

(Myls)

The black mould on my arm doesn’t speak to me with words. It has no brain.

But we manage to have some dialogues and understanding, without Blume’s translations even.

I let It run along my bones and muscles, slowly. And my body doesn’t try to fight what is technically a foreign infection.

We exchange materials, nutrition and information, on a cellular level.

When it wants to tell me something, it liberates something in my blood stream that soon makes me feel like the lord of nightmares is just behind me, looking into my mind.

We can make this work.

~

The pink glint appeared over the horizon.

We shiver, and we know it’s time to hide again.

Blume and I are used to it now.

We find a sturdy building and hide deep inside.

We have a time limit to gather there what we can find around. And that one is no joke.

When the rain starts falling, it’s the end. Everything dies.

Curled up inside, we watch forests and fields dissolving into puddles and streams.

Even lush lands turn into grey wastelands, in minutes.

It rains over us, the target, for about an hour.

A thick fog then covers the dead and quiet land for a few minutes.

Then the part that every physicist in the world would like to witness begins.

The fog grows thicker as it rises into a cloud. And all the rainwater on the ground with all it dissolved begins to drip back toward it and the sky.

Droplets rise slowly at first, floating around, slowly ascending.

And after a few more minutes or so, it rains again, but upside down.

All the watery deadly liquids returns into the sky, loaded with everything it dissolved. It’s a dark colour.

For maybe half an hour, the dark rains are vacuumed toward space, twirling in clouds and into tornadoes at times.

And after that, Magenta is too far away to reach us, for now. Its bright spot in the sky leans further toward the horizon on the other side.

The land is desolated and crumbling. And the god in the sky has fed.

I can’t believe Rose created something so horrendous...

B - Maybe it would have been a better call to let it blow up the continent after all, and provoke a new volcanic ice age with its ashes...

M - What? That doesn’t sound better at all overall!

B - But it’s hard to see the gains of prevention... We only face the consequences.

I think about it, watching the inverted rain going upward this day. I close my eyes then, trying to forget for a brief moment what’s happening around us.

~

We get ready to leave. We’re packing up.

Blume opens a little her petals or leaves shaped like that which are growing on her back. She puts her bag pack above.

She’s growing, on her own terms.

Her face and appearance in front are still mostly human and female. But that’s less and less every day now.

The sides and back of her are more like a flowery jungle or beast now. It’s lush, with large protrusion like leaves or petals, bark and thorns.

When she spreads her large petals open, it looks a little like a plant or giant flower spirit opening. Or sort of like shredded wings.

M - You look a little like a rose, a gigantic rose.

She looked at me oddly, not smiling. Her face has thorns protruding here and there, like horns.

It makes her look more and more evil or threatening, but I know her.

Still, she’s looking at me oddly after hearing what I just said.

Then for the first time in a long time, she laughed. Quite heartily.

Enough to make even me smile for a moment, after the embarrassment.

B - Rosa Gigantea, eh eh eh... That was funny, really funny.

I don’t get her, but there’s relief.

We went outside of the shelter, now surrounded by a completely dead wasteland.

The sky was clear again.

We resumed walking toward the chains of mountains over the horizon.

~

M - Why did Nightmare turned human for a moment before she died?

Blume looks ahead and upward. She thinks about it. The answer isn’t as easy as it looked maybe.

B - There... That’s because of our inherent origins... Daiûas like me or her, when we’re destroyed in our physical manifestations, remains our essential, primal origin. For me, it would be a spore of what I once was. For her, it... Her energy collapsing returned her to her lower energy, most stable structure.

M - The human body she once was? Not a spore like you?

B - That’s what I think. It’s just an hypothesis. But that is the big difference between her and me, even though on normal days not much separates our grown selves. Her existence has always kept some memory of thats table form and most of what it contained. Mine too. Not genes but an expression of your primordial body as a daiûa. Which is somewhat similar. Mine is an immaterial seed. Hers was that human body she doesn’t recall. Rose’s would have been her human body too.

M - And... Magenta?

B - ... Probably a kind of spore, like me. But most importantly, it kept a memory of its prime emotions through its rebirth... The memory of hatred toward us. Unless we destroy all of it, that weed will always grow back...

M - Yeah. Just like you, and Rose.

Blume looked suddenly much darker.

B - Like me perhaps, but no longer like Rose.

M - Why? You’ve resurrected her so many times already.

B - I can’t anymore. I’ve lost track of her brain and memories. And...

Blume looks sad. Like a human, but sad.

B - And her last wish to me on that matter was not to do it anymore. She asked me to let her life, that life lost because of me, to be her last.

She’s gritting her teeth now, just like I did too.

She’s fighting tears... She can cry.

If a demon like her can cry, it shows how human she’s become I believe.

But that means that whatever’s remaining of Rose out there in space...

Blume will not attempt to use it to bring another Rose back.

It pinches my heart too, not to be able to look at her sorrowful face anymore...

~

On our way, we found scattered human remains, burnt and destroyed as if they had been blown away by powerful explosions. Or as if they had fallen from very high in the sky...

Charred corpses. A few. Spread over a large dead area. It’s really grim.

M - I guess they were eaten and spat by Magenta...

Blume inspects the crispy black remains of flesh over the torso abandoned there.

B - I hope it’s only that.

What could be worse than god killing the few remaining humans in the world?

Unfortunately, I would soon discover there are other rings to discover in the heavenly hell.

~