Act 3, Chapter 96: Stillness in Motion

Day in the story: ??? Zero hour

Gertrude Monkey

When the power of the Identity spread through my aura and settled, my body wasn’t the only thing that had become an immovable object anymore.

Every squirming tentacle still present within it was immediately caught in my stasis trap and stopped moving entirely, as if we had all been frozen inside an intangible and invisible block of ice. The pinkish mass obeyed that imposed permanence everywhere within the area I had created, and the rare parts of it caught outside the bubble thrashed against the immaterial field that suddenly cut them in half—one part trying and failing to get away, the other hanging idle, as if waiting for something to happen.

The thing above me was another story. Its wheels kept turning, but they slowed with every passing second. The bulging masses of whiskers and muscle moved with far less intensity and urgency, and I felt it trying to retreat, trying to pull away and hide from the power of art that contained it and forced it to become its own direct opposite.

It fought my Authority, and it was strong. But apparently so was I. Maybe because of what the voidling had awakened in me when it changed my soulmark. Maybe because of the resonance of everything within the Domain, including that fated necklace that had started it all. Or maybe because simply opposing an advance was easier than trying to overcome the being.

Whatever the reason, the fact remained that even though the monstrosity hanging above me was immeasurably powerful, I still had a fighting chance.

D̸̘̯̝̝̖̻̥̯̩͆ẹ̴̛̛̙̬̰̟̓̅̽̄́̌̽͒̄͗̎̑̽̋́̆̔̐́̈̔́̚̕̚s̸̢̨̯̬͎̣͇̺̠̫̻͍͍͇͙̺̱̭̦̓̋͌̒̏͐̈̿͛͑̈́̉̊͗͗́͐̉͑̆̏̚͠͝͠ͅͅp̵̡̧̻̫͓̹̜̼͔̗̮̙̼̲̤̤̼͓̤̼͈̿͐̾͛͑̾̾̂̔̌͌̈́͌̇́̈́̑͂̚͘͝͝͝ǐ̴̡̭̫̦͍̠̤͖̈́͋̿͂̀̿̑s̷̫͎̒̈̑͐̀̏̒̈̏̒̉̐̀̈̇̿́͊̆̉̓̓̾̕͠e̸͍̓̓̑́̎͆͊̐͋̚ ̷̙͈̦͉̪͍̯̖̈́͐͐͊̽̈́͂͛̃͒͗͆̌͆̍̃̓̓́͂̈́̑̚͠͠͝͠t̵̰̣͎͕̦̙̩͓̫̖̝̻̤͎̹̬͗̿ͅh̵̛̗͎̉̎͂͐̄̓͛̽͊͆́̓̎̾̄̀͘̚̕͝͝e̸̢̧̛͎̱̦̣͔̤̲̬̖̦͈̼̲̮͍͍̱͉͇͇̭̝̙̓̆͆̌͑͆̒̒̔͂͑̊̒̐̓̚͘͝͝ ̷̡̛̮̠̮̒̂̍̿͝ş̵̨͔̜͎͉̮̹̣̳̤͕͔̘̬̦̱̺̣̳̦̩͚͔̟̜̣͖͎͂̃̑̍̃̄͠t̴̢͖͕̫̱͍͖͉̥͚̋̈́̓̂̐́͑̏̀̉̓̔̉͛͐̏̎͑̌͂̀̿͗͑̂̑̅̚͘͠î̷̝̪̞̒́̄͗́̉̈́̈́̽̽̍̆͛̈́͒̾̽͊̋̋̽̕̚̕̕l̸̨̧̡̙̭͎̩̥̙͙̲̘̝̱̿͗̈́͑͋͂̆̂͊̓̃̿̓̒̂́̕̚͝͝ͅl̴̛̘̹̘͍̉̐̋̀̈̅!̶̭̜̹͎̳̪͈̩͙̣̯̯̮̝̠̖̥̤̺̬͉̌̀̈́̉̔͛̉̈̽͊̽͊̐͂́̀͗̑̈́́̽̃̄͛̔̀͂̉͘͘ͅͅ The voice of pure concepts rang all around me and suddenly I found myself both where I was and somewhere else entirely. I was bodiless and all around me stretched a void. It wasn’t completely empty, though.

Deep within it—and somehow impossibly close to me at the same time—was the thing opposing me. Its true visage defied logic and comprehension.

Interconnected spheres made of whirling flesh clung to one another through immense columns of muscle and forests of twitching whiskers. The entire structure rotated across multiple axes at once, like planets trapped in impossible orbits around one another. Some spun slowly. Others revolved so fast they blurred into rings of wet pink light. Flesh folded into flesh. Wheels turned inside wheels. Massive growths emerged only to vanish behind larger structures or into what I perceived as empty space moments later.

At the center of it all, the thing to which every sphere was connected, hung something akin to a heart made of brain tissue, or perhaps a brain shaped into a heart. And the fucking thing pulsed, each beat expelled torrents of shadowlight that raced through the alien structure like electrical currents through nerves. Brilliant rivers of grey and pink colors surged across muscles and vanished into distant spheres before returning to the center once more.

I was surprised by the size of it all. Whether I thought that simply trapping it would kill it by making it suffer through the hunger for impermanence, now I wasn’t so sure.

“Filth of the unchanging.” The words reached me as concepts rather than sounds again. They carried the feelings with them: of disgust, contempt, revulsion even.

I wanted to respond to bargain. Every inch of me urged me to make a move now. To attack through motion or the words and yet caught in the same trap I sprung against this spaceless monstrosity I remained motionless in that place beyond places and observed.

“Change mine for reaping.” The mass undulated. The brain-heart at its center distorted the space around itself, bending light like a black hole swallowing stars.

At the same time, in the physical reality, Penrose and the others were moving the hotel guests, keeping them away from where I had made my stand.

“Move. Think. Remember. Do. Decay.” The concepts kept appearing in my mind. It tried to steer my thoughts, to force a reaction, but the only answer it would receive from me was my power pushing back against its own.

When those were not enough its tendrils of shadowlight extended from the impossible structure and wrapped themselves around the essence of my being—the Authority I had been granted to exist.

The tendrils coiled around it greedily, weaving themselves into a cocoon of pale and cold radiance. The vast impossible being turned its full attention toward one insignificant human form.

And the concept that followed carried the weight of a divine command. “Begone.”

It washed against me like a wave of force as the spool of shadowlight broke and pushed against me with all that otherworldly light, carrying its Authority. And each grain, molecule, or strand—whatever that shadowlight really was made of—carried an order of change within it. Bloody Impermanence. The state in between.

That’s why it wanted the hotel. A place where people just wandered in and moved on. Where no room had a fixed owner for longer than twenty-four hours. Why it wanted memories gone, so nothing stable would remain, only constant movement and the acquisition of new experiences. It fed on that entropy. It thrived on that. And it was looking for it in me now. And yet, like that same ocean wave it felt like, it crashed against the solitary rock I had become and moved past me.

I could not destroy that thing in front of me. Of that I was certain now. It had too much influence, too much power, and too much pure fucking Authority I could not overcome. That drunken bastard had been right, and I could feel it now. I took a stand against something I could not ever win against. One move, one twitch, one lapse in concentration resulting in a thought made in that real brain of mine and in this form, this being would no longer be satisfied with nibbling on the livestock it kept inside the building. It would turn its attention fully toward me and drain everything that was still changing within me.

As its power moved against me, I saw another light sneak between the strands of that vast column pushing against me. It moved slowly alongside it, but in the opposite direction. Toward the being. Toward that bloody flesh of its, suspended somewhere both close and impossibly far away.

I watched as it reached the body. Just a small, miniscule fragment of it but what it reached it forced to stop moving and the rest of the being recoiled.

Its brain-heart shook and sent another violent pulse of electric shadowlight racing through every sphere, every strand of muscle, every writhing whisker that made up its body. New tissue surged forward toward the still one, ripping it off and casting away, trying to replace what had been damaged.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

But that new one was stopped too where my Authority touched it, caught in the permanence it hated so much. At the same time I took notice of the fact that back in the hotel's lobby the sphere above me had stopped moving completely.

It simply hung there. “Release hold.” It said to me, and the entire hotel shook as if struck by an earthquake. Everything around us crumbled in response. Walls split partially apart and collapsed. The large, uneven aquarium built into the wall near the entrance—its structure rising like the trunk of some strange glass tree—burst all at once, releasing a flood of water, fish, and uprooted plants that crashed across the floor.

The drunk man in the corner woke, disturbed by the chaos. He stood up quickly after moving torrent pushed him against the wall.

Penrose turned silver as the embodiment of the coin in his hand took hold. His weight must have been changed too, as he was undisturbed by the water. Thomas caught Ramirez and shielded him with his own body from chunks of falling ceiling and both of them dropped onto the floor tripped by the wave. Rei simply vanished into the shadow of one of the men.

The area around me remained unchanged.

Every falling fragment bounced off the dome I had created and slid along its invisible surface before dropping harmlessly to the ground, forming a growing wall of debris around the pink flesh fragments still struggling to break free from the hold of permanence—some of them crushed under the wight of the building fragments now. Water parted on the invisible shield and crashed against it and was now slowly falling down over it.

“Let move!” the concepts appeared again. I felt it agitation now. There was so much change all over it could not reach. It made it pulse with anger.

“Get the fuck out of this place!” the drunkard suddenly shouted. “Get out! You hear me?!”

Penrose cupped both hands around his mouth. “Abandon this place, or you will stay here forever, creature!” he shouted too, energized from the other man’s outburst.

I appreciated the effort, because I felt that any response from me would result in my own doom. My Authority was being strained at an alarming pace by the amount of resistance I had to hold back. I doubted I had more than a minute or two left.

I had hoped this creature wasn't quite as powerful as it turned out to be. Still, I had done my best and if it came to dying here, I would not regret the attempt. I had faced a godlike being and forced it to become the one thing it hated most. Not many people could say that.

The drunkard, oblivious to my thoughts and the struggle taking place inside the statue-like stillness around me, leaned against a nearby sculpture and promptly vomited all over it. Then, with a sudden clarity entering his eyes, he straightened and extended one hand to the side.

Shadowlight answered gathering around his shoulder before flowing down his arm, illuminating the vague outline of something grasped in his hand. A second later, accompanied by a flash of pale light, a spear appeared. Long and ornate, fashioned from some pearlescent material that seemed carved from polished bone.

“I will fuck you over, stupid godling!” he shouted.

He charged forward a few steps and thrust the spear toward the halted monstrosity. I wanted to scream at him to stop. To tell him that movement itself might strengthen the creature. But the spear never left his hand.

Instead, a wound appeared on the floating sphere of flesh hanging above me. The drunkard spun and slashed. Another deep crevice tore itself across the creature's surface, as if made in its essence and not the flesh.

Again. And again. And again. For several seconds he continued, remaining just outside the field I had created. He paid careful attention to where the fragments of pink undulating and stopped mass were caught by permanence and never stepped within the area himself. Each thrust and slash wounded the creature trapped there, yet somehow denied it anything to feed upon.

And inside the liminal place where I confronted the true thing, the monster felt every strike.

Its form withered and the interconnected spheres faltered in their rotations. Some of the burst apart completely crumbling into a dust and disappearing in this bloody strange space.

The brain-heart suspended at the center began beating slower and slower. Cosmic blood seeped from fresh wounds that opened throughout its flesh and organs. The shadowlight it bent around it changed its course, as if released of the gravity that held it and it splashed against the farther part of the creature speeding up its movements and decay until that too vanished entirely.

“Release!” it pleaded, but for as long as I possessed the strength to hold, I would. And apparently the other man still had enough left in him to finish what I had bloody started.

“Finally, something that can hold you!” he shouted, carving another slash through the air as he flowed through his kata. With the spear tucked beneath his arm and gripped firmly near the tip by his right hand, shadowlight once again spread across his other forearm and onto his left side. A heartbeat later, a long knife materialized in that hand.

Pivoting out of one of his spinning strikes—the spear gouging into the creature as it passed—he drove the knife into one of the Harbingers. The pink mass reaching for him hissed and recoiled. Flesh withered and collapsed in on itself, rapidly dissolving into a puddle of blackened, smoking sludge where it lay beyond the bounds of my field.

As I counted down the seconds before my Authority failed me, the creature’s demise seemed tantalizingly close. Everything was working in our favor.

The main body trapped within the liminal space thrashed violently, as though desperate to escape my grip. The smaller Harbingers were being cut down by Penrose and his reshaped weapons of money, while Thomas wielded my laser rifle and Ramirez covered another angle with my twin pistols. Together, they did an admirable job of erasing any creatures that remained outside my control. Their bloodied pulps splashed against the field of permanence.

Then my hand twitched and a moment later, my entire arm jerked upward.

Not by my will—it rose like a marionette's limb, pulled by the shadow connected to my own. While my attention was directed elsewhere, my body moved, and the performance was broken. With it, everything that held that monstrosity in place disappeared.

I noticed him—way too fucking late—standing on the sidelines and smiling wickedly: Rei “cunt-eye” Yamashiro. The bloody traitor had sacrificed everything and everyone around him to take petty revenge on me for taking his eye. Not even a second later, hell broke loose.

“No!” Penrose shouted as he saw what happened. His expression tensed and he dropped his own spear made of a rolled banknote elongated and sharpened through the power over value of the money.

When the whiskers from the creature above me lowered themselves and came for me, he was already running toward me, jumping over the smaller fragments of the monster now set free. He rushed forward, turning the banknotes in his hand into something akin to a blade, which he thrust toward the being intent on ending me before retreating.

“Not letting you go now!” the drunkard shouted at the same time. The spear and the knife in his hands disappeared and a rifle took their place. He aimed and fired, and the air itself was torn apart, reality breaking with a wet crunch as the mass above me was shot straight through. When the whiskers caught me and squeezed, it happened to the accompaniment of blood raining down from above along with the water and debris that were still caught above now-dissolving stillness.

I issued commands before I'd perish.

All the statues around me held my Authority just in case, and all of them received an order to come alive and fight until that monster and its harbingers were dead.

They jumped off their pedestals in an instant, all ten of them inside the aura and came down to punch, stomp and tear through the pink mass that had been there before the main thing appeared.

At the same moment, Thomas turned toward Rei, leveling his weapon with the clear intent of cutting him in half. He never got the chance. Shadowy tendrils surged from Rei's feet and seized him mid-charge, locking him in place.

Ramirez, thrown off by the sudden shift in the battle's momentum, snapped his attention toward Penrose as the older man sprinted in my direction. He opened fire at the sphere of revolving wheels, but half of them decayed the instant my power was stripped away.

What remained hung together only loosely now. And the main mass had begun to retreat—reaching for me with those whiskers of its.

Equinox, whom I'd hidden in the corner in preparation for just-in-case launched its powerful shot right at the monster above me. Its report, as loud as a cannon discharge, was followed by another shot from our deus ex machina, almost-savior, who fired a round from the rifle he had summoned.

And to the sounds of violence and momentum, that apparently was now too much for the creature to get the use of. To the loud gunshots and to the screams. To the shout and frantic haste of the man who taught me everything and apparently was not ready to let go of me. And finally to the light of the Domain which I could feel again reaching for my soul.

To all that and more—one of the whiskers, sharp as a needle, went straight through my eye.