I failed.
That’s all I could think as I watched the Earth from a million miles away.
My Shaping was gone. I felt cold space invade my chest cavity. My skin cracked in this soundless hell and I knew what would be next. Blood boiling and freezing, tissues expanding. I would become a balloon of biological mess entirely unprepared for an environment that had no protection from the raw elements of reality.
But none of that mattered. It was over. The burden was too much and my legs had given in.
I’d really wanted to help everyone. I’d really tried.
I thought there might be some relief, some emancipation after I no longer needed to care about humanity’s fate, but there wasn’t. It just hurt.
My face began to swell as I felt my insides burning up. I couldn’t even cry.
What had I wanted from life?
I wanted to be loved. And if that wasn’t for me, I wanted to at least be needed. And if I couldn’t be needed, I could be used, consumed until there was nothing left of me, apologizing for the way I tasted, hoping that someone would find a morsel of value.
No. That’s not right.
That isn’t what happened. There were things I’d chased for me. There were things that fueled me in a way that thousands of lives at stake hadn’t. Could I name those things?
In the pit that sat at my core, that terrible hungry void, something remained. A memory came to me. Not one stolen away from others, but one of my own, nestled and warm.
Nell brushed her hair away from her eyes. She carefully supported the stem and roots as she transferred the plant to a larger pot.
“Do you hear that?” she asked, turning to me with eyes that sparkled like a pond in the summer.
I shook my head.
“Right,” she said sheepishly. “I can’t really hear it per se. Did you know that plants can speak? It’s true. They talk in crackles and pops. It’s called cavitation. There are insects and rodents that can hear it. They know when a plant is dying long before we could look at it and tell.”
She went quiet, closing her eyes.
“Can you hear it?” she asked in a whisper. “Just imagine it, okay? Like a thousand tiny fireworks.”
Maybe it was just my imagination, but somehow, I could hear it. A thousand tiny shifts in pressure. It was like listening to a bubbling brook or a faraway glacier melting.
“The trees talk too. Their language is scents and sharing resources between roots and giving shade and shelter. That’s the thing, plants don’t have the organs to hear each other, or the nerves to feel the heat of the sun. They simply exist and their existence is like the bones of the world or its blood.”
Nell smiled sheepishly, raking her fingers through soft loam.
“That’s what I want for myself. The kind of selflessness that doesn’t hurt, because it’s just me existing, reaching towards the clouds, drinking up the rain.”
I pressed my own hands into the cool earth beside her.
“I like living. I truly do.”
I didn’t wake from this memory like the others. I didn’t have to wrench myself back into the reality I was stuck with. It buoyed me up, raising me from the depths, making me feel weightless and satisfied.
I still wanted to fight. I still wanted to dance. I wanted to live so furiously and messily that I would be like a vibrant paint splashed across the dark etches of space.
I still wanted to live. Was that okay?
I watched the cosmic lights dance fearfully in a theatre of nothing. And there I found that my heart still beat. I could feel Nell’s tender warmth as her fingers closed around the gift she had given me when we first met in a dream. For all his power, Chase had missed this. And in his exultation, he hadn’t noticed that I had had two hearts since near the beginning. My old heart had been ripped out. But Nell’s hands pumped the new one for me, coaxing me to wake up, urging me to take control, to try again at living.
I had her permission to keep trying.
The invisible waves of Shaping repelled the forces in the vacuum of space, tempering my boiling blood, healing my frozen skin.
The Lacunae all snapped back into reality around me, red, green, and… dark. The silent one of the three loomed closest, blocking out the sun. The surface looked like a desiccated corpse, deep brown and wrinkled, its ridges and whorls frozen into their final shape, giving a facade of meaning to where the shadows made shapes out of chaos.
I felt myself drawn closer, as if gravity had just kicked in. Like it had just noticed me.
My feet touched down on ground that felt soft despite there being no soil or vegetation. LIke at any moment it could suck me down to whatever lay at the core of this thing. I looked out across the barren plains and alien geography and I wondered when this Lacuna had first taken shape. Cecily had seen it in the sky during her time, so it was older than her. Far older.
According to H.E.S.P., the frequency of Shapers appearing in history was on an exponential curve, with modern times being the highest level recorded. Which left me with the thought: Was this the first? The original Shaper?
I walked without purpose.
If Cecily had slept for hundreds of years, had this person slept for thousands?
Was it even a person at the core of this? Or was it something else entirely?
This dread I felt in the stale air and the quiet, this planetoid didn’t feel like an egg. It felt like a tomb.
I wanted to leave as soon as possible.
I was so distracted, looking up at the other Lacunae and the Earth, that I nearly stepped out into nothing. My arms pinwheeled, leaning much too far over a cavernous hole massive enough to hold a city. The walls of the hole were perfectly rounded and smooth.
“Hollow,” I whispered. Regret filled me as soon as the word left my mouth. It was a breach of the dead silence. The smallest sound felt profane in this place.
But then my sound was returned with another. As if my utterance had reminded this world that sound existed. A shoe scraped on the ground behind me.
I turned.
A shiny black orb reflecting the light of the stars, perched on a figure clad in a bulky greyish-brown space suit. It was old, once white but now so covered in dust and the smears of space that it looked as old as the planet.
I stared at the astronaut.
My mind made connections that I never wanted to. A hope that I’d kept hidden away in a box, tucked into a corner of my subconscious. The hope that the victim of my first encounter with the Hermit had somehow, against all odds, lived. Just a boy who had been born to monsters, forced to grow up too quickly in body and mind.
“Jason?” I asked, breaking the sacred air once more.
The astronaut turned ever so slightly, as if they hadn’t seen me until this moment. They raised their hand towards me and my heel caught the edge of the hole. My heart pounded against the silence.
My trembling lips parted. “Wh-”
There was a singular sound of glass breaking and a massive spider’s leg broke free from inside the astronaut’s helmet.
Fear dashed away every thought in my mind and I fell noiselessly into the abyss.