Skyline Severant (The Consilience War Book 3) Read online

  Location Indescribable

  Under the discolored clouds, moving like vast sheets of bone in the body of a whale, Sarkoth Amnon commanded the landscape. Made it dance, and made it sing.

  Ravines split, not from the moon, but from his gestures, his thoughts. He loved seeing plumes of dust rise, sucked into coruscating boleros of sand, riding clockwise spirals until they were a hundred kilometers high…and then letting it all fall.

  He explored, his confidence growing until it was the size of a planet.

  The moons orbited, two scions that spoke and whispered about his power. He knew their exact positions intimately, knew them as he knew his own hands.

  He could have walked forever across the purple tombstones of the rock, creating and destroying, endless satiating his desire for change and heave and flux. Dynamics. Physics. The simple satisfaction of taking something indestructible, something meant to last for ages, and revealing it as a lie.

  Then he came to a strange structure.

  It like a pyramid. A stable shape, a stable design. It could easily resist the transverse sheer pressures exerted by the wind, and the compressional longitudinal pressur exerted by the planet’s gravity. With soft material and extreme environments, pyramids were the only way to go. Even nature sometimes formed them, sharpening dull edges into what almost looked like steps.

  But this was no nature formation.

  It had a curved walkway, spiraling and zigzagging back and forth between four points, each of them curling up in a spiral of fluted rock, with each sharp edge catching the wind and adding another mournful howl to the threnody.

  It was a stair stepped pyramid, a ziggurat.

  …an altar?

  Built by who or what? And for what purpose was it made?

  He could see the steps, could discern their purpose.

  He started to climb.

  Started to probe the mystery of this great thing that had erupted out of the planet where he had mastery, where he was king.

  Someone had been here before. He received this knowledge without the slightest touch of territorial aggression. It would be nice to have a brother. A fellow destroyer. Cataclysm echoing and thundering across the universe in stereo, blasts of hate and molten rock heaving from two separate hands as they burned a swathe through every kind of matter that stood in their path.

  He sighed, and reached the top.

  Staring around, he decided to split the ziggurat, and see what was inside.

  He channeled his energy, allowed the moonsong of the polonium black orbs to course through his veins.

  The rock beneath him shattered, imploding into halves and quarters and eights.

  Beneath was a mighty void, a recess that speared straight into the heart of the planet. Wind blew against his face. Ancient air, perhaps a million years old, contained within the world like a bubble and now bursting through to freedom.

  Momentary freedom, before it mingled with the rest of Caitanya-9’s air and became forgotten and irrelevant, an interchangeable part of the planet’s atmosphere. It had traded freedom for uniqueness, a trade he would never make. He would be chained to the planet for eternity, overseeing it, keeping it, imprisoned in a material a thousand times denser than rock, that of his own holy duty.

  Why do I call it Caitanya-9? That’s not its name.

  Its true name was unpronounceable, in this and any other universes. It might be possible to pronounce by osmology -a sequence of smells detectable by a highly adept alien nose, or it might be a series of light flashes, or noises operating far beyond the maximum frequency of the air he now stood in, or in untold numbers of other ways to communicate.

  It might be completely unpronounceable, its true name an unspeakable thing.

  He knew that this was so.

  Caitanya-9’s real name was as far beyond dreams as dreams were beyond reality.

  He fell.

  Or the planet rose up to meet him. Perhaps both, perhaps the reference points were equal, dancers to a discordant system, pressure from above and beyond uniting them the dextral gavotte of physics. He imploded into the planet, merging into its surface, and found himself in an entirely new place.

  There were things stirring around him.

  Breaking free.

  Disentangling from the rock.

  He shuddered as cilia caressed his face, exploring its grooves and cavities.

  The Vanitar.

  Insectile nodes of thousands of eyes stared right through his body, examining his bones, and he shuddered, flayed a thousand times beyond nudity.

  As their eyes passed through him, he felt eviscerated. Ripped apart.

  You have brought us back.

  It is time for us to return.

  And he understood then, some of it. How the planet had suffered incredible damage, an explosion that had devastated a large amount of its area, and that their ether.

  We never died. We never became extinct. We only went away until it was safe. Until the problem plaguing the universe was resolved, and erased.

  The problem of suffering.

  Once this has happened, when no creature bleeds and no energy is lost to the void, then Caitana-9 will have no further reason to exist. At the signal of the planet’s dissolution we will reawaken, and return from our slumber.

  Breaking free.

  Unlocking our chains.

  Your words destroyed the planet, Sarkoth Amnon, and your signal now blazes across the heavens.

  We are coming back.

  Download the fourth book in the series, Foreverlight: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XD4TSGD/