They stood on the viewing deck of the derelict, one of only four still on their feet after the attack. Everette stood eyes closed in something akin to rapture as he swayed back and forth over the ground. A small, manic smile tugged at the corner of his lips, and every time his mouth opened a string of incoherent whispers would cascade from his lips.
Renegade stood next to the man clinging on to the last fraying edges of her patience. She had locked that other bitch away in the back of her head, but that didn't change what had happened. She had the entire group of them in her grasp, and could have dealt with them then and there, but the other one had gotten in the way, actually taken control of her body.
Forced her to do things she did not want to do.
That fact was both embarrassing and rage inducing.
"You're just afraid."
Worst of all, she was still here.
"I am not talking to you."
"Giving yourself the silent treatment, you know, back on earth they make pills for that."
Off to her right Everette continued to whisper to himself.
"Will you shut up!" Renegade snapped, finally unable to contain her rage, but unable to direct it at the true target of her anger without choosing to punch herself in the face.
Everett turned to look at her, the manic smile passing from his face for only a moment, "You do not understand what we have accomplished here. HE is coming."
The phrase made renegade shiver, and in the back of her mind she couldn't shake the shard of ice that formed inside her head and sent radiating shivers down through her body. What made it worse: that sliver of ice, that sliver of doubt wasn't the product of Maverick, it belonged to Renegade herself. Even worse than that, the smug satisfaction radiating from Maverick, who had sniffed out the sliver of doubt the moment that it appeared.
This time when Maverick spoke it was, surprisingly not mocking, her voice was soft and reasonable.... And she hated it. "Of course you have doubt, you spent your entire life trying to avoid this moment, to fight against apollyon. You know what he can and will do. Personally I don't think you are fighting for Apollyon at all."
Renegade snorted, but tried not to think too far on the subject.
"You are fighting because you are angry and rebellious, and they are the only ones out there to fight for. Personally.... I think we should just go off on our own. If I can't have my friends then at least don't subject either of us to this."
Renegade ignored the construct in her head, but she didn't have to worry about fighting Maverick for long as they were both interrupted by a sudden rising chill. It began in that sliver of ice in the back of her head and radiated out through her body. Though nothing outside in the universe had noticeably changed, to her it seemed as if the world had grown that much darker.
Wavelengths of orange and red became more saturated, and the shadows in the derelict behind her only seemed to deepen. Her heart sped up a fraction, her mind filled with the distant buzz of anxiety, like a fly trapped inside a fluorescent light.
Everett leaned his head back, eyes rolling and mouth open in a sick expression of pleasure, "He is here!"
Another shiver ran like a rat down the ladder of her spine.
"We must go to him."
Even renegade could admit that was the last thing she wanted to do. Apollyon was not a creature in the same way they were. They talked about him in terms of he, and intentions and thoughts, like he had a body and a mind like the rest of them, but the truth couldn't have been more distant.
Apollyon was.... Something that could not be described by words alone.
Outside the forces of the universe the architect had created. He and the architect were equal and opposite in all ways. Where the architect had a form, Apollyon had none, where the architect was a being of rules and law, Apollyon was a creature of complete and total chaos. In a world ruled by apollyon there would be no sentient life, no structures no, light, nothing, because all of those things require rules and are governed by laws.
But still she stood, following at the mad priest's heels as they made their way through the ship and out of the airlock, leaving their dead abandoned in the altar room. With a flash of light and a dizzying whirl of colors the two of them passed through a warp tunnel created by Everette, finding themselves floating in orbit above the Necratorium. A column of light funneled itself down toward the planet's surface as the souls of the living were slowly fed into the proverbial woodchipper to fuel the void machine.
Maverick shivered.
Renegade tried not to agree, but it wasn't until she turned her head, and caught an eyeful of the void behind them that she truly understood. It only took a moment, just a single moment with her guard down, and she almost went mad.
She couldn't have explained it, what she saw or how she felt when she looked upon apollyon, and words will never be able to describe what she saw. The thing, it was not an entity, not really, but a nonentity forced to take on a shape against tis will, but instead of a recognizable structure, it took on a cloud of color, shapes and impressions all set within a haze of rage, fury and uneasiness.
If she were to describe it as anything, she might have compared it to some sort of nebula, a vast fog of intelligence that spilled malice like a star radiating light.
And at its center?
A gaping well of blackness shot through with streaks of burning light:
Sagittarius A* the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.
In that moment, past the fear and confusion and gibbering madness that tried to take her over, everything around her became suddenly clear.
Beside her, the mad priest cackled in delight.
The black hole, the one place in the universe they didn't understand and had never understood, the place where time and light and space didn't make sense, where all the rules seemed to break in impossible ways.....
That was the domain of Apollyon, one of his many calling cards left as indelible scars on the universe what remained of the world that came before. From here it was impossible to tell Apollyon's relation to his dark phenomena.Was he spreading out from the black hole, escaping from it, did he live inside? Or WAS he the black hole.
It was impossible to tell and she found she did not want the answer.
In a moment of, what she felt to be weakness, she turned her head from the scene.
At her side Everette reveled in it, basked in the sight of his lord, raised his hands in praise to the doom he had called down upon them.
Doom she wanted nothing to do with.
Her implanted com system blinked with an incoming call, and she hailed it with only a short message of reply before grabbing Everette and heading down towards the surface of the necrotorium. Even past the faded hazy atmosphere of the necrotorium, Apollyon was still visible as a vast discolored streak across the sky. The ring around the black hole provides the light required to warm the planet's dry, cracked surface.
Kaza waited for them at the base of the temple steps beneath the red haze of the sky, head tilted back to look up at what they had wrought.
She turned her massive head to look down at them, wicked spikes of her helmet silhouetted against a bloody morning.
"The end is coming."
At the base of the steps stretching across the cracked earth as far as the eye could see, knelt an army in the process of prayer, thousand upon thousands of creatures both void and construct kneeling upon the dirt and bowing their heads to the thing in the sky. Black metal and spikes jutted up from the crowd in homage to their awoken leader as construct, void creature, and turned maker alike pressed their foreheads into the cracked ground.
Everett raised his hands to the air, and began to chant out a cry of glory to his dark lord, throwing himself to his knees and prostrating himself to the dirt, pressing his head down against the ground, rising up only moments later to hold his hands to the sky before bowing again.
It was a sick display.
One that neither Kazna nor Renegade chose to emulate.
Renegade, sickened at the sight, turned her back on the crowd, instead choosing to look at Kazna.
The tall Drev was looking older, though massive, and shrouded in apollyon's cloak of swirling black tendrils, somehow she didn't seem any bigger or more intimidating than she might have at any other time. Once upon this story, Kaza had been the biggest scariest thing to roam the galaxy
And now.
Well, there wasn't much special about her.
There wasn't much special about anyone. Apollyon was going to destroy it all, and it wouldn't matter whose side she was on in the first place. Apollyon wouldn't be here if she hadn't.
Nausea began to rise itself within her stomach.
Had she gone to far?
But no.
Stubbornness refused to let her answer that question.
She had done what she had had to do to get her independence, that was.... What she had wanted, wasn't it.
Beside her, and inside her Maverick let out a soft painful laugh.
"What have you done"
"This wasn't me." She snapped
"No, maybe not, but you sided with these crazy people. Your rebellion isn't going to mean shit if there is no one and nothing there to experience it. If apollyon wins he is going to take everything and destroy it. Even the meaning of your rebellion will be gone, because there will be no one around to think about anything, because thought in the way that we understand requires some sort of law to govern it."
Together they turned to look out at the mindless worship happening beneath the necrotorium palace.
"Look at them, look who you threw in your lot with."
The nausea only grew.
"Are you proud of this?'