Void Dragon

SHE WAS TRAPPED in the darkness. She tried to wake, but there was only the utter, unbreakable
darkness in all directions. In truth, she could not even think in terms of directions, for this space
appeared to be dimensionless. She had no sensation of up or down and no sense of the passage of
time. Had she been here for long? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember much of anything.
Her memories were hazy. She had once roamed freely, she remembered that much, feeding, birthing
and extinguishing stars without heed, but now…
Now there was only the eternal darkness of death.
No, not death, but was it sleep? Or was it imprisonment?
She didn’t know.
All she knew was that if this was not death, it might as well be for all the power left to her.
Were these memories or hallucinations?
She perceived of herself as female, but even that meant nothing. What did sex matter to a being of
pure energy and matter?
Her mind roamed the darkness, but whether she ventured across the span of galaxies or travelled
only millimetres, she couldn’t tell. Did she journey for mere moments or the lifespan of a universe?
Many of the dimensions she was thinking in were meaningless to her, yet she sensed that they were
all equally ludicrous in this darkness. Nothing existed here, nothing but the darkness.
Nothing.
Except that wasn’t always true, was it?
Sometimes there was light, tiny sparks in the darkness that were gone as soon as they were noticed.
Holes of light would sometimes appear in the darkness through which elements of her being could be
drawn, atoms of existence planed from a life the size of a star, unnoticed but for the promise of a
world beyond the darkness they brought.
She tried to focus on one such light, but no sooner had she registered its presence than it was gone,
only the tantalising hope of its return sustaining her. This was no life, this was pure existence
sustained at the verge of extinction by the forgotten mechanics of Old Science.
Dalia.
The sound came again, no more than a whisper, barely heard and perhaps only imagined.
Dalia.
The word gave meaning to form, and she began to build a sense of scale and place with the
concepts given weight by the sounds. As more and more of her surroundings became concrete, she
began to re-establish her sense of self.
Dalia.
That was her name.
She was a human being… not a creature of unimaginable scale that defied time and the material
universe with its power. Indeed, she wasn’t sure if creature was a term large enough to encompass the
immensity of its existence.
She did not exist in the darkness. She was not a prisoner hurled into the lightless depths of the
world by an armoured gaoler and bound with golden chains.
She was Dalia Cythera.
And with that thought, she woke.
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Eventually, Semyon brought them out onto a wide ledge high up in a glittering cavern of blinding
silver that put Dalia in mind of the hollow core of the planet, such was its size. It was the largest
internal space any of them had ever seen or could imagine, the uttermost reaches soaring above and
below them, and the shimmering walls curving out to either side of them like the largest amphitheatre
ever conceived.
‘Behold the Dragon!’ cried Semyon, moving to stand before a wooden lectern that was incongruous
for its very normality. A thick book with a worn leather binding sat atop the lectern, next to a simple
quill and inkwell.
Dalia looked out over the vast expanse of silver that was the interior of the cave, half-expecting to
see some winged beast launch itself from its lair.
She glanced over at Caxton and Rho-mu 31, who both shrugged, both equally as puzzled as her.
Severine shuffled forward to the edge of the jutting promontory they stood on, her eyes with a glazed,
faraway look.
‘Severine, watch out,’ cautioned Zouche, looking over the edge. ‘It’s a long way down.’
‘This place feels… strange,’ said Severine, a tremor of disquiet in her voice. ‘Do any of the rest of
you feel that?’
Dalia saw Severine looking in confusion at the distant walls of the gargantuan cavern, blinking
rapidly and shaking her head as though trying to dislodge a troublesome thought.
‘If the Dragon is chained somewhere in here, I expect it’s bound to feel a little strange,’ said Dalia.
She squinted at the far off walls, though their unbroken, reflective sheen made it hard to focus
properly.
‘No,’ insisted Severine, pointing with her good arm at the vast shimmering silver walls and roof.
‘It’s more than that. The angles and the perspective… they’re… all… wrong! Look!’
As though Severine’s words had unlocked some hidden aspect of the cavern, each of them cried out
as the sheer impossibility of its geometry, previously concealed from their frail human senses, was
suddenly and horrifyingly revealed.
Dalia blinked in confusion as a sudden wave of vertigo seized her, and she grasped Rho-mu 31’s
arm to steady herself. Though her eyes told her that the walls of the cavern were impossibly distant,
her brain could not mesh what she was seeing and what her mind was processing.
The angles were impossible, the geometry insane. Distance was irrelevant and perspective a lie.
Every rule of normality was turned upside down in an instant and the natural order of the universe
was overthrown in this new, terrifying vision of distorted reality. The cavern seemed to pulse in
every direction at once, compressing and contracting in unfeasible ways, moving as rock was never
meant to move.
This was no cavern. Was this entire space, the walls and floor, the air and every molecule within it,
part of some vast intelligence, a being or construct of ancient malice and phenomenal, primeval
power? Such a thing had no name; for what use would a being that had brought entire civilisations
into existence and then snuffed them out on a whim have of a name? It had been abroad in the galaxy
for millions of years before humanity had been a breath in the creator’s mouth, had drunk the hearts of
stars and been worshipped as a god in a thousand galaxies.
It was everywhere and nowhere at once. All powerful and trapped at the same time.
The monstrous horror of its very existence threatened to shatter the walls of her mind, and in
desperation, Dalia looked down at her feet in an attempt to convince herself that the laws of
perspective still held true in relation to her own body. Her existence in the face of this infinite
impossibility was meaningless, but she recognised that only by small victories might she hold onto
her fracturing reason.
‘No,’ she whispered, feeling her grip on the three-dimensionality of her surroundings slipping as
the distance to her feet seemed to stretch out into infinity. Her vertigo suddenly swamped her and she
dropped to her knees as her vision stretched and swelled, the interior of the cavern suddenly seeming
to be as vast as the universe and as compressed as a singularity within the same instant.
She felt the threads of her sanity unravelling in the face of this distorted reality, her brain unable to
cope with the sensory overload it was failing to process.
A hand grasped the sleeve of her robe, and she looked into the lined, serious face of Zouche. With a
gasping snap, her focus returned, as though the squat machinist was an anchor of solidity in an ocean
of madness.
‘Don’t look at it,’ advised Zouche. ‘Keep focused on me!’
Dalia nodded, her senses numbed by the violated angles and utter wrongness of the cavern walls
and the thing they cloaked from view. How had she not noticed it before? Had it taken her senses a
moment to try to process the sheer impossibility of what she saw?
Even knowing the warped nature of what she was experiencing, she still felt dizzy and
disorientated, so she followed Zouche’s advice and kept her attention firmly focused on his loyal
face.
She took a series of deep breaths with her eyes shut before pushing herself to her feet and turning to
face Adept Semyon, who stood beside the lectern. The dark-robed adept and his towering combat
servitor were an unwavering slice of reality amid the chaos of her unmade vision, and the more she
concentrated on him, the more her brain forced the anarchy of angles and rogue geometry into a
semblance of normality.
She could still sense the roiling power and madness behind the thin veil of reality her mind had
imposed, but pushed the thought of it to the very back of her skull.
Caxton lay curled in a foetal ball on the ground, his eyes screwed shut and a thin line of foam
dribbling from his mouth. Rho-mu 31 was down on one knee as though in prayer, gripping his weapon
stave tightly as he fought down the maddening vision in his head.
Severine stood where Dalia remembered her, staring out over the expanse of the cavern at the
furthest extent of the ledge.
‘I understand,’ Dalia told Semyon. ‘The Dragon… I don’t know what it is, but I know where it is.’
‘Do you?’ asked Semyon. ‘Tell me.’
‘This cavern… everything in it. This is it. Or at least a sliver of it.’
Semyon nodded. ‘A tomb and prison all in one.’
‘How?’
Semyon beckoned her over to the lectern and opened the book. ‘Look. Know.’
Dalia took halting steps towards him, feeling the strange sense of inevitability that had gripped her
when they had travelled on the mag-lev. She had a sudden sense that she was meant to do this, that she
had been heading towards this moment all her life.
She reached the lectern and looked down at the book, its pages filled with the tightly knotted
scrawl of a madman with too much to say and too little space to write it. The words made no sense to
her, the language archaic, the lettering too small and compressed.
Even as she tried to tell Semyon she couldn’t read his words, he reached over the book and took
her hands in a grip of iron as its pages turned in a frantic blur of parchment.
‘No… please…’ she begged. ‘I don’t want it!’
‘I said the same thing,’ said Semyon. ‘But he doesn’t care what we want. We have a duty.’
Dalia felt the inhuman fire in Semyon’s blood through the searing heat of his hands. The pain was
excruciating, but it was nothing compared to the terror that filled her at the dreadful truths contained
in the immortal depths of his eyes.
She tried to look away, but his gaze held her locked tight.
His skin blazed with a pure golden light. ‘Look into my eyes and see the Dragon’s doom!’
And in one awful rushing flood of knowledge, Dalia saw everything.