Vacation II (Chaos)

(( CHAPTER 11: CHAOS ))

There was nothing.

Then, everything. The world rushed toward her, but not the one she knew – the world she witnessed was one full of nothingness and everything, impossible to comprehend. Chaos surrounded her, and she could feel its tendrils sink into her mind.

This isn't the first time it's happened. I'll just be here a while longer. It's comfortable and warm.

Pain, heat, pleasure, cold, fear and love and hatred and fury and forgetfulness. They washed over her, through her, around her. Her identity clung desperately to her consciousness. Nothing availed her; the roiling nothing/everything which surrounded battered her on every side.

You are it. The Chaos encompasses you, absorbs you. There is no more you.

“No”, she would have whispered if she still possessed a body with which to do so. She heard it, though. Her voice was torn to shreds, refracted and reflected back to her, mocking her defiance.

There is no more you, your voice is our voice, you speak only what we speak.

“No!” she screamed it, and heard it come back to her again, clearer.

The defiance of Chaos seemed to become even more defined as she did so. Do not struggle! There is no point to it! You are nothing!

“I am Alyssa D'Eldess.” she spoke clearly, her voice ringing around her, and the Chaos which had imbued itself in her shrank suddenly, cringed from her.

Sensation returned to her, she took a deep breath; though there was no air in this place, her lungs were there. Her body was returned to her. This place was pure chaos, which could destroy anything - but anything could be created from it. She could bring order to it.

She sat, cross-legged, in her small bubble of calm, and concentrated. I am sitting on the grass, she thought. Her eyes closed and she moved her hand, feeling with all her concentration for the blades it should be intersecting. It was there – the nothingness she had been floating in was replaced with a small plain, and she was seated upon it.

It was a very small shell of order, outside which Chaos raged. The storm hadn't been an expression of chaos, she'd come to realize, it had been chaos itself made manifest in an ordered world. This place was the true storm, and she was within an eye of her own creation.

She concentrated, and her shell grew bigger, though each additional bit cost her more and more willpower to maintain. Chaos was hungry, and she was taking directly from it to do what she was doing, but she wouldn't allow herself to fail. Failure meant she would be absorbed by the chaos, and she somehow knew that this fate would be one worse than simple death. It would mean the end of her, of her memories and everything she'd experienced.

The roiling chaos outside her increasingly fragile shell seemed to become even more agitated, though she suspected even the winds of chaos were changed by its very nature. She saw, dimly, a shadow take shape and begin to move. Unlike everything else, it did not writhe and change. It remained coherent, and growing.

At first, she had throught it to be a long distance away, but there was no perspective within the twisting outside world, so she could not tell. As it approached, though, she could see its details more clearly. She tried to remove her suspicions from her mind, knowing on some level that in this place more than any other, her fears could become real. Try as she might, though, she could not dislodge the truth. She knew what that thing was.

It stopped just outside her sphere of influence. It stood perhaps six feet tall, shaped and proportioned as a human, though far more angular. She couldn't tell where exactly it left off and the chaos began, as the edges seemed blurry and half-chaos themselves. Everything about it suggested smoke; its eyes were smoldering embers and his body was hazy and translucent, churning slowly as though caught in a permanent updraft.

“Soldier.” she spoke to it, her voice clear and distinct.

“Your name is Alyssa D'Eldess. Your recognition of the body and identity you inhabit has given you strength against us. That you would so soon come to fruition was unexpected.” She had to strain to hear it; she couldn't even tell how it was speaking in the first place, as no element of its facade that was not already changing had changed during its speech. Its voice was as ephemeral and fading as its shape. “Regardless, you have failed. Give yourself over to our care, and be re-made.”

“I'll pass.” she replied.

“Look around yourself, child.” the thing gestured. “You own a universe barely long enough for you to pace. Outside is the universe my masters own. Chaos expands, chaos consumes, chaos takes all and only in it can you survive. You have accomplished something in your defiance, and we recognize this, but you cannot stand against us in your current state.”

“I guess I'll just have to wait until I can, then.” she said. She was still seated, but was ready to jump at a moment's notice.

The thing may have shaken its head, she couldn't tell clearly. “The Unknown and Unknowable are patient, true. They waited for you to come around, but they will not wait forever. You create order from the forces of chaos, and this makes you rare, but your little world is but a plaything to them, to crush at their whim.”

“Then why haven't they?”

She could have sworn she saw a smile in the thing's nonexistent face, but if it had appeared it vanished a second later. “Child, why do you think I have come?”

It stepped forward, then, into her world, and she sprang to her feet. Its outline was more distinct here, she saw, and the smokiness inside it less chaotic. As its arm passed through the border from the chaos world into her island of order, part of the swarming madness came with it. A blade, she saw. The smoke-thing carried with it a blade of pure chaos.

Her claws were order, she remembered saying to herself long ago. Did that make her a solider as well? She certainly felt like it. Her body in this place was not real, she realized on some level, it was simply an extension of her will, a projection of her identity, formed in the same way she'd formed her reality from the chaos outside. She was incapable of feeling fatigue in the traditional sense, but she did. She'd fought all day yesterday, and what felt like the entire day. Moreover, it seemed like she'd been struggling as long as she could remember. Though her body couldn't feel tired, her mind certainly did. Her claws were order, she thought. In this place, that made them the only weapon which could stand against the thing before her.

“Your kind has been defeated by my kind before.” it reminded her, “Often, by far less. Do you really believe yourself so much stronger than your peers?”

Something about its tone struck her. Belief, she thought. Here, all that mattered was that she believe herself strong enough. It was trying to sow doubt, she could see.

“You'll have to see for yourself.” she said, claws extended.

“You are a creature of order, and my nature is apparent.” it said, slowly advancing on her. “I find it ironic that reason has failed to sway you, that you leap to violence so quickly. Consider that there is more to you than you think.”

Though it told her to consider it, it certainly didn't give her enough time to do so. As it was speaking the last word, it leaped forward in a burst of speed. The sword was slicing toward her before she even realized the creature was done speaking. Her reflexes were good, but acute awareness that her world was not really big enough for this sort of fighting clouded her ability to fight. The claws barely intercepted the weapon in time, and she felt a horrible recoil as they collided. The claws were ethereal, she rarely felt feedback from them, but this time it was as though she'd tried to use her fingernails instead. Intense pain, as though they were being torn from her, suffused her. The creature did not back off, it struck again and she was forced to parry or die – the pain was not yet such that she would prefer the more terminal alternative.

It would be, though. She knew that if the battle dragged on, she'd falter before the tireless assault of the creature. It attacked over and over, and each time she was pressed further and further to the edge of her universe.

She shook her head rapidly at her own stupidity. Her own universe! In a figurative sense, and now literal that she'd realized it, it revolved around her. She was no longer pressed against the edge, instead she was in the center. No matter how she moved, her world would move with her.

The sudden shift of surroundings did not disorient the beast at all – in order to survive in chaos, she supposed, it had to be adaptable. Its swing wasn't even off, and she barely parried it. The creature was every bit as fast as she was, as evidenced by the fact she couldn't dodge it and thus far hadn't even been able to get an attack of her own in.

He was on her turf, though. Her thought about it surviving in chaos gave her an idea – it was no longer in chaos, it was in a world, however small, of order. A world she had created and still, it seemed, had control over.

The next time the creature swung, there was a wall in its way. The blade it held sliced through it effortlessly, but despite its appearance the monster itself was solid. Alyssa used the advantage she'd created herself to put some distance between her and it.

There was a tortured creaking sound as the wall buckled and collapsed, and the creature came on. She did it again, this time surrounding it with a cage of steel, and it fought its way out. She willed knives into her hands and flung them at her adversary. It deflected them with the blade and advanced, but she could tell it was far more wary. It hadn't been counting on this sort of resistance.

Taking a page from saturday morning cartoons, she created a weight above the thing. Its blade could cut through it, but it was simply a large mass, so the creature – moving even more slowly – was forced to dodge out of the way. She flung more knives, then, and some struck it. It howled, then, backing more toward the edge of the world in retreat.

She didn't want that, she found herself thinking. If it escaped, it would go to its masters and let them know of its failure, and they would redouble their efforts. Destroying it would buy time, and every time she struck it with something she'd created it slowed down. Her knives, which should have just been ordinary matter, injured it.

She put another wall, this one spiked, between the creature and the border of chaos. It turned from her, then, trying to run around, and Alyssa created another wall of swords directly in its path. It could not stop – and it struck the wall at full speed. It screamed again, its cry of pain echoing the raging chaos outside. It flailed wildly with its blade, trying to hack apart the wall that it might escape. Alyssa concentrated harder on the blade – she'd driven back chaos once before to create this world, there was no reason she couldn't do so again.

The creature became silent when its blade vanished. It turned to face her again.

Not willing to give up the initiative to hear whatever it had to say, she quickly created more walls, surrounding and trapping the creature. Then, with only a bare moment of hesitation, she sent them crashing together.

The noise was horrific. The steel bulged and split, spikes flew everywhere, and chaos threatened for a brief moment to overtake the world. Then, silence reigned again. Small wisps of smoke trailed up from the wreckage, but no other sign of the Soldier remained.

Order. She sat back down and concentrated, and the wreckage she'd created vanished. Her world began slowly expanding again. She kept an eye out for other Soldiers appearing within the maelstrom outside, but saw nothing.

She was still within the storm, but this island was hers. If she concentrated hard enough, could she make her way back from here? She hoped so; it certainly seemed like her only real option.

She looked forward and imagined an archway, and so it was. Then, concentrating, she began to picture the city. She had only a vague idea what it looked like, her contact with it necessarily made distant by her powers, but nonetheless she imagined it. Office buildings, traffic lights. The way the cars had seemed scattered throughout the streets. She purposely did not imagine the Sightless, though her strongest memories were of course of them. If possible she didn't want to come back to a part of the city they owned.

Billboards... windows... order and chaos in balance... Savant and Yael and Richard and Jacob... life.

It was there, then, she could see it through the archway she'd made. She jumped to her feet and leapt through before she could think better of it.


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