In the void of the boundless universe, there drifts an indestructible vessel containing a Substance beyond mortal comprehension. Not a single mote of matter accompanies it in the eternally black stretch of space, where even light seems an intruder.
The deadly liquid inside the invincible bottle never escapes its prison. Once, on the desolate planet of Aquarius, an Orinean monk, traversing the arid deserts of water, chanced upon this otherworldly bottle of Substance. Drawn by an inexplicable compulsion like the First Woman to her forbidden jar, he observed it — its surface inscrutable, its contents enigmatic — and in a moment of ill-fated curiosity, he consumed its essence.
Moments thereafter, he collapsed to his begrimed knees, his tattered thobes grazing and wafting above the desert land, and let out a wretched scream that was neither scream nor groan, but primal — the sound could only be interpreted as the shredding of a soul. His skin blackened to a horrifying mosaic of Tartarean darkness and ashen pallor. Bones jutted at unnatural angles, twisting grotesquely, while his veins bulged and seethed under the unabating gaze of the desert’s fervent star.
Eons passed, and the remnants of this accursed monk were unearthed by a shoal of human-fish, creatures of the briny deep whose forms were a grotesque fusion of man and marine. Though his piscine limbs and humanoid visage had decayed into unrecognizable forms, the mystic bottle remained untouched by time. One among them, intrigued by the pristine artifact amidst such desolation — the corpse beside it was nothing of consternation — picked it up. An instinctive dread, a supernatural aversion, stirred frantically within, and it held him back from tasting that unknown liquid. Turning, it perceived what it made out to be its kin atop an eternally verdant hill, bathed in a sourceless, radiant luster. Gently, almost reverently, it replaced the ageless bottle and cautiously began to move toward its silhouetted assembly on the celestial slope. Mere steps into its journey, it succumbed to the same unfathomable demise that had claimed the monk millenia before.
Only one knew of the origin of the Substance.
Upon the white dwarf star Amicitia resides a being of neither solid, liquid, nor gas — its essence, the form from which its elixir is sourced, exists beyond the trifling classifications of matter — and it is nameless, for the concept of names is alien to its eternal solitude. It harbors no beliefs, no flights of imagination, no constructs of reality. Its existence — the whole abstraction in itself — is neither suffering nor joy, neither agony nor ecstasy — it is a void, an endless expanse of harrowing solitude, where even the most diminutive amount, the smallest speck of sentience, amounts to the living state of death.
Its barren abode — one cannot call it a home — lies beside a river of an intensely live inferno. The being patrols the star routinely, and has been doing so for epochs inconceivable to any other being, in vain of any creature other than its macabre reflection in the aflame shore.
TO BE CONTINUED…
