Ravens of Eternity

460 Shadow Beckoning

Raijin faded back as the rest of the council continued their arguments. Many certainly wanted them to push forward despite the darkness, while the others simply wanted to disappear into it.

No-one wanted to die, of course. But for some, the struggle was already insurmountable.

She herself didn’t know which way to go. At first she believed they could weather Godeater, and survive between its shadows. But now? Now she wondered if Yggdrasil was the only thing left to them. Maybe they should all be preparing for that reality.

As she quietly thought to herself, an alert came into her DI – someone was activating one of the devastator hangar bays. When she brought up the ship’s tags, immediately saw that it was Thanatos.

Raijin left behind a semi-autonomous construct of herself at the chamber, then sunk down into the station herself. Her consciousness sped through the various circuits and nodes in the blink of an eye, from the chamber all the way to Thanatos’ hangar bay.

From there, she logged into its Engined and traversed through its liquid circuits.

Within moments, she transferred her conscious self into a swarm of nanites and formed on Thanatos’ bridge. There, she found Freya kneeling in the center by herself.

Thin black circuit lines ran down her face and skin, a sign that she was telepathically connected to the devastator.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

.....

She floated over to where Freya was, then sat down on the floor next to her, cross-legged.

Although Raijin was always poor at reading faces, she still did her best to understand Freya’s expression. There wasn’t a hint of despondence or fear or anxiety on it, anywhere. Instead, there was a kind of peaceful determination etched on it.

“Gonna go have a chat,” Freya answered.

“With Godeater?” Raijin asked, which Freya easily nodded ‘yes’ to.

“Figured it’s worth a shot,” she replied.

“Is it even possible to communicate with Godeater?”

Freya opened her eyes, then turned her gaze on Raijin. Both of them had changed significantly since they had first arrived in this universe. They became fearless, powerful, lethal. And also kinder, more understanding, more patient.

In between becoming all of that, they experienced a great many things in the galaxy.

“We’ve both already talked to it,” she said. “Maybe me more than you. But still. You know it’s possible.”

Raijin shook her head in disagreement.


“I believe we brushed up against its consciousness,” she refuted. “I do not believe that is the same as talking to it.”

“Maybe. But if we brushed up against its mind, then it brushed up against ours too. I know it reacted to me, responded to questions. Like it understood me. I say that’s a kind of talking.

“And if I can talk to it, maybe I can also say something. Maybe convince it to stop. Or maybe I gotta beg for it to stop. I dunno. Gotta try, right? Least I could do, anyway. Not like I’m doing much else but… send people to their deaths...”
Freya trailed off as she thought about everyone who had died in her name. Whether for her, or against her, it was all the same in the end.

Raijin easily saw the sorrow etched on her face, and grimaced.

“You heard about the settlements, then?” she asked.

Freya nodded again, slowly this time.

She looked off into the distance as the guilt ate at her from the inside. Of course she knew the risks. They all did. But it didn’t stop her from feeling heavy. It was her plan, her idea in the first place. Well, her and Raijin and Azrael’s idea, anyway.

They thought that maybe if they showed Godeater that they could build without consuming everything around them, it would spare them. But those hopes were dashed the same moment those settlements vanished.

Hundreds of thousands of people, gone. Just like that.

“What a waste,” Freya muttered.

“Even if I agree, talking to Godeater will not bring them back,” Raijin said after a moment. “Even with the best-case scenario, and you convince it to stop… half of the galaxy is already gone. Most of our people are dead, and the rest are scattered, heading for the edges of the galaxy.”

“Maybe. But also we wouldn’t get wiped out. If even a few of us live, that’s enough, right?”

Raijin didn’t answer. It wasn’t something she could answer, even if she knew everything there was to know in the galaxy.

If there were only a hundred humans and drogar left in the galaxy, was that survival? Was that life?

“And besides,” Freya continued, “we definitely haven’t tried everything, right? We’ve shot at it, ran from it, hid from it, everything. Except maybe try to talk to it. I can’t be the only person who thinks this way, either. So I’m thinking we should. Now.”

Raijin continued to process what Freya was saying.

It was true that they hadn’t tried everything. In fact, one of the many things they haven’t tried was to become like her, a purely digital being.

Any single one of them could have easily joined her. With plenty of mental preparation, of course.

They could all become beings that existed inside of massive databanks for the rest of eternity, where they could play out their simulated lives amidst the encompassing darkness of reality.

But of course, she also understood that transitions like that would never be accepted. Some would never understand it, or even try to. People were far too attached to their biological identities to ever understand any kind of transcendence beyond them.

Not that she could fault anyone for feeling that way. After all, she still mimicked her own biological body, even though it wasn’t something that was necessary for her survival or growth in the slightest.

But otherwise, yes, she knew that Freya was right. They hadn’t done much to face Godeater in any meaningful way. Their own collective desperation narrowed their vision greatly.

They didn’t even attempt to send signals to Godeater first, or any kind of attempt to reach out. No declarations of war or armistice, just an automatic revulsion, an automatic avoidance. Automatic hostilities.

“I agree with you,” Raijin said. “We should attempt to speak to Godeater, and carve out a future from those talks, if it turns out to be viable. But this does not mean that you must go out there by yourself. All you would achieve by going yourself is risking your own death.”

“I know what I’m risking,” Freya replied. “Just myself. And if I’m wrong and I can’t talk to Godeater, then I’m the only one that goes down. Not a hundred thousand of us. We don’t all have to die because one of us had a suicidal idea.”

“If you haven’t already realized, you would be in defiance of your own purpose as Dark Feather. You vowed to protect the Republic, neh? I don’t recall the part where you promised to throw your life away to an omnipresent glutton.”

Freya chuckled and shot Raijin a grin.

“I disagree,” she said. “This is exactly what being the Dark Feather is. Doing what I can to keep everyone safe, by being their shield. It might be good for me to stick around if we’ve got fleets to fight, or people to beat down. But the only thing threatening our survival’s Godeater.

“It’s the only fight we’ve got left. Which means going out there is… it’s basically my duty to go.”

As the two went back and forth, Thanatos slowly maneuvered out of Yggdrasil. The massive devastator exited out the large hangar bay, then began to orbit the planet-sized station.

The gaping maw of Sagittarius A* glared at them defiantly in the distance as it munched on the remnants of a passing star. Its brightness was literally stolen by the black hole’s accretion disk, where it spun closer and closer for the rest of eternity.

“Look, if anything I need to go first and make that first try,” Freya continued. “If I fail, I fail. But if I succeed in starting something, then I can come right back. We… we can put a whole team together, all of us dedicated to talking to Godeater, negotiating with it for time and space.”

Raijin pursed her lips with doubt.

“Do you honestly believe you can talk to it?” she asked.

“Yeah, I do,” Freya replied. “Like I said, no-one else but you and I have talked to Godeater more. Oh, except maybe Redstar. And Sara Chase. And Kayt’s crazy uncle.”

“I doubt any of them are alive at this point. I believe they were all on Helios when it was taken over by shadow. Additionally, I could never trust Kayt’s uncle to properly perform negotiations. He hardly understood his own reality.”

“Which drives home my point – I’ve got the most experience talking to it. And I’m still sane. Mostly. So obviously I’ve gotta try harder.”

“Godeater is an existence that is many times higher than our own,” Raijin said with exasperation. “It would be the same as if I attempted to negotiate with a wildcat – neither of us would understand each other because neither of us have an intrinsic understanding of the others’ needs.

“Imagine that it interprets your actions as hostile or threatening, and decides to lash out at anyone left in the galaxy.”

Freya looked deep into herself as Raijin’s words sunk down into her.

There was a great deal of truth in what she had just said – her actions could have serious repercussions on the rest of them, no matter what she intended.

And it was certainly true that she didn’t have a deep understanding of Godeater. All she had were impressions of what Godeater was doing based on her own perspective. Which could most definitely be wrong.

Her own interpretation of their communications could be erroneous from a fundamental level.

She began to question how someone like her could even try to talk to Godeater, much less negotiate with it. Everything she had learned and gained in this crazy life hadn’t taught her anything in regards to dealing with a problem this consequential.

Or an intelligence of this magnitude.

But something deep inside her told her she needed to go, needed to try. Maybe it was Godeater itself tugging at her through her subconscious. Maybe it was the guilt of all of the deaths under her name. Maybe it was Tiamat’s Transcendence urging her towards this fate.

Maybe it was some mix of it all.

Either way, it was far too powerful for her to resist.

“I know,” she said quietly. “I know it could lash out, turn everything upside down and dark in a flash. All because I said something ignorant or idiotic or something like that. But I could also say something good, something smart. Enough to get it to pause and think and maybe say something back.

“If we don’t do anything, it’d be the same as saying something ignorant and idiotic and getting wiped out. At least this way we’ve got some chance to make it.”

Raijin blinked as Freya filled herself with sheer determination. She made it clear without any shadow of a doubt that nothing was going to stop her from going. It dawned on her that she hadn’t already left because Raijin herself was still on board.

Or, at least, a shard of her consciousness was on board.

“Very well, consider me convinced,” Raijin said with a sigh. “However, I do not believe that you should talk to Godeater alone. I’ll come with you.”