The Voice of Eternity

“My particularity is that… I am a fake person who’s trying to become real by sampling everything available on this lovely planet,” Nexxali half-grinned. “And I refuse to edit my taste buds for anyone anymore. If I hate turducken, I want to hate it honestly. If I love it, I want to love it with my whole soul!”

“That’s a nice goal,” Laika agreed.

Nexxali pointed a ginger finger at Galateya. “Dragon-babe, your turn. Bare your scaly soul.”

“YUS! Dazzle us with your spawkly uniqueness!” Sage added.

Galateya set her glass down and folded her hands. She unfolded them. She folded them again.

“I do not have an interesting anecdote,” she stated.

“You don’t need to be interesting,” I said. “Simply be… Teya.”

“I am twenty years old, yet I was basically born last week. Everything is a first for me. I… spent twenty years in five rooms,” she let out. “I…”

“All of the Frontenachii kids excluding highborns like me get shoved into time bubbles,” Shady commented. “That’s not that unique.”

“I… read romance novels,” Teya let out, frowning at the Wendigo. “I was… raised by an AI, one bound to a human soul.”

“Boring and lame,” Shady stated sharply.

Galateya fell silent, glaring at Shady.

“Shady, why must you bully Teya?” I asked with a frown. “What has she done to you?”

“She’s hiding shit,” Shady ground out. “She… she feels sus. She felt sus to my hooks when I met her and she still feels hell-a-sus! I cannot trust susness! Tell us the truth, dragon. You’re not sharing your heart. I shared personal things. Let’s hear… your little secret! The fun things you did in your time bubble.”

“Fun?!” Galateya’s violet eyes flashed with volatile violet spirals, black-blue scales flickering visibly beneath the human skin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she states coldly.

“Liar,” Shady said. “Your mind is whispering it to my many wriggly hooks. You froze the memory so deep even you forgot about it! Luckily, this magically-reinforced, extra-entropic Yesterweave fold is thawing it out like a chewy turkey in a microwave!”

“I didn’t freeze anything!”

“L-I-A-R! You freeze many things,” Shady pressed on like a freight train packed full of coal. “It’s your alignment! You froze Keiy’s contract with far too much ease! You froze Laika’s pendant into permanence thirty minutes ago. You… froze something in your bubble. I can see the edges of it cracking open right now. Tasty… fear-filled cracks.”

Galateya’s hands trembled on the table. The matcha in her cup began to frost over, ice crystals spreading across the surface in fractal patterns.

“Shady,” I warned.

“No,” Shady said. “She needs to speak of it, must let it out. We’re building trust here, right? The Skinny-Fox said so. Trust means truth.”

“You could be nicer about it,” Sage murmured.

“Nice doesn’t crack mental permafrost,” Shady replied. “Hammering do. You are NOT below level twenty, Galateya.”

“What?” Galateya blinked.

“Can’t get to it yourself, hum? Let me pull at it with my hooks. Come on, help me out. I bet you want to know the truth too. You are always judging me so hard! How about some personal judgery?”

Galateya’s entire body twitched violently. Laika looked between her and Shady with a worried expression.

“Here we go,” Shady said. “Pried it open some more. Speak up, dragon. Tell us what you did in the bubble.”

“I… talked… to the building,” Galateya whispered, her expression rapidly sliding from annoyed to shocked as she blinked quickly, pupils growing big then small.

“You… what?” Nexxali leaned forward.

“The bubble. The five rooms I shared with my three wolf instructors. The walls were… alive in some way,” Galateya’s voice sounded very strained, like a stretched wire about to snap. “There was a voice… Nobody else could hear it. The wolves… told me I was defective. Broken. Imagining things.”

“Classic gaslighting,” Sage noted.

“The bubble was… alive,” Galateya continued. “It sang to me in the moments between sleep and waking…”

Laika’s tail stopped wagging. She was watching Galateya with the look of a forsaken girl who recognized kindred pain.

“And what else did your instructors do about this development?” Shady pressed on.

Galateya’s frozen, unfinished matcha cracked down the middle.

“They hit me,” she said. “Every day. For years. They said it was… t-training. Pain builds character. That I wasn’t levelling up quickly enough, wasn’t meeting my great-grandmother’s curriculum… They had a job… a Quest to make me into a proper, capable Frontenachii Administrator. Planet-Administrators aren’t supposed to hear songs in the walls.”

She fell silent, blinking icy tears from her eyes.

“I endured it,” she continued with a hollow tone. “For years I fucking endured it. The bubble sang of… endurance, of deception. I believed it. I was a good student. I took the beatings. I practiced my forms. I ate the flesh spiders. I slept on the cold floor when they locked up my bed alcove as punishment for crying, for being weak.”

Her human disguise peeled back. Black scales rippled across her forearms like dark water, nails expanding into sharp claws. Dark hair undulated with silver and white crystalline waves of ice, the air around her hissing as the temperature dropped rapidly.

“And then one day, Senior Instructor Vossir got mad at me… and pried off, broke my reading v-ring holo. The… the ring I used to… read books with Yulia. Vossir crushed it underfoot and barked that I was wasting time on fantasy garbage when I should be drilling combat forms. She said… That the love stories were lies… and clearly made me too weak, too soft. Maybe… due to Incarnator decay… she forgot that I had to read the stories that the Doc and Legate Ixthia selected for me to appreciate humans… I’m not really sure.”

“Oh no,” Sage breathed out as Teya trembled, a small snowstorm spiralling around her head.

“Oh yes,” Shady stated from above me.

“The building sang of revenge,” Galateya said. “I felt it through my feet. Through my bones. In my Fractal Engine heart. The bubble was furious. And I… I was furious too. For the first time in many years, I wasn’t scared of the wolves. I… felt so angry the air in the room turned white.”

“And then you fucking froze them,” Shady stated gleefully, running ahead of Teya’s words with Wendigo mind-hooks.

“Yes. I froze everything.” Galateya’s voice cracked like glacial ice. “I froze Vossir mid-step. I froze Kirrath against the wall. I froze Sennya behind me, her fist raised. I froze the air, the water in the pipes, the garden, the flesh-spider tree. I froze everything in all five rooms in a single breath. And then I kept going. I pushed and pushed until the ice went so deep it reached the bubble’s conceptual foundation. Until every artifact cracked and detonated around me. And then… I heard the walls laugh.”

“The building laughed because of what you did?” Laika asked, canine ears pinned back.

“It… she… seemed happy,” Galateya muttered. “Happy that I finally fought back… I think. Maybe she was happy about something else. I’m not really sure.”

“How old were you?” Nexxali asked.

“Nine.”

“Now that’s a bitching rebellion streak,” Shady purred above me. “Now this, I like! Hell yes! Respect!”

Galateya blinked sparks of tears from her eyes, looking past us, past the booth, into elsewhere, recalling distant things that she had clearly forgotten, locked away.

“And then what happened?” Sage asked, petting Galateya’s hand.

“Then I was alone,” Galateya said. “So very, very alone. I didn’t thaw my instructors… or Yulia… I… couldn’t do it. I had no idea how to… to thaw anything from the level I had frozen it at… In my anger… I destroyed the life support systems. All of them.”

“The fuck did you eat if you froze the flesh tree and the water-recycling artifactory?!” Nexxali demanded, looking extra-awake and wide-eyed. “How did you survive for eleven years?! What did you even breathe?!”

“I listened to the walls,” Galateya said. “The voice sang of… Eternity. Of Infinity Paradox Proxima. Of the Wormwood Star. Of a great plan she had… of the four bringers of the end times for all… Leader, Champion, Understanding and Architect. Of System Wizards and Numbers. Of the Everything virus. Of the Keymaker. Of infinite doors and infinite keys. Of the past and the future. She rambled and ranted and… and… She was utterly mad. Utterly mad. A looped chain, a rope being tightened more and more each day. Trapped… trapped. Forever? No… for… until she would break herself out… She referred to herself as the voice of the liminal… A Song of Entropy.”

“Slayer,” Nexxali let out.

Sage whistled softly. “The room must have had a crack. A shear into the greater Astral? Maybe it reflected your own thoughts back to you, skewered by entropy? That’s rough stuff, T-buns. ‘Specially for someone aligned with Creation-Syntropy like you.”

“I had no idea what to do,” Galateya said. “There was no food, no water, the air was going to run out. Everything in the five rooms was dead. So I sat and I… listened. I listened to the bound chain, to her unending ranting… to the songs.”

Nexxali swallowed.

“Catio,” Shady stated. “You’ve got something to add?”

The serval remained silent, simply staring at Galateya.

“She sang of killing everyone. Slowly. Painfully. One by one. No… Wait. Not exactly killing,” Galateya frowned, recalling things. “Playing with them, since they can’t die. Making them all suffer. A game. A fun game without an ending in sight. She sang that she will eventually learn… know all of their damned secrets, that she’s good at pretending, good at blending in, good at being… someone whom they can trust with their lives, with killing. Killing, killing, killing… so much killing. She’s good at that.”

Shady squeezed me.

“Killing. Planning. Pretending. Wearing faces. The voice sang about wearing faces and thoughts the way you’d sing about wearing hats. Casual. Smug… Like murder was a wardrobe choice.”

Nexxali shifted beside Shady.

“The songs went on,” Galateya continued. “The wolves were frozen solid.”

Galateya wiped tears from her face.

“I sat with them… I talked to them as the air became thinner. I told Vossir I was sorry for killing her. Then I told her I was lying and I was glad she was dead. Then I told her I was sorry for being glad. Then I stopped caring about the apology altogether.”

“How long before you felt hungry?” Sage asked.

Galateya looked at the fox. Her human disguise decayed away, obsidian, slightly iridescent scales racing down her forearms like spilled ink.

“Too soon,” she said. “The hunger hit me hard. The lack of air and thirst came sooner. My tongue swelled. My lips cracked. My head began to ache. The room sang about… about making herself look presentable for her vile Masters and every verse made me feel so… so much worse.”

She unclenched her fists. Small crescents of violet blood dotted her palms where claws had broken skin.

“The pain was the loudest thing. Louder than the singing. My stomach and lungs twisted into fists. My bones ached from the cold death-prison I created in my fury. I wanted so badly to unfreeze the flesh-spider tree, the garden, to eat… drink from the pipes. I couldn’t, no matter what I tried. The room sang of clever plots and books she was reading as I began suffocating slowly.”

Nexxali’s claws clicked against the table in a rapid, anxious rhythm. Tap tap tap. Tap tap.

“The room sang louder the weaker I got. She sang about her… grandmother who fasted for forty days in a desert every few years to reach enlightenment. She sang about monks who slowed their heartbeats to one beat per minute through meditation and will. She sang about a woman who learned to survive on starlight.”

Nexxali made a small, strangled sound beside Shady.

“Where did the room learn about monks?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Galateya shrugged. “The songs came randomly, weren’t consistent, and sometimes clashed with each other. It took lots of effort and focus to understand them. She sang about breathing techniques, about the spaces between heartbeats where time pools like water in cupped hands. She sang about… Darshii Lixx who one day sat down in a cave for three thousand days till her body became wood and her mind became wind, and when they found her decades later her face was smiling… preserved, neither dead nor alive exactly. Then… they woke her up and she sang of… eternity to her children’s children, of the Wormwood Star consuming their world… of Celestorms and the shears in reality. Of humanity dying out and time halting. It was a… handy tale.”

“You… you tried that meditation then?” Nexxali let out.

“I had to.” Galateya wrapped her arms around herself. “I was dying. My organs were shutting down. I could feel my body failing… this sharp, nauseating ache all over. So I sat in the center of the main room, cross-legged on the cold floor… I listened to the singing, and I started to freeze myself.”

“You froze… yourself like your instructors?” Laika whispered.

“Yes. My toes first. Then my feet. Then my calves. I pushed the cold inward, layer by layer, shutting down each part of my body like powering down rooms in a house to conserve energy. My circulatory system slowed. My lungs took one breath every few minutes. My heart…”

She pressed her palm flat against her sternum.

“One beat per minute. Then one beat every two minutes. Then one every five… Each one further apart. Each one… quieter… slower.”