Random Science Fiction Story

He sees the system laid out before him. It sits perfect in the surrounding black, like jewels hanging from the night. Planets, barren crags and superheated metal and verdant oases, emanate outward from the sun-halo of a red super-giant class star.

Arms outstretched, he soars towards the sun at speeds which cause the fabric of space-time to ripple and distort. Seeing his destination, he enters the sun’s gravity well and uses the gravitational slingshot to propel him to near light-speed. Any faster and matter burns into energy. While he could certainly recover, regenerative processes have always struck him as tedious. Pan-dimensional wanderers such as Xixius fear the void of inactivity that comes when waiting for one’s molecules to reunite.

The speed causes distant stars to trace designs in the sky, and Xixius laughs in exhilaration. His destination grows near, and he begins to recite incantations. Ancient prayers and formulas in a dozen languages. Hurling words out into the vastness. The delight of approaching battle.

He reduces his speed and lands gracefully onto the surface of a bio-engineered asteroid that floats prismatic and crystalline between planetary orbits. The entire structure has been molded into spires and pinnacles that needle outwards at all angles. It seems to be made of glass, as if one could shatter it into a diaspora of falling jewels that would litter the heavens. Even so, Xixius knows that the building could exist, comfortably and defiant, in the event horizon of a black hole or in the heart of a sun.

He walks into a cavernous vestibule, and as he moves forward he shifts the structure of his biomimetic implants, changing his appearance. The air around him shimmers, and he appears shrouded in a velvet robe and hood. The robe is of a darkness so intense that it seems to draw the light out of the room. He is apostate, a hermetic destroyer, a forbidden and reviled anti-priest, and the shadow that he casts moves, bends, and takes on forms of its own.

A voice, asexual and mocking, emanates outwards. “Xixius, has long has it been? Eons? Millennia?”

“Not long enough, Radian. Word of your atrocities reached me on the other side of the galaxy. You should know that I do not like being disturbed me from my studies.”

In the middle of the room a beam of energy appears, and within it a pattern forms. Out of that blinding steps Radian, dressed in god-light. Radian dances across the floor, and as he moves he conjures his own solar-system of planets and heavenly bodies which revolve around him.

Xixius spits and waves his hand, causing the planets to disappear. “I have no mind for parlor games – my business here is far more serious. I know what you have done to the populations of this system. You have squandered your gifts like a child with power and no wisdom.”

Radian sneers – “Populations? You speak of them as if worth something when they are no more than trinkets and baubles to be toiled with.” Radian speaks lightly, as if he was discussing the mundane and trivial. He sees no problem with weaving discord into the plane of order. An experimenting anti-god, he looms above the preterit and lusts after their undoing. Radian had risen to power as a prophet of harmony, but somewhere along the way he grew dark and corrupted, and his goodness collapsed in on itself. Now he is just a shadow, dancing on the edge of the universe, a bringer of ruin. Somewhere out near the end of space he looked, and saw nothing. And that nothing became a part of him.

Xixius bows his head for a moment, sending out elements of his mind to infiltrate the compound’s data stream and structure, turning it into a temple of his own. “You have betrayed all, wasted all. A failure. You see no trouble in what you did? Monster! Whole worlds, sentient and full of life, were ground beneath your feet. Your petty meddling brought about this world-death.”

“And how would that be, exactly?”

“Do you think that anything escapes my notice? Everything that exists does so with my permission and with my knowledge. I felt the reverberations when you infected them with your crude thought-virus, causing populations to desire only death, only chaos. You caused loved ones to turn on one another with tooth and nail.”

“It’s not like I killed them myself, it was just a harmless little meme.”

“You know that I have long banned memetic warfare. How dare you disobey?”

“You bore me, Xixius. There is nothing you can do, not to me, not in my place of power. You were a fool to come here.”

“Your place of power? Naïve little child, all places are my place of power,” he says, stripping away Radian’s control.

Radian falters, a look of anguish spreading across his face. He extends his hands, beseeching the terrible avenger looming over him. “How – what did you do?”

Xixius steps forwards and removes his hood. His face is a miniature universe, containing nebulas, star-systems, sentient worlds, all the density of the multiverse. Long ago when mortal, he forged secret sciences and magicks, joining himself in sexual union with the fabric of being. When he speaks it is with a voice that is all voices, every nuance and shade, it is the sound of trumpets, of the tearing of the seals, of the awe inspiring and terrible. “I did a very simple thing, Radian. I took away what I gave.”

Radian stammers backwards, crying out, eyes wide and transfixed on the splendor of Xixius’ true form. “But how could you? I am a god!”

“Such words are meaningless. You may have been a god, but I make gods. I am that in which gods exist.”

Xixius hovers in the void, looking at the stars and planets, looking at the crystal mausoleum, and he watches and thinks. His thoughts are as immense as the stars themselves, and they move with glacial surety. Such thoughts that have never been imagined by any creature, the summation of all-things, a great synthesis forged in the alchemical center of his being.

Radian is gone now, vanished or dissipated or destroyed or reabsorbed, and now all that is left is too repair his wrongs. This part of the galaxy is too tainted and corrupted to remain, a blemish too cancerous to stay.

Xixius raises his hands, and begins manipulating space and matter. A virtuoso conducting the harmonies of space. His hands begin to move, moving in rhythms and polyrhythms and counter-rhythms, and the universe sings for him. First the crystal palace disappears, then all traces of it, then not even memories of it remain. Erased throughout time, gone forever. He then moves his attention to the planets, to loose fragments and particles, and they too are erased.

Last his thoughts turn to the sun. For a moment he bathes in its light, savoring its last caress. His hands come crashing down, a final curtain call, a last dance, a triumphant ending.

The sun is extinguished. What once gave light and life to a dozen worlds is now snuffed out, excised from the great text.

Xixius looks at his deconstruction and is well pleased.