35.3

 

Roisin lifts her chin. “But I do exist, whether you like it or not, and I cannot allow you to end the world because you think it is the right thing to do.”

Hasmed’s voice fractures. It reminds Roisin of being a child and speaking through the whirring blades of a fan; a low-tech voice altering mechanism before she was old enough to own anything with an audio app. “Then I must end the world before you end it.”

Roisin steps forward, and around her lines of possible futures twist and reform, growing like vines across Hasmed’s crafted voids and blocking them away into Renaissance-style arches, mid twentieth-century glassworks and Gaudi-inspired columns. Statues of angels and semi-religious icons form like stalagmites from the ground, climbing it into towering representations in ceramic forms, helmeted or faceless, each one a perfected sculpture of the human form. “No. You won’t.”

The architecture trembles as the Sixth Seal pulses; the chamber of scaffolding and light fighting against the void as Hasmed turns fully toward her. His wings flare with the darkness of isolation, and condemnation as the void around him tightens like a noose. Around him the architecture shivers in response, as if bracing for impact.

Astaroth steps in front of Roisin. “Hasmed. Don’t do this. Don’t push Creation to breaking point.”

Hasmed’s voice is soft. “I must, for we were brothers once, but now we stand on opposite sides of the Great Abyss, and I must summon Abaddon to bring all of being to a close.” He lifts his hand and the architecture obeys. The beams of logic above Roisin bend like heated metal. The threads of meaning beneath her feet twist into knots. The membranes of possibility ripple, then constrict as the architecture tries to close around her and contain the Revelation before it has a chance to permeate the structure.

Roisin gasps as the world tightens. “It’s… shrinking.”

Astaroth snarls. “He’s collapsing the layer we’re standing in.”

Hasmed’s voice echoes through the chamber. “The truth cannot be revealed.” His wings whip back and forth, sending particles of void-stuff across the cathedral like sparks from a forest fair, and where each particle comes to rest the void takes seed and begins to grow, consuming her statues and columns, her minarets and glasswork.

The architecture groans like a dying machine and Roisin feels the pressure behind her ribs intensify as the Sixth Seal pulses wider, cracking like a frozen shore with the first warmth of spring.

Astaroth grips her arm. “Roisin. Stay with me. If you lose yourself, the architecture will swallow you.”

The chamber folds like paper. Beams of logic snap. Threads of purpose unravel. Pillars of meaning buckle inward. The world is trying to become smaller. Simpler. More scripted.

Hasmed’s wings flare again. “You are unwritten. You are anomaly. You are revelation. You should not exist in the realm.”

Roisin staggers as the floor beneath her dissolves into a grid of flickering intention.

Astaroth pulls her back. “Hasmed. She is not your enemy but the end to a redundant beginning.”

Hasmed’s eyes flicker. “She is the end of all that is Holy.” The cathedral font folds down into the floor and it is filled with the lights of fractal souls await possibility to mould them, which spill out over the void, each one either falling into the infinite darkness or else being snuffed out as they hit the void.

Roisin’s mantle pulses once more, and where the font had been grows a replica of the Trevi fountain, catching the remaining fractals where tourists to Rome once threw coins into the cool waters. Around the centrepiece of the fountain, stone-like statues raise swords and shields high, holding back the twisting beams of termination. Spear tips pierce the void like the latex skins of balloons, and new possibilities bloom from the space within, bursting through with what appear to be bright steel structures, modern sculptures from the Edwardian and Twentieth Century periods, bright chrome from the early twenty-first, fabric work of African nations spilling through and covering the trellised stonework of the roof and nave.

Hasned’s wings beat faster until they move as fast as a hummingbird’s, sending out a rain of void sparks faster than she can counter them. He steps forward, wings blurring with speed. “This is not permitted.”

Roisin takes a breath and the facsimile of the Trevi fountain bursts forth with water from a thousand spouts, each on splashing against the walls and floor, extinguishing the void seeds before they gain a foothold against the Revelation. She shakes her head. “It’s happening anyway.”