35.4

 

Hasmed raises both hands as if he’s lifting an offering to the Gods. Or just the One God, rather, Roisin thinks, and she hesitates as she tries to anticipate his intentions. As he brings his hands together, the architecture around her screams not with a voice, but with the shriek of tearing steel; the sound of car being pierced by the steel rods transported on the truck ahead of it, or the shriek of a ship as an iceberg, freed by the rapidly heating climate, rips through its hull in what was previously a safe shipping lane. The chamber folds inward like a closing fist. The beams of logic twist into spirals. The membranes of possibility tear. The threads of meaning snap like overstretched wires.

Astaroth tries to pull her back, but his grip on her arm is like a toddler trying to pick up a live pony as it would a toy. “Roisin — he’s collapsing the architecture around you, specifically. He’s trying to erase the space you occupy.”

Namaan shouts a similar warning: “He is targeting your existence. Not your body but your place in the world. If he can erase the space you occupy…”

Roisin doesn’t need his to finish the thought. She feels the pressure intensify, as inside her the crack in the Sixth Seal deepens like a rivulet carving a river through a block of limestone. Around her, the architecture curls inward, fingers of possibility folding down to crush her like a fly against newspaper on a butcher’s plate window.

Roisin looks up as the beams of logic curl toward her and then stop, open by something Hasmed cannot touch: Revelation. The beams twist upward, curving away from her to from an impossibly wide arch, one that would never, could never, exist in the mortal world. From the centre of the arch sprout more beams, growing like the thickening branches in a timelapse of a tree’s growth; each one curving down into another arch, until the whole cathedral of light is encompasses within the scintillating dome of a science-fiction movie, more like a domed amphitheatre of Roman origin than the Gothic and Renaissance architecture of extant buildings. Despite the void outside, the dome is illuminated by a thousand panels of glimmering chance; windows of hope holding back the collapsing void.

Roisin is left standing in the epicentre of the structure, hovering on possibility as it extends around and below her; a more perfect sphere than the Tianjin Binhai Public Library. It is aligned to her, and Hasmed is left in the area his dismantled altar used to occupy.

He stares at her, trembling. “You are redesigning the blueprint faster than I can dismantle it. I cannot collapse you.”

The sixth seal pulses again as Roisin lifts her head. “No. You can’t.”

The next pulse is stronger, taking her almost by surprise coming so fast after the first. The next makes her wince in pain and the one after that…

The pressure behind her ribs becomes wider, splitting the seal into a dozen fracture lines until it completely ruptures, realving a truth too large to stay inside her.

Astaroth’s eyes widen. “Roisin! Brace yourself. It’s happening. The Sixth Seal is breaking. Now.”

The chamber around them dissolves out of any resemblance to architecture and instead becomes a mass of rules, suggestions and orientations. It becomes a cascade of logic gates, of grammatical constructs, of perspective vanishing points. It becomes the warp and weft of canvas; the chemical composition of pigments, the particles of atomic physics. As the bones of reality fade away, they are left with the dust between atoms, and the atoms comprising dust, the particles comprising atoms; the strings describing particles. The sky becomes a dome of constraints. The ground becomes a mesh of permissions. The air becomes a lattice of rules.

Everything is scaffolding, placeholder, notations of future concepts. Everything is written as it has always been and always will be.

Except Roisin, who stands in the centre of the collapsing architecture as the only thing that is not written. From the centre of not just the universe, but the whole of existence from beginning to end, the revelation hits like a silent shockwave. From here she can see the threads of intention that hold gravity together, the beams of meaning that define time, the pillars of logic that keep cause and effect aligned and the membranes of possibility that separate one reality from another. The world is laid out around her as the Creator fashioned it, as the angels maintained it, as Hasmed is trying to restore it.

She sees the world as it really is, and it is an unfinished canvas. A work in progress. There is no Divine Plan after all, just a minor artist playing with a palette whose colours appear and vanish seemingly at random.

Astaroth drops to his knees, humbled as no angel has ever been before. “Roisin,” he says, “This is still only the preliminary sketch.”