azure_mercy

Zhaan, accompanied by Stark, is out in the gardens. They aren't working on her plot today, however. They're looking for someone.

"Asar-Suti?" Zhaan calls. She didn't schedule a meeting: she's just hoping that he's around.

Zhaan had been the logical choice: she had been dying anyway.

Someone had to work the controls of Pathfinder Neeyala's ship to phase it out of Moya's hull, so the Leviathan and those aboard her could escape from the wormhole in which they were trapped.  Zhaan had known - they had all known - that the one who did this would die in the process, smashed against the wall of the vortex that surrounded them.

She expected it to hurt, but it did not.  It was just a change: one microt she was a mind and a soul bound inextricably to an ailing body, and the next she was something else, something that stretched itself through the wormhole.  And somehow she worked her way out of that strange tangle of time and space, until she saw all of time and space.

Zhaan watched the birth of the universe as it exploded from a tiny jewel into a swirling mass of stars and nebulae and worlds: watched the cosmos play out its elaborate dance, swirling and destroying and creating all around her: watched it all play out over billions of cycles in a space of time that seemed much less, although she could not say for sure how long it was.  But time did not matter, in any case.

The universe was perfect, she realized, now that she could see it all at once.  Why hadn't she realized before?

Eventually the spiral slowed and the dance entered its last movement.  The stars grew weary and red.  She knew that everything would end soon: this was an ending far more momentous and permanent than the end of her own small life.  But she felt no fear or sorrow, for this ending, like the beginning, and all that had come between, was perfect and beautiful.

She watched the ancient stars ripple as they started their final collapse, waiting for the last exhalation of all existence.

Then, suddenly, inexplicably, her awareness was pulled back, put once more in the confines of a body.  She could still see the red stars collapsing, but they were on the other side of a window.

And Zhaan was falling through a Door...