this impossible thousand years

She contributed her own help to the extra defense for the next many years to ensure the aether supplies were not tampered with. Mr. Burrison helped by lobbying some members of the CAPS board; he had always believed the aether should be protected more thoroughly with the dangers that would come if the supply was destroyed.

On the other hand, Zeillese wanted to end this war. It was nearing eight hundred years long -- all her life, ever since she had been born in year 37, she had been subject to the propaganda, the work, the fear and the constant, looming presence of something beyond comprehension.

She knew she was missing something. Something big, something bigger than her, something bigger than everything she had ever known.

You had to wonder -- Riwohrs had existed since what seemed to be the beginnings of time. With time being so long and stretching so infinitely, that was a big thing to say. Their population was huge, twenty billion, perhaps even more, especially considering they never died, unless by weapons. They phase through space, walls and become invisible, and even see the future. The planets and ships they lived on were all one and the same with them. The entirety of their species was linked together into one great thread: Zeillese, a stuttering anomaly among everything else. She often thought that the Riwohrs were closer to the universe than any other living thing that had ever existed. They were linked to both space and time, and even the fabric of their skins looked like the universe itself.

There was something more that Zeillese had picked up on in the last hundred years or so. Distress. Snippets of the future of Riwohrs, strangled with an all-encompassing fear, and so many more emotions. Defiance. Anger. Sorrow. Denial. A chant. Impossible, impossible! It could never happen to us. Zeillese had never felt emotions in her dreams before. But those - those snippets, like a flash in the netherworld, was like dipping her foot into hot lava minds.

She would first suppose this is some kind of victory for the cyborgs, for CAPS - finally. But for all she wishes that was it, Zeillese also knows it can’t be. It isn’t right. She remembers that earlier future dream, of that ship being destroyed by itself. She wonders.

Zeillese has the stupidest idea. More stupid than any idea she ever had as a child. But she knows, unlike her father, she won’t live forever: this has to end now. And she knows, in the reflection of her soul, in Prism’s words, in her past and Mr. Burrison and Seven and a million other people, that she has a duty she must resolve, must fulfill.

It is the conflict of her past. So Zeillese decides to go the heart of it.

~*~

Year 823

To wander to the ends of the universe, to the heart of the beast, is a difficult task.

For all of the stupid ideas in her life, Zeillese, at least, did not run in head first. Her route was carefully planned, making a map from snippets of the universe in her dreams, from her own travels and the resources available at CAPS HQ.

She requested backup, too. A assault on the Riwohr front. They needed to be shocked; the Head Coordinator and every other cap agreed easily enough to her tip. And Zeillese would need to touch their minds, somehow; each and every Riwohr mind.

Zeillese hopes she had gained enough trust from her peers for her to lead this assault. For years, with her subtle meddling, they had pushed back against the Riwohr fleets. It has to be enough. After all, for all of their sense of mysticism, Riwohrs could be killed, destroyed even, the same as anything else.

~*~

It’s been days.

War is simple. Now, at the front lines again after so long, it makes all of her inner pondering like a waste time. She knows it wasn’t; but the fact remains.

One, small, invisible ship, with one, small, green invisible occupant. Funny thing, invisible technology on ships doesn't’ work if there is something living inside -- it just looks like they’re floating. It’s good for her, because no-one expects someone to hijack the Riwohr main ship.

It doesn’t take long, and then she’s on board, through some mangling through strange, jaw-like hangers, and slipping through doors that barely seem to exist. The ship seems to be trembling, from the way the paws of her feet feel like they’re vibrating, occasionally sending her stumbling. She knows this certain ship is not sustaining any blasts. No; it has to do with that feeling of fear from the Riwohrs.

Zeillese looks left and right through the dark, black caverns of this beast of a ship. The walls are rough, knotted; nothing like the steel utilitarian aspect of any other ship she knows. They glitter with millions of subtle, starry colors; purple, orange, and green. It is, to Zeillese’s distaste, somewhat beautiful, in the same way she would at times call herself beautiful. It is, also, identical to the substance of her ‘rock’.

But that doesn’t matter right now. The fact that she knows she is going to get caught very, very soon is critical.

Zeillese turns a corner. And get caught she does, because by some kind of gravity, the universe had pulled her to her father, as if they were two opposite magnets: always destined to meet. Zeillese hadn’t forgotten her first dream, either, not a second, over these long, harrowing centuries.

There is a strong difference here, though. The fear. The unfamiliar fear in her father’s face, gaunt and drained of that black color, of those galaxies that were supposed to glitter. And Zeillese stands, strong and with the power of fury and grace at her side, an avenger older than centuries.

Her father speaks first. She remembers those screeching tones; oh, how she could ever forget!

“Zeillese! How are you even -” his face, suddenly, contorts, into something more devilish than ever on his alien face. “You have something, don’t you?” Zeillese’s eyes pop; it must have been a mistake to bring her ‘rock’. For a moment, she thought of pulling it out of her pocket -- but why should she be showing anything to him?

“Maybe I do. But that doesn’t matter to you now,” she threatened.

“You view yourself in a higher place than you really are, Zeillese…” His tone went from the screeching tone of all Riwohrs to a deep roar like a dragon. Anger. It would be more frightening if it wasn’t for the clear agitation of his eyes.

She took a step forward. “More than ever, I would say the same of you.” And then, as if struck by the most deafening blow, he stumbled back, mouth gaping and eyes blown wide. He looked more human than he ever had before. He seemed then to come back, vehement and bursting with fire, face twisted once again. Denial.

“How do you know that? How have you even gotten this far? This isn’t the future laid out for us. It can’t possibly be -” he broke off, staring at the contorting floor. Defiance. Fear.

Zeillese didn’t know what he was talking about, but it was best to roll with it. “I am half Riwohr, am I not? I feel it too.” She promptly looked down at her feet, mirroring his emotion.

Something broke in the air. “You are a bad actor, Zeillese.” She looked up, and saw his distraught eyes. It was as if he was facing death itself, like the world had been ripped away from him; or maybe, like a child who had been taken away from their childhood years too early. Sorrow. “I know you can’t feel it, even if you can… see the future, perhaps. It’s the only way you could have stopped us.”

“Feel what?” Zeillese demanded. And her father cried out, as if praying to some god that had abandoned him.

“Feel the end of our lives! Twenty three billion, one hundred and twenty three million, four hundred and seventy two thousand, and seven hundred and thirty-one,” he listed, “I can feel it. We all have, every last one of us - those as old as the universe, those as young as this year - the end of all our lives, for the past thousand years! You CAPS are fools. You don’t know what war you’ve been fighting all this time. Y-you…” his screeching died, shuttered, whispered, “y-you don’t know, you’ve been fighting against the dying of a race. For the universe…. Our greatest entity, which we have gone against. You have to understand! When your god tells you your time is up… would you accept your death?”

“Yes!” Zeillese spat. Hysteria. Utter hysteria was what her father was reduced to. “If I was you -- if I was so horrible a father to have left his own child on a desolate planet for death, I would welcome it! It would be what I would deserve. It was what you deserve, it is what -” your whole race deserves, and she cuts herself off, because for all she hates her father, she remembers herself. A whole race cannot be so bad, and in that trembling moment, suspended away from the currents of time, she too feels sorrow.

Her father bows his dark, dark head. “It had already begun, then,” he whispers, “more than ever I was fixed on the Riwohrs as a race, towards surviving. You didn’t fit. You didn’t belong to stay. But now…” He breathes in, slow. “It looks like you will be the only remnant of the Riwohr species left at all.”

“What- what exactly…?”

“Everything. We will all just disappear. This ship. This planet. I feel it coming. I feel it coming…” Then, clarity, and he locks his wild eyes with hers. “I hope you can forgive me.”

Zeillese’s mouth twists. “Never. You can’t be forgiven, you can only beg for forgiveness and the bigheaded view of your people,” she says, harshly. “But perhaps I can give your-” maybe just our, a little bit too, “-race penance.”

Her father merely laid on the ground, and touched his nose to floor, seeming to melt into the ship. Faintly, he nodded, and locked eyes one last time before they closed. Go, his voice seemed to whisper, in the most human tone Zeillese had ever thought to hear from a Riwohr, I cannot ask for your forgiveness. Only for this. Only for this.

Zeillese ran.

~*~

Zeillese gets back on her ship, and flies, and flies, and flies, til she reaches the surface of the Riwohr home planet. It is almost as if not just her father had spoken, but the entirety of the race. Perhaps there were some wonders of the Riwohr race she did not know yet, would never know.

Stepping down onto the planet for the first time in what is nearly a millennia, Zeillese is guided, perhaps, by those unknown forces of the Riwohrs. But to carry out the end burns like fate in her blood, guiding her limbs, both real and fake, to a empty space in the ground. The ‘rock’. It fits perfectly.

Perhaps a millennia ago, her mother took this piece of her home so she’d always have it with her. Or perhaps she took it so she would stand here on this day, and not die alone on a steel ship, at the feet of her own father.

The air trembles with sorrow, thick like cloying mud with each step Zeillese takes, with each inch of her hand towards her pocket. Taking in a deep breath, she kneels by the indentation, and holds the rock out of in front of her. It feels like standing at the center of the beginning and end of a world, of a legacy greater than any other. It is exactly that, Zeillese knows with grim certainty.

Zeillese remembers. She does not forget. She wonders if that man, Prism, had not been right. If to lose your home planet forever was not as bad as he made it out to be.

Because that’s what was about to happen to her, but far more. And Zeillese found, she wasn’t so afraid. It was more of a state of calm. She, after all, was eight hundred years older than Prism. The endless of years stretched emotion, thought, and life have brought her to this moment of peace among whimpering despair. I am not afraid. But I will mourn you, even while the rest of the world celebrates.

“I will mourn you,” she whispers, because she knows the Riwohrs will be the devils in their history. “I will mourn you,” she repeats, feeling all of the minds around her whisper acknowledgement, reassurance, bitterness and resignation. She placed the piece of herself into the crevice, turned, and ran, skidding into her ship the moment the world came to a shuddering stop.

The moment the emotion slid off like water, the resounding defeat, the lost hope and crying souls slipping away into some great void. And this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. Zeillese had once read that in a Earthen anthology by some man called T.S. Elliot.

She turns. The planets, the ships: all gone, and in their place, a mere shower of fiery orange stardust, the same color as Zeillese’s blood, and no one else's.

She stands among the quiet of the universe, for that moment, in the quiet, hovering ship in a newfound realm of nothing. She bows her head. Silence.

So this is how it ends.

This impossible thousand years.