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“A conscious observer has entered the Eye. Thank you for remembering me, friend.”
You blink at Solanum as she stands before you in the ever-shifting dark, her weight leaning against her staff. Isn’t everybody… dead? No, Solanum was on the Quantum Moon. Surely the Quantum Moon didn’t die with everything else? The Quantum Moon is a piece of the Eye, it can’t die. And yet Solanum is here, seemingly alive and seemingly well. Both of you, the last of your respective kinds.
“There’s only one observer between us, friend. A conjecture, if you’ll let me: you’re the only one truly here. What you see is a maelstrom of possibilities, collapsed to a silent few you can understand, interpret, manipulate as a tool. I don’t speak your language, reme-”
She’s cut off as you tackle her to the floor in a hug.
“Ah. I suggest I shut up, hrm?”
She wraps her arms around you and pulls you close, careful not to poke you in your plus-one-eyes with her gigantic mask. And you both lie there for a moment, one on top of the other beside a crackling campfire, the warmth and spitting light keeping the darkness at bay in this little clearing amongst eternity. She wipes the tears from your eyes with a gloved thumb and shushes softly.
“Shh shh. You made it. Quite literally. You can take your time - time’s no longer a concept after all. You’ve been so brave.”
You look up at her and her three eyes, and she meets your glance.
“There’s others here, if you can remember them. But they can wait. You need your strength.”
Blasting sound, the utter cacophony of everything that ever was and ever will be, flashing in your ears and drowning out every thought and every sense, all in a single instant, again and again and again and again and again.
And through it all, by some forsaken miracle, you hear something else. The faint plucking of a banjo and the drone of a harmonica and the hum of old throats, a quiet and forgotten symphony lying at the heart of it all. And it would pluck at your heartstrings, if you still had something resembling a heart.
It sounds like home.
Home. How long has it been? Seconds? Centuries? The difference between the two isn’t what it used to seem, not that you could comprehend a century, never mind the scale you live on now. “Live” is such a funny word.
If only you could reach through the collapse and grasp something, mould something with hands you no longer feel. Then maybe…
It’s soft at first, like elastic. With enough force, you feel like you could punch through, but force is… abstract. If you try to push, it becomes hard and tough like concrete. You get the sense it needs to go back the other way, as if you could play this in reverse. Time is a thing, right? It has to be a thing. You push.
And your senses are suddenly drowned out by the inverse of cacophony, by abstract and infinite nothing, and it feels so empty. You wish there was something, someone, and you wish for home. Slowly, materium fades into view. Atoms into matter into branches into trees and the next thing you know, you’re lying down amongst grass gazing up at an ever-expanding emptiness.
Your helmet is cracked and you immediately feel air in your lungs, newborn gasps filling you with life. The oxygen metre in the peripheral of your vision crackles and glitches in shades of red, alarm fizzling out in the back of your suit. You feel heavy, limbs dead to senses, and you’re hopeless to do nothing but watch as points of light blink into life in a sky slowly but surely filling with existence.
You notice the canopy above you, blinking as light filters through into your eyes for the first time once again. There’s a gentle breath of wind that flows through this space and movement is created as the grass brushes against your suit and the branches above filters the breeze with the sound of fingers on velvet.
And with a rush of warmth, something catches ablaze next to you. Logs spit in the flames, the heat filling your lifeblood, and your heart swells with hope. You fight against gravity to pick up your head and shift it, trying to get a better view of the fire. In the corner of your eye, you see the feet of a rocking stool, back and forth, back and forth. The gentle hum of an old soul - an old friend - casting forward life into the forest around you. And they seem to notice your struggle and stop their humming and their rocking.
Shh… It’s okay. You can rest now. It’s over. You made it. You made it. I promise. Rest.
And their presence vanishes, as quickly as it came, but their humming continues, a soft and gentle song that soothes the soul.
You rest your eyes for now, in the warmth and safety of the campfire. You made it.
Home.