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The endless void yawned its violent purple colors, bleeding into the black sands of the forsaken desert. Larger flakes of stone skittered across the obsidian surface, as though they floated in the glittering crystals. Under the violet skies, clouds marched to and fro, their oddly lighter contrast against the maddening deep purple, sunless sky.
Ava sat up, pushing herself to a seated position, before she noticed the absence of the cutting pain she’d felt as Bea and Lilith had placed her in the quantum portal. She tentatively placed her fingertips against her abdomen and felt the shards of divinium crumbling into black dust, as though they were nothing more than week-old crackers. She felt the warmth of the Halo surge through her body, her wounds healing once the divinium had scattered into the wind.
“What… where am I?” she said aloud to no one in particular. The only reply was the shifting sand and the chittering of glassy legs beneath the sands. Across the horizon was nothing. Literally nothing, absent of any features save more black sand dunes. “Bea? Lilith? Anyone?” she called out, her voice fading into the breeze.
She looked up to the skies, sanity spilled haphazardly on a canvas. Where was the scorching sun Michael had talked about when he brought back his experiences from this realm? Where were the endless battlefields, the armies of demons? Instead, she faced a sea of… nothing.
Unsure of where to go or what to do, she shrugged to herself and started walking toward some of the taller dunes in the distance. With no frame of reference, she looked down at her wrist, only to find her watch’s screen blank. She tapped the display with her fingernail, but it failed to respond entirely. Sighing, she pulled her phone from her pocket as well, saying a small prayer of thanks that the divinium explosion hadn’t shattered it. It too failed to respond; the display didn’t even light up.
So she walked, counting her steps. After a dozen, she looked back over her shoulder, and the shifting sands had already swallowed her footsteps whole. With her shoulders sinking, Ava walked.
In the beginning - the first hundred dunes or so by her reckoning - she forged on out of a sense of duty. The fight wasn’t over. They’d defeated Adriel but their world was still a shambles, still needed a Halo Bearer to deal with the thousands upon thousands of wraith demons Adriel had unleashed.
The next several hundred dunes, she crossed out of a sense of longing. There was still so much living she had to do, so many places she still needed to go. She’d seen Spain and Switzerland and a few other nations in their evasion and then pursuit of the firstborn children.
Whether an hour, a day, or a century had passed, Ava had no idea. Time meant nothing. She felt no hunger, no thirst, no fatigue. Each dune she crossed gave way to yet another dune. She’d laid down at one point, but felt no fatigue, no sense of tiredness, and even trying to nap did nothing. She had no idea if this was life, death, or something in between. Even pain meant nothing here. Somewhere around the five hundredth dune or so, she pinched her arm hard, expecting her flesh to bruise. Instead, it barely felt as anything. Ava took out her lifeless phone and slammed it against the back of her hand, and it may as well have been a wet sponge for all the pain it failed to cause.
After the thousandth dune, she stopped counting. Instead, she recited to herself, swam in fading memories to keep them as fresh as she could. Carding her fingers through Bea’s hair. The astringent, almost woody scent of Bea’s shampoo in their apartment. The constellation of freckles on Bea’s cheeks. The silky softness of Bea’s lips in those final moments before she’d faced Adriel.
Dune after dune, she recalled every aspect of the woman she loved, good or bad. Vaguely, Ava remembered reading some fashion magazine article about how a person’s voice was the first thing loved ones forgot after their passing, so she cataloged every conversation, every argument, every murmur Bea had uttered to her in the short handful of months they’d known each other.
In this lifeless purgatory, Ava knew that only the force of her own will would keep the flame alive in her heart, keep her memories, keep her love from withering and fading as surely as the sands around her. Every step she took was accompanied by Bea’s name on her lips, a balm for her sanity.
Until finally, far in the distance, her eye caught something. For the first time in forever, she picked up her pace, breaking into a run to get to… whatever it was on the horizon. Even if it had been a horror, anything would have been better than the endless sea of sand she’d been fording.
As she approached, her heart dropped. Of course she’d cross an eternal sea of sand only to find the inhabitants of Reya’s realm she’d seen the last time she’d visited. Tarasks. Or in this case, one very large Tarask standing motionless on a dune, eyes glowing like coals in a campfire. Unlike in her world, here they required no energy to maintain their presence, so its silver armor barely reflected the violet skies.
Ava weighed her choices. There certainly was more than enough room in the endless desert to avoid the killing machines. Ava picked up a larger fleck of obsidian from the sands, not enough to be a weapon of any import, but enough to break her skin. Closing her eyes and grimacing, she forced the edge of the shard into the skin of her thigh.
And felt nothing once again. The skin healed almost immediately, even without the flare of the halo’s energy to restore her. Perhaps this is what happened to Lilith, she thought to herself idly. Something about Reya’s realm transformed flesh and blood into… something more. Michael too came back with substantial recuperative powers.
Ava exhaled, letting some of the tension bleed from her shoulders. She gathered a handful of obsidian stones, the largest she could find (though none were much larger than a coin) and slowly approached the Tarask.
“Uh… hey buddy,” she murmured as she gingerly stepped towards the beast.
And its eyes caught her motion.
Ava tensed, ready to leap into action. Perhaps, she thought, with the latent magic of Reya’s realm and the halo, she might survive the fight without meeting Adriel’s gruesome fate.
The Tarask turned.
Not towards her, but away from her, and began to take its lumbering, clumsy footsteps, its talons sinking into the sand.
Ava gaped at the demonic creature. Every time she’d encountered them, they’d made their best effort to perforate her and this one was… just walking away? She shook her head, dropped her hands, and started after the creature.
“Uh, hi. Hi, me, down here?” She ventured, barely managing to keep pace with the demon’s elongated strides across the black sands. “Where are you going? Where are- uh, where are we going? Are you going to Reya?”
The Tarask didn’t respond or even acknowledge her.
Hours or perhaps days later, Ava was unsure, she’d filled the space of their travels with one-sided conversation. The Tarask never acknowledged her one way or another, so she’d taken to answering for it. “Henry. You seem like a Henry. Well, insofar as you seem like anything, but I knew a kid at the orphanage named Henry. He was the quiet type too. So, uh, Henry, do you come here often?”
Ava laughed at her own jokes. The Tarask, terrible company, certainly wasn’t about to. And yet she felt some sense of relief at having someone, anyone, to talk to in whatever seemingly endless journey they were on. “Hey, have you seen Reya? Last time I visited here, she was a little more present.”
They walked on.
“Do you think Bea loves me? I told her I loved her just before I came here. I’m fairly certain she does, or she wouldn’t have kissed me back, right?”
Dunes came and went.
“Do you have a type? I mean, I haven’t ever really had time to look, usually you’re trying to skewer me. Do you even have, uh, naughty bits? Like, is that your armor or your actual body? Do you guys date and have scary spiky babies?”
She exhausted most of her questions over a few hundred dunes, transitioning to just airing her thoughts. Since the Tarask didn’t seem to mind, Ava used the time to settle her thoughts, to focus again on Beatrice.
Some interminable period of time later, they came upon an obsidian tower, dark as the sands around them, and the Tarask simply walked up to the tower, turned around, and faced away from it. The massive spiked claws of its arms extended as it stood motionless, burning eyes surveying the landscape.
“So… I guess this is the gate you keep, huh? You know,” she half-heartedly laughed, “Gatekeepers and all. No? Yes? Okay, good talk, Henry. I’ll, uh, I’ll be seeing you, I guess.” Ava looked at the base of the tower and found a doorway carved out of the stone. She gingerly walked past her Tarask companion to find herself at the bottom of a stairwell. With no other obvious features, she began to climb.
Thankfully for her, fatigue never set in. The tower seemed far taller inside than outside; she’d lost count of the steps after two thousand. Confusingly, there were no windows and no obvious sources of light, yet the black stone was lit with a pale violet light that seemed to come from nowhere, guiding her up the stairs.
Finally, she reached another doorway. The moment she stepped through it, she found herself in total darkness. Alarmed, she turned around to step back out, only to find the doorway gone. “What the hell… hello? Anyone? Henry?” She called out, receiving nothing in return, not even the echo of her own voice.
A pinprick of light appeared in the center of the room, illuminating the cracked obsidian floor. Ava knew instantly where she was; she’d been here before when the Crown of Thorns had let her briefly cross over. The tiny white light swelled as the room brightened. Before her stood a woman wreathed in gossamer white fabrics, her skin aglow.
“Reya,” Ava breathed.
Reya nodded her head at Ava, looking over the Warrior Nun before closing the portal behind her. “Welcome, Warrior Nun. What is it you seek?”
Ava resisted the urge to run across the room and hug the… person? Creature? Deity? Alien? She wasn’t sure, but she smiled at the first real conversation she’d had in what felt like decades. “I seek… how do I get back to the life I left? Beatrice sent me here so I could heal, so that I wouldn’t die, and I’m clearly not dying now so… how do I get back?”
“The life you left?” Reya tilted her head in apparent confusion. “Which one?”
“The- what do you mean, which one? My life! The one where I fell in love with Beatrice, the one where I saved the world, the one where I cleaned up your mess - you know, Adriel? That life!” Ava protested.
Reya shook her head. “You do not understand. But then, I suppose that’s to be expected. Your world is so… linear.” The ethereal being waved her hand and a series of portals burst to life, each with a shimmering image in them.
Ava squinted at the rips in reality before her. There she was, laying in her bed at the orphanage, paralyzed. Another was her fighting FBC cannon fodder in an ally with Bea. Switzerland, doing shots with Bea and dancing the night away. Those scenes she recognized, and yet more flickered in and out that she didn’t. Her at an office, wearing a suit and in a meeting with someone. Eating dinner at a fancy restaurant with Bea, an event she knew had never happened.
Then she gasped. One of the portals showed her and Bea holding hands with a young girl who could only be their child. “What… what is this? What am I looking at?”
“Do you not understand?”
“Clearly not!”
Reya waved her hand again and the room filled with portals on every side. “What you call time, we call choice. Every choice you make in your life sets you a step further in your path, but the other paths, the other choices do not cease to exist simply because you made a choice. Your human minds only perceive the path you chose.”
“Like one of those puzzles where you move a little metal ball through a maze?”
“Yes. Your life is the maze and every choice you could possibly make exists. When you wish to go back to your life, I am simply asking you which life, which set of choices you wish to return to. In this realm, with the portal key you carry inside you, all choices are possible. You may choose any one of these paths and move into that reality.”
Ava’s mind boggled at the thought. “So I could choose to go to a life where… where Bea and I are together? Like that one there,” she pointed at an image of them pushing a little girl on a swing, “where we have a kid?”
“It exists. Or rather, the conditions for that life to exist are present and predestined to be fulfilled.”
“Wow. This is trippy. So what’s the catch?”
Reya tilted her head. “I do not understand the question.”
“What’s the catch? You know, what’s the gotcha, the - the- what’s the price I have to pay? I know how the world works. Well, uh, my world I guess.”
“Ah. You mean what the cost is for moving realities. Are you aware of how long you have wandered in this realm to find yourself here?”
Ava shook her head. Nothing had changed except her long-gone wounds. However long she had walked, it hadn’t exacted a toll on her, not even scuffing her boots.
“You have walked for over a century, by your species limited understanding of time. Only the portal key embedded in you has kept you alive and unspoiled during your long walk, and that was only because you found one of the gatekeepers by accident. Once you choose a path, should you return, it could take you centuries or even millennia to find your way back here. Or you might wander our realm lost forever, or perhaps find the well of souls that Adriel has harvested and be destroyed by it. The price, as you call it, is that you may choose only once, lest you risk being lost forever should you return here unsummoned.”
A shudder rippled through Ava. “That’s why my memories are so… so faint. I’ve been alive for a hundred years?” She looked again at the portals and sighed with happiness. She’d never forgotten what Bea looked like, but the refresher was more than welcome. “How do I choose?”
“How does one of your species make any choice?”
Ava smiled. “That’s easy. We choose the thing we think is going to make us the most happy.” She regarded the myriad of portals all around her, focusing on the images of her and Bea. Dinners. Walks along the beach. Waking up together. Their child. Her eyes widened - their children, if another portal’s image was to be believed. Growing old together. There was even one of them in their golden years, playing miniature golf together. “There are so many.”
“As choices are infinite,” Reya soothed, “so are the realities you could return to. All that is possible, all that you can imagine, exists. Be cautious in your choices, for some realities contain your death, and returning to those could prove… problematic.”
Ava closed her eyes and recalled the moments before her near death. Bea, cradling Ava’s broken body in her arms, tears slowly falling down her cheeks. In that moment of insight, she knew what reality she’d choose, the only reality she could possibly choose. Choosing a timeline wasn’t about her happiness, but about giving happiness back to Bea, absolving the woman she loved of the burden of her disappearance and possible death.
“Can I go back to the moment I left?”
“No. Time is not space. Crossing over to here, to our realm, does not change the basic nature of time. As water does not flow backwards, neither does time. Here, time meanders slowly like a creek, while time flows vigorously in your world like a river, but in neither world does the river ever flow backwards.”
Ava scratched her head. “So then why show me all these portals with things that don’t exist or things that already happened?”
“Why paint or draw? To illustrate possibility.”
“Oh now you’re getting all philosophical on me. Look, I want to go back to the same reality I came from, the same one where… where I told Bea I love her. That’s it. That’s all I want, to go back there and reassure her that I’m not dead. Can we just do that?” She huffed.
Reya flexed her fingers and a single portal remained. “As you have spoken, there is the reality you left.”
“Really,” Ava gave her a lopsided grin, “was that so hard?” As she took a step towards it, she turned to the mysterious being. “Uh, do you want… what about the Halo?”
“Adriel meant to use it to tear a hole in realities and summon his army to your world where it could be given substance and lead his forces back here to attack me. With his destruction, that is no longer possible, and thus the portal key no longer threatens us. Keep it safe within you, Warrior Nun.” With that pronouncement, Reya faded away into a white mist, her portal the only evidence that she’d ever been there in the first place.
Ava took a deep breath. “I’m coming home, Bea.” And she stepped through.
Author’s Notes
My first fic in the fandom. Let’s see how this goes.
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