Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Ascension

Maverick knelt, head bowed, and hands clasped before her offering her soul prostrate to.... something . Once, she might have called it god, but after all she had learned, she wasn't so sure. The architect was certainly like a god, creator of all things, 'architect' of the universe, but was it a god in the sense that it could hear them. Did it see all things? and know all things?

That she wasn't so sure of.

Certainly there was something to the idea of a god. All her life Maverick had found sanctuary before the alter, hidden away in the bowels of the earth, where only the dark memory of civilizations past reamined. There she had found both comfort and horror in the halls of churches, some whose walls could keep out the dark, and some whose walls could not. She understood it now to be her own sin that dogged at her heels, the very void creature, with which she had once made a pact, before her Anima had a body.

Though she understood the reason for her lifelong terror, that knowledge did not make her feel better. It was her own sin that nipped at her heels, her own treachery that dogged at her. All her life she had run from the very thing she had sold her soul too: a creature of the void. It was both liberating and heartbreaking at the same time to know why she had suffered.

But still there was some truth to the idea of holiness, otherwise she never would have found sanctuary in the walls of select churches. She could feel the difference in her, a sort of light that began in her chest and spread outward. Though religion was not as she once understood it, it still held power in some way weather it be in the name of the Architect or something else.

Upon her moment of possession by the void creature, Maverick had come to fear she would never be able to set foot in a church, almost wondering if she would go up in flame as she passed through a doorway. No such thing happened, of course, but certainly the void creature did not like it.

Even as she knelt now, in the mostly unvisited chapel of the Arcadia hospital, she could hear the creature whispering.

Her relationship with the being was not all together easy to understand. Most times it felt like her foe, she feared it, felt her skin crawl and was afraid to look in mirrors in case she would see it staring out through the windows of her eyes. She trembled in the dark, unable to fight the thing that rolled around inside her head whispering horrible things to her in the night. But other times, it seemed as if their wills were aligned, like the void creature was less and agent of the void and more of a symbiotic power she could twist to her will.

But even that made her feel sick and guilty choosing void power over anima power.

She rubbed her temples, as if that would stave away the chattering whisper in her mind.

'Join our cause. Be what you were meant to be' it repeated, over and over and over again.

But still its voice was quiet, bearable.

She bowed her head lowerm falling into the familiar paths of prayer, and soon the voice had faded and then ceased.

There was some power in faith, though she couldn't have said how.

She lifted her head in response to a knock at the door, and turned to find Ramirez standing in the doorway. He tried to keep his expression light, but she could see the worry that cast a pall on his handsome face. He reached up and ran a hand through his loose curls. "They're ready for you."

She stood, and nodded to him, unable to find her tongue.

Ramirez didn't like this idea, not even a little. They had talked it over for hours, going back and forth on the matter until both of them were horse, their mouths robbed of moisture. Ramirez had once confided in her his reason for never taking on any augmentation. Adam would gladly have made him an SE soldier if he asked, but Ramirez had no intention of corrupting his body with either Anima surgeries or metal exoskeletons.