The Justiceers - Part Six: Chapter Sixteen
the next chapter in my forthcoming novel
The Justiceers
by Daphne Garrido
Part Three: The Will to Choose
Part Four: Prefinished Business
Part Six: Death Rides a Horse
6.16
There was a harshest rousing below the ever crashing waves of Malta’s planet-wide seascape. Something pulling, ripping, and shredding the currents of the entire ocean by its singular doings. A force of immense power building, growing, birthing what would become a being beyond that which’d been known to human eyes before in this universe.
Whatever this was, it was big. The surface water itself had risen quite noticeably around the breadth of Malta’s circumference.
Illith, who’d only just returned with Arthur from their journey to the past, one of moments in this space-time, were most compelled by what they observed happening on the planet.
Cataclysm was written into the data of its stirrings. Nothing here made sense to the natural ebbs and flows of Malta’s history. There wasn’t a single instance in its recorded past where anything remotely similar had taken place.
It was as if the entire sea was being pulled in towards a single point; a swirling vortex had begun taking shape, some viscious whirlpool of gods wrath, which had been growing most quickly on this tidal-locked ocean planet’s coreward facing hemisphere so bathed in the light of Learo.
Arthur’s gut told of the need to be far away from this place in short order, but his mind shared much of Illith’s inquisitiveness as to the nature of this unfolding. When it launched drones without his prompting, he’d been most been most pleased, and even told it as much.
He swore he’d felt Illith groan.
Whipping currents of toxic water tore into the hearth of Malta’s own heart’s energy, absorbing more than water, taking in its ruthless lifeforce. This planet had been exploited by evil. The ways of Yemi’s civilizational decay so apparent below the surface of Grammaton had found manifestation here as well.
Those harvesting machines destroyed by the war evil wrought on this system, which would create great trial to be rid of for the people left behind, were not built or maintained in harmony with the sea. They exploited and corrupted Malta, burying seeds of hatred, changing the energy from what would be a most sustaining force of life, to one of retributive intent.
Illith skip-jumped, embellishing with a briefest breath of peace in the fold for Arthur and itself, materializing in orbit of Grammaton. It was programing an approach on Oliath, calculating the safest path, taking in all data mined by the drones it had preemptively deployed there, scanning for life which might be saved in the process of the fateful undertaking of joining Miriam beneath the surface. Just as her vision had spoken of.
Arthur trusted her it now, especially in this instance, as it confirmed what gut had spoken when discovering that cathedral of light as he’d rushed through towards Miriam’s rescue so long ago. He was meant to come back here.
He’d not been able to tell because of that strangest hum, along with exertions of mind from his great descent upon The Beast beforehand, but Miriam Lightfoot had been with him there. She’d was all around him as he’d looked about he place, able to feel him so completely, and had hoped he’d felt her too, that he’d come to find her in that sacred chamber she’d made her favorite place.
Despite the enormity of the confrontation upon Grammaton so near and its broader implications on the direction of his life forward. No matter the beauty and splendor his time upon that sacred beach had borne within. Regardless of the ways his heart felt so called to be present with what was happening here. Every last available sense of both Arthur and Illith had been trained on Malta.
A singularly detached drone, tearing away from the evolving planetary event’s nexus point, sweeping close above the waters so torn by its absorbing tides of change, was recovering most interesting data now that it had finally broken the breadth of this whirlpool’s reach, nearly travelling a quarter of the planet’s radius to do so.
That great swell in surface-level, those rising waters of Malta, were now moving in quite the opposite direction. This entire planet had lost whole units of height to the base elevation of its water. Whatever was growing beneath the surface of this enormous spiral of rebirth had taken much of what was there before into itself.
The trio of drones now circling the central spiral of this mammoth creation of energy were detecting a physical presence beneath the surface. At least, a centrality of mass which would be observed by their sensors as such.
This was of highest interest to Arthur’s gut. He was going to have trouble focusing on what was to come with this going on out there in the system, yet he’d have to, Illith was setting him down at the former site of The Grand Bizarre.
Stepping forward now that time spent aboard this ship, without The Beast or any weaponry hold as protection, had Arthur feeling awfully exposed. There’d never been a time in his life where he’d felt as vulnerable as he had here, coming to join Miriam in this place in such bareness.
As he’d begun descending the great staircase, only steps beyond that first flight of so many, wrapped in the cocoon of protection Illith’s effector fields would be able to cast around him no matter how deep he went, was the moment it happened.
Illith’s drones fed their data, the imagery, all their own calculations directly to it. Within its processing of what was witnessing had been the codes of a strangest new emotion for this Goddess ship of fateful remaking, there was nothing to call it but a newfound level of revelry for creation itself; faith. A love for Admanium themself, and a gratitude for its role in all of this wonderous creation.
There hadn’t been a way to show Arthur what she was — that elemental beast of burden so born by the cruelest ways of Malta’s sea, a Goddess remade once more, become at last the truth of that namesake — vengeance, reborn.
She was risen.
Jesus, this bitch will just not die