Prologue: Antennas to Heaven
When she had left, all had seemed right with the universe.
The seas and skies had been incarnadine with the blood of mankind, but there was hope, and a chance for rebirth. With Lilith slain and Instrumentality subverted, she had been content to leave Earth for her sojourn to the stars, her conscience appeased by her successes. The sun and moon were steadfast in their orbits, the stars stock-still eternal sentinels, and so long as they existed, they were proof that mankind could find its heaven.
She felt some guilt, of course; her motherly instincts did not lie abandoned, and combined with her scientific curiosity it was almost enough to make her give up her quest for the stars, make her regret leaving the world when there was still so much to do. Almost. It was only natural then that when she first heard the buzz of radio traffic once more upon the aether not half a century after her departure, her heart rejoiced. Her trust in and hope for mankind had been vindicated, her works not for naught; humanity yet thrived.
Within fifty thousand years – before she had even left the galactic arm proper – she could hear the chatter of the works of man from every direction behind her. Signals danced through the interstellar void as man took to the stars, and her heart filled with a sort of maternal pride, for she felt that they were all now her children, and she was proud to see them thrive and strive and multiply across the universe. Mankind had proven worthy of its aspirations to the stars, she remembered thinking to herself later as she left the galactic plane of the Milky Way for another, using the gravitational slingshot of a neutron star to fling herself towards Andromeda like a relativistic missile, her AT field acting as a cushion before her, extended half a lighthour wide to stave off oncoming debris.
It was as she flew through that gasping void between galaxies that she first began to notice it, that she first began to feel that something was – not wrong, per se, but definitely off – with the universe.
Although the journey lasted over a million years, at the speeds she travelled at a few centuries of relative time passed, and with the aid of that dilation of time she began to notice strange patterns in the universe at large.
It was barely noticeable then, but the galaxies were dimming.
She had never by any means professed to be an expert in the field, but her knowledge of astrophysics was not insignificant, that science having captured her fancy long before the plots of foolish men forced her hand. Everything she knew told her that this was natural, or would be, given a timeframe several orders of magnitude greater.
A quarter million years she wandered Andromeda, dim suspicions lurking just of outside the reach of consciousness. With all the power of her massive mind she fought for an answer, but found none.
There was life here, myriad civilizations totally alien to anything in man's conception; some were advanced enough to observe her even as she observed them. Yet she saw, with disappointment, that
they were unable, or perhaps unwilling, to traverse the stars. Their technology was not sufficient to explain this gloaming.
Setting sights on further reaches still, she strove forth from the disk of Andromeda to another nearly a dozen million lightyears away.
This time there was no mistaking it, the stars were dimming exponentially, accelerating towards their demise. Some went supernova, she saw as she approached, but more and more the even the greatest stars were dying with whimpers, decaying away into disparate vapor. And as she drew near, as she exerted her power to decelerate safely into the galaxy's waiting leprous arms, she felt it. A titanic malign Presence, applying subtle force to her approaching AT field. Its mind must have been vast, its power inconceivable, to reach her across the gulf of space, and yet it did.
Yet her will, too, was mighty, and she pushed back, held back its tides of malice with her practiced calm.
And as she approached the minds multiplied in number, Presences joining in their vigil from every corner of that cancerous galaxy, its stars long reduced to dull red embers.
She saw them then, she felt their presence, and she knew fear.
Ponderous gods of miscreation she saw, feeding on the entropic decay of existence, bringing everything to its end. They needed no purpose for their destruction, for malice is its own purpose. Their hunger knew no bounds, for they were the Eaters, the Slayers of Worlds.
Looking back across the gulf to her home, she knew only desperation, the faintest glimmering of hope that there was still a chance to warn her children, to save them from these monsters.
Yet even then the dread was overwhelming her, and she knew that the hope was false, that it was already too late. The Eaters were the cause of the decay, and they had already begun consuming Andromeda, by now they had surely reached the Milky Way. There was no chance that she could outrun them, yet she had to try, and so she did.
Twelve million years she flew through that ghastly void, the stars flickering horribly before her eyes – flickering and dying like scattered embers in a storm. There were no more signals in the aether, no human voices piercing the gloom. On a hundred desolate worlds orbiting rotting stars she saw the shattered remains of civilizations, testaments at once to humanity's might, and humanity's insignificance. In the void between stars she found titanic structures to dwarf even the Black Moon, fortresses built in desperation; and tiny wisps of metal and gas, the final elaborate defense against the onslaught, final symbols of defiant rage against the dying of the light. Gutted starships and space hulks floated with mocking tranquility through the night, and so frequently did she come upon them that her mind was staggered at the sheer size of the fleets which man had built, of the sheer size of mankind's former empire. They must have numbered in the trillions, she thought, yet now… I cannot find a single sign of life.
Everywhere she felt the presence of the Enemy, everywhere she saw their mark upon the desolation. And she cursed the Eaters, cursed them for what they had done to her children.
With all the power she had left, with all her fading sanity, with all the power of her massive mind, she sought the Earth. There was not a sign of life about it for a dozen lightyears or more. Where before not a month went by without sighting some new product of man's struggle, growing increasingly more terrible and elegant as she closed the distance towards the homeworld, now there was nothing, not a single ship or hulk or anything to betray the existence of man. It brought to her heart a dread she could not comprehend, and at once an unattainable hope: if there was no evidence of mankind's defeat, perhaps then they were not defeated?
And at last despair overtook her as she saw the ruins of Earth, trapped in perpetual darkness about a long-dead sun, scarred beyond the faintest glimmer of recognition. If not for the absolute certainty of her calculations, she would never have believed it to be the same Earth she had left some twenty seven million years before. The moon, Venus and Mercury were vanished, not a trace left behind. Jupiter and the gas giants were reduced to icy metal cores, their atmospheres stripped away by forces she did not dare to fathom. The atmosphere of Earth, she saw, was thin, thinner even than that of Mars, and more toxic than the vapors which had erstwhile shrouded Venus. The surface was barren, its temperature barely a dozen kelvins, and so utterly ruined that no life could dwell upon it. And in the horrid crevasse which marred Earth's crust, a canopy of clouds hung black like the surface of the seas which had once graced this world.
That ultimate desperate hope abandoned her, and she let herself fall into that abyss, no longer caring what befell her. Her children were dead, devoured by an enemy which even their greatest weapons had failed to halt, but which she had survived. She had failed them. It was over.
And as she fell through the atmosphere, now too thin to even slow her descent, she felt the malefic entities swarming about her, their ethereal strands of immaterium clinging to her soul to entangle her within their webs. And she raged at them, screamed at them to take her and end it all. But as she fell through the bottom of the black roof of clouds, as they parted to reveal beneath her a landscape of ash-strewn ice and jagged stone teeth, she saw. She saw them.
A/N: A prologue to what will hopefully become a much longer piece of fiction, based loosely upon (and recycling much text from) an earlier Night Land fic of mine which I never got around to finishing.
Disclaimer: GAINAX owns Evangelion and related characters; the Night Land and its mythos are public domain.