Poised at the lip of the world, fingers digging into rough wood. The ritual concluded. The air filled with sound, and yet silent. The greatest scholar of Mensis sat and waited.
The thing below...that thing they had created themselves had not been a Great One. Micolash knew that now. It was composed of mortal pieces, all twisted, all ephemeral. A valiant effort, but nothing compared to what was coming. The truth hit with full force, like a gale against new trees.
Yahar'gul shook. Clouds of dust and earth blew up into the sky, the nearby buildings collapsing in on themselves. The cord had served its purpose. Micolash blinked, straining. The world was beginning to open to him.
All around, he could hear the frightened murmurs of the other acolytes. Pressed together as they were, they yammered like insects, about the ritual, about the writhing mass in the center of the plaza. Cages clattered together dumbly between words as heads turned. The earth underneath them heaved violently, and one of the younger students cried out as the tower of a nearby cathedral cracked and fell.
Micolash slapped the arm of his chair. "Silence! We will not abandon the ritual! It comes! Now..." He concentrated, bowing his head and the cage toward the heavens.
Just then, he felt a force. A titanic, numbing thing that slid like a jelly over him and yanked him into...something else. His physical body jerked slightly, but it was not his body that was carried away with the unseen power. The force of it made him want to clutch at his head - it hurt so, his mind was fit to burst - but he bit back the impulse. This was what he had waited for, was it not? Would not the Great One admire a fortified will? He began to think back on how he had studied for this. Ah, yes. He was a cell in a body. One cell among billions, trillions. So small. So -
Shrieks. He was vaguely aware, on the periphery, of red fountains jetting from the heads of those nearest him. Some slumped, some dropped, some had gone crimson all down the front. Those last had stopped moving altogether. Some, like him, bowed slightly and let their antennae touch the cosmos. But he - he was already there. Already part of the cosmic body. Chosen! Ah, but no, could he be so lucky?
Normal vision - normal senses - were quickly ebbing away. New eyes becoming accustomed to a new plane. "Eyes, eyes," he said, somewhere. "Grant us eyes, Great One. Grant us eyes, Great One." He clutched to the mantra like a relic. A thousand voices in one. As you once did for Rom...most blessed of scholars...
His head stopped hurting. He waited for a second, for a generation. He was far away from the physical world now. In a strange, lonely place with unknown shapes that flickered in and out of vision. He did not "see" so much as "feel" them here. They, too, waited.
And then, like a chance breeze, there came - a name. Not spelled out. Not spoken in lazy human tongue wags. It was simply forced into his mind, in the unutterable language of symbols and sendings. His brain in all its clumsiness came up with a way to represent it - Mergo.
The beauty of the sending made Micolash want to weep. But he did not consist of a "he" anymore. There was no he or I or they - there was no foolish man named Micolash - only an entity that observed, and a great yawning chasm of knowledge opening to it. "Micolash" was only a placeholder for the something he had become.
Micolash...stepped forward. He pushed ahead, somehow. His brain still could not fully grasp the new reality of movement, of being everywhere and nowhere at once. And yet he was still so - small! So ignorant, even more pathetic than a babe in arms before this enlightened being. He was but an ant to Mergo. Truly, he had only been gestating in that old world, waiting to be born into this one.
A baby's cry came to him, a grotesquely familiar sound in a foreign universe. Sounding as if from a dream.
He twisted toward the sound, but the unfathomable enormity of what waited ahead pressed in on him. Somewhere else, he slumped back, head coming to rest on his chest. And still this body stretched out - this thing that was his body now, the astral form of a pale, weak, diseased original - it was somehow strong enough to reach out to - the dream, and the light!