Chapter One-Hundred-Four: Alone and Awry

Cass stood, mesmerized, underneath the bleachers of Downingtown West High School's football stadium, watching a cannabis transaction take place between two familiar souls.

Cruz Arevalo peered through the bleachers' crisscrossed support girders, sweeping his gaze across the school grounds and parking lot.

"C'mon, bro, are you waiting for a raid?" groaned an impatient Gino Caiazzo. "Do you think the fuckin' DEA is gonna swarm the area?"

"Feds? Nah," said Cruz. "Teachers, though? Or a school cop? Way more likely."

Gino rolled his eyes. "Yeah, so, clearly the best way to avoid detection is to hang out under the bleachers like we're in fuckin' high school noir, 'cuz, this isn't shady at all."

"Can't be too careful."

"You can, though. You are. That's my whole fuckin' point."

From his sylladex, Cruz produced a large mason jar filled to the brim with portioned baggies of cannabis. "You said you wanted a quarter, right?"

"Yeah, got any sativas?"

"Let's see…" Cruz rummaged around the cluttered mason jar, fishing out two quarter-ounce baggies, each containing a different sativa strain. "I have Ghost Train Haze and Durban Poison."

"Ghost Train Haze, hands down," chuckled Gino. "What a name. Who comes up with these names?"

"I dunno, man." Cruz dropped the Durban Poison back into the jar. "Soon, I'll hybridize and grow my own plants, and then I'll come up with the names. It'll be rad."

"Is this California shit?" Gino handed Cruz a small wad of cash, accepting the baggie of Ghost Train Haze in return. "Looks like California medical shit."

"Colorado, actually." Cruz screwed the jar's lid back on, pocketing the money and stowing the jar in his sylladex. "Medical's been a thing in Colorado since 2000, and they'll probably legalize it recreationally in the next couple years. Speaking of which, are you still hanging out at my place tomorrow?"

"Yeah, but I'm telling you, putting me in the same room with Tami and Adam is asking for trouble."

"Aw, c'mon, don't worry about it. Everyone's gonna get stony baloney, and we're gonna have a good time," assured Cruz. "Plus, you'll get to see what happens when the Lotus statue's countdown reaches zero. Trust me, it'll be fun."

"I'm just saying, rose-colored glasses don't actually turn the sky red. Don't expect Tami and Adam to magically embrace the…" Gino froze, staring transfixed at the shadowy figure lurking behind Cruz. "…the fuck…?"

"Uh, dude?" Cruz blinked, frowning at Gino. "You okay?"

"Behind you…"

Cruz glanced over his shoulder, but he saw nothing. "Huh?"

Gino could not take his eyes off the dark, shadowy figure. How could Cruz possibly not see it?

A petrifying fear clenched Gino's gut, and without thinking, he fled, emerging from underneath the bleachers, leaving Cruz in a state of utter bewilderment.

Cass blinked, inhaling sharply, startled from her reverie by the sudden flurry of activity. Realizing she had drifted off again, she actively willed herself against wondering how much time had just been lost. She followed Gino towards the sunlight, walking past a silent, frozen Cruz, who faded slowly away into nothingness.

Anna Carrero sprinted towards the fiery ruins of Downingtown East High School, navigating through the chaotic multi-pileup accident blocking Route-113.

"Help me!" shouted a bleeding man trapped in his burning car. "Someone help me!"

Anna stopped for a moment to help the afflicted man, grabbing the handle of the car's crumpled driver door. She heaved at the door, but it would not open.

"I can't get out!" screamed the bleeding man. "I need help!"

"I'm trying!" Anna ran a finger over the shards of glass protruding from the frame of the driver's window. Pulling the man out would be tricky. "Take off your seat belt. We can try and get you out through the window."

"With all that glass in the way?" the bleeding man fumbled with his seat belt. "I can't move my legs. My spine… I don't think I can make it through the window."

Anna circled behind the car and attempted, with equal unsuccess, to pull open either of the passenger-side doors. "Your doors are all stuck. Can you push from the inside?"

"How? I can't move my legs!"

Something popped within the car's engine, and the flames underneath the car's smashed front hood began to surge even more vigorously.

Anna backed away from the car.

"Where are you going?!" shrieked the doomed man. "Come back!"

Anna turned and ran, and within seconds the man's screams were abruptly silenced by the explosion of his engine. "Sorry. I'm sorry." She did not look back, making her way around a horrifically tangled mess of what had once been two separate cars. Several bodies could be seen within the wreckage, slumped against their bloodied seats and seat belts.

Looking away from the wreck, Anna nearly tripped over the mangled corpse of a woman who appeared to have landed on her head after being thrown through a windshield. She hurried past the corpse, grateful that it was lying face-down. "Wear your seat belts, kids," she muttered, clutching her stomach, breathing deeply to try and avoid vomiting.

Hundreds of fires roared from the massive impact crater where Downingtown East High School had once stood, sending mountainous plumes of smoke gushing into the air, blackening the already cloudy sky. Wailing sirens in the near distance grew steadily louder as Anna crossed the athletic fields between Route-113 and the high school's lower parking lot. Flashing red-and-blue lights heralded the arrival of two ambulances, a fire engine, and several police cars speeding down Route-113 towards the burning hellscape.

The wind blew some of the smoke across the athletic fields, stinging Anna's eyes. Coughing from the acrid air, she could not initially see anyone in the lower parking lot ahead, but when she looked to her right, Anna spotted Cass Galavis near the hedges lining the perimeter of the nearby baseball field.

Anna sprinted towards the hedges, waving to get Cass's attention. "Hey!" she yelled, realizing Cass was in the process of examining a motionless Adam, who lay sprawled unconscious within a crushed hedge. "Cass!"

Cass turned around, saw Anna approaching, and exclaimed, "Anna?! What just happened?! Did you-"

"Everyone in school just got an early dismissal! From life!" Anna shouted back, arriving breathlessly at the hedges. "Weren't you watching? Please at least tell me the idiot is alive."

"He is." Cass returned her attention to Adam. "The blast threw him all the way down here. If he hadn't landed on the hedges, I doubt he would have-"

"Cool, look, here's the thing," interrupted Anna, squinting up at the roiling sky as little flakes of ash began to fall. "You need to get home and play Sburb, like, right now."

"Sburb?" Cass gaped at Anna. "What is wrong with you? The school just blew up! How can you talk about computer games at a time like this?"

"It's more than a computer game. Sburb is the reason the world is now ending," declared Anna. "Meteorites like this one are falling all over the world, and everyone is going to die. But you and I don't need to. You've been getting weird messages from Theo, right? Warning you about the apocalypse?"

Cass blinked. "I thought he was joking. It was getting out of hand."

"Theo isn't joking," said Anna. "He's already left the planet. Gwen's probably entered the game too, by this point. We need to play Sburb and complete the intro stage to reach safety. It's the only way out."

"If the game is destroying the world," asked Cass, "shouldn't we destroy the game?"

"That's like destroying a gun after the bullet has already been fired. There's no stopping the bullet. How far away do you live?"

"I'm not going anywhere until Adam gets an ambulance," insisted Cass.

"I'll make sure he gets help." Anna grimaced as the police cars came to a stop near the multi-pileup on Route-113. Many of the police officers were in such a hurry to secure the scene and block oncoming traffic that they left the doors of their cars open. "You're out of time. How far away do you live? Can you run home?"

"I live by Pickering Valley," Cass took a deep breath. "It's almost past Marsh Creek. I'd be running for nearly an hour."

"Here." From her sylladex, Anna retrieved her bike, holding it by the handlebars and offering it to Cass. "Ride this, and get home quickly. If I remember the order correctly, you'll be connecting with Tami."

"What?" Cass accepted the bike.

"You need to be Tami's server player," said Anna. "Don't you know how Sburb works?"

"Yes, but-"

"Good, then hurry home, connect to Tami, get her through the game's intro stage, and hopefully by that point, Adam will be able to connect to you."

"Adam?" Cass frowned, climbing onto the bike. "But how? He's going to a hospital."

"He's fine," assured Anna. "Don't worry about him. I'll get him an ambulance, but you need to go right now. Before the cops see us. If you get delayed, we're all dead."

"But-"

"No more buts, Cass, except your butt, on that bike, speeding swiftly home to save your own life and the lives of your friends. Time to go." Anna gestured for Cass to leave. "Go on! Shoo!"

Still in a state of shock, gripped by a sudden desire to be as far from the carnage as possible, Cass felt a quiet impulse to trust Anna. Against her better judgment, Cass glanced at Adam one last time before pedaling away, vanishing into the smoky haze.

Anna immediately whipped out her phone and dialed the number to Adam's house. While the phone rang, a wailing fire engine turned onto Devon Drive, pulling into the high school's entrance lane, where it came screeching to a halt.

The call went through. "Hello?" asked the voice of Abigail Tarrant. "Who is this? If you're a telemarketer, I will find you-"

"Adam's school just got blown up," Anna said. "His car is still in the parking lot, and he'll be at the Phoenixville Hospital very soon."

The fire engine's siren slowly died down. Several firefighters disembarked and deployed two hoses, unleashing powerful twin streams of pressurized water upon the roaring flames.

"What the fuck?" asked Abigail. "Who the fuck is this? Who do you think you are?"

"Jesus Christ, just turn on your TV and go to any news channel!" snapped Anna. "Once the hospital takes a look at Adam, you need to get him back home so he can play Sburb. If you think I'm batshit crazy, I don't blame you, so talk to Chela Arevalo if you don't believe me, and tell her what I told you."

Anna ended the call, pocketing her cell phone. She extricated Adam from the hedges and carried him across the baseball field towards the carnage on Route-113. She spotted a nearby ambulance and headed in that direction, passing an empty idling police car whose driver door had been left open. "Hey!" she shouted to the paramedics emerging from the ambulance's rear doors. "Over here! I've got a live one!"

One of the paramedics noticed Anna, and he pointed to the ground next to the ambulance. "Put him down here!"

"Fuck that," said Anna, "why don't you just do your job and get him to a hospital?"

"We could have people here with far more severe injuries," explained the paramedic, moving to circumvent Anna. "They need to go first."

"No." Anna stepped into the paramedic's path, holding Adam out to him. "Please take him. Make sure nothing is wrong with his spine. Or his brain. Or any other essentials."

"Is there a problem, here?" asked a low, brusque voice from behind Anna.

Turning around, Anna first saw the holstered pistol, then the taser, the handcuffs, and the blue uniform. As she made eye contact with the police officer, her heart sank. "Not at all," she said, laying Adam down on the asphalt next to the parked ambulance.

"We need to set up a triage until more units arrive, and she is getting in our way," explained the paramedic, hurrying to join the other paramedics at the nearest car wreck. "Keep her from interfering, please!"

"You don't seem hurt at all," observed the police officer, frowning at Anna. "Why were you so close to the bombing without getting hurt?"

"It wasn't a bombing," corrected Anna. "It was a meteorite."

"Show me some ID," ordered the police officer. "Do you have a driver's license or state ID?"

"Um." Anna swallowed. "I don't have it on me."

"You don't have any ID?"

"Not on me," repeated Anna.

"Are you a United States citizen?"

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Anna glared at the police officer. "Would you ask a white girl that?"

"Arrest her!" screeched a tortured voice from Anna's nightmares. "She's the one who you want! Arrest her!"

Anna and the police officer both turned in the direction of the shrill voice.

"Officer!" Karen, the CVS cashier, bleeding from a newly acquired gash in her head, limped towards Anna and the police officer, shouting, "She killed my son! Arrest her!"

The police officer tried to say, "Calm down," but Karen was having none of it.

"She stole from my store!" Karen pointed a damning finger at Anna. "You'll see if you search her, and who knows what else you'll find. I work at the CVS across the road, and not only did she shoplift, she bragged about my son being dead and on fire! Those were her exact words! Dead and on fire!"

"She's lying!" Anna shot back. "She's fucking crazy!"

"Fucking bitch!" Karen balled her fingers into a fist and swung at Anna.

Ducking the blow, Anna instinctively stepped forward and shoved Karen back.

"Ramirez!" the police officer hollered to his nearby partner, grabbing hold of Anna's arm while using his baton to hold Karen at bay. "I need you over here!"

While Karen melted into a fit of screaming, swearing, and hysterical sobbing, Officer Ramirez hurried over to restrain her.

"Let go!" Anna fought against the police officer's grip. "Am I under arrest? If I'm not under arrest, you have to let me-"

"Stop resisting! Stop resisting!" shouted the officer, hauling Anna over to the idling police car with the open driver door. "You're going to sit here and shut up, and when we've secured the area, I'll have questions for you. And I'll need you to empty your sylladex."

"If I'm not under arrest, you have to let me go," insisted Anna. "This is bullshit!"

In the process of retrieving handcuffs, the police officer changed his mind and decided instead to grab his taser, but before he could use it on Anna, bright light flashed suddenly in the southeastern sky.

Transfixed, the police officer watched in horror as a second meteorite thundered down from the storm clouds, leaving a trail of fire and smoke across the sky, making landfall in the distance with enough strength to send powerful tremors underfoot.

"Holy shit, did you see that?!" yelled Officer Ramirez, who was about to put Karen into the back of his car. "Radio chatter is lighting up. Whatever that was, it just took out West Chester!"

"The whole fucking town?!" exclaimed the officer holding Anna. "What the fuck was that? A missile? Is it the fucking Russians?"

Sensing an opportunity which would never come again, Anna sprinted with all her strength towards the idling police car, taking advantage of the officer's shock to break free from his grip.

"Fuck!" the startled officer's fingers grasped empty air. "Motherfucker!"

Desperate and out of breath, Anna leaped through the idling police car's open driver door, shifting the engine into gear and stomping down on the gas pedal before she'd even lain hands on the steering wheel.

In the horrible moment it took for the shell-shocked police officer to realize the full consequences of his mistake, his car screeched away, blowing through a red traffic light and turning down Devon Drive. "Ramirez, let the crazy woman go and call for backup!" he shouted in disbelief. "That fucking bitch just stole my car!"

"There goes your pension, Wilks," remarked Officer Ramirez, releasing a hysterical Karen and ducking into the driver's seat of his own car, opening the passenger door for his glowering partner.

"Only if we don't get the car back. Will you get a move on? I can't have another lost car on my record." A stormy, purple-faced Officer Wilks climbed into the passenger seat, slamming the door shut behind him. "The Captain will put me in the fucking D.A.R.E. program until I decay. We need to bring in that thieving fucking bitch, Ramirez. I think she had something to do with the bombing, and I hope to God she's illegal."

As he started the engine and began to drive, Officer Ramirez frowned at his partner. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Undocumented. She had no ID." Officer Wilks rolled his eyes. "Don't be a snowflake, just fucking drive."

As Gino hurried away from the bleachers, the football stadium grew blurry and unfocused, disappearing into the encroaching shadows.

Cass walked quickly to keep up with Gino, disconcerted by the murky darkness descending upon the edges of the world. She could no longer see the horizon in any direction, nor could she even clearly make out the buildings across the street. The area immediately surrounding Downingtown West High School remained in sharp focus, but everything beyond school grounds slowly lost all color, becoming shadowy and immaterial.

The dream bubble appeared to be shrinking.

Gino did not seem bothered by the endarkening of his world. It would be fair to say that he did not even notice. All of Gino's focus remained fixated on the nearby athletic fields, where the lacrosse teams geared up for after-school practice.

Cass saw Gwen wearing full lacrosse gear, practicing with her teammates in the field ahead. Realizing where the dream bubble experience would likely go, and in an effort to spare Gino the misery, she called out his name. "Gino?"

"No." Gino clasped his hands to his ears, stubbornly pressing onward to the athletic fields. "No more voices."

Cass followed Gino onto the fields. After taking a few steps across the grass, she noticed the feeling of a hard floor under her feet, and when she looked down to investigate, she realized that she was indeed standing on a gray stone floor. Reality shifted seamlessly around her, replacing the grass with gray stone, the high school and surrounding woods with soundproofed walls, the blue sky with a black ceiling. Cass recognized the Duskfall Broadcasting Station's news room, and she barely had a moment to brace herself for Gino's imminent screaming.

Gino crouched on the floor, panicking over Gwen's blood-soaked corpse, and as he begged Gwen to wake up, the dream bubble continued to shrink. Slowly, the walls of the news room vanished, swallowed by the encroaching darkness, forcing Cass to move closer to the grisly scene. "Gino?" she asked. "Can you hear me?"

"No!" Once again, Gino clapped his hands over his ears. "Go away!"

"Focus on my voice," suggested Cass. "Try to calm down."

Black fire surging angrily from his fists, Gino twisted suddenly around and charged at Cass, thundering, "NO MORE VOICES!"

Startled by Gino's abrupt attack, Cass instinctively backpedaled, and when she stepped into the shadows, her feet found no purchase, sending her plummeting into the void below. The bright yellow luminescence of Gino's fleeing dream bubble grew fainter and further away, diminishing rapidly into a tiny point of light before vanishing completely, leaving Cass very much alone, plunging further into the everlasting dark.

After a few dizzying moments of terror, Cass realized the sensation of plummeting was illusory, and that she was not actually falling deeper into darkness, because this was as dark as it would ever get.

Bearing down on the stolen police car's gas pedal, Anna accelerated past the burning ruins of Downingtown East, past the neighboring YMCA, and across Whitford Road intersection, following Devon Drive all the way into the Marchwood area. She glanced at the rear-view mirror, spotting the red-and-blue flashing lights of a pursuing police car which had yet to come into view.

"Fuck." Knuckles white, Anna wrenched the steering wheel to the side, causing her tires to screech as she hanged a hard left onto Concord Avenue, disregarding the stop sign. As she regained control of the car, her phone vibrated, but she was in no state to answer it. "God fucking damn it," she grumbled, noting the curved dark skid marks left behind by her breakneck turn, recognizing how easily those markings would tell the police which way she'd gone.

The speedometer needle hovered near sixty miles per hour, and Anna's heart raced as she tapped the brakes, anticipating the approaching left turn onto Marchwood Road. She glanced again at the rear-view mirror, and although she could hear the not-too-distant siren of the pursuing police car, she could no longer see the flashing lights.

A blaring car horn snapped Anna's attention forward, just in time to see an approaching car swerve to avoid colliding with Anna's stolen police cruiser. "Oh fuck!" she exclaimed as the swerving car tore through multiple mailboxes before finally crashing into someone's front-lawn sycamore tree. "Oh god!"

Anna turned left, accelerating quickly down the length of Marchwood Road to the parking lot of the Exton Diner, where she brought the stolen police car screeching to a halt. Flinging open the door, Anna jumped out of the car and sprinted through the diner entrance.

"Hey!" exclaimed a flustered server who Anna did not recognize. "What do you think you-"

Anna delivered a sharp kick to the dessert counter's protective glass window, shattering it.

Ignoring the server's frightened exclamations, Anna quickly gathered the entire German chocolate cake into her sylladex. After a moment's hesitation, she also took the pineapple coconut vanilla cake, the red velvet cake, and the entire platter of turtle brownies.

With the precious desserts safely tucked away, Anna ran back outside into the rain, hurrying through the parking lot. While crossing the road, she retrieved her keys, sprinting the rest of the way to the front door of her apartment. The police siren had gone away, but Anna could see the flashing red-and-blue lights through the trees around the corner of Concord Avenue, right about where the hapless car had crashed into a tree.

Scrabbling with her key, Anna unlocked the front door and ducked inside, slamming the door shut behind her and locking it.

Home again, Anna checked her phone as she ascended the stairs to the second floor, curious as to why it had vibrated earlier. Sure enough, she saw a PalHassle notification indicating an unread message from Cruz Arevalo. Reading quickly through the message, Anna was relieved to have confirmation from Cruz that he would be her client player, but he first needed to act as Adam's server player, which he could not do until Adam was back from the hospital.

Pocketing her phone, Anna approached Great Uncle Andrés's room, and when she opened the bedroom door, she was immediately struck by the fetid smell of a soiled bed. "Mierda, gran tío, again? You're killing me."

Great Uncle Andrés made no reply.

Anna realized Great Uncle Andrés was not snoring, and his chest did not even seem to be moving. "Gran tío?" She took one of Andrés's hands and pressed two fingers to his wrist, checking for a pulse. "Oh."

Allowing Andrés's hand to fall back onto the bed, Anna took a deep breath, calmly grabbing hold of the nightstand and pulling it to the side. She knelt down and removed part of a floorboard from the bedroom floor, revealing a hidden compartment from which Anna produced her great-uncle's old bible. Opening the bible to the Book of Revelations, she found, cut into the pages, a small compartment containing a metal key.

Pocketing the small metal key, Anna closed the bible, placing the dusty book in her great-uncle's hands.

Wrinkling her nose at the smell of death and feces, Anna hurried back into the hallway and closed the master bedroom door. She rested against the door for a moment, trying to keep from hyperventilating. "This isn't happening," she murmured, finding difficulty in taking a full breath. "This can't be happening."

Anna forced herself to move, walking quickly into her bedroom, where again her olfactories were assaulted by the pungent smell of stagnant vomit. "Oh please no."

Past Anna lay unmoving in her puke-stained bed, unblinking eyes gazing emptily up at the ceiling, throat and mouth still full of the vomit upon which she had choked to death.

"You too?" Anna began to cry, overwhelmed by the chaotic piling on of everything at once. "Why didn't I check on you? Why did I have to spend all night at the diner?" She sat on the edge of the bed, closing the unseeing eyes of her dead past self before wiping her own. "I should've made sure you were sleeping on your side. I'm sorry."

The floor trembled slightly under Anna's feet. Moments later, she heard the thunderous explosion of another distant meteorite impact, and it was anyone's guess how many more lives had just been snuffed out.

"Okay." Anna stood up and crossed to her desk, opening her laptop. From her sylladex, she retrieved her two Sburb disks. When the laptop finished cycling through its power-up routine, Anna entered her password and opened the disk drive, inserting her server-player Sburb disk. After a few seconds, a window emblazoned with the Skaianet logo appeared on the screen of Anna's laptop. Contained within the window was a prompt asking whether or not Anna wanted to install Sburb, and she clicked Yes.

While Sburb's installation began, Anna pulled out her phone and accessed PalHassle, composing a quick message to Theo Gibbons, informing him that she would soon be ready to run Sburb's client disk. She then composed an equally brief reply to Cruz, telling him that her game was installing and that he should prepare to connect with her at a moment's notice.

After pressing the send button, Anna looked up from her phone and glanced out the bedroom window, noticing the dreaded flashing red-and-blue lights across the road. Another police car was parked in the Exton Diner's parking lot, next to the abandoned police cruiser Anna had stolen. Two familiar police officers emerged from the diner, led by the server who'd witnessed Anna's ransacking of the Exton Diner's dessert counter.

The server pointed the two police officers towards Anna's apartment building.

"God fucking damn it." Anna sprinted out of her bedroom, downstairs, through the kitchen, down again into the damp, moldy basement. "Thought I'd have more time," she muttered, walking toward Great Uncle Andrés's gun safe, which rested against the far wall. "I was so fucking careful, earlier, too. How did it come to this?"

Brushing away the cobwebs covering the gun safe, Anna took out the small metal key from her great-uncle's bible, unlocking the gun safe's padlock with a snick. She removed the padlock and opened the gun safe, revealing a compact Smith & Wesson M&P pistol, and several fully-stocked magazines of ammunition, all of which Anna immediately took. "Thank you, Second Amendment."

Anna clicked off the basement light and headed back upstairs, loading one of the magazines into the pistol.

For an immeasurable duration, Cass floated silently through the void, surrounded by unimaginably vast expanses of nothing.

Unable to see anything, unable to hear or smell anything, Cass wondered if she had a body, or if she was nothing more than a floating, disembodied collection of thoughts, emotions, dreams, and memories. Moving her idea of a finger towards the memory of her leg, she was relieved to recognize the familiar perception of touch, suggesting that she still possessed a corporeal form, or at least the convincing memory of one.

Time seemed to unspool, slowly losing all meaning. Were minutes passing, or weeks? Years? Centuries? "Okay, stop." Cass was not sure if she'd actually spoken those words, or if she was just imagining the sound of her voice.

Without any reliable way to measure time, Cass could not know how long she drifted, trapped in a permanent state of sensory deprivation with only her own thoughts for company. She remained vigilant, searching fervently for any sign of Our Home, but nothing could be seen. She was on her own.

It had not fully occurred to Cass that she might become stranded in the void, and the awful implications of her situation began to weigh on her mind.

Ever since she'd awoken from being killed by the Draconian Dignitary, Cass had not aged, and although she could still eat and drink, she no longer got hungry or thirsty. For all intents and purposes, she seemed to be biologically immortal, which meant she could not count on thirst, starvation, or even old age to cut short her eternity in the void. How long would she last before she went insane? A month? Perhaps a week?

Could Cass endure even a single day in the void without going a little mad?

Surely it would be better to end things before it came to that.

Better to do it sooner rather than later.

Cass accessed her strife specibus and retrieved her M16 assault rifle, placing the rifle barrel under her chin.

Wait.

Unwilling to pull the trigger, Cass hesitated. Even if she shot herself, wouldn't she simply resurrect?

Swallowing nervously, Cass again considered the prospect of spending eternity alone in the dark, wondering if suicide would not even help her situation. "Only one way to find out," she declared, flicking off the M16's safety. She considered closing her eyes, and the thought prompted amusement, because what difference would it make?

There was nothing to see.

Cass curled her finger around the trigger.

Nothing at all.

Initially, when Cass saw the bright point of light in the distance, she had only a moment to wonder if it was her imagination before it exploded suddenly outwards in a pattern reminiscent of a firing neuron. Waves of intense white energy ripped across the void, filling the profound emptiness with a searing light which revealed, much to Cass's unrest, that the void was not as empty as she had always presumed.

Millions of shadowy behemoths filled the vastness of the Furthest Ring, thrown into sharp relief by the sudden ongoing explosion of light. Most of the shadows appeared as little more than tiny black dots in the distance, but many hundreds of silhouettes were within close enough proximity to allow Cass a glimpse of their deeply disturbing form.

The outlines of the nearest silhouettes painted vivid images in Cass's mind of looming amorphous Lovecraftian masses of mouths, teeth, spines, appendages, and tentacles.

Cass stared numbly at the silhouetted tentacles and appendages of the nearest nightmare-creature, wondering how many miles long each tentacle stretched. Every tentacle and appendage trailed off in the same direction, suggesting the silhouetted creature was moving rapidly in a specific direction and maintaining a steady course. After observing several others, Anna realized that not only was every visible silhouetted creature moving in a shared direction, they seemed also to be converging on an unseen destination.

The brilliant white light began to subside. Cass looked around one last time for Our Home, and she managed to catch sight of a large tentacle-free circular shadow, implying a spherical celestial object, which would certainly fit the description of Derse's orphaned moon.

Flying as quickly as she could, Cass threw herself towards the spherical silhouette, but with the receding light went Cass's ability to see Our Home, returning her once again to the oppressive darkness. As quickly as they had arrived, the last dwindling effusions of bright energies collapsed and stabilized into a single point of light.

Cass pushed on, flying forward with all possible speed towards where she'd last seen Our Home, gazing in wonder and confusion at the distant point of light burning steadfastly in the darkness like a newborn star.