BOOK II: PURGATORY
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
CHAPTER 14
Down and down and down we plunged.
Lit by the sullen red glower from deep below us, Anya and I were weightless, in free-fall, like parachutists or astronauts in zero gravity. We seemed to be hanging in mid-air, floating eerily on nothingness, slowly roasting in the blistering heat welling up from below. A fiery wind like the blast from a bellowing rocket engine howled past us. We could not breathe, could not speak.
I willed my body to draw oxygen from the vacuoles within its cells: a temporary expedient, but it was better than drawing in a breath of burning air that would sear my lungs. I hoped Anya could do the same.
The brief glimpse into Set’s mind that I had obtained told me that this seemingly endless tube we were falling through reached down toward the earth’s core, where the raging heat powered a warping device that might fling us into another space time.
That was our only chance to escape Set and the slow death he had planned for us. That, or death itself in the searing embrace of molten iron that was rushing up toward us.
I gripped Anya tightly to me and she wrapped her arms around my neck. There were no words. Our embrace said everything we needed to say. I thought that Set and his reptilian minions could never know this kind of closeness, this sharing of body contact, flesh to flesh, that is uniquely mammalian.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to recall the sensations of previous passages through spacetime warps. With all my strength I tried to make contact with the Creators, to will the two of us into the safety of their domain in the far future. But it was useless. We continued to plummet toward the earth’s core, clinging to each other in our free-fall weightlessness as the heat boiling up from below began to cook our flesh.
Energy. It takes the titanic energy of a planet’s fiery core or the churning radiant surface of a star to distort the flow of spacetime and create a warp in the continuum. The closer we got to the molten iron at the bottom of Set’s core tap, the closer we got to the energy needed for the warp. Yet that same energy was killing us, driving the breath from our bodies, charring our flesh.
We had no choice. I forced my body to drain every drop of moisture it could generate to cover my body with sweat, desperately hoping that the thin film of moisture would absorb the heat blasting at me and save me from being broiled alive, at least for a few moments longer.
Anya’s face, so close to my own, began to shimmer in the burning heat. I thought my eyes were melting away, but then I felt her fading into nothingness in my arms. Her body seemed to waver and grow transparent.
Her lovely face was set in a bitterly tragic expression, half apology, half desperation. It rippled and flickered before my streaming eyes, blurring, dimming, waning into a transparent ghostly shadow.
There in my arms, Anya changed her form. She began to glow, her solid body dissolving away into nothingness, transforming herself into a radiant sphere of silvery light tinged ruddy by the glow from beneath us.
I realized that she truly was a goddess, as advanced beyond my human form as I am beyond the form of the algae. The human body that she had worn, that she had suffered in, was a sacrifice she made because she loved me. Now, faced with searing death, she reverted to her true form, a globe of pure energy that pulsated and dwindled even as I watched it.
“Farewell,” I heard in my mind. “Farewell, my darling.”
The silvery globe disappeared and I was left alone, abandoned, plunging toward hell itself.
My first thought was, At least she’ll be safe. She can escape, perhaps even get back to the other Creators, I told myself. But I could not hide the bitterness that surged through me, the black sorrowing anguish that filled every atom of my being. She had abandoned me, left me to face my fate alone. I knew she was right to do it, yet a gulf of endless grief swallowed me up, deeper and darker than the pit I was falling through.