The Prometheus Objective

33

Caleb stood up, but it didn’t feel like the normal effort. And, come to think of it, all the pain and fatigue he had just been dealing with had now receded to the point of being unmemorable. Was he even paralyzed?

He looked back…

Oh. There…

Is.

My.

Body.

And another’s.

Raiden.

And more. On the tables, sleeping, resting, dreaming, (dying?). The twins on one together, face down, so… pale. Their auras — dull pink and fading.

Back to his own body and Raiden’s — vibrant red and orange, like heat signatures. Seething and alive, compared to the others around them. He wanted to go back and look closer, but something gripped his shoulder, his…

Glowing body. Like scintillating chain mail armor, golden interlocked elements comprising his form, and that of the other figure behind him.

“Come,” the word reverberated from somewhere, inside and out, and when he shifted his view, the fiery breach opened before him.

Like a giant two-handed sword, something out of a fantasy video game Orlando would have played for days and days, except it roared with crimson energy, expelling waves of it in all directions. Not so much a sword, he realized, as a rift: a sword-shaped tear in reality, beyond which coursed energy and something else. Like anti-matter or furious negative vibrational power.

“Your destiny is here.”

And Caleb, who thought he was moving so slowly, found himself ahead, approaching the flaming, sputtering, gusting portal, as energies ripped and tore at his form to no effect. Imbued with the stuff of astral, cosmic consciousness only, the waves of devastating power that would have annihilated all matter coming toward it, did nothing now but offer the barest twinge, like the soft, enticing touch of a lover’s caressing fingernail.

It enveloped him and enshrouded Raiden, and the two of them moved closer still, into the expanding fold.

He thought of the twins. Thought of Alexander — and had a vision of him standing before the sealed door to the pyramid, studying the tiles and the clues, trying to decode the ancient puzzle, and he felt a swelling pride.

But at the same time, it was only an emotion, just a thing tied to an obsolete material form. Of no consequence any longer. Especially, he thought, after stepping through the rift.

Did Raiden not sense this? Or was he blinded by his mission, by his destiny?

His figure proceeded ahead, blinding and dazzling and lordly, but also imbued with an emerald tinge that faded the more he distanced himself from his body — and the gem around his neck. Half of his form was gone, dissolving into the beyond, into the world between the worlds, stepping in to the realm of Paradise, the world of the Tree.

And the Serpent.

And Alexander forgotten, the twins forgotten, Nina and the others and the entire world and all his guilt forgotten (or just put in its proper, inconsequential place), Caleb stepped ahead, and joined him.

Past the sword.

Into the rift.