Prologue: Light and Darkness (3)

He couldn't perceive anything. Neither light nor darkness. He couldn't feel anything. Just an insatiable hunger. He was in this strange stage between life and death. Not organic life, but something else. And his essence was slowly depleting.

On the verge of vanishing, he did what should never be done. At that moment, countless vagrant wills invaded him. Urges, intents, desires, beliefs,… They had many manifestations, but all were clashing to influence him, to control him. Among these, three stood out. Far more domineering than any other, they savagely marked the root of his fading existence. It forced him to experience traumatic memories that weren't his own.

The first was the despair of a young boy drowning in a lake and the resulting unfathomable fear of death. The second was of another child whose mother drove him to commit suicide and his resulting hatred for this world and its creators. And the last one, much more familiar, was a reminiscence of his ancestor and mentor who was betrayed by the one he cherished the most.

While the first two parasitised his consciousness, the last one invigorated him as one might expect from a symbiosis. As a result, he vaguely recovered his own memories, a fraction of his perception and the understanding that comes with it.

Why those three will fragments had lived hidden inside him was a mystery. But the fact that they were gradually taking over his consciousness proved how little time he had left: just enough to make one last choice.

January 1, 2500, was the day it all changed. From peace to war. From his plans for greatness to his sole survival. And as humanity faced unprecedented dangers, he quickly rose to prominence. At that time, his particularly inflated ego blinded the stars under the name of Ethan, Ethan of the Divine Neurons.

Only one day a tragedy occurred, not on the scale of humanity but on his own. From this, he had developed his own conception of the greater good. He became a Light. A beacon whose sole purpose was to guide humankind towards a future, if there was one. The resulting conviction had freed him from any influence, including the overwhelming pride that enveloped all Merigenians.

And yet, for the first time since then, he doubted. Humanity's survival: at what cost?

On his right, the body of a girl devoid of herself languished in pure agony. Her silver hair and pale complexion darkened as a violet substance spread through her arteries and veins. Then it spilled out of every cavity in her once soap-smooth skin.

His other companions agonised the same way. Aliens and humans alike suffered the worst tortures under his red eye.

Tilly, Bailey, Rosalind, Shaka, Molly, Jabril, Fang, Ghostie, Stunner and even Irvin. The few comrades - who had so far survived an endless hecatomb - were sinking into a poisonous sea of purple quicksand. Ethan was the only one who had the luxury of looking around, or rather, the misfortune of holding one last spark of free consciousness.

A single being stood tall and strong amidst this bloodbath. It was a woman. Thousands of waving snakes formed her hair. Long and thin as ropes, most shared the same slimy, dark purple hue. They multiplied steadily, splitting and seeping into the ground. Bit by bit, they corrupted the surrounding area, expanding her purple domain.

Her other serpentine hair remained dormant in their shimmering multi-coloured hue. Some appeared as liquid and cyan as the Caribbean water, while others raged like fierce thunderclaps and swirled like growing hurricanes. These elemental snakes wriggled in all directions. By doing so, they hid most of her facial features. Yet, the reflection of her equally colourful eyes sometimes appeared through the gaps in her living hair. That's how her gaze met his.

At once, all snakes stopped. And her lips curled up as if she was happy that he was still alive.

He knew she knew, yet Ethan had no time to reveal his presence that her smile shifted into something vicious. Something that no one would want to be the target of.

She turned towards him, who had long since been reduced to a floating lump of molten coal. Only his rocky head and part of his pectoral muscles remained. These were fading away and would soon cease to exist. Still, he hovered upright and looked at her with absolute impassivity as a remnant of what he once was.

The little ambiguity regarding his condition did not last long; a powerful golden glow flashed from her eyes and pierced through his dissipating body. Far from destroying him, it forcibly anchored his existence in this world. The woman giggled as she faced his burning red eye in the centre of which a white light point emerged—sign of his presence.

Ethan had neither the strength to speak nor to move. He only had control over one eye as she raised her arms, signalling the start of a show. The bodies of his near-dead companions rose under the yoke of her improvised puppetry.

In a macabre dance, they attacked each other.

A giant black fist, whose wrist and arm appeared to be devoid of ligaments, crashed down on the skull of a mole-like civilised alien.

The silver-haired woman beheaded a green-haired one with a graceful stroke of her sword. The falling head rolled down to face Ethan. Staring into her lifeless cyan eyes, he remembered who she was. She, who once sparkled like a field of flowers, had not been the same since she gave up on love. Now she was dying. Too bad, but he couldn't feel anything; may her demise benefit the greater good.

Ethan raised his impassive stare. The monstrous woman looked back. "Feel," she said. Her tone contained an unquenchable loathing as if the very concept of hatred manifested in her word.

Sadness, fear, and then madness raged from his deepest self. Since his first moments of consciousness, his unwavering will had subjugated all his subconscious abilities. Yet for the first time, he unwillingly felt.

The whirlwind of emotion destroyed him from within. It disturbed him with irrational thoughts. With emotional thoughts. His gaze was no longer impassive as he looked at the agonising silver-haired woman. Tilly.

The greater good: Humankind.

Tilly.

Humankind.

Tilly.

Humankind.

Tilly.

He knew they wouldn't survive. That any exchange would only be detrimental, an unnecessary risk—a rewardless sacrifice. Still, he had a choice to make, a last one.

As Ethan's mouth half-opened, some purple liquid poured out.

"Speak," she said.

A single spark of his corrupted core recovered. Just enough to utter some intent. "What do you want?" He addressed her from will to will.

Her lips turned up as if she had had the thrill of her life. "Your suffering."

Despite knowing very much how it would end, Ethan couldn't help. Ah, irrationality. "Why?" He asked.

Her serpentine hair stood up, revealing pure anger through the twitch of her tanned skin. "Why? Why?!"

The half-giant black man - who had unwillingly left a crushed human-sized mole on the sticky ground - approached the alien species. His mouth opened and revealed teeth as sharp as white. He hollered in agony first, despite being the eater.

Ethan could merely observe as she forcefully turned two friends into prey and predator.

She giggled until the last bite, then shifted her attention to him. "Because you picked on my poor baby."

A baby? No, a monster. A being with a boundless ego that could have sacrificed anything for its benefit. Someone with enough potential to immerse everything in its darkness. Humanity's greatest threat. His long-dead nemesis: The Last Gregoryo.

Even in death, its unleashed will destroyed everything in its path and perverted the mind of the mightiest, only to fulfil one last whim.

While each of her words was an understatement, it remained true. Ethan had killed it. He had done it for the greater good… just like everything else. And ironically, that's why he was facing his final moments. Still, as it wouldn't end with his death alone, he had to make this one last choice: who would pay the price with him.

Glancing down, his gaze offered an ultimate expression of affection for the silver-haired woman. For Tilly. The next moment, everything he might have felt for her was gone. As it never existed, or almost.

"All right. I'll suffer as much as you want." Ethan said. With each additional word, he failed to live up to the core concept he had developed. His consciousness grew increasingly unstable as he betrayed his own greater good—as he betrayed humanity. "At the charge of a single wish." An unequivocal reluctance mixed with a certain inner peace. Then, once again, an absolute impassivity took hold of him.

The woman approached. Detaching from her hair, a snake swarm crawled over his body. The liquid and the gaseous ones slithered their way through the gaps in his face while some others sank their electric fangs into his putrified skin. Organically speaking, he had long been dead. Not even she would have dared to keep him alive.

"Perhaps. What do you value the most?" She asked.

Lulled by her deadliest reptiles, he might keep quiet but not lie. "Humankind."

The mouth of his corpse opened wide. Through it, a slimy turquoise cobra emerged. Far thicker than other snakes, a tiny ripped obsidian diamond twirled in its centre.

The woman stared at the new serpent, discarding the falling corpse behind. "Your wish?"

An infinite sadness seized Ethan as if his life had no more meaning. Perhaps influenced by his new host, he increasingly desired the salvation of the one whose death he had masterminded. So much that he had to answer fast, otherwise his wish might change.

The liquid cobra flicked its tongue out, emitting a shrill sound. "Let Tilly go."

"Very well, the Amuse-bouche lasted long enough," she answered.

Wind serpents cut the silver-haired woman to pieces. Fiery snakes reduced the remains to ash, and then a blazing tornado blew them away.

May she rest in peace.

The fate of his other companions proved quite different. Assimilated by the purple quicksand, only snakes containing their respective attributes re-emerged. These attached to her hair, adding new coloured strands.

The monstrous woman turned toward him. Ethan was both kept alive and entrapped within the cyan cobra soon to become one with. She reached up, stroking its cheek, his cheek. "Now connected, may you feel my suffering. I will feast on yours till the end of humankind."

Perceiving the bottomless pit of heartache she strained to fill through her every action, Ethan realised, far too late, that the will of The Last Gregoryo never drove this.

Someone had ensnared him in a contest that wasn't his. And he alone paid the price.

...

Sinking into the floating bed that caressed him with relaxing ripples bordering on the divine, a teenager awoke. His dendrite-like hair flashed from turquoise to a light purple. They kind of looked like the representation of a neuronal network.

As he was about to fully wake up, an ominous emptiness came over him. It was as if he had just forgotten something important, something existential. In reaction, he forcefully maintained his sleep state, striving to recollect what he was not supposed to comprehend.

Last night he had a strange, somewhat inexplicable dream. The worst is that only fragments surfaced. This was an unprecedented shame for young Ethan. So far, such stages of awareness had always abided his will. His dreams were just supposed to be a tool to refine his understanding of the world.

In his nightmare, a never-ending purge drove humans to commit the worst atrocities. All that for nothing more than a glimmer of survival. What shocked him the most was not its decades-long duration but its fantasy aspect. This marked the first time any form of irrationality had crept into his mind.

Yet despite the evidences, Ethan refused to jump to such a conclusion. He would analyse every bit of his first-ever nightmare. Only not now, his timetable being full.

One day at a time, and tomorrow marked the dawn of a new era. Although he was far too young to seize the best opportunities of the coming interplanetary age, his ambitions extended beyond Earth: Sooner or later, the planet Mars would be the cradle of the greatest human civilisation.