PRL Serials

The Banned Regions are behind them now and they have been flying toward seemingly nothing for a long time. 

Alia thinks of God and she wonders if it was possible to change his mind with more time, without so much looming in her immediate future. To her, the level of violence that he displayed was a symptom of something in him that was corrosive to the spirit. To enjoy inflicting pain on someone, even if you feel they deserve it, is sadism and that is a bad characteristic to proliferate in a universe that she hoped would be filled with prosperous and enjoyable life. And to be the cause of another’s suffering slowly robs a spirit of its energies, though this is a sentiment that she can’t prove but feels to be true. She doesn’t like to hurt others and she only does it to prevent the immediate suffering of others, and even then, she feels weak like she does now, hesitant to ever lift her hands and bring the white glow to them again. The nature of her soul exacerbates these feelings–she is only half of herself as the other runs the Rainbow Road–and tapping into the white light to fend off the fighters in God’s toll territory of the Regions, really taxed the half of her that animates her body. 

She sits in the copilot chair next to Kazi Fandral who understands that their recent fight must have drained her, and Alia drifts in and out of sleep, catching glimpses of the experience of her other half as Fandral navigates to the coordinates where she knows they will find SoEl and his wondrous Aeternus Machina.

Meanwhile, on the Rainbow Road

Heaven is not the place that she expected it to be, though it has the look that one would expect, and the hum, before it becomes maddening in its persistence, that is vaguely angelic. 

“This isn’t heaven,” Darker says as though he is responding to Alia’s thoughts and he looks around them with a look of skepticism. “It’s not the heaven we know anyway.”

Alia stares around them as well and it is a blanket of white all around her, though she spots what seems to be a distant, far away smudge as she scans the homogenous horizon. It is red and it is possible that she makes it up in her mind to disturb the vastness of the white that they are very small inside of. But she wants to approach it, to see what it could possibly be in this place, and before she realizes that she is moving, she hears Darker calling to her from a distance.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

Alia looks behind herself and she sees that Darker is approaching her but he is still at a distance.

“I didn’t realize I was moving,” she yells back to him, struggling to be heard over the hum that she imagines makes it difficult for him to hear her. “I was thinking about that spot in the distance and then I was headed there.” She thinks about stopping and then she does and Darker floats to catch up to her but then she watches him float past her. “Just think that you want to stop,” she yells at him and she watches him slow to a stop. When they are next to one another, Alia grabs his hand.

“What do we do now?’ Darker asks. “Can you summon the rainbow?

Alia knows how it had manifested in the past; she experienced the negative emotions that she had conquered to find the Road, and once she overcame those emotions, the rainbow would manifest and she could touch it to take them both back to the Road. So Alia thinks of rage, things that infuriate her, and then she thinks of peace, of letting go of the rage, but her white suit doesn’t turn red like it had when she experienced rage in Hell.

“I guess I can’t fake it,” she says and she starts to worry. There is nothing that she can see to stir emotions like there had been in Hell and she fears that she and Darker are stranded. But rather than be consumed by that fear, Alia turns to Darker. “Maybe we have to explore a little bit, we might find something to help us feel.” And as she says it, her white suit turns yellow and she can see the shape of her body for the first time since they arrived here. When she looks up, she sees an explosion of colorful sparks that rain down around her, and she can see the flat plane of the rainbow that she can touch to take her back to the Road. She hears Darker exclaim with pleasure and before she can reach her free hand up to touch it, she hears someone calling as if from a distance.

“Alia? That is you! I knew that I felt you here!”

Before she touches the rainbow, she turns to see a being that seems to coalesce a solid form from faint dots of energies that are various colors and when he is close, the dots of energies form a face that Alia recognizes. It is a male face and it looks like hers. 

“Pomp?” Alia says, squinting her eyes.

“Yes! It’s me, your brother!” He hugs her, his energies move to surround her and she can feel him vibrating gently against her yellow form. 

Alia laughs at him. “You pretended to be my brother,” she reminds him. Pomp is something like the grim reaper and he appeared in the physical realm following the resurrection of Darker. 

“I see you are with the abomination,” Pomp says and he indicates with his eyes that he is talking about Darker.

“You shouldn’t call someone that,” Alia says. “He’s not an abomination.”

“Why are you here?” Pomp asks. “Why are you less than yourself, you feel the same but very different.” He is obviously concerned for her.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she says. “Darker and I are running the Rainbow Road…”

“That isn’t real,” Pomp interrupts. “There is no Heaven and Hell. You beings of existence have wrong notions about your place in everything. No one punishes you for bad things, because bad is hard to apply metaphysically.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Darker says. He doesn’t like Pomp’s attitude, especially given that he is very wrong about the Road. “Whatever you are, look up.” Darker points up at the flat plane of the rainbow over Alia’s head.

“What is that thing?” Pomp asks.

“It’s the Road, Pomp,” Alia says. “I have to go, we have to get to the end and I think we’re coming up on a difficult part.”

“What’s at the end?” 

“What’s on the other side of Heaven?” Alia asks. “Do you know? If we started at the bottom of Hell, or whatever it’s really called even though there were a lot of demons and the devil was there, but whatever. If we started in Hell and we ran the road from there to here, where will we end up when we leave Heaven?”

Pomp’s expression becomes one of concern.

“You are crossing the divide? No soul can return from there…” he trails off and then looks at Darker, then back to Alia. “Though I guess I am wrong there too. Why are you going there? Are you ready to expire, or are you trying to kill a portion of yourself?”

“It’s complicated Pomp. I’m going there because things will be different soon, and it will be a way for me to remember everything as it is now because I might not have any special abilities after this reset.”

“Reset?” Pomp asks. “How will things be different.”

“The Ascendant will disappear, the Aje, all of it because they won’t travel back in time.”

“But I was made by the Aje,” Pomp says. “Will I cease to exist?”

Alia shrugs. “I don’t fully understand what you are.”

 “Neither do I,” Pomp says with a look of resignation on his face. “Maybe whatever awaits me after the reset will be better than this boring existence.”

“You can come with us,” Alia offers. “I don’t know what will happen to you, but Darker was there before and he liked it enough to go through all of this to get back to it. It can’t be bad.”

“I have been there, at the divide, and it is a long way there from here. I have seen what happens when souls cross it, there are explosions visible from this side. It seems very destructive. I think that I will pass on your offer. But I wish you well on the rest of your journey.”

Alia and Pomp smile at one another and she is sad that she might be saying goodbye to the only sibling she’d ever had, even if he wasn’t really her brother. They hug and Alia likes the feel of him around her, and then she touches the rainbow, and she and Darker are back on the Road.

They are pinging along as they come to the large loops in the Road and Alia holds Darker’s hand to make sure that she does not leave him too far behind her because she can move much faster than him; they had learned that when they are separated at too large a distance, it is like falling from the Road. They hit the first of the large loops fast as they make the climb up and they manage to stay on the road when they are completely upside down, and then they hit the descent at a much quicker speed that seems to propel them forward through the subsequent loops that occur in a long succession.

“Don’t get dizzy,” Alia yells, “just focus on the view right in front of us.” 

Darker doesn’t respond, but she feels his grip on her hand tighten as they loop up and down, over and over for what feels like a very long time. 

The radar of Fandral’s ship registers a black hole at the edge of its range and they both know that they should encounter SoEl soon. Alia wonders if he is on a ship, or if there is a planet where he is waiting for them, but the area seems to be devoid of things, and it seems that there are less stars in the sky.

She wants to close her eyes and feel for him, but closing her eyes pulls her to sleep, so instead, she sits up alert at the view through the front window.

“What do you think will happen when you meet this man you are looking for?” Fandral asks to fill the silence.

“I have no idea,” Alia says. “I don’t really even know who I’m looking for. He wasn’t Solse Prab in the Dreamscape. They were SoEl, Solse combined with someone else, so I honestly have no idea what we’ll find.”

“Will you complete the Road before we get to him?” Fandral continues. “I feel we are nearing the end of this journey.”

“I should,” Alia says and then she starts to say something else, but pauses for a second. Fandral looks to her, but she thinks very carefully how she will continue. Finally, she says, “We will. We have already, and the world is already changed. And I will remember and we will have the tools we need to make the universe brighter.”

“We’ve already won?” Fandral asks with a smile. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t,” Alia says and looks him sincerely in his eyes. “I just really believe it.”

The large loops in the road last for a while and Alia can’t get a clear view of the Road beyond the loops. She wonders if it continues this way until the end. Darker focuses on pushing himself as fast as he can go, and Alia glimpses the strain on his face as they barrel forward. After a while, what feels to Alia like days, maybe a week, they circle the last large loop and the Road lays flat before them and continues straight ahead into the brilliant distance that is a cosmos filled with stars. It is a long way away, but Alia can see a bright light, maybe a star, that is straight ahead and she wonders if there is a bright white light at the end of the road. As they continue to run, their footsteps pinging loudly, the white light at the end of the Road seems to grow larger, like they are approaching it, but it grows at a very slow rate even though the two of them are running very fast.

SoEl is not inside of the black hole, they are very far away from it, but they float the space between the black hole and Fandral’s ship. When the black hole comes into view, Alia and Fandral notice a bright white light at the center that puzzles them both. They zoom in on the front view display and they see SoEl with their dark skin and large horns. They wear a tattered spacesuit and most of their body is exposed to space. There is a rectangle of light in their torso and it shines brightly.

“Is that him?” Fandral asks. “He can survive the void?”

Alia shrugs. “Apparently they can.”

The light at the end of the road is very large now and Alia can see that the road runs right into it. As they get closer to it, they seem to run faster and they are both eager for the end. They realize the enormity of the star at the end that seems to be about the size of Earth’s sun, but there is no heat from it and the closer they approach, less colors appear in the Road and become more white. 

“Are you ready?” she calls to Darker.

“I am,” he calls back.

They run for what feels like a day before they smash into the white, and Alia reaches the everything and the nothing. She can feel and experience any moment in her existence, she can see others’ existences, including her mother and her father and she is able to see their faces. And when she is done feeling, she is nothing, at rest, alseep. Until she isn’t.

Alia and Fandral approach the figure of SoEl in their spacesuits and their helmets are tinted to the color of sunglasses because of the bright light. 

“How do we talk to him?” Fandral asks.

Alia approaches SoEl and she sees that their eyes are trained on Alia and they are smiling. They wave a hand indicating for Alia to come even closer and when Alia is right in front of them, she feels an intense heat radiating from them. SoEl grabs her hand and it feels very hot, she wonders if her space suit is damaged. And then he puts Alia’s hand to the light on his chest. 

The view of everything changes. The light is dim and no longer contained inside of SoEl who is still smiling at her next to the form of dim light in the vague shape of a person. 

“I am AEther,” Alia hears from the light form. “Why have you summoned me?”