Shortly after the destruction of the Talj Junction, Une went silent. Her tendrils across the multiversal structure continued their work, there was a contingent of the Descendant converting the matter of a universe into food for their mother and there was a large force of Pito battering the resistance of another universe, but Une’s consciousness was not in these efforts. Une was in the Une-verse that she’d created for herself by consuming all of the matter that she could digest and repurposing it in her image. The things that she could not consume, bore witness to Une’s swift ascension from menace of Earth, to conqueror of everything and this is the only space where she feels safe to rest her consciousness because of her complete control over it. Every living thing in the Une-verse was alive because she allowed it and everything understood that they existed for the sole purpose of preserving their mother. Even the existences that she had conquered were not completely hers and it would take time to consume them to her satisfaction that she would risk resting her mind in those places.
When she awoke from her rest, she occupied her physical form that is disturbing to view from a distance. Une is the horror of an overgrown cosmos, a tight ball of mycelium that looks like yarn around what had been Earth, with both thick and thin tendrils unfathomably long, stretching across the cosmos to the other bodies that Une had long ago reached and conquered. She thrives in the void of space, and she creates new environments of her being, the mycelium, on the new places her tendrils reach.
She managed to grow out of her existence when she conquered the Ascendant and she has taken exactly thirty-three universes since her emergence from the universe that bears her name and the scope of her influence varies across them. None are as completely hers as her home world, but she had a feeling that the beings she’d encountered who handed her the first defeat she’d ever known would be the key to consuming existences more quickly and more completely. She had encountered beings like the ones who had defeated her. The one who called herself Pultine, Une had corrupted to Pulatas, who was theoretically the thirty-three iterations of Pultine that she had acquired in her conquests, though not every one of those existences had a being similar enough to the Pultine of the Node 5 Fonlands to be considered an iteration and Pulatas was actually just nine iterations of Pultine. And the one with Pultine, the one who had forced the meeting with the eyes of pure empathy, Une had seen her before and this one who had defeated her was the only one she had allowed to live. How was it possible that these things that she had already dominated were capable of threatening her very existence? How had they burned her and forced her out, that was an affront, and that existence had to disappear into oblivion to erase the proof of her mortality. She’d expelled so much of her energy at the entry point she had taken into the Talj Function, that was also the point at which she withdrew the parts of her she could salvage, that it sent Talj into a shock and caused it to reverse the attraction that held the two parts of it together, and in the absence of that attraction, Talj ripped into nothing.
She had to do the same to the home world of Pultine and her companion and she would take the two of them herself and pilot their bodies as the two halves of her consciousness that she would split to lead her forces to the homes of those who had insulted her. It was easy for Une to find the Fonlands and the Hyperion universes and she plotted for her revenge.
Une is splitting herself down the middle when she makes her opening move against her enemies. Outside of everything, the corrupted Vodun of another Fonlands are conjuring her magic to launch it at the Fonlands of Node 5 and the Hyperion universe of Node 1 simultaneously. Two balls of mycelium that each contain the female form she had taken before Pultine and the Hyperion, blazing with the green, purple, and yellow energy of her are launched by two sets of Vodun and they both blaze like planet-sized comets at the toric visualizations of the existences from the outside vantage. Maybe they move fast, maybe they move at a snail’s pace, but they move and they will arrive simultaneously and it will be worth it to lose the Vodun she had corrupted because they will perish in the nothingness outside before they can regain the Une-verse; the intensity of the spell weakens them and they blend into the fathomless nothing.
Une is two when her bombs breach the spacetime inside of her targets. Uneb is aware inside of the Hyperion Universe and Unea is aware in the aether around the slumbering snake known as Aido Hwedo where the Fonlands rest. Both Unea and Uneb slow their movement and come to a stop, still blazing with their energy, but still, and they sit as beacons. She gives a command to everything she touches, ordering everything that she allows action and violence to one of two locations. And as her forces follow their beacons, Unea and Uneb both resume their incredible speed, Unea on course to the Disc of Agê and Uneb to the planet Earth.
“Once you have entered, follow my trajectory,” both Unea and Uneb say to the forces traveling to the Fonlands and Hyperion universes. “Land on my mark and we will devastate the land and then everything else.”
Since the failure in Talj, Une had lost trust in her Descendant and her Pito. She had allowed them to remain autonomous when she slept, but since awakening, she has limited their ability to make decisions for themselves, setting most of them to repetitive tasks. Her Descendant and Pito can only cut down opposition that they identify using primitive methods like identifying sentient things without dark coloring that is a characteristic of beings infected by Une, and this had led to considerable friendly fire among the Descendant and the Pito, but this was negligible to Une who would sacrifice any number of her forces to avoid the humiliating defeat she’d suffered.
Une has tunnel vision, Unea and Uneb will bring destruction, she is overwhelmed by her anger and the forms of her flare with her actual magic, her actual consciousness. Une is barrelling toward…
Uneb is puzzled. The ground should have cratered and everything in a radius that would have leveled the east coast of the United States should have been instantly killed. She had imagined the devastation her impact on the ground would be and it made her smile to think of all the things that would die, how the empathetic one who dared stare upon her with fake understanding would weep at the sight of her impact. But her crash landing is interrupted. She lands on a cushion and she screams her frustration, stamping down hard on whatever thing is at her feet.
“What is it, Neb?” Uneb recognizes the words of the empathetic one who had insulted her.
“A mushroom woman?”
“This is what Kyrie was talking about? She don’t look so scary to me.”
“Kyrie said Death spoke to him and he believed it because it was afraid and told him how to save many lives. Whatever she is, she means to do us all harm. Let’s get her off-planet as fast as we can, Kevin.”
Uneb is angry. She can move but she is contained. Something is containing her fury and this will not stand. She feels herself moving away from the surface she had hoped to shatter, back in the direction she had come and she explodes in a rage, her power pushing out green, purple and yellow and stressing her containment. She feels whatever it is around her give, and she explodes again, pushing the containment to its limits.
“Just get it out of the atmosphere!” she hears and Uneb knows that she will be free soon.
When she is free, she sees the blackness of space and the Earth that the Hyperion calls home in the distance.
“Why are you here?” Uneb hears and she sees two beings floating in space nearby her, but they aren’t the source of the voice, though she knows that the voice speaks for them.
“This space belongs to Une,” Uneb responds. “Give yourself and these beings to me immediately or face my wrath.”
“This space belongs to the beings who occupy it and those beings you see are not mine to give. We don’t want to kill you, but we will not give ourselves to Une, whatever that is. So go back to where you came from or those beings will kill you.”
Uneb’s energy flares and the force of it pushes the beings back, but they do not retreat. She flies at them but before she can attack, she feels the force of a fist smash into her head and then she is zooming backwards in space, too shocked to regain her composure, as though Une’s awareness inside of Uneb is severed and has to reestablish a connection. When she does, Uneb is closer to the orbit of Mars than Earth and the two beings who had stopped her assault on Earth are there, watching her from a distance.
“I must say that I am galled by your ability to prevent me from doing what must be done,” Uneb says to the voice that she had spoken to before.
“You must be a being of immense power to underestimate Kevin Blackmon and Nebuchad Abed. They are the beings that you see and they will not allow their world to be assailed. Leave this place now. We have no desire to harm you, but you have declared ill intent and we will not hesitate to end your existence if you continue to threaten us. Leave now.”
Uneb will not be denied. She extends a hand toward the beings and pale brown tendrils of varying thickness shoot across the void toward Kevin and Nebuchad.
They both wear suits to sustain themselves in the void, Kevin had made them in the blink of an eye and they mirrored the IP standard issue suits that he’d used in his time working with the Interstellar Panel. They also wore helmets that allowed them to talk to one another.“
Hit her again,” Kevin says, confident that the suits he and Nebuchad wear are capable of standing up to whatever this thing is. It looks like a woman, an elegant woman, but her body is trama, the flesh of a mushroom, and it is fibrous and tan brown with spots of darker color. Her head is a mushroom and the cap looks like hair with two long brown tendrils like the ones shooting through space at Kevin and Nebuchad on either side of her head.
Nebuchad maneuvers through space toward Uneb and he easily dodges the tendrils that look hairy like yarn, but before he can hit Uneb as he had before, with the strength mastery he’d learned from the Kazi of Eel that was capable of generating immense power with concentration on very specific things that he held in his mind, Nebuchad is wrapped in hairy tendrils and he is suspended with his fist out just a foot from her face. He feels the strength of the tendrils tightening against his suit and pulling at his arm.
“You alright in there?” Kevin asks over the communicator. He has light weight but sharp swords in each hand, swinging them furiously and at such speed that his arms are a blur. He is slicing the tendrils that attempt to ensnare him and they are relentless.
“Im fine,” Nebuchad replies as he concentrates on the sensation just when you lose your balance, when you realize that you are not solid on your feet, as well as the feeling of something finally breaking under the weight of your strength, and his strength increases enough that he is able to pull his arm toward his body and snap the tendrils that hold him. As he frees his other arm, new tendrils try to wrap him and he moves faster each time he rips layers of the yarn. He retreats from Uneb who advances toward him until Kevin arrives to slice her with the fury of his swords. With Uneb distracted, Nebuchad is free to focus his energy to project it from his hands with his fingers splayed in a circle and his arms extended and it cuts through Uneb’s tendrils as Kevin retreats just in time for the energy blast to connect to the pieces of Uneb and push them back until they are overcome and burned through by the energy. Nebuchad’s energy projection pushes her towards Saturn’s orbit.
They take time to burn away the tendrils and then fly back to Earth’s surface, to Kevin’s house where Kyrie is waiting on his front porch. He is an older man, in his sixties and it shows in the gray of his hair on his head and beard, but he is spry for his age and looks younger in the jeans and T-shirt he wears. He looks very worried at the moment.
Kevin makes the spacesuits and helmets disappear and he and Nebuchad are dressed similarly to Kyrie.
“What the hell was that?” all three say simultaneously.
Unea is puzzled. She has been moving toward the Fonlands in the aether around Aido Hwedo for a long time, but she is not coming any closer to it. Unea is frustrated and moves faster, propelling herself by exploding her energy behind her and the longer she moves and doesn’t come closer, the angrier and more resolved she becomes.
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