Une is sleeping, but not a sleep that many would recognize. She doesn’t have dreams that bleed across the blackness of sleep to expose the details of her subconscious hopes and fears. Her body, the planet-sized ball of rough, hairy tendrils, slumbers as many things do, but unlike many things, Une can think and operate the two distinct bodies that contain the two halves of her conscious will; Unea and Uneb. She can operate two vessels of her consciousness, but she is vulnerable in her home, suspended in the space that she had conquered long, long ago.
She sees and understands Uneb’s conflict in the Hyperion universe. Uneb has been met with the force of formidable beings from the planet Earth, and also from other planets who have joined in the battle. Uneb is surprised by the resistance, but she is compensating, drawing from the immense stores of power that Une had stashed across the multiversal structure in her conquest. Uneb faces a complex fight with beings bringing strange magic and technology to bear, and they even manage to transport her to an empty corner of the universe far away from Earth, but they all tremble at the sight of her. All of them have to goad themselves on to overcome the fear of her fearsome form that is large now, large enough to grab planets and hurl them. She can feel their fear and it delights her, she can hear their doubts and she is happy to play this game until she has eliminated them all. She has no intention of corrupting any of them, she will delight in each of their deaths and the fear it instills in a universe that bears witness to its end.
She doesn’t intend to corrupt any of them until she feels the one called Kevin. He had been one of the first two who had stood against her and kept her from landing on Earth, but she hadn’t paid attention to the two of them. Uneb had assumed that Kevin and his companion Nebuchad, all of the beings she faced really, were constructs of the voice that had spoken to her. She thought that the voice was controlling them like Une controlled her and she delighted in the voice despairing over the failed efforts of its constructs, but none of the beings she face have a commanding voice in their heads, though many of them share a mindlink.
Kevin stands out among all of them. He commands many of the beings through a mindlink and he coordinates with leaders of the beings who look very different from the Earthlings. His mind is steady, he is not shaken by the appearance of Uneb like the rest of them, and he can bring gargantuan constructs into being that manage to wound Uneb, a feat that always necessitates a break on one of the flying ships like the ones that shoot lasers at her, though the ships for resting are bigger and floating at a distance from the fray. When he is resting on one of those ships, Uneb can hear his mind that is bitter, exhausted, despite the fierce facade he displays before the others. Kevin is weary of battle and though he will fight to the death of him to avoid the fate that Uneb promises, there is a part of him that wants to curl up and disappear, or allow Uneb to kill him so that he never has to fight again. This mentality is very attractive to Une, and in turn Uneb, who was practically salivating at the chance to sink into Kevin’s mind and seed her taint. He would be a formidable convert to her side and his mental link would allow her to turn many others before they even realized what was happening. Even though he does not wield arcana, Uneb recognizes the Black on him, he is a powerful manipulator of reality with the very weak resolve of meat brain and body.
Uneb keeps up the battle in the dark corner of Hyperion and she begins the subtle work of worming her way into Kevin’s consciousness so as to be undetected.
What Une sees through the eyes of Unea is puzzling because for a very long time she beholds the splendor of the Fonlands in the distance of her view, and she feels the sensation of Unea’s body barreling towards it, but the view of the Fonlands never advances, it always hangs very far away as though Unea is not moving at all. For a while, Une thinks that the distance between Unea and the Fonlands is just larger than can be easily judged from the aether outside of it, the physics of the Fonlands is very unique to it afterall, but soon, Une recognizes that the view through Unea’s eyes is somehow unnatural, as though she has been made to see something that is not actually there, and it is then when Une spots the faint sign of the pattern, very faint lines of gold that run line a grid on spacetime. There was magic active all around Uneb but it was being hidden from the view of anyone not well versed in arcana as Une has become over her long existence consuming the bodies and knowledge of beings of the multiversal structure.
Unea does not panic at Une’s realization, she merely remains in her position as she charts the traces of the pattern around her. In doing so, she eventually identified the prison she was being suspended inside of and she instantly saw the face of her jailer who floated the space in front of her, observing her closely. She smirks at him, basking in immense power. The humans are always pleasant to look at, Une has always thought so, and their form had inspired the form she created for Unea and Uneb, and the form she had presented when she was insulted by Pultine and Alia. Unea’s human jailer seems familiar to Une, and she searches her memories that include the consciousnesses of everything that she had ever consumed. She found things that resembled him, but nothing threatening, nothing of note and this made her apprehensive. She had consumed enough that very few things were ever unfamiliar to her and when she encountered things that defied her expectation, like Pultine and Alia, she knew that she had to eliminate the threat, and convert it to her cause. Her human jailer was a bright beacon of the pattern and his magic had been strong enough to fool her for a significant time.
But she won’t be distracted any longer and she overpowers her jailer, wraps him up and disposes of him. She will see the Fonlands fall, and then she can come back to collect the human who amuses her. But then the Vodun arrives.
“You will come no closer,” Jo says and even though Uneb wants to seize on the Vodun, she cannot move.
“Not this again,” Uneb calls out to Jo. “More traps, I see. You all must be terrified to face me.”
“I am not terrified,” Jo responds resolutely, “but I am also not an idiot. We will fight, and our power will shake the aether, but not before I know you better.”
“Then learn fast, Vodun,” Uneb sneers. “I am eager for a fight.”
PRL Serials 