The Big Meow

A shiver went right down Rhiow from her ears to her tail and all her fur stood on end as the black gate paused in the air above them, and began to throb and grow. It spread fast, its blackness flickering now, impossible to look at for more than a second’s glance. And then, the portal section of the gate having widened out to nearly fifty feet across, it went utterly dark… and something came out.

It was a single pinpoint locus of darkness, like a micro-black hole. But no innocent singularity ever carried with it such a freight of unreasoning horror as swept over Rhiow with its appearance. Inside the shielded worldgate enclosure, Rhiow saw all her team staring at the tiny thing with loathing and fear. But it did not stay tiny long. Very slowly it started blooming outward into a dark sphere, as incursions from mathematically more complex dimensions tend to do. The sphere was not solid: part of it passed through over and through the black worldgate as it grew, briefly obscuring it, then drifting to one side. Absolutely silently it grew to ten feet in diameter, thirty, fifty, a hundred feet wide. Rhiow noticed, then, how all sound had been fading away with its growth. The realization made her fur stand up even more enthusiastically than it had been.

That was when the black sphere finally stopped growing; and through its surface, on all sides, a writhing shape began to extrude.

At which point the air began to scream.

Right through her shield Rhiow could instantly feel the burning on her fur, the desperate inner shriek of matter outraged by intimate contact with something impossible in normal space, the air burning a brief and horrified violet of instant annihilation where it came into direct contact with what was coming out of the black-burning sphere. Black wasn’t even the right word for it; but it would have to do, for sensory perception in this continuum had few other ways to deal with the concept of something that was the absence of physicality and on which light refused to fall, as if refusing contact with something so alien. Emptiness didn’t work as a description either; both brain and spirit, used to dealing with a universe that had no true emptiness in it though it was full of space, shied away with nature’s own abhorrence to something that by comparison made a vacuum seem packed full. Caught between the contradictions, the eye and the mind both reported emptiness that was full of something peculiarly horrible, that curled out in strangling tendrils that gripped and slid over and around the hyperstrings in space, annihilating even them where touched, and gazed eyelessly at you with a hunger that could never be filled no matter what it devoured –

From down in the city, from nearer on the hillsides, the anguished screams of ehhif began to arise – innocent souls realizing that they without warning they were suddenly damned, and far worse than damned. Rhiow shot a glance at the gating circle. The nothingness was washing up around it, eating at it; she could see thinning in the outer walls of the protective dome over it, places where the splashed-out glow of the LA gate against the forcefield was wearing thin. Inside it, Urruah and Hwaith and Aufwi were all reared up, every one of them with his claws full of hyperstrings that were trying to warp out of shape, but being prevented. For how long? Rhiow thought, shuddering with the pain that beat on her own shield, relentlessly eating through it toward her like acid.

The dreadful shape kept on boiling out of the sphere on all sides, filling the air over the Observatory, and the air kept on screaming in agony as the shadowy manifestation of the Outside One poured into the world, like flood waters from some dark sea, irresistible, infinite. Its dreadful pressure on the soul grew moment by moment, crushing, so that you wanted to do anything to make it stop: flee, even die. But fleeing won’t help, Rhiow thought, and neither will dying. Now’s the time!

She was shivering with terror, and ashamed of it; yet she knew what she had to do… and so did sa’Rraah. You have no choice, the Lone One said in the back of her mind, urgent. I am the only one that our enemy will trust to come into contact with it. It thinks It knows my will. And now it will find out exactly how well it knows me. And then the silence fell in Rhiow’s mind again, waiting.

So will I, Rhiow thought, desperate. For of all the Powers, sa’Rraah cannot enter in except where by commission or omission She is invited. And now we find out whether the word I speak next will kill not only my body, but my soul.

One last look she threw at her team inside the great gating circle: and, inside, gazing back at her in terror, Hwaith. There has to be something else I can do–! he said to her.

At such a moment, she thought, he’s still thinking about me! It pierced her to the heart. But there was nothing he could do, and right now, only one thing left for her.

…Come, Rhiow said to the Lone Power.

And She came.