The Paragon of Eden
Chapter 18

The Paragon adapted, converting all of its remaining energy into awakening the Crystals and protecting them from the fire. They spun to life, granting Hau more power than he thought to use. He couldn’t. There wasn’t enough time. Instead, the Paragon itself charged an independent action with all the energy of all eight Genesis Crystals, bending space and time around it with its attack.

The power of the Crystals reached a full charge, consuming enough energy to destroy planets upon planets, stars upon stars. It bent time, folding it in half as it used to fold space. It folded them both, and it flung its surroundings away and scattered them across the galaxy, diminishing their existences into shards of themselves, casting them into different ages.

Hau came back, he and Deelia floating dumbfounded in the cocoon in the machine. Even when all the cards had fallen into place, even when the Angels commenced their plan perfectly, they were no match for the primordial power of the Crystals and the thing that held them.

Hau frowned. The Crystals charged up again, giving him power. Infinite power. He now knew the capabilities of what he held. He was also tired. It wasn’t quite as much fun anymore to wreak havoc. He needed to end this soon.

But still, it wasn’t time. Hadn’t he let them have enough?

No. The Paragon became a flower again, a shifting plant of colliding multicolor petals, alight with energy. It lit up the darkness, shining rays of potential on the rows of ships below him. He wasn’t aiming for that, though. He aimed for the planet itself.

The Paragon’s center point grew, and then it ballooned into a massive spike. Just when the light reached its brightest, the point spread open, folding into leaves and falling flat with the rest of the machine.

A wall of energy was emitted, floating gently toward the forces below. The wall of light loped through space, almost playful, approaching the ships and the multicolor sphere in the distance like a playful creature, contrasted with its symbol of doom. Ships and projectiles flew at Hau, but they all met the expanding wave and disintegrated into nothing. Deelia watched in awe, too numb to say anything. What was she watching, now? When would it be over? Her life had never encompassed something on such a scale, never offered to. What was this?

The wave of energy descended upon the first ship, catching it like a fishing net and crushing the metal walls. It brought the thing down, forcing it towards the next ship. Trails of smoke and fire followed the massive structure in its colossal path. The smokey trails painted grey brushstrokes in the air, visible from far away like a deity’s work on an invisible canvas. Soon, the two DAs collided, and then both of the ships fell, doomed for reentry.

The UPOA had lost. All their tricks had been used up, and they no longer received any aid from the Angels. They had been beaten. Hau had won, and with ease.

No, not yet. Though Hanin and his friends had dissuaded the UPOA from using Void weapons, the possession and expansion of such things were inevitable. They had occurred entirely in the background, ready, just in case.

Now, with no choice left, the officials of the governing force of Ookon turned to their destructive prototypes. They saw their tools disappear before them, and they turned to greater power for help. They had made a deal with the devil in bringing forth such a thing.

The Void Bomb was carried by a single experimental Warback frame on standby. It carried with it no guns or weaponry of any kind. It simply hugged the spherical object, boosting its jets in the air and coming around the destructive wave of energy. It flew, piloted by a special individual who had gone on this mission knowing full well that he would not be returning. This single flight would reveal the fate of the majority of the lives in the galaxy. That single vessel was the last hope of so many innocent souls.

Deelia watched the Warback approach, trailing its puffy jets, dignified and ready. The wonderful planet of people behind it watched from under their clouds and skies. It was the symbol of everything she wanted to deny: the fact that life came only from death. Yes, the death of this person was going to be the life of their people. And Deelia knew she would die here, too. She was fine with that. She didn’t want to live as long as her existence brought so much destruction along with it. She saw the world through a pure lens, and so she was ready to put her life on the line.

But Hau would not let her die.

The Warback approached, and then it slowed. It stared at the Paragon, and the Paragon just waited. The white herald of destruction hovered in place, shifting and becoming a simple star shape again, its pointed limbs spread proud and righteous.

With one final action, the pilot of the Warback detonated the blast.

He was gone in an instant, consumed by a mass of darkness. The sphere of the explosion was perfect and spinning, growing and growing as it consumed everything in its path. Debris was soaked up and eliminated, never to be seen again. The air of the DAs swirled around the thing, sucking in all the destruction around it and churning it all into an opaque soup. All that stuff vanished as it went beyond the surface of the ever-growing sphere.

The Paragon stood still in the air, the sole object that was able to do so. It waited. Hau waited. He waited all his life, all his ambitions and plans flowing like molasses before him. He waited for this.

The Void bomb never stopped. It consumed everything. Had the inventors planned for how much it would destroy? Perhaps the leaders of the government had authorized its use regardless of the scientists’ warnings. Whatever it was, Hau had bet on it. And he had won.

The Paragon began to glow. Darkness crept in, but the Paragon stood visible against everything else. Its white shell seemed to brighten into other colors, swirls of space and galaxies, nebulas and stars, swimming on the mystical shell of its exterior. The power of the Genesis Crystals was ready. The Paragon had fully accepted all of the strength, and now it stood at Hau’s command.

The Void Bomb threw everything inside of it, a black hole blocking out the world below, threatening now to swallow even that. But the Paragon was simply beckoned lazily inside, slowly, as if brought in for an embrace. Inside, there would be a pocket dimension, and it could not support life. It could not support anything at all. It was a gap in reality, a void, where things could not be.

The Genesis Crystals said otherwise. Beyond the surface of the explosion, there was no going back and forth. The blast would be permanent, and perhaps it would never stop expanding. Whatever had been there no longer existed, and its confines in the universe held no potential for anything anymore. It was the grave of life on Ookon.

With the power of the Crystals, the Paragon rewrote the reality of the Void. It introduced a code, an existence, a basis for where things could be. Its silhouette shone in front of the blackness around it.

Then, there was an explosion of light. Everything was set ablaze, as if there was nothing one moment and everything the next. Every color was thrown outward, even colors that were invisible otherwise. Stars shot out into the sky, replaceing places of rest in the emptiness. Clouds of dust whisked themselves into existence. Spheres of rock and gas flew here and there, going everywhere around the Paragon, the center of this place. It was the birth of a new universe.

The Paragon continued to output all of the Genesis Crystals’ power, beaming creation into every corner of this space. It made the new sun and the new sky, and lastly, it generated a world, and it populated the world with life and filled it with beautiful scenery. Mountains sprung up from the surface and braved beams of sunlight as they scratched and scoured the surface. Soft, green grass flowed in the gentle wind.

The Paragon slowly hummed its actions to a slow crawl, and it began to descend onto the planet below. There was no struggle or fight into the atmosphere of the new place. It simply drifted, showing the scenes of the landscapes and its wild inhabitants. Pink, brown, plain and grotesque, orange and purple and alien animals with strange heads, animals with no heads, animals that could have been nothing but heads, creatures that were impossible to make out the purpose and function of, all grazing and living their infantile existence on this newborn world.

The Ground opened up before Hau and Deelia, forming a small mountain where the rest of the world could be seen. The Paragon made its way there, coming closer and closer to the ground below. When it stopped, it did so gradually and gently, as if there was no concept of conflict or violence in the machine’s nature at all and never was.

After a few moments, the shell opened up and created a ramp onto the dirt of the foreign planet. Hau stepped out of his precious vessel, touching the grey rocks with his bare feet. He breathed in, his naked body expanding as he took in the magnificent sight, the cool breeze, the absolute silence that meant even the world itself was still in awe. He stood there, doing nothing else.

Deelia stepped out too, just as naked as he. She touched the same ground, feeling it the same way Hau did. She stood behind him, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, pretending to be as dead as she wished she was.

Minutes of silence passed, and all Hau could say was: “Eden, Deelia.”

“Why?”

“Why you? Why Eden?”

Deelia said nothing.

“I wanted to show this to you, Deelia, because I love you. There is no one else in the world who has that same value to me.”

“There is no one else in the world, now.”

“Oh, I know better than anyone. You and I shall be the gods of this land. We will be the overseers of all that expands and learns and develops into a society. It doesn’t have to look like us. It doesn’t have to live like us. Remember what I told you at Jonce? A real utopia needs to be something no one has ever thought of before. It has to be weird and alien, or else we will replace flaws in it. We have flaws in everything we know from our experience. Humanity was born with a flaw. It came from sin. This here is the achievement of conquering that sin: removing everything we know and have experience in knowing in our worlds. Society itself is gone. That was a big step. In fact, I think it was the most necessary. Killing all those people brought me joy only in the knowledge that it would eventually lead to this. And can you blame them? Can you blame them for dying? It was easy, I admit. I think they must have almost submitted to me. I claimed their souls as if they had laid them out for me to collect. That was what I was doing. I know it is a little distasteful, but you can think of it like this: I won’t have to do it again, now. Everything is effectively reset, and now we can…”

Deelia stopped listening. She looked at the ground in front of her, the rocks and stones of a place so young that life barely had time to know where or what it was. Had it even been made to thrive? The Paragon must have done that, but the bright pink moss here almost bubbled and gurgled like infants.

Deelia’s mind was breaking. She was coming apart at the seams. Her mind filled itself with so many thoughts that everything else in the world blurred. She couldn’t hear anything. She felt sick. Terribly sick. She watched Hau give his long speech, still going on and on about whatever it was he was saying. Her eyes burned. Her body ached. She was painfully aware of how alive she was in this moment.

Hau stood there, his back turned to her, facing the horizon. Deelia stood right there, a few steps behind him. She closed that distance, slowly and mindlessly.

Hau turned to face her, a smile on his face, his eyes wide, laughter in his heart.

Deelia summoned the dagger inside of her and plunged it into Hau’s stomach.

He stood there, looking at her, his smile still on his face, his eyes still wide. The world returned to Deelia again, and she saw and heard him with full clarity. He said nothing. He stood there, saying nothing, thinking nothing.

He looked down, seeing the dagger for the first time, seeing the black marks it left on his skin. It was going to kill him, and there was nothing he could do. He looked at Deelia.

“No,” he whispered. “Deelia…”

He collapsed to his knee. His eyes went blank, as if he were going blind. He fell to the ground, his naked body lying there in a fetal position. He looked around. He saw things, but they weren’t there. He was somewhere else, in his head.

“My Eden,” he said, looking for one last time out into the horizon. He breathed, struggling and fighting against the poison. Deelia watched, her heart racing. She watched as she killed him, slowly.

Out of Hau’s mouth escaped his last few words. “Mummy,” he said softly. “Look. I made… you something. Daddy… Mummy, Look at what… did it make you happy?” He smiled. “Think of me… I see… Did you make this…? I made it… all… on my own…”

Hau lay there, dead. Deelia did not know what to think. She stood in front of him. She sat down. In front of him. At first, she just watched him. Tears rolled down her face. She wept, angry and sad at the events that had transpired, at the action she had just committed. It was not like her. No. She was dead.

The sun reared above her, rotating in the sky and coming down into a sunset in the distance. Deelia’s tears dried, but she never moved. She hugged her knees, sitting and watching the sunset go. There was no one else. She was completely alone. Nothing moved. Nothing happened around her. She was the sole origin of action in this world.

She wanted to sleep. She wanted to go to sleep forever, but she couldn’t. Alive as she was, her brain only waited. She wanted to watch the sun go down. She wanted to see time pass before her, leave her behind, run away without her.

It didn’t work like that, though. She was the one who had to leave it all behind, eventually. She could not die.

Behind her, the Paragon stayed, alive, alive with power, patient with potential, alive.