Chapter 8 — The Mortal's Disguise

In the deep black ruins, cold physical threads of law silently collapsed.

Umbra, the God of Darkness, stood in the shadow of a great broken starship deck, her black-hole eyes coldly watching the Rustclaw force its way from the rescue site.

She clearly perceived that the mortal boy called Elias had kept his life under the brutal first aid. Stirred by the higher-dimensional inert waste-energy she had secretly injected, the boy's vital signs, though frail, clung to the faint light of living like weeds rooted in bedrock.

"Divine-link stable… 'karmic buffer' operating normally."

Umbra lightly worked her fingertips. She could feel the violent, frenzied backlash born in her divine core from forcibly cutting Tartarus pumping, through that hidden soul-covenant, at an exceedingly steady, slow rate, endlessly out into Elias. This purge efficiency could not match closed meditation in the highest Sanctum, but it won on absolute concealment — the old timers of the Divine Court could never imagine that the God of Darkness's backlash-energy was being silently absorbed by a blind-spot mortal's soul.

Yet this was far from enough.

Elias was an "Anomaly" — off the LinBoo Astrolabe's written fate. His very survival was a hairline crack, barely perceptible, chiseled into this strict prison of cosmic order.

If he were used only as a long-distance toxin-draining flesh-tool, the moment he was casually swatted dead by a divine-messenger patrol on the wasteland, or torn apart by other scavengers in an emotional fit, this interesting crack would close again. What's more, manipulating dark energy across light-years easily stirs higher-dimensional fluctuations in the void, which at any time could invite a scan from Astra's holy-light probe, or alert Jupiter's faction of judgment-gods.

To stay safely on the mortal side, to observe up close just how far this boy who swore to raise a blade at the gods could go, she had to descend in person.

"But to descend in my god-body would be like raising a torch in the night…"

Umbra elegantly lifted her head, glancing at the faintly writhing bright-gold threads of law in the deep sky.

For a higher-dimensional god, descending directly into low-dimensional mortal dust is an exceedingly dangerous and troublesome thing. The law-mass of a god-body is too vast; without absolute dimensional compression, the mere physical gravity she carries would crush this brittle-as-biscuit wasteland into a black hole in an instant.

"Then… let's play a different game."

Umbra's lips curved again into that arc of three parts amusement, three parts coldness.

Without the slightest hesitation, she shut her eyes tight!

Boom!

In an instant, her vast higher-dimensional god-body — itself a composite of several galaxies — began in the void an exceedingly violent yet precise folding of law-threads and compression of gravity!

The vast black law-threads, as if summoned by some supreme law, frantically condensed toward her core. She actively severed ninety-nine percent of her link to the Divine Court's higher-dimensional authority, heavily sealing the star-flattening divine power in the deepest part of her soul, retaining only the faintest perception and basic matter-shaping force.

Black dark matter and cold dust-particles churned and reassembled at the compressing core.

Bone, muscle, skin, capillaries, nerve-networks…

In only a few breaths' time, a woman's body, fully conforming to three-dimensional mortal physiology yet wrought to exquisite perfection, quietly took shape in the black vacuum.

The once-vast black-hole eyes became two pools of clear, fathomless black; waist-length black hair drifted like silk-satin in the cold microgravity; her skin was pale to near-transparency, showing a sickly-beautiful cold white against the black deep-space backdrop; a rough yet well-fitted black insulated protective suit condensed around her, perfectly wrapping her slender, trim figure.

This was no longer the lofty God of Darkness who waved a hand to annihilate stars, but a mortal woman who looked cold, quiet, yet carried an indefinable air of amnesia.

"Mortal flesh… truly heavy and cramped."

Umbra slowly opened her eyes and let out a faint sigh, head lowered. To breathe, feel temperature, and bear gravity with this crude cellular body was, to her, like forcing a vast soul into a narrow glass bottle.

Then she reached into the nearby wreckage and drew out a half-destroyed emergency escape pod. With a flick of her finger, the pod's pressure-maintenance system was forcibly reactivated, radiating a faint rescue-locator signal. She elegantly lay into the charred pod, closed the transparent cover, and let inertia carry her, slowly drifting, along the Rustclaw's wake.

---

The Rustclaw cockpit.

Caleb had just hauled Elias onto the bunk and forced a large cup of warm sterile protein broth down the boy, and was about to return to the pilot's seat for a breath.

Suddenly, the shortwave radar that had barely quieted began its "beep—beep—" dull prompting again.

"Again?!"

Caleb nearly dropped the screwdriver in his hand. He rushed back to the console; the mechanical left eye spun quickly, focusing on the second faint life-signal tracing across the radar screen.

"Distance three light-leagues… single emergency escape pod… also debris flung out when Tartarus burst?"

Caleb's brow knotted hard. This dead blind spot was cursed today — usually not a living soul for weeks, and today he'd just pulled in one freak tough kid, then less than ten minutes later another survivor drifting in an escape pod!

"Forget it. Save one, save two. Today I'll play the madman running a charity hall!"

Caleb spat out the tea-leaf dregs, wrenched the ship to slow, and again opened the alloy mechanical arm, precisely hauling the half-charred escape pod back into the lower airlock.

With the hiss of pressure restoring, Caleb, crowbar in hand, stepped into the chamber and with a crack forcibly pried the pod's deformed mechanical lock.

The cover lifted; a cold white mist dispersed.

Caleb's hand on the crowbar instinctively tightened.

The woman lying in the pod was beautiful to the point of unreality.

On this filthy, oil-stinking wasteland, in this death-blind-spot where every breath carried metallic dust, the woman before him — though her clothes were a bit torn, though her face showed blood-loss pallor — still radiated from her bones a coldness and stillness like a black polar flower blooming in a heap of scrap iron.

"Hey, wake up! You hear me?!" Caleb bellowed at the top of his lungs.

The Umbra lying in the pod slowly opened those night-black eyes.

She did not, like an ordinary mortal refugee, erupt on waking into screams, terror, or frantic gasps. Her gaze was extraordinarily clear — clear to the point of cold indifference, as if calmly watching everything around her.

"Where… is this?" she spoke, voice a bit hoarse, but level and without the slightest inflection.

"This is the Rustclaw, my salvage ship!" Caleb slapped the ship's iron wall roughly. "You're one lucky bitch — the pod's valve hadn't fully jammed. What's your name? Where you from?"

Umbra slowly sat up, looked down at her slender mortal hands, then lifted her head and with utter naturalness unveiled the lie she had long prepared:

"I don't remember… I only remember black light everywhere, then the pod bursting… my name… seems to be… Vespera."

She did not speak her sacred true name. In this star-region, the name of the supreme god Umbra alone could spark panic or priestly alarm; she casually offered a mortal alias drawn from the ancient star-tongue, meaning "evening star."

"Vespera? Sounds like the name of some old star-region pauper." Caleb grumbled, but did not doubt much. On the wasteland, survivors with memory-core damage and amnesia were countless, and bizarre names were the norm.

He studied the woman calling herself Vespera.

Though she looked frail, what struck Caleb as faintly odd was that this woman, just through a pod-crash and suffocation crisis, stood with a steadiness unlike anything — not the slightest muscle-tremor that should follow extreme panic.

"Forget it. Whoever you are, alive is lucky." Caleb waved a hand, signaling her to follow. "There's a tough little devil in the back cabin, same as you, burning with fever in bed. If you don't want to die, stick close and don't touch the ship's machines."

Umbra gave a slight nod, said nothing, and quietly followed behind Caleb, stepping along the creaking metal walkway toward the back-cabin bunk.

In the back cabin, hot dry air hung thick.

Elias lay on the narrow bunk, his face a strange crimson from fever, lips cracked, eyes shut.

Yet the instant Umbra stepped into the back cabin—

The still-unconscious Elias suddenly loosed a low groan! The half star-core pendant clutched at his chest, and the dark-energy vein lurking under his skin, burst into a violently intense hot-cold resonance!

A powerful soul-sensation, like an invisible thread, instantly bound the mortal boy on the bed to the black-clad woman at the door.

In his unconsciousness, Elias instinctively turned his head toward Umbra, as if in his chaotic, black mental world an irresistible icy gravity was pulling him fast.

Umbra halted.

She looked down at the huddled Elias on the bunk; in the depths of those black eyes flickered a very deep amusement and glacial detachment.

Within arm's reach.

The god-slayer and the blade-bringer, the off-track anomaly and the supreme God of Darkness, upon this broken, narrow salvage ship, completed their first convergence in a dim posture no one had foreseen.

In the blind spot of fate, undercurrents surged.