Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
23 - CLARA
“Ihave to find him—"
This is the last thing I say to Tyse before I am ripped away into a sea of darkness. A force so strong it feels like I’m being torn from reality itself. A pulling so utterly overpowering—it yanks me like the hand of God and extracts me from the spark stone cave dimension and into something cold and tight. Frigid and dense. Pressing on my bones, making them brittle. Pulling, and pulling, and pulling until…
A warmth surrounds me, comforting me like a blanket. The sense of being pulled apart is gone, and I’m… somewhere else.
Space? The starry sky? Floating on an ocean of mist? A sea of… spark.
I lie on my back, floating on this sea. Undulating up and down with the motion of something massive. Something alive. There is darkness, but it’s not dark. Emptiness, but it’s not empty.
And the little pinpricks of light above me, aren’t the night sky. These aren’t stars. I am something else. Somewhere else.
A womb. Soft and comforting. Warm and serene. A place between worlds, where neither gods nor humans, matter.
A place where an empty soul might be filled back up by the sea that holds me up.
As I think these words, the little dots of light that I first thought were stars, begin a journey towards me. As if I’m drawing them close. Pulling them in—like a mother opening her arms for a child.
These bits of light are spark, but there’s something different about them. And as they come closer, the pinpricks of glow turn into globs of blue light floating all around me. The spark glitters and gleams. Twinkling with mystery and magic.
My mouth opens in awe, and the clumps of spark enter me, sliding down my throat, filling me up with thick, cool, wet… peace.
My body becomes weightless. Time passes. Seconds. Minutes. I can’t tell. Then, all at once, I’m… somewhere.
Treading water in the rolling sea of spark. Wearing nothing but my own skin, which is not skin at all, but transparent and black, glowing with spark symbols. The same symbols that have been with me since I was a Little Sister, drawing doodles in the air with my light.
In front of me is a fleet of Godships. Dozens, hundreds, thousands—there is no number to define the quantity of Godships in front of me. And filling the decks, from bow to stern, are women.
Millions of them. More, even. It’s like every female who ever existed is on a boat, floating in the sea of spark.
They all look like me—black and transparent, outlined in blue—except for the symbols. They are not covered in glowing symbols. Just me. Just me—which makes me not one of them, but apart from them.
They stare at me, faceless heads wavering in the gentle wind of waterscape. Inside these null faces, just above where their eyes would be, sits a small glowing orb the size of a cherry. A tiny thing, really. They all have one and when I roll my eyes up and find a glow, I realize I have one as well.
“What is it?” I ask them. “What is this little cherry of light?”
But they have no voices, no mouths to speak with, so they don’t answer.
Instead, a humming, buzzing echo floats around me. Unattached and self-contained it leans towards me, into me. I hear it, but not with ears. I hear it in the glow of my head.
Spark, it answers.
But of course, it’s spark. You need only look at it, to see that.
No, it whispers back. Source.
The instant I hear the word, I know what the source is. The cave where Tyse and I just were. The spark stones. Giant crystals protruding out from ragged walls of rock.
It… followed me?
Or brought me here?
For a moment, I don’t understand. But when I turn the mystery around in my head, arranging these puzzle pieces into new configurations, they start fitting together. At least a bit.
Those crystals in the cave are the source of spark. And we—the women floating in the seascape with the little cherries of light in our heads—are… its children?
No.
Daughters?
No.
I laugh—a soft sound that spins through the stars and bounces off the edge of the universe before returning to me.
Not daughters.
Little Sisters.
My joy comes from understanding. It’s a relief, really. Because it would be easy to assume that nothing we did inside the Tau City Factory had meaning. It would be very easy to dismiss it all. To call it a sad lie.
Which is a sad ending to a tragic story.
And that’s not the kind of story I want to live in. So to me, this proves that my life in Tau City was something more than that.
Yes, it was a lie. The tower, the god, the Extraction—but there was truth there. Truth in the form of the Maidens.
All the maidens. Not just the chosen ones. Because every single woman had spark inside her.