Author's Preface
TOC Short Story: Abide the Darkness
The space between the stars was vast and dark.
The light from far away stars often taking years or decades just to travel the spaces between them. Entire civilizations could be born and then die before the light of distant stars even had time to leave their own home galaxy. But the void between was so much darker and larger still and colder than the deepest winter.
Between this great expanse of what is known and the terrors that existed without.. sat a presence. It was not human, not even remotely so. I felt no emotions as one might understand them, save one.
The Yerning.
This thing born of the endless darkness between galaxies had but one driving imperative, one singular motive that drove its implacable hunger.
To spread and grow across all that is until the Yerning was all that was.
It had already consumed the entirety of the space available to it. The craggy surface of that large world subsumed in an ocean of jelly-like biological matter tens of kilometers deep and neural ganglion the size of islands linked by networks of thick white filaments. Its surface was a dark and startling blue green, its atmosphere a choking teal haze of greenhouse gasses. All across the Yerning were massive organic towers like great spires that pierced the very heavens themselves. The tallest of them reaching tens of kilometers into space itself like skeletal fingers grasping in desperation to escape the confinement its existence had become.
The world seemed to almost pulse with a deep inner life, for it was alive. For kilometers into the air and burrowing deep into the very crust of the terrestrial shell it infested, the Yerning spread itself over and into every single centimeter of the world that it called its cradle. Every spare portion was taken either in the service of its own survival or dedicated to the extraction of nutrients and precious heat from its molten core.
For years beyond counting it had struggled alone in the darkness. Knowing neither kinship nor sunlight, but in response to this all-encompassing darkness the world had reached out into space with questing eyes made of bone and chitin. Towering sensory spires and great radio-sensing depressions more powerful than any telescope or device devised by man peered unerringly into the void.. and saw the lights. The lights of a galaxy called home by many species, mankind amongst them.
With cold and passionless senses, the Yerning observed these distant pinpricks with dark hunger and gluttonous envy. A deep hatred of those that had been born of these lights cemented itself in the mind of the thing. Restless and frustrated, the being yearned to reach these lights, to snuff them out one by one till all was as dark and cold as the intergalactic dark of its birth.
But the Yerning had now seen the path, the way, the plan. It wanted nothing more than to feel the gentle radiation of those distant lights across its planetary body. But how to get there?
The intelligence that brooded throughout was unsure for a time until it chanced upon a storm of cometary fragments that bombarded its surface. The impacts were painful. Neural ganglia were crushed flat and fractal pathways were severed en-masse, the Yerning had to defend itself from this extra-planetary assault. From the poles sprang great capillary towers. Gouts of plasma larger than cities were flung in a desperate attempt to ward off further assault. Comets were evaporated or turned aside and in this desperate effort the Yerning realised that these defensive postures had affected its momentum slightly. So small as to have been unnoticeable to a regular intelligence.
But nothing about this creature of the void was regular, and its powerful sensory organs registered the smallest shift in momentum with startling accuracy.
Thus began a new plan. Not a futile and forlorn hope, no. It could move, so it could reach those distant lights. It may take it an age or more, but the mathematics of its success were absolute. More and more towers rose like stalks of grass in vast clusters across the planet’s surface. Taller than the tallest sensory spines, wider than their great neural ganglia. These huge plumes spat plasma fire hotter than a star’s heart into the void in controlled immolation, the world first slowed.. and then changed course.
Years passed.
Ten thousand flashed by in a blink. Then one-hundred times that a dozen times over.
The Yerning slowly drifted with intent now. It's million eyes fixed on those distant lights, not so distant now. For eons it moved through the darkness between galaxies. Hungry and full of longing for that which it had never possessed. But soon it would arrive. Soon it would spread and consume and grow. The Yerning would become all that was until the entire universe sang in one rapturous chorus, one joyous song of ultimate becoming.
But not yet. The lights were still long distant and little warmer than a memory of summer in the depths of winter.
The world turned slowly in the dark. They could wait a little longer, they would abide the darkness, watching those distant warm pinpricks grow larger ever so slowly.
‘Soon though’ it thought slowly. Very soon.
End of Story