Finally, Asura thought, some results.
“Asura!”
By the sound of his voice, Siddhārtha was moving rapidly from right to left behind her. Asura didn’t need to turn—she knew what was happening. They had reached the moment of maximum peril. Springing into action, she ran from the hall on silent feet. The moment she was through the outer door she crouched and rolled across the cold, dry ground. She could feel Siddhārtha and Orionae moving off to her right. Inside the translucent building, Jesus had become a receding silhouette.
Something like a dark tide had begun to spread from inside the great hall. It expanded in all directions as it came, pushing back the vast night before Asura’s eyes. As it grew it transformed in shape until it had become a gigantic figure looming over the plateau like a towering peak. There were arms and shoulders like mountain ridges, a chest like a sheer cliff face, immense pillared legs. Strangely molded armor wrapped around the chest and shoulders.
The giant silhouette looked out over the barren stillness of the basin, seeming to envelop all the endless spread of night. Something like a crown grew from its head, concealing the few stars in the sky.
You appear at last. Asura’s terror at facing the most dangerous of enemies mingled with her elation at the realization that they had at last found the entrance to their enemies’ world. Her enemies’ achievement had been near perfect, yet Asura and her companions represented a final remaining threat, a pinprick that had turned into a wound their foes could no longer afford to ignore.
The giant figure stepped slowly out onto the basin. Beneath the shadow of its headdress, the features of its face were impossible to make out. Shrouded in darkness, it took another step.
“I saw your statue,” Asura said, her voice traveling low through the frozen darkness. “When was it you were supposed to appear and save the masses? Five billion six hundred seventy million years from now? As I expected, you are big enough to reach the heavens, yet in places your statue rusted—”
For the first time in her existence, Asura understood that there was a kind of fear in this world impossible to overcome. It began deep inside her and came with a terrible dizziness and nausea that swiftly developed into a bottomless whirlpool of madness she was unable to contain. She realized she had only one or two seconds remaining in which to escape this place of death. She took a step.
“You did well to come this far,” a voice echoed down from the darkened sky. The force of the giant god’s words was almost enough to stop Asura’s heart on the spot. She had no time to think.
“We did not expect anyone to reach this gateway to eternity. Yet this is the end of your road. The path beyond here is not one you may travel.” The great being’s denial scattered the shadows of Asura’s reality in every direction. Mountain ranges and giant oceans lost their shape. Before her loomed an unfathomable emptiness, a barrier which nothing in her world could hope to overcome. It seemed to block even the flow of time. No wonder he called it the gateway to eternity. This was the end of the world, of all worlds—the bridge to the true void.
A wind blew across the dark basin, its passage through that unsympathetic darkness reminding Asura’s crumbling mind of where she stood. Slowly, she felt her former self returning from someplace deep within her shattered heart.
“Where did you come from?” she demanded, thinking the question more than speaking it, unsure of whether her words would even reach the god before her.
“You may decide that for yourself. The place you choose is my origin.” Her enemy’s response bored through Asura’s mind, scattering sparks in its wake. She wondered where exactly in the space-time continuum that enveloped her home world a presence like this had found entry. These beings had revealed themselves several times on Earth in the past, and doubtless had done the same on other planets and in other galaxies. Where did they come from, and why?
“It appears you have questions concerning my existence, yet you know that I exist to the same degree that you exist. You seem secure in your knowledge that your solar system and the spiral galaxy you call the Milky Way, and all the hundred billion other galaxies in this universe, occupy the same space-time continuum on the same time axis. Asura, it appears you think of your universe as being on the inside of the sphere which extends to infinity, and that is well. But have you considered what lies beyond the borders of that sphere? What lies beyond the limits of your universe?”
“It is meaningless to consider that which lies beyond infinity,” Asura responded.
The god looked down with pity. “You understand that infinity is nothing more than an abstract concept, do you not? Or do you believe that there exists true infinity in this universe?”
The being’s words sent a shadowy coil across Asura’s mind that threatened to paralyze all thought. Yet she understood instinctively that now was no time to consider the structure of the universe—not with her own destruction looming.
“Maitreya!”
A shooting star streaked above the shadow in the darkness, leaving a long fiery tail between the scant stars.
“What possible purpose could you have to make a wasteland of this world? What reason could you have for doing everything in your power to drive humanity to extinction?”
An aurora the color of blood flickered on the distant horizon, spreading like a thin curtain as it shifted from red to blue, then back to red, its light ebbing. The dark sky was visible behind its thin red veil, looking deeper and vaster than ever she had seen it.
Asura’s mind went blank as she faced its light. Then she noticed the giant Maitreya moving soundlessly, the distant aurora reflected in his face and across his chest. His face was visible now beneath his boat-shaped crown. She saw long slitted eyes, set deep under long eyebrows, that held the calm glimmer of a bottomless lake. The giant’s chest was full and rolling beneath the lines of the garment he wore, and she noticed a necklace around his neck that radiated an unusual energy; its emanations struck the sensor on Asura’s chest, causing it to glow a bright orange.