Malaran opened her eyes, saw the churning clouds above. Felt the rain falling. Felt her head pounding.
She couldn't move. She laid there on the hard ground and blinked as the rain hit her in the face. Her hands and feet no longer burned, but she was afraid to look, afraid of what carnage she might see.
Other than her head, most of the pain was gone, but her body still tingled with energies, still felt the symphony of the Void. She had expelled the red lightning, but she remained attuned to the forces surging around her.
Maybe even more attuned.
Vision goes black, but there are stars. Then Nuevo rotates into view. The mind's eye is in space, in orbit. The Menelaus, the old Imperial battlecruiser dodges and weaves as Umpala raiders close in.
Malaran sucked her breath in as her heart surged. The vision had come upon her unprovoked. Since she had not consciously invoked the Sight, she didn't know if the vision represented Far-Sight or some kind of Fore-Sight, what was happening now or what might yet happen. Whether her optic nerves followed a trail of quantum entanglement or whether it perused the sea of quantum possibilities.
The Umpala might already be here. In orbit, engaging the Menelaus. She tried to stand, but her body would not cooperative. She could only breathe and blink.
Her head still throbbed, but she tried to focus her mind, tried to invoke Far-Sight. She needed to see what was truly happening in orbit.
She gasped as her mind's eye was flung through space. She couldn't control it. Too many raw energies surged through her body.
A girl of seventeen, dressed in the simple black robe of the Priestesses of the Void stands on a sandstone plateau in formation with scores of soldiers donning black and silver uniforms of the Agema, staff and shield at the ready.
Calista. Calista at Athene. At the Fall of Man. She had seen this in her dreams over and over again, but this was different. It wasn’t a dream, but Sight.
As monstrous storms and tornadoes erupt all around, a great fissure into the Void devours much of the Umpala fleet. The fissure touches the surface of the planet, ripping through sandstone and carving a great swath of destruction before Calista as she stands amidst the bodies of fallen Agema and Umpala, large gorilla-like beings with round, reptilian heads. As the Umpala hordes pour in around her, the one lone remaining Agema stands with her and uses his body as her shield. Just as the Umpala rush encloses her, Calista summons the fissure to her, engulfing herself and thousands of Umpala.
And so fell Calista. And the Empire of Man.
In the end, she had not quite accomplished enough. Too many Umpala remained. They soon penetrated the bunkers of Calista's father, the Emperor of Man.
But Malaran couldn't be seeing this. Not with Far-Sight. Calista fell at Athene over five hundred years ago.
But it couldn't be Past-Sight either. As far as she knew, only one's own experience could be revealed.
Unless all the energies here maybe enabled more.
Then her mind's eye was flung across space again.
A huge alien ship, like a great tower in space with unfathomable geometric structures all about it, bears down on a brown and white planet.
Then another shift.
A giant space station, dwarfing the dozens of starships docked about it, explodes in a brilliant blast.
Malaran screamed as a torrent of visions blasted into her in a harsh, hallucinogenic mix. Starships. Planets. Battles. Faces.
A dark hooded figure stands upon a barren, frozen landscape. In the night sky, a faded red sun is torn asunder by its companion star, something very dense -- a neutron star perhaps. The figure's glowing blue eyes peek out beneath the hood. "Nine champions," thunders an inhuman voice over the icy landscape, somehow reverberating through vacuum, "to stand against the darkness."
The vision shifts to a writhing plain beneath a blue sun. The focus zooms across the plain, revealing thousands and thousands of beings clad in all kinds battle gear. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, of beings, human and otherwise, raise their assorted weapons up in down in unison. The focus zooms in enough to see their mouths move. They chant something as they raise their weapons. The silence of the vision is broken as sound now thrusts forward to accompany the imagery, the deep background rumble of the horde and the roar of thousands upon thousands of voices chanting two words over and over again. "War Witch."
Malaran gasped, her mind racing to make sense of all these images. Maybe on another refuge world there spawned not an Order of Calista, but an Army of Calista.
Then she sees the darkness. It creeps through the expanse between galaxies, coming forward, coming towards Malaran's galaxy. Somehow she can distinguish this darkness from the Void of intergalactic space, and she realizes that some of it has already arrived. Pockets and slivers and nebulous fragments already pockmark her own galaxy.
Her head screaming in agony against it, Malaran tried to focus.
The vision zooms in on one of the slivers of darkness here in her galaxy. The vision erratically streaks back and forth, resisting her control, but slowly succumbs as her Sight focuses through stars and nebulas and eventually hones in on this particular region. But the Sight cannot penetrate.
She feels a presence there in the darkness, just beyond her perception. She reaches out with her mind, attempting to touch the other's, to make a connection and communicate like she has done on occasions before in the Oculus chamber with Calistites in other chambers across the planet.
But what she touched, this time, was no Priestess or Calistite. No human. Nor Umpala.
Malevolence. Blood and fire.
The muscles in her neck seemed to work finally, and she turned her head to the side as she vomited. The visions and her consciousness went black.