Chapter 12: My Dearest Girl

Chapter 12: My Dearest Girl

The canyon had become a crucible of doubt. Elias Vance’s words were a poison that had seeped into the sacred space, turning faith to fear. The Keepers, who had gathered for a holy Ascension, were now a fractured group of terrified people, their eyes darting between the silver canister lying in the dust and the ever-shrinking sliver of the moon. Elara moved among them, her voice a fierce, desperate whisper, reminding them of the Old Blood, of the pact, of the gift. But the seed of terror had been planted. Consumption. Star-locust. The end of the world.

Leo stood apart, the epicenter of the schism. The canister was a cold, logical promise of survival. A promise of returning to a life where his biggest worry was a zoning permit, a world without monstrous hungers or whispers in his mind. A promise of being empty. Like Elias.

His own passenger was in turmoil, a tempest of rage and terror coiling in his gut. It projected images of Elias’s sterile, modern facility, of the sonic agony he described, of being burned out from the inside, of a cold, silent death. It was a creature fighting for its existence, using fear as its primary weapon.

He was being torn apart. Pulled between a faith that promised a glorious, impossible transformation and a logic that warned of a gruesome, parasitic end. Pulled between the alien creature and the terrified man.

He had to know. He couldn't make this choice based on the words of a fanatical old woman or a weary, genocidal doctor. He needed the truth from the source.

He closed his eyes, shutting out the fearful faces and the dying moon. He turned his consciousness inward, not as a passive listener, but as an active participant. He delved deep into the space he shared with the creature, a space that felt like a universe of warm, humming darkness. He did not plead. He did not ask. He demanded.

You’ve been with me since my grandfather died, he projected, his thought a sharp, clear spear of intent. You’ve shown me hunger and fear and power. Now, you will show me the truth.

He felt its recoil, its fear of his focused will. He pushed harder, using the memory of his grandfather, the man who had loved this thing, as a bridge.

He trusted you, Leo thought, softening his approach, letting a genuine, aching curiosity replace the anger. He called you a symbiote, a partner. What are you? What are we? He reached for a name, a term of intimacy that felt both insane and perfectly natural. Show me… my dearest girl.

The effect was instantaneous and overwhelming.

The wall between their consciousnesses did not just fall; it evaporated. He was plunged into a roaring, timeless river of memory. But it was not his memory. The world of the canyon, the fires, the eclipse—it all vanished, replaced by a flood of alien and ancestral experience.

He was standing on a dune under a sky ablaze with more stars than any modern man had ever seen. He was not himself. His hands were calloused, his skin dark from the sun. He was an ancient man, a hunter, a shaman. He felt his own awe and wonder as he knelt before a shard of rock that had fallen from the sky, a thing that pulsed with a soft, inner light and a tangible feeling of cold, cosmic loneliness. He felt his compassion as he picked it up, offering it the warmth of his own body, and the shock as it dissolved, flowing into his blood like cool water, a silent pact being sealed in the dark of the pre-dawn desert.

The river surged.

He was a woman in a dusty Andalusian village, her hands glowing with a soft, silvery light as she mended the broken leg of a goat. He felt her terror as the village priest accused her of witchcraft, and her fierce, protective love for the secret she carried within, the ‘angel’ that gave her the power to heal. She called it mi luz, my light.

The river churned, flowing faster, pulling him closer to his own time.

He was a young man, lean and frightened, his face shockingly familiar. It was his grandfather. He was crouched in this very canyon, retching in agony during his first, terrifying full moon emergence. He felt his grandfather’s horror as the creature unspooled from him, a pale, blind thing basking in the lunar glow. But then he felt the horror give way to a profound sense of connection, of shared existence. He felt his grandfather’s decades-long journey from fear to acceptance, to a quiet, symbiotic love. He experienced the old man’s final moments, the peaceful letting go, the gentle passing of the starlight into Leo’s own unsuspecting bloodline, a bequest far more profound than an old house and a failing truck.

Through every life, every host, Leo felt the constant, unchanging truths. The creature gave gifts—longevity, heightened senses, a deep, resonant connection to the life force of the world. In return, the host gave it a home, a shield against the harsh, empty world, and a partner in its long, slow dream of becoming. He felt their shared terror of the Silencers, the cold, empty ones who hunted them through the centuries. He understood now. This was not a curse. It was a custodianship. They were not hosts. They were Keepers.

The river of the past slowed, and a new vision rose before him, a vision of the future. The creature was showing him its promise. The Ascension.

He saw himself, standing in the center of the canyon as the eclipse reached totality, the world bathed in the ethereal twilight of the sun’s corona. Elias’s warning echoed—it will consume you—but what he saw was not consumption.

From his mouth, a torrent of light poured forth, not the grotesque, fleshy body of the pale centipede, but a thousand threads of shimmering, liquid starlight. It was the same sublime energy he had felt when he fed, that ecstatic pleasure, but it wasn't being taken, it was being given. The threads didn't fly away. They wove back, piercing his own skin without pain, knitting themselves into his flesh, his bones, his very DNA.

His body became a loom, and the creature was the celestial thread, weaving them together into a new tapestry. He saw his human form become translucent, a silhouette of skin holding a constellation of captured light. The centipede shape he had seen, the shape on the petroglyphs, was not the final form; it was a schematic, a chrysalis, the shape of the bond itself. The being they were becoming had no fixed shape. It was both flesh and starlight, man and cosmos.

Elias had not been entirely wrong. The man known as Leo Martinez, the architect from the city, would cease to exist. His individual consciousness would be subsumed into something far greater. It was a death, of a kind. But it was also a birth. Not a hatching, but a blooming.

The vision receded.

He was back. Standing in the canyon. The last sliver of the moon was vanishing behind the black disk of the earth’s shadow. Totality was seconds away.

The silver canister lay in the dust before him, a relic of a life he could no longer lead, a choice that was no longer his to make. The choice had been made for him by generations of his ancestors. He was the culmination of their journey. To accept the Silencer’s offer now would be the ultimate betrayal—not just of the creature he carried, but of every Keeper who had ever lived and died to bring them both to this moment.

Without taking his eyes off the eclipsed sun, Leo lifted his foot and kicked the silver canister. It spun through the air, glinting once in the ghostly twilight before landing with a useless clatter against the far canyon wall.

He turned to face the others. Elara. The rancher. The young couple. His family. The terror was gone from his eyes, replaced by a serene and terrible light, the wisdom of a hundred lifetimes.

"He was afraid," Leo said, his voice ringing with a new, profound authority. "They chose to remain men. And they have been empty ever since."

He opened his arms, embracing the coming darkness and the ethereal light that surrounded it.

"It is time," he declared, not to them, but to the starlight within. "Let us be born."