1:5:1 Quatarr (Part 2)

It was uncanny how similar it was for both of them. They both awoke in their relative sleeping area; they both went outside and they both looked up to the sky. Above them, a glistening dome of concentrated Tempora energy. Only one of them knew exactly how long they had been underneath it but both longed to escape it. The divergence began with Lore having to navigate a series of tunnels and trenches before they could eat their breakfast whereas Char only had to return to her cave to procure her rations.
Lore tried to remember if Char had told them about the war but found themselves unable to focus. “Why aren’t you in your army’s trench?”
“I… I…” It was a difficult question to answer but her focussing on it swapped her point of view to show the events of the day she made her choice.
It was sometime towards the middle of the war and a recent resupply shipment had given the Quatarrii soldiers a new weapon to work with: The Arm Cannon. Unlike their usual weapons, these were designed for war first and foremost. They had been issued only a few days prior but they were turning the tide rather quickly; they were also injuring almost as many of their users as their enemies. Two soldiers entered her dugout with a stretcher between them. They deposited the contents on an empty bed then returned to the front lines. Char approached her new patient. They smelled. Surrounding the patient was a smell of burnt, aged meat. Undeterred, she continued her examination. The proportions of the patient were that of a teenager but the skin that clung to their frame was wrinkled and thin; they were beyond lean to the point of nearly being just skin and bones. Char examined their patient’s implant and there, she discovered the full extent of the damage. Just like the thirteen soldiers she had treated before, this one had a rusty implant. She closed her eyes and said a short prayer before she tapped at it with the end of her long broken, Medscanner. She knew the result before she completed the action. Hope had failed her as the metal rod of the scanner turned the implant to dust. The slightest touch had led to a domino effect that had just needed an excuse to start; it all came crumbling into the patient’s body. A considerable hole had been left by the ancient implant but the body it was attached to lacked the blood to bleed. The pile of coppery rust just sat in the cavity as Char turned around and declared the soldier dead. They were too far gone. Something she had never expected to report and yet she had reported the same fourteen times in the last handful of days. As per her orders, she stripped the cannon from what remained of the patient’s arm and ensured it was battle ready for the days to come.
She sat in her work hole, tinkering with the second hand cannon when she caught her reflection in one of the replacement panels. There was a layer of dirt that seemed baked across her face, she hadn’t been able to wash since she arrived; her pale golden skin, stained brown from the sands; she seemed to have aged at least a decade since she got to the front and her face had grown gaunt and haggard. She hated what she had become, what her mother had convinced her to become. Today had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Char took the weapon, a deep breath then left her workshop. Checking there was no-one about, she slid it onto her arm and felt as it dug into her wrist. It drained her as it charged. The night as cover, she ran to the closest exit to the trench. With no-one to stop her, she made quick work. Her heart was beating almost as fast as she was running, a hundred metres a second. She ascended a nearby rock face and stood over the trench she had been forced to call home. She ran. She had no idea how far for but she ran. Eventually, the terrain forced her to descend and that was when the next hurdle reared its head. As bodies were a finite resource under the dome, the Quatarrii forces had devoted a small detachment to ensuring deserters were dealt with before they got too far. A small tent checkpoint sat alone in the valley. It was supposed to be empty. The post was usually manned by four soldiers on a daily rotation. Char looked to the sky to approximate the time; the hour had passed and they should have returned to base. She knew that there was only one way she could cross the boundary, she had seen what the cannons were capable of. She swapped her weapon’s tube from its grip and attached it into the side of the cannon. Energy squeezed from her like juice from a grape until the cannon was overcharged. She took aim. A ball of gilded light at her fingertips; there was no going back. It started moving towards the tent. The shot floated along to its destination giving the occupants of the tent plenty of time to make themselves visible.
“I’m sorry.” She whispered to herself as the ball made contact. It shattered against the frame, spilling its glow across the tent and the area as a whole. Anything it touched withered away; the light that gave Char her life eternal took the very same thing away from her unwitting victims. The tent collapsed in on itself in a pile of rot and rust; the garrison tried to run, they tried to call out for attention but they were unsuccessful. Aged beyond even a Quatarrian’s healing ability, they too fell to dust. All that remained were their identification tags; four tarnished, golden tags lay where the soldiers had fallen atop the piles of sand they had once belonged to. Carefully and rather shakily, Char descended into the valley. She took her own bronze tag from her shoulder and tossed it with the rest before she ran as far and as fast as her shaking knees and depleted body could take her. A pale blue light appeared at the centre of her vision which slowly expanded until she and Lore were blind to the past. The future-present took its place.

It was as if they had never taken the detour. The day continued. Lore watched as they got themselves ready for the day and Char ascended a nearby cliff face, overlooking the battlefield. Char sat there, waiting; Lore zipped about their trenches, going about their day. The fighting commenced and still, Char only watched. The battle raged on until the day reached its half way point. Char saw it first as something new blazed across the sky. Little by little, the fighting stopped as both sides observed the disturbance. A figure of blinding light crossed the sky on a wave of pure energy. It distorted the very fabric of reality upon which it rode; light, time and space, all distorted by its brilliance.
“We’ve never done that before, have we?” Char looked somewhat concerned. “Can we do this?”
“They haven’t yet but they will.” A foreign voice came from their mouth. “Char…” A tendril of blue light sprouted from Lore’s hand. It wormed its way through the air between them and Char before wrapping around her wrist. “You will not remember today so embrace that which you will become and seize the day.” The same light flashed across her entire body. The foreign voice was soft and welcoming. It continued to speak without Lore’s mouth; words only Char could hear, words that she didn’t quite understand yet but words that invited her.
She blinked it out of her eyes before leaping at Lore. Instead of knocking them off balance as they were expecting, her body became pure energy and was absorbed. The new light within them called upon their own as they too began their transition. Pure, electric light. A form of pure energy grew, humanoid in shape but it bore no resemblance to either Lore or Char; tall, slender and almost perfectly androgynous, their new physique a perfect blend of the two of them with hints of Time. They stood tall before crouching. They readied themselves as an athlete before a race; their legs tensed as if charging in preparation. They pushed off, propelling themselves high into the sky. They tore through the clear blue, cutting through the air, leaving fractals like shards of glass in their wake; each shard glinting and refracting the suns’ light as it passed through. The wind rushing by them felt like nothing they had ever felt before, their virgin form hypersensitive to the world around them. They could see everything, every life below, every grain of sand below that and more than that, they could see everywhere those people and grains had been. Every atom of existence, every electron, neutron, proton, every quark from that moment to the beginning of time seemed to have their full attention. Something drew their mind back on task. They came to a stop in the exact centre of the battlefield. Looking down upon it, it flickered; for a moment, it became unspoiled once again. The sand levelled and uniform. Before it returned to its actual state, it changed once more; a field of pylons and a downed space craft littered the landscape, two armies once again crawled across the surface, a circle had formed, two warriors at its centre. Back as it should have been, they began their descent. Soldiers on both sides lowered their arms and marvelled at the being before them. The Paragon never touched the floor, floating about ten centimetres from the sands. In the distance, commanders from both sides of the conflict forced their way forward before eventually leaving their respective trenches and beginning their push over no-mans land. Four came from the West, two from the East. The Paragon closed their eyes. When they opened them, the six were now at their sides.