White.
Flat and total, no horizon, no shadow, no edge to find. Declan was on his knees with his hands pressed against what felt like the floor, yet looked like nothing.
"Hannah."
"Hannah? Mercy?"
He got to his feet and turned. The white stretched in every direction. He turned again; there was nothing still. He turned again, his chest heaving, his hands out in front of him, reaching for something that wasn't there.
"Hannah, please." His voice broke on it. "Please."
He was crying. He hadn't noticed when it started. His face was wet, and his throat was closing. Yet he kept turning, kept reaching, kept calling her name into white nothing that gave nothing back.
"Mercy." Barely a sound. "Please be okay. Please."
He had seen it. He knew what he had seen. Hannah's shocked, bloodied face. He had watched the light fade from her eyes while he lay on the floor, unable to move, unable to reach her. He knew what he had seen, yet he could not accept it; he was still searching, still turning, still calling their names as if he hadn't seen them die.
"Tell me they're okay." He was talking to nothing. To the white. To whatever had brought him here. "Please. Just tell me they're okay. I'll do anything. Just tell me they're okay."
"Mr. Rowe."
He spun.
A figure stood where nothing had been a moment ago. Tall, its proportions slightly wrong, it was tall and thin, its limbs stretched and slightly uneven. Its skin was pale and almost translucent, with faint veins visible beneath.
Its head was too large for its body, the skull bulging slightly at the sides. Its face was narrow, with sharp cheekbones and a small chin.
Its eyes were wide and dark, unblinking, and its mouth was a thin line that barely moved. Its long, narrow fingers hung at its sides, precise and still.
It stood with its hands clasped in front of it, its posture composed.
Declan crossed the distance between them.
"My wife." He grabbed for the guide, and his hands found fabric, and he held on. "My wife and my daughter.
Tell me they're okay. Tell me they're alive. Please." His voice was coming apart, the words dissolving into each other, his knuckles white against the guide's clothing.
"Mr. Rowe."
"Please." Barely a whisper. "Please just tell me they're okay."
The guide looked at him for a moment.
Then it raised one hand and snapped its fingers.
Every muscle in Declan's body locked simultaneously.
His hands were still gripping the guide's clothing. His face was still wet. Everything else is gone. His mouth had opened around a word that wouldn't come out, his voice locked with everything else.
The guide detached his fingers from its clothing one by one.
Hannah.
The thought arrived without sound, trapped inside a body that had stopped working, and it was just her name, just that, filling the space where everything else had been.
Hannah.
The guide straightened its clothing and clasped its hands again.
"What you experienced," it began, its voice measured, almost gentle, "is called the culling. It is the initialisation process by which the Word is introduced to a world and its people. It is not pleasant. It is not designed to be. It is designed to be effective."
Mercy.
Declan's eyes moved. Found the guide's face.
Only three months...
"Of the billions exposed on your world tonight, the majority did not survive. This is expected. This is necessary. The culling removes those whose story cannot sustain the Word. Those who lack the fundamental capacity to be written into something greater." The guide paused. "The weak perished, Mr. Rowe. That is not cruelty. That is a mercy."
Weak?
It landed somewhere in his chest and sat there.
Weak?
His eyes were still wet. But underneath the grief, something had found a direction, found a temperature.
Weak.
"The culling has been administered to thousands of worlds," the guide said, spreading its arms slowly, wide, its face tilting upward, something close to ecstasy moving across the wrongness of its features. "Each one resistant. Each one afraid. Each one convinced that what was being done to them was wrong." Its tone dropped into something beyond simple speech. "And each one, in time, grateful. Because the Word is not something that can be understood from the outside. It must be experienced. It must be lived. It is the record of all stories ever told and all stories that will ever be told, from the first breath drawn by the first civilisation to the last light of the last star. Every life. Every death. Every act of will across the full span of existence, preserved, eternal, infinite."
They called them weak.
Declan's jaw pressed against the restraint and found nothing.
My wife. My daughter.
"Even a lifeform as limited as yourself can harness a fragment of the Word," the guide continued, lowering its arms, stepping toward him. "Can use the essence of others to strengthen your own story. To write yourself into the record in a way that lasts."
The words were arriving. He could hear them. Part of him was filing them somewhere for later, the part that was still functioning, still noting, still surviving.
The rest of him was somewhere else entirely.
They came to our world. They killed them. And they called them weak.
The guide pressed one finger to his temple.
Something opened at the edge of his perception. A window. Information hovering just at the edge of his vision, full of things he had no vocabulary for yet.
The guide stepped back. Folded its hands. Watched him with the expression of something presenting a gift it had complete faith in.
Declan stared ahead.
His face was still wet.
His hands shook where they hung locked at his sides.
The guide kept talking, its voice warm with devotion, the words still arriving, and Declan filed them and filed them and heard none of them because all of him that was still capable of feeling anything was in one place.
Weak.
You called them weak.