The thing swelled up from a sea of itself, a great anvil-headed leviathan breeching to observe the world beyond the surface. It was colossal. The size of a battleship. Dark, almost black. No, wait, not exactly. Subtle waves of color coursed across its surface like an octopus in deep purples and blues. Eyeless, it watched us as we watched it. It lived as one, and yet was made of discrete parts, which also seemed alive; each moving independently of the whole while keeping its place in it – like cells. They were armored and scale-like, but heterogenous in shape, size, and motility. It was an individual and a colony – both it and they at once.78

Then it collapsed. Innumerable pieces poured to the ground like sand and scattered. They spread out around the newly transformed voidscull enclosure, rippling and frenetic; forming and dispersing, then congealing again. A new shape emerged, encircling us, but at a distance this time. It coalesced rapidly – near instantly – into a sculptural ring, studded with small projections. The speed at which these pieces moved was... I want to say, impossible. I spun around, trying to take it all in. It was huge, hundreds of feet in diameter. Fin-like structures erupted upward from the body of the ring, almost like spikes on a crown, their tips changing from black to violet, to hot pink. Pulsing. The fins tilted slowly inward toward the center of the ring, their points angling slowly down, down, toward our enclosure.

Cold overwhelmed me. Existential cold; the chill of death. I couldn’t feel my hands. And I couldn’t look away.

Sweat streamed down from my armpits. The sharpened fins continued their downward tilt. Was this some great device, the Scythin’s version of the neural dredge, that would hollow my brain and dissect it for its secrets? Anticipation built as the points took aim. A trapped animal, I panicked, spinning in circles, making strained pleas for mercy that froze at my lips. My core plummeted to ice. The display was a trespass, a finger that reached into the weft of my soul to pluck an uncanny chord.

My heart froze solid, halting my breath, and everything around me –

Patton, the enclosure, the megastructure, the great living sculpture – were obliterated by a burst of light. There was nothing but cold then, and a whiteness that was just as much nothingness as the purest black. Within this nothingness an image flashed. A great, devouring mouth that filled my heart with awe. I was being shown something I recognized but could hardly describe. A thing that transcended existence; a glimpse of... perfection.

I was seated against the wall when my vision returned to a very close view of Patton’s face. “I thought you shorted out, man.” He went in for a hug. I let him. “What was that?”

I was exhausted. My breath came short. But I knew the answer. I looked him in the eyes. “The Bloom of God,” I said.