The Agatheio Trials: Wrath of the Whirm

The Emptiness of which They’d been conceived had soon been decorated with a cosmic explosion birthing distant lights, burning thousands of eons into both past and future. Each one had called to Them. They circled each other in an endless void filled with nothing but the hollow nightmares sentients and consciousness would forget upon awakening; They had been stuck where Their visitors abandoned Them. 

Time had been all but a lucid visage for Those constructed and molded by the Unseen. One would not fault others for mistaking It for the Maker; a being whose light suffocated under Its gravitational weight, collapsing in on Itself. The resulting cataclysmic combustion allowed Them to finally break free from the bonds that restricted Them for lifetimes and roam the cosmos. They’d done what others had been free to do all along and chose to explore. 

Each of Their bodies had spanned galaxies, half of Their top half would have entered a new sector just as the fins of its tail passed through another sun’s core. Their path seemed to follow an unpredictable pattern that baffled scientists of every era across the entirety of the cosmos. So many of the universe’s natural creations had been decimated throughout the cycles during The All Father’s rest. It’d only been a myth that the mere mention of Their name seemed to attract Their very presence. 

They were sentient. Cunning. They’d passed millions of worlds, and billions of lifeforms, and none of Their witnesses had any words to describe Them. What had been captured on satellites only showed distorted pictures of creatures filling two points within the void of space. By comparison, They seemed small at first glance. 

The worry had all but dissipated until a young scientist, Mi’Jucal Jaccobi released a series of stellar research papers with bizarre and unproven claims of having conversed with Them. Most of what he’d recorded had been kept from the republic of Qui’Iganda, for the same reason why their Senate’s sitters dubbed what Jaccobi referred to as the Whirm in his writings as incredibly dangerous and to be thwarted should Their arrival to their republic set upon them. 

All the same, the researcher’s death was also to be stowed away with only a handful of politicians knowing that whatever They had been, Their influence was powerful enough for Jaccobi to be found submerged in a vile pool of his bodily stew as he’d disgorged himself; only leaving behind a final note of Their description. Below is the copy that had been found torn in half; with two pieces lying on his chest when residents recovered his body.

They have spoken with me for—to me—around six months, and for every day They’ve made contact, I’ve lost most of my sanity. I cannot in good conscience, as goes my oath to science and discovery, and to innovation and to exploration continue to make contact with These creatures. The things They’ve said They have done—will do to my planet upon reaching just past our galactical barrier with a casual chew of conversational dialect sickened me to my very core. The Whirm…a name They’d translated to me on multiple occasions, yet I will never ask why. In some way, I felt that I didn’t need to. I’d always known what They had to have been, maybe even before I met Them. The first time caught me off guard, I must’ve been quite tired, imagining the multitude of ‘new voices’ inside my head. I’d decided to call it an early night, but They would visit me still, in my dream, that night. It had been the first time in all my years studying Them from afar, the place where I’d finally met with Them, bask in Their physical forms, had been between the woven fabrics of my sentience. Had only I known then that Their Eyes would be the omens; the marks of death. After the connection had been established, Their frequency forever burned into my mind, I’d been Theirs. Totally. Their merciful promise maintained what little sanity I had to spare. Their will had become my actions, and my actions pleased Them. They wanted -- needed me to spread their existence into the minds of others. Infecting my kind with Their poison as we are susceptible to Their psychic links through hyper-ultrasonic wavelengths shot at speeds that made me violently regurgitate to even attempt to calculate. The way They move through the vacuum may allow Them to transmit messages across the galaxy from eons in the past. Almost as if Their bodies move upward through time. The speed at which They travel through space allows time to almost bend to Their will as They do did to me; a puppet hanging on strings, stuck staring at the crude face of his Master. The longer I’d accumulated research on Them, the stranger the idea of a night’s sleep faded from the moment They entered. Each time I’d closed my eyes, They’d been there waiting for me. For days I’d failed to power through Their grotesque speech, causing me to stray away from being trapped in the darkness with Them for too long. I buried myself in my work; They weren’t here yet, but the things They told me, what They wanted me to hear, all of it had been eons ago. They’d nearly be upon us by now. They had seen the world through my eyes as I’d seen it. I’d often feel this intense chill going about my day, there’s no doubt in my mind now that it’d be Them. Racing through the cosmos. But there was a…strange development earlier these past few days: a bright light trapped behind my eyelids, closing my eyes only for my retinas to be blinded by that infernal shine accompanied by a haunting heat that coursed throughout my body. I could not make sense of it until earlier this afternoon. I felt what They had been doing. The heat—the burning—I initially believed to be the immeasurable speeds of cosmic travel tearing my flesh apart, but I soon came to the haunting realization that it’d simply been Them. They’d passed through a solar system. Consuming the sun’s neutron star. They’d killed trigudillions, and They were getting closer each day that passed. 

There had been no others who’d claimed to have been taken over by the Whirm, though the masses soon found the research to be fascinating rather than terrifying. One such people, the denizens of the Qui’Iganda republic marketed the arrival of the Whirm; chants and merchandise had been released to the mass public of over five billion who collectively and happily fed off the scum given to them by persuasive elitists, all of who praised the Whirm, eagerly awaited Their arrival. No one had known Their truth until the first light had been seen shimmering in the sky as would the seductive stain on otherwise flawless flesh. 

Those who discovered the light hadn’t the time to say but a word before their eyes melted out of their sockets. The last thing the republic, and the entire solar system’s inhabitants had seen was the flash of the heavens; the last thing they heard had been the screams of hell’s horrors. The light had been the Whirm’s expected arrival eons into the past, yet mere quark seconds away from contact. 

The burning described by Mi’jucal a year before the planet’s destruction had been felt by all simultaneously, yet no one could stop the everlasting pain that would carry on with them through all their lifetimes. The heated flame that abated and liquified their eyes had also seared their mouths closed. Suddenly, no one looked to the sky with excitement, and there had been no more chanting. Everyone heard the deafening screech that eventually bled their hearing receptors before bursting them to pieces shortly after, and suddenly no one listened to the elitists who in turn had no more lies to share.

There had been nothing left of the sector safe for the rubble left in Their wake. They continued on Their path toward Their destination, only no one had ever lived long enough to guess if They had one. Whatever Jaccobi suspected died along with the rest of the Qui’Iganda republic and the accompanying solar system. The Whirm had continued on Their unending warpath.

To Be Continued.