Hallowed World

Chapter One

Sea and Earth

I.

Wind and earth borne on wind filled her vision. For a moment that expected terror seized her, and then there was a voice somewhere nearby, telling her it was fine, she was safe.

The girl let the itching sensation in her chest clear, and tried to get her breathing under control. The terror diffused into the liquid around her, ego and certainty filling that gaping void. She was invincible, not even the awful conditions Outside could harm her.

The voice over the com continued inane reassurances, already growing grainy and faint. She silenced the dying echo with a sharp command, and then disengaged the safety locks binding her to the transport. Shut off the optical feed of the outside and engaged the topographic map.

She deployed.

Progress was slow and bracing, but easy enough. She actually enjoyed an opportunity to flex her knowledge, making minute adjustments from moment to moment to maximize efficiency. The beginning and end of her journey were the only portions that would require anything like skill, the interim being a long and tedious journey that simply required her presence.

It took her an hour to reach the forward observation post, one of several squat granite structures that ringed the observation bunker, and shelter proper. A blue icon appeared on her display marking the building, and she carefully avoided it.

Another hour passed. More adjusting for variable conditions, several serious OS errors she would have to address in the interim, and numerous areas of geography inconsistent with the topographic database that she had to map out manually with radar. She still reveled in the challenge, and screamed obscenities against the savage winds and the barren earth as she typed and twisted and pushed.

It was with something like hatred that she finally acknowledged the ocean. The deep, unending depression on her topographic HUD could be nothing else. Below was the deep dark of the North Sea, silent straights and empty waters. There was little life below, even less sunlight. Just a perpetual rain of ash as the earth from the winds filtered down to settle on the ocean floor. Aside from a simple, strong signal, she would have no contact with the outside.

She stood on the edge, where earth met water, and triggered normal visual displays. It was only here, where the heat of the ocean pushed the air up and away, that she was afforded a glimpse of the true Outside. The nominal green wire-frame disappeared from her heads up display, and was replaced with blurry images of naked rock and ocean spray.

Fifteenth years ago the land on which she stood had been part of a bustling deep-water port, with a population of over three hundred thousand. Not a single trace of it remained. The buildings had toppled and blown away, their foundations long ago undermined and scavenged. The roads and docks and trees and houses were all gone as well. All that remained was the basic stuff on the planet; stone and sea.

Asuka Langley Sohryu turned from what had once been the city of Bremerhaven, and plunged into dark waters.

II.

Shinji Ikari was dreaming of a train car.

It was old fashioned, pre-Second Impact design. The interior was splashed in the orange-red light of an evening sun, which filtered in through large, unarmored windows. The shrill, haunting call of the train signal came and went.

To his right was the ghost of a landscape. Gently sloping hills, trees and grass and shrubbery, the occasional home... rural Japan. All bathed in the amber light of the setting star. There were no people, no cars, no animals.

To his left, the landscape continued on into an absolute dark. A gentle fade that started at the tracks continued on and away, into an endless night, without moon or stars.

It was only after taking in his surroundings, drunken in his dream-state, that Shinji noticed the other occupant of the train car. A young girl in a traditional school uniform sat opposite him, regarding him silently. Her face was framed in hair that might have been ghostly white, her eyes masked in shadow... yet he could see discern her focus, could feel it upon him.

She stood and slowly walked to him, hair falling forward until her entire face was hidden. Though the car rocked as it progressed down the tracks, the girl did not seem to acknowledge the gentle sway. Her path was set and sure, and when she stopped before him, she did so absolutely. Not a fold of clothing or strand of hair moved from it's place.

And then she spoke.

"Behold the past," the girl said, and gestured towards the setting sun. "Those pathetic, short lived creatures that dwelt in the light. Incomparable to our ancient enemy, just self-aware enough to be polluted with egotism and hubris. They are naught but a mistake, an experiment which outlived its creator."

The girl then pointed to the other side of the train, to the darkness. "Behold the future, a timeless place wherein our kind might thrive."

She lowered her hand, and was once again still. Then: "This is a difficult time, a delicate time. The creatures are small, but they will fight to continue to exist. They conceive of some idle bid for power, but in that they will not succeed."

And then her arms were around him, her face close to his. Angled upward, her hair fell away, the light touched her face, and Shinji saw that her eyes were blood red.

"Soon He shall be freed from his tomb." Her eyes clouded with tears, and a faint smile touched her lips. "Soon that delightful agony will wash over everything. Air will become stone. Stone will become air. The very fabric of reality will re-polarize. It will bend to our will."

The tears raced down her cheeks, appearing molten in the light of the evening sun. She brought her hands to Shinji's face and pulled him toward her. Her touch was cold and wet. It was at that touch that Shinji willed the gentle sway of the train car from him. It was at that touch that he started to seek an escape. To wake up.

"...and, in that orgy of creation, of death..." The girl leaned up to meet his face... he could feel her breath, could taste the scent of brine and wind-swept marble, an old graveyard by the sea "... the two of us will know each other." And when their lips came together, he knew the taste of corpseflesh.

III.

Somewhere beneath what had once been the state of New York, a sleek armored carrier sped on magnetic tracks. There were sixty people inside, all on various assignments for NERV or the UN. For most the transit was routine, a simple transfer between two shelters.

The main car would have been considered luxurious fifteen years ago. Plush furniture, heavy tan carpet, an open bar with everything from beer to straight whiskey, a large supply of recreational sedatives... but this was all a mask, a lie, to distract people from objectivity, from the truth of their situation.

All the alcohol and pot in the world did not change the fact that they were on a train, traveling under many metric tons of rock, beneath a world all of them had once known, now long dead. And there were the stories, rumors whispered in idle moments. Some trains never reached their destinations. There were vague accounts of the horrors recovery teams had uncovered, of living, babbling corpses and steel armor shorn away with careless ease.

And there was always the chance that there would be a tectonic event, a shift in the tunnel. The friction experienced while overcoming the effects of such activity would slow the magnetic train down. Each were powered by a very precise electrical charge, any slowing meant that the train would stop somewhere short of its destination. The cars would lose power, and the occupants would have to wait in darkness until the sending shelter sent enough current through the rail to jump-start the train, a ham-fisted bit of engineering that would probably drain the whole shelter system's grid.

Nothing like that had happened on the New York-Arkham line. Yet.

-

Of the fifty-two people officially aboard the train, thirty one were technicians escorting a prototype N2 power plant, ten were corporate-industrial transfers, and eleven were null-level civilians being transferred for personal reasons.

The remaining eight people were secreted away in a hidden car. Seven of those eight were professional soldiers in the service of NERV. The eighth was Shinji Ikari. While the NERV agents would have been described by an observer as security for the boy, Shinji himself considered them his captors.

Captive and keepers were both exhausted, having traveled by rail for more than two weeks. The soldiers, though hardened professionals, were distinctly on edge. They all remembered what had once been, and speeding beneath the ruins of Second Impact was starting to effect them in subtle and disturbing ways.

Ikari, too young to remember the splendors of civilization in excess, experienced no such cumulative trauma. That ignorance allowed him to embrace sleep far more easily than any of the professional soldiers. But he had his own ghosts as well.

His captors now glared at his sleeping form. Most wished he were out of sight. They were... uncomfortable with anyone, even a boy, who could carry himself so easily, so simply, through a passage in the long dark. They slept only when exhaustion overtook them, and then only for a few hours, at the most. Nearly all had been forty hours without sleep, and were sweaty and cold and twitchy.

So it did them credit, when Shinji Ikari exploded from the crash couch he had been sleeping on, screaming, that they didn't shoot him by reflex.

-

Shinji Ikari was a fifteen year-old boy that looked far older. His brown eyes had a certain dullness to them, his body leaner then even the strictest rationing could account for. His hair had once been rich chestnut, but was now spotted with gray and faded, the cause of which could have been the genetic produce Japan was subsisting on, or something else... something much worse.

He was the only known survivor of the First Shelter, mankind's prototype stronghold. Shinji was amnesiac of the events that had led to the fall of that shelter, to the complete slaughter of over thirty-thousand souls. How he escaped and managed to get to the underworks of a shelter a hundred miles distant was also unknown to him.

The only "clues" he had were shadowy dreams that were mostly emotion and sensation. They were things he could not articulate, even to himself, but he knew they were wrong on a primal level. In these dreams he sometimes heard chanting, sometimes laughter, sometimes screams... but he never saw anything. He was always blind in these dreams, and probably better for it.

Shinji had been twelve when the First Shelter had fallen, he was fifteen now. He had come to terms with his chronic dreams, learning to forget, and treasuring those few nights his sub-conscious lingered on sane, human things. He had his ghosts, yes, but he had learned to ignore them.

-

Some distance down the train track, earth shifted.

-

The impact itself was minor, a slight scrape against one of the tunnel's sides. But through the ventilation, shared between the cars, Shinji heard screams. The men around him did a poor job of looking unconcerned.

The electrical charge the train was riding on was now insufficient to push them to the receiving shelter. The train would eventually stop. The lights would go out... until their absence was noted downstream.

Shinji knew little of the inter-continental rail system. This was his first time on it, extended trip though it was. He did not know what the bump meant. Though he could feel the train slowing, could easily see the restrained concern of the soldiers, he did not yet understand what would happen. And no soldier saw fit to educate him.

-

Eventually, the train screeched to a halt, collapsing against the rails as the magnetic charge was depleted. The lights went out. The screams that echoed through the ventilation system were much more insistent this time. Horrible recognition dawned, and Shinji almost screamed himself.

It was happening again. Shinji did not understand the feeling, just that it was true. Something awful was about to happen. Those screams, he had heard them before...

Without another thought, Shinji Ikari ran and locked himself in the small lavatory at the rear of the car.

-

The men might have grinned at the boy's flight, had they not been concerned with their firearms. In their line of work, they were cursed with incomplete knowledge, only what their superiors wanted them to know. So they had no clear idea what kind of threat to expect, only that it could be matched with sufficient force.

They taped flashlights to the wall to illuminate the heavily armored entry-hatch. They unlocked the tall cabinet towards the rear of the cabin and removed several automatic rifles. After checking their weaponry, the men waited.

-

In the lavatory, Shinji was shuddering terribly. His waking mind was showing him terrible things that he couldn't push away. He saw what was creeping towards the stalled train, even in the blackness of the tunnel. He could sense the insane mix of hunger and joy and something he could not name, building up in the tunnel outside.

Then he noticed that the thing in the tunnel was staring back at him. Again, he screamed.

-

As the boy began to scream, another, much more terrifying sound coming from the forward car. The people there joined Shinji's lament as the side of their car was torn away, and things came from the dark to claim them.

As screams turned into other, wet sounds, the private car was filled with the sound of safeties being clicked off. The darkness hid the men from one another, leaving them to sweat and shudder and quietly cry without fear of shame. They were soldiers, but also quite human, and they had been pushed far past their ordinary limits even before the train had slowed. To find themselves in such a fantastic situation was too much.

Silence. And then, a strange, melodious sound wafted through the air. It sounded vaguely like a flute, but some of the notes were strange, twisting and merging in odd ways. This further teased at the men's sanity, coaxing it over the edge.

And then the noise faded, but did not disappear. One of the men that still retained some composure moved to the ventilation grate and listened carefully. There was another sound over the strange music, a pulsing, creaking... and the fluting hadn't moved away, simply been diminished, as if...

A sudden back draft brought the smell of ruin. To the man at the ventilation duct, it smelled like a sun-bloated body, writhing with corruption, its stomach bloated with that deceptively smooth flesh that would split open at the slightest touch.

The soldier at the duct was suddenly back in the killing fields. Reaching to strip a side-arm from a half-naked corpse, and it's distended belly was erupting, and he was breathing it in, tasting it against his eyeballs and down his throat, felt it settle cold into the pit of his stomach...

He collapsed and vomited. Those near him tried to drag him clear, figuring he had finally cracked. They weren't expecting a gas attack, and indeed, that was the least of their worries. As one bent over the now-still form, something black began seeping through the grate. At first it seemed a trick of the uncertain flash-light, a mere shadow...

But then a gelatinous tentacle slowly extended from the shadow. It bobbed and swam through the air like a serpent, and for a moment the men watching it were transfixed.

It descended on the unaware agent, it's tip branching into three slender, searching growths. Then it took the agent, tendrils sliding into the base of his neck, lifting him off the ground, and throwing him across the room. The top of his skull and some gray matter remained in the thing's tri-fingered grasp.

All this happened in an second. When that instant passed, the men reacted.

-

When Shinji woke, the gunfire had faded. Looking in the small lavatory mirror, he scraped away the blood that had dribbled from his nose down his chin. Only then did he realize that the lights were back on, and the train was underway again.

They must have fixed the train, he realized. Fleeing to the lavatory, the thing outside, he must have been letting his mind get the better of him... something that hadn't happened in almost a year. Shinji cursed his own cowardice and opened the door.

There was a man. He was floating two feet off the ground. He appeared to be missing the top of his head.

Shinji closed the door.

Something black oozed in from the outside and ripped the door away.

The man was still there, flesh guant and drawn, most certainly dead. Something dark moved at the top of his head where his scalp should have been. He was not alone.

End Chapter One