Unity's Death

GM

Pain.

Being ripped apart by the claws of an extradimensional horror will do that to you. Unity knew he was dead when a crab-like chitinous claw ripped into his neck, severing his jugular vein. As his lifeblood poured out he made one last, desparate lunge with his sword and impaled the central body mass of the creature.

His last conscious perception was of Relena's throwing knife, stuck in one of the abomination's arthropodal joints. Slowly, as the blackness descended around him, he grasped the knife. Then he was gone.

Dimly, he had a sense of motion. Everything was black, but he felt that he was moving somehow - racing blindly across the universe. Galaxies flashed by in the briefest of instants, but his mind could not constitute thoughts. He was pure sensation - the sensation of movement.

There was a presence. An entity. It was not accompanying him on his journey. It was the source of his motion. He was like an arrow, fired from her bow. A spear, cast from her hand. But she was also his destination. After an eternity of travelling, he knew that he would find rest in her arms.

Stars, galaxies, superclusters, voids. A few trillion years and it became tedious. But there was always the goal, the anticipation, of coming to rest. He experienced eternities unknown to mere mortals. For a while he tried to count the galaxies that he passed, but lost his way somewhere in the fourteen thousands. Dimly, over the course of millions of years, he started to notice himself. He was a shard of absolute nothingness. No life, no death, no matter, no energy, no time, no creativity - infinitely thin and infintely long. He was the Nothing from which the universe was drawn.

Slowly he became aware of his destination. He approached a cluster, a galaxy, a star, a ship, lonely in the void of hyperspace.

A black-clad woman was standing over a corpse, tears in her eyes. Presently, she exited the tiny room, and he finally saw his destination. She was magnificent, glowing with a golden aura. Her hair fell around her shoulders, unable to be contained by her shining helmet. In one hand she held a spear, the head of which was a shard of the universe. In her other hand, a shield. She wore archaic armour, but her face formed a beatific smile. The gaze of her crystal blue eyes was mesmerising.

Come, she said, without moving her lips. She gestured with the spear towards the corpse on the bed. Unity jumped at the realisation that the corpse was his own. Lie, came the voice.

Hesitantly, Unity climbed onto the billet, knowing that he was insubstantial, that he could occupy the same space as the corpse. The woman closed her eyes and whispered strange phrases, passing the tip of her spear over his lifeless body.

I give you Life, came the voice. Feel the power that I offer. Awake in the Life that is the essence of the Valkery. Awake!

The lifeless corpse on the slab drew a staggering breath. In his mind he heard a whisper...

You have more to do...