Lotus

By Colton Guy Nelson

This story follows an inhuman creature as it finds humanity, breaking away from the higher dimensional entity that unleashed it upon the world. Meet Ren as she discovers power in herself and others in a dimensional story based in time, space, and magical destruction; spanning the course of eras of history to ultimately find and defeat her creato

• Language: English
• Publisher: Colton Guy Nelson
• Release date: Jun 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088148679

Book preview

Necessary Reading

I am old. Really, really old. There are something’s I barely remember, falling to pieces, memories eroding like sandstone in the wind and filling the desert of my violent past. Then there are somethings preserved so perfectly, almost luminous like sunlight captured in amber. But ultimately, in every grain of sand or every chunk of resin I can find what I need. My memories are vast but never fleeting. And that is a beautiful part of the curse of my existence. I never thought that I would ever tell anyone else this story, not after things fell apart with her. But I think it’s time to gather these stories, if for no one else, myself.

I have many names. I have been called many things. Until recently, most of them horrible- meant to inspire fear, awe, hate. My name and presence designed to trigger every survival instinct the human condition. I was made to look like a human- designed from the shell of a young girl whose mother spoke an old tongue and wove ancient magic. The young girl was talented, beautiful, and immensely skilled in her craft, weaving runes and channeling gods beyond the pantheons of her village. Unfortunately her great power and ambition would soon be the end of her mortal life, and the cruel beginning of mine.

The girl’s name was Zorne- derived from the word of the spoken language of the time for Wrath, born to the Zauber family. She was born to be great; prophesied to lead her family coven and her village to great victories across the continent. She tore through every text, called on every ancestor, mastered every skill. Her younger sisters both envied and worshipped her success and her latent abilities. So much magic and strength in the eldest daughter of the eldest family. The perfect target for a heinous and terrible plan.

One night, Zorne divined with the gods of her people to foresee the fate of their warriors. Her mother Raserei, the leader of their army, had planned a preemptive attack on a neighboring enemy village who planned to raid them for their magical resources. Zorne lit a fire, drew her wand, smeared runes on her face and body, and sang and danced around the smoke. Her magic was unlike anything their coven had ever seen. It was vivacious, interactive, colorful. It was alive. Light of all colors danced around her wrists and ankles, trailing up and around her ivory dress all the while tussling through her dark brown hair. She closed her eyes and smiled and the light shimmered across her fingers and into the fire. As she opened her viridescent eyes, they lit with the fire in front of her and she could see into the heavens where the gods were. She had done this dozens of times. But tonight would be different. Horribly different.

This is where the story gets difficult to explain. Hang in there, I will do my best. Outside of all of this- outside of the Zorne, the Zaubers, the warriors, the continent, the whole world, debatably the universe, there sat an entity both evil and beautiful, magnificent and terrifying. Not a god, but somehow more. No followers, only siblings. An abstract family of thoughts and concepts. A mingling of truths and absolutions. Outside of the divine, almost required by the universe. Necessary and terrifying contributions to the multiverse both known and unknown. As far as I have ever been able to perceive him, he has looked like a young Caucasian man in his early twenties, bright pink eyes like Azaleas in the summer framed by sun-bleached hair and tanned freckles across a beaming and voracious grin. Tall, gaunt, and somehow magnanimously charming. His entire appearance reduced down into something attractive and easier to digest. My mind would probably whither at the sight of his true form. Human eyes aren’t designed to see things like that. Not even mine.

That night, as Zorne danced her dance by the fire, on the other side of time and space, just beyond the reflection of the mirror where he was, something clicked in his mind. He was bored. He was curious. He contributed to the aspects of growth, life, beauty, and expansion, no matter how cruel. He was literally the concept of more incarnate. And even in his great expanse, he remained unamused. In the beauty and talent and potential of Zorne, across the cosmos and through time and space, he saw a sparkle of her beauty. That night, instead of the gods of her plane, she reached him instead. And he answered.

Back in the moment of our world, the light exploded from her wrists and ankles and the fire erupted from her eyes, spilling out and over her in a maelstrom of opalescent flames. That night, a god would not speak through her and give them answers, but she would become his in every way. The fire pushed the spatial presence of her surroundings away from her, creating tears in the fabric of reality and isolating her into a bright white flower, burning petals slowly engulfing her. As the sun set, she burned so bright it was like the light of day had gone nowhere at all. Reality was breaking, gravity was confused; this world was never meant to experience the physics of his dimension. Some of the villagers scattered in fear. Some froze in shock and awe. Some were completely torn apart in the rifts that stretched as indescribable colors this world had never seen in scars across what was the ground before it became nothing and everything at once. These small rips and tears of infinity scattered like leaves falling from this great and fearsome blossom before them.

The final petals closed around Zorne, forming what I can only remember as the shape of a lotus flower resonating with the intensity of a fallen star. The fire didn’t burn her as much as it did change her. The runes she had painted on herself in the ashes of her became carbonized tattoos in her flesh, the fire in her eyes setting into emerald green glass, and most importantly her mind flayed beyond any recognition of who she used to be. She was raw sentience again, nothing but potential and light magic. Her identity tragically and forcibly traded for even more power she never asked for, because he saw that she could hold it in her bones. In the confusion of a newborn, she cried and looked around, seeing nothing but the white light around her. Finally he made himself apparent to her.

Hush, child, he said in a voice as soft and crackling as a campfire, warm, wise, and enchanting. You don’t have to be afraid. I am about to give you the greatest gift you could ever receive. He smiled into a conniving promise across his sun-kissed facade.

The last bit of her humanity trembled in her hands as she pulled them to her chest, unable to blink her newly christened eyes against the impossibly bright light. What are you giving to me? Her voice rattled back at him, drier than smoke in the winter.

Everything. He said, joyously. He skipped with a juvenile vigor across the light of the now seemingly endless flower. In this dark night, I will give you my eternal Spring. And together, we can grow this garden forever and ever. He suddenly and violently reached both of his hand under her ribs and into her torso, elbow deep, and arrested her heart in his fingers. Using his higher magic, his impossibly complex and mathematically unquantifiable powers, he crystallized her heart into a cursed machine.

She winced and stopped breathing, bloody tears falling down her face from her new eyes, as her heart was replaced with this cruel device. He leaned in, whispering into her ear as he rearranged her existence within her rib cage, you may call me ‘Spring’ from now on. You will be my eternal weapon to change this world. You will be my hand, and I will be your will. Please, my beautiful monster, keep me entertained here until this world is no more, and I am forced to return to mine.

His voice was cruel and intense, but everything about it compelling. He pulled his hands from her body and as the wounds healed instantly, his sealing words burned across them in a binding contract she was never given a choice to sign. Spring then pulled vines of light from the base of the lotus and bound them across her wrists, ankles, and throat. I’ve burned out your humanity, but should it ever resurface and you try to defy me, know that it is an impossibility. As he finished speaking the vines stretched her apart as if to quarter her, and she screamed in confused agony.

The last thing you need is a soul. Spring continued, having completely snuffed hers out of existence. He closed his eyes and inhaled, placing his hand on himself where a human’s diaphragm would be. As he exhaled he slid his hand across his slender build and up his throat, pulling out a bright green flower from his mouth. This will feed the machine inside you. And like coal to an oven, he fed the flower to her and it began to stoke life into her limbs like a demented marionette stringing to life.

Then suddenly it was all gone. Spring, the light, the flower, the rifts- everything. Zorne was just standing by the fire as she was before she started her ritual, unblinking eyes fixed on the ground. But now everyone was still around her. The only thing that had changed was her. Runes burned into her from head to toe, bright fixed eyes glowing with an eerie green light, and a curse across her torso from a being she never meant to call. The once brilliant witch with a full life ahead of her, contributing to her village and leading her family, was completely dead. And in her place something feral. Something unstoppable. Something evil. Something that was designed to entertain the dark tastes of a tongue that could never be satisfied.

Before anyone could ask her what was wrong, she lifted her hands and drew every sword from every sheath of the army her mother commanded and flicked her wrist, the runes glowing from the back of her hand and up her arm, a perfectly tandem reaction mimicking the speed of a lightning strike. In that short instance, in that small gesture, each sword slice through their owners necks and beheaded them all. Hundreds of people, all who loved and trusted her, dead and gone to the cold actions of a near-zombified monster. Eyes still fixed to the ground, her mother’s head rolled to her feet, and stared up into the glass that once held her daughters eyes. Nothing looked back at her.

Before anyone could scream, Zorne raised her head, and with it the ritual fire in front of her erupted with he intensity of a lighting strike and instantly shrouded every structure, man, woman, and child in a blaze. From beyond the veil, just on the other side of Zorne as if leaning on her back, Spring smiled and followed the smoke up to the sky, curiously wondering which lights were stars and which were sparks from the blaze below. He sighed and happy sigh and whispered to himself, you’re going to be so much fun. Walk. And as commanded, she stepped forward, leaving scorching footsteps in her wake, leaving everything she once loved and adored behind her.

Those are my first memories, seared into my brain and fossilized in my bones. I am the dark machine that Spring placed in that poor girl, hundreds of years ago. And this is the story of how I set myself free.

Lotus

Like I said, I am really, really old. And I have done some not-so-great things. I used to hate myself for it. Some days I still do. But my hands were not my own. To this day, I wonder if they ever will be, or if they are still the hands of the girl that fell to the misfortune of her talents. I spent that lifetime as Zorne, single-handedly pillaging and leveling empires, armed with an army of swords floating above my head; those same swords I stole from my mother’s army. My name is Wyvren, or at least that is the name that Spring gave the machine that sustains me. I like to go by Ren for short, nowadays. A small, intricate series of interlocking mechanisms; a heart sized cube that interlocks with even smaller cubes, each containing the magical and genetic memories of my magic and my existence.

I suppose Spring’s higher dimension understood things like programming much sooner than our primitive plane and timeline. My hardware was programmed with eons of magical software, self-sustaining and fed with violence. The more carnage I caused, the stronger I became. I evolved with each victory. Every spell used against me during those times I was able to analyze, memorize, and store in a new revolving cube in my engine. Spring was right. As far as power, magic, learning, skills- he gave me everything. He knew that he was a higher being, able to artifice constructs like myself to defeat anything I encountered. Even before I gained any sort of consciousness, in those early years before I regained any kind of self, I knew that I was unstoppable.

Spring is from a place I can’t imagine or describe. Even being made from those higher dimension specifications, I am limited to a human-dependent system. I don’t necessarily like to call myself a parasite, but that is essentially what I am. But I make the host stronger… at the expense of their humanity.  But we will get to that.

One day, during the raids against the most powerful magical practitioners of the time, after I had destroyed and defeated almost as much of the magical community as the Catholic Church, my body simply stopped. After roughly 150 years of not aging and thriving in the destructive cycle that sustained me, ultimately, my vessel was still human and had to die. I absorbed the last of the information around me, my body collapsed, and before anyone could get to Zorne’s corpse, Spring reached into her and pulled me out of her chest.

It was honestly the first and only time I had ever seen him confused. His usual proud smirk and beaming pink eyes now contorted into disappointment and displeasure. How could I be so short-sighted, he muttered to himself. He spent sometime opening each of my cubes, expanding my code and making some adjustments. Even in my fledgling stages of development, this was the first time I recognized my self as aware. Even without a body, I could feel myself being handled in my creator’s hands. Shifting. Changing. Adjusting. As evil and as terrifying as I would one day come to find him, I felt comfort. I was a war machine full of weapons, dark magic, and civilizations worth of spells and knowledge- a grim library, haunted with memories of devastation. But in those moments, I was just a child in the hands of her father, learning knew skills.

Suddenly, I was closed and he seemed satisfied. He smiled and looked at me, and before I knew it, I was waking up again, but this time in the body of a much younger girl. I think I she must have been four or five. As I became more aware, I could feel myself snuffing out the flamer of her vitality as I made room for myself. I looked up and saw that I was holding onto the finger of a tall man, I can only assume now that this was the girl’s father. We were walking down a street, there were bricks and cobblestone on the road. I wasn’t quite sure how much time had past since Zorne’s body died and this awakening. But I was wearing much more complex clothes, especially for a young child. Where was I? When was I? Who was this girl I just killed? Why was I asking questions at all?

Once I assumed control, I felt her heart stop and my magic start to rewrite her body. The runes I had before started burning onto her delicate body, and suddenly I felt her spirit become another flower, just like the one Spring fed to me. By instinct I consumed it and just like that, my engine was thriving again. The girl’s eyes shifted from a bright blue to my much more familiar green color, and as my footsteps began to burn behind me I summoned my army of swords again and struck down that innocent man.

But I had fewer swords than before. Was this body too young and fragile to summon all of them? I looked behind me and the scorching of my steps was much lighter than Zorne’s feet. What was happening to me? I ran a quick diagnostic check as people screamed and ran from me, the cold steel of my swords still protruding from the girl’s father on the road beside me.

My latent power as Wyvren had not waned, but this vessel was not as powerful as Zorne. I huffed in frustration and disappointment, understanding that I was now limited by a less than perfect vessel. Then I realized- disappointment? I had never cared to feel before, much less be disheartened by something. After running more tests, everything seemed to be fine. Slightly dampened resonance with a weaker body, but the presence of vague emotion didn’t show up on anything.

I decided that it was the fleeting humanity of the young girl and to not tell Spring I was showing defective signs of emotions. I reconfigured the physical form to be much older and continued in my conquest. Killing, learning, adapting, thriving. Evolving. Over and over again, data being collected and viewed by Spring and him occasionally making necessary adjustments. Even to my cold demeanor he always made a point to treat me with care. Delicacy. The fine and tempered hand of a surgeon with no desire to do me harm.

We did this again and again, throughout the ages. But each time, I secretly became less and less compatible with my past self. Each incarnation the runes never came back as dark, my footsteps never as hot, my swords fewer and fewer. Was this aging? Or something else? As I developed I always found myself existing and coming back as a human woman. I think that was in the original code. Zorne could only see herself as a woman, the runes only knew the form of a woman, the engine only could metabolize as a woman.

The most noticeable difference was I was gaining feeling. I was not only destroying and killing on command, but as the violence fed me it began to give me pleasure. I felt full and satisfied when I was done with a battalion. I felt excitement and adrenaline when a witch summoned a horde of demons to slay me. When angels raised their weapons at me and my vast arsenal of darkness swallowed them whole, I felt capable. Ultimately, above all else, the one feeling I remember feeling the most back then clearly was pride.

Then something happened. I came back, as I usual, and this time I found myself as a twenty-four-year-old young woman in lavish clothing in a room that could only be described as ornate and extravagant. Gold polished decor, pastel wanes-coating on the walls, floor to ceiling mirrors adorned with gems and precious metals. I turned to find my image in that mirror. I was tall, long brown hair, and before I had the chance to manifest and take over this host, her eyes were already a bright green. In her reflection, I could feel her looking at me in her own eyes.

She knew I was there, coming to life behind her eyes. She must have been innately magical herself to feel me enveloping her. As I took her heart, she grabbed her chest in pain but did not fall. She made her way over the the mirror and smashed her hand into it, cutting her as large shards fell to the ground.

She looked at me in her reflection and told me in her last dying breaths, I don’t know who you are, or what you want. My name is Irene. I am an assassin. Assassin? This is an interesting scenario. I will go willingly, I see this body is what you want. But please. The man about to walk into this room means to kill my sister. Please, promise me you will use these hands to end his life. Oh, wow. First meal on the house? I couldn’t imagine a better way to start this life time.

As she struggled and died in her own body and I assumed the mantle of her existence, I felt a strange wetness on my face. I touched my cheek and felt water. I looked at myself in the shattered mirror and saw the last tear Irene would shed from her own set of green eyes before mine took their place. And in that moment, I felt her dying wish. I could feel her rage. Not a blood thirsty rage. It was vengeance, and not my own.

I stumbled, confused. I was in control of the body but I wasn’t in control of her heart. I could feel her magic in me, the binding request of her dying wish still breathing her breath across my lips. Her love for her sister pumping through her now-dead veins. I had become more and more aware over the years and lifetimes that I was becoming more human, but I had never been overwhelmed like this before. The binding lights of Spring from my first design began to illuminate into shackles around my throat, wrists, and ankles. I wasn’t trying to disobey him, but the growing presence of humanity in my design was apparently coming to a head as a clear and fatal flaw.

The man Irene spoke of walked into the room, I suppose expecting a willing and able woman to service him in his upper crust mansion, but instead found me, burning with light and forming only the faintest runes on my skin. They were barely there at all this time; none on my face, only manifesting on my arms and legs. He fell back in horror of my sight, glowing and struggling against ethereal chains of light reaching in from the higher dimension.

In that moment, I felt so much. Too much. Spring, as I will go on to fully describe to you, is the manifestation of the act to create, in all meanings of the word. I was cut from that cloth and sewn into the being I am. Whatever I am given, I am made to thrive and cultivate the materials. Something neither Spring or myself saw coming was that Irene’s love for her sister and hate for this man would ever linger in this body for so long. And my goodness did I grow and cultivate those emotions.

The white flower engulfed me again, freezing time in it’s surroundings and ripping up space and gravity from the beautiful room I woke up in. I felt a tear, a rift in myself. My engine stuttered and shook, trying to process and metabolize these abstract human emotions. My design had always killed the human heart, and suddenly my program was trying to grow a new one for me to feel with. I beat against my chest in the white light, the pain overwhelming me. I heard the sound of something breaking and looked down across my new body to find orange cracks forming spontaneously from me. The body was overheating. I was overheating. I was falling apart. Was I going to die? Was I afraid of dying? Was there anything of me to die in the first place or did I just break?

Before I could frantically ponder any more hypothetical questions, I disintegrated- atom by atom, around my engine. The body desperately trying to reconfigure into something that could withstand what was happening to me. I was meant to evolve, and so there I was, in real time, changing the nature of the organic matter around me. Once the Wyvren was happy with this arrangement of chaotic matter, I slammed back into myself like a star imploding, bringing all of the light of the flower back with me. I opened my eyes and found the man dead and the room failing to behave as it should in the third dimension. Light was slowing down to dusty photons, pigments were shifting to these new light configurations, and most shockingly I found myself completely changed.

I crawled across the room and looked at my reflection in the broken mirror that kept fixing and re-breaking itself; without the steady presence of light, it couldn’t find its place in time anymore. Just repeating the last moment of steady time and space it could remember. When I raised my head and I saw myself, I was for the first time in my life horrified.

Nuts and Bolts

It occurs to me that I am giving you a lot of information about my existence and how I perceive and understand the world. I feel like to better understand me, I should take some more time to explain exactly how I work. Magic, is the short answer, but I was designed to fit in and learn the magic of this world. The closest thing this dimension’s magical practices has to my skill set is called alchemy, or a metaphysical approach to the sciences.

Magic and science, combined to create conditional outcomes and results through equivalent exchange and a modified understanding of thermodynamics. I give this, so this happens. Of course this plane has countless other magics; elemental, spiritual, holy, demonic- I have come to learn that the