The Black Dancer

Abigail Tasman became a sister in the mystery with a purpose. She wished to get away from the painful existence humans brought upon this reality. The sister was misanthropic and filled with hatred down to her bones. She hated the fruits of the Anthropocene, and she hated the children of Adam more than anything else. There was no real reason behind her burning disdain. Some people are just born different. She was one of those. Sister Tasman was a human with a pitched black soul.

For three long and painful years, she had toiled, rising the ranks of her mystery. Three arduous years during which she studied the dark arts and refined her craft. They have finally paid off. At the center of the temple, she stood ready to summon her chthonic god, finally to rid the planet of the filthy cretins that swarmed its surface. Sister Tasman stood at the center of a black candle circle. Clad in a simple black dress. Her fellow brothers and sisters stood all around her, chanting in an archaic language most people could never understand.

Clutching the obsidian knife in her hand, Abigail cut Stigmata all across her arms, straight through the sleeves of her dress. Once she finished producing her blood offering to the god below, Abigail placed the obsidian blade beneath her tongue. She bit on it as hard as she could to ensure she could not scream. Red language poured through the fabric and onto the floor beneath the sister as she raised her arms into the air. Along with her crimson humor, burning pain flowed across her self-sacrificed limbs.

Abigail closed her eyes and began spinning in her place. Ignoring the pain as hard as she could. She breathed in and out, clearing her head of all thoughts. A mesmerizing red-colored tail formed from the language pouring out of the sister’s body. She spun faster and faster, completely devoting her body and mind to her Sophy dance of primordial darkness. Before long, everything disappeared, and sister Abigail Tasman completely submerged herself within the void.

Finally, at peace, she detached her psyche, her soul from the last threads that tethered her to the earthly reality. The black dancer was one with the cold, empty cosmos. She was one with the dark matter that kept everything together. She was omnipresent and non-present at once. Everywhere and nowhere. Alive and dead. In a perfect balance between existence and oblivion.

She was free.

At last.

The other members of the mystery stopped chanting once Abigail’s blood began floating around her. Assuming their evocation had worked and their beloved master was on his way, they all prostrated themselves on the floor before the rotating mass at the center of their temple.

The black dancer wouldn’t stop spinning, however, and no deity came from within the gyrating mass. Soon enough, the realization that nothing was going to crawl out of the spinning black materia set in. Looking at it, they saw an ellipsoid shape of black and red colors spinning on its axis at an ever-increasing speed. Compressing itself slowly into itself. They remained fixated on the object for a while. They soon came to realize that the strange thing was bending space around its parameter, made clear by the abnormal curvature of the floor beneath it.

The black dancer swirled itself into a nearly perfect circle before stopping in its place. An orb of pure blackness at the center of the temple. Floating at the total center of it all. Forcing the surrounding space to bend to its malicious will. Curving the room into odd shapes whenever it came into contact with the circular void.

One member of the mystery approached the round nothingness. She contacted the thing. Her touch was disastrous. Ripples tore through the member as she came too close to the black dancer. A sudden sharp pain tore through her head, which was closest to the black mass, and then nothing.

At all.

An explosion of bright lights emanated. A chaotic rainbow of impossible lights too alien to be described by a human language It burst forth violently from within the black mass enveloping the entire temple. The sudden cascade of luminescence temporarily blinded remaining members who watched the unfolding with the utmost reverence.

Once the Luciferian bombardment of shades had finally died down, something strange revealed itself. A small, fleeting strip of white spinning across the surface of the black dancer. Thus, the high priest concluded that the black dancing sphere was absorbing everything it came into contact with.

The ritual turned out to be a failure, for the chthonic god had not risen. Moreover, the mystery had lost two sisters. They concluded that the black dancer was too dangerous to be left alone, hence the mystery had to abandon worship inside the temple. The high priest designated five members of the mystery to watch over the black dancing orb to make sure it won’t cause any more damage to the mystery.

Time passed, but the black dancer kept on spinning the space and reality all around it. Until it stopped.

The black dancer finally slowed down, shedding its pure black mass over time as it got slower and slower. Eventually leaving behind nothing but the glowing form of a young human woman. The woman eventually stopped spinning entirely.

Once she did, she opened her eyes and surveyed her surroundings. The temple all around her was desolate. Time corroded its remains and pathetic, leaving behind a pathetic shell. A few human bones laid strewn across the surrounding floor. They were caramel brown and painfully ancient, marked by clear signs of weathering and abuse at the hands of the elements. Abigail Tasman walked for the first time in a long time when she moved from the ground she danced upon. Accidentally, she stepped on a skull that disintegrated beneath her measly weight. The woman smiled as a chilly speck of dust caressed her skin.

She followed the speck of dust until she found herself outside of her temple’s ruins. Surrounded by a desert of black sand and dead rocks. Abigail fell in love with her new home. The corpse of her long-dead planet, devoid of all life. She was the last one. The last thing. A sole remnant still aware inside a lifeless and decaying universe.

Abigail breathed every last bit of the air of desolation that surrounded her with sheer excitement. She had achieved her goal of absolution. She reached her dreamland of cosmic isolation.

Falling to the ground, Abigail had realized just dark the night’s sky was. Most of the stars had died and fallen into the jaws of Mot while she was dancing her dance of the void. There was barely any light visible left.

Abigail laughed and said to no one in particular, “Dancing for eons was worth it.”