Chapter 178: A Garogs’ Memory

[0.00]

The moment the countdown hit zero, everything turned dark for Adrian.

He didn’t fall unconscious though, he didn’t explode into pain either. Instead, everything simply ceased.

—It all vanished into an absolute, silent blackness.

He was no longer in his body. He was a disembodied point of view, a ghost adrift in a sea of nonexistence.

He floated in that silent void for what felt like an eternity, and then, a pinprick of light appeared.

It expanded rapidly, pulling him forward until he burst through into a new reality. He saw a world bathed in the ethereal light of twin suns, casting long, sharp shadows across a landscape of towering forests.

Before him stood a young boy. His skin had the rough, textured appearance of greenish, fractured stone, and four powerful arms sprouted from his broad torso.

The boy was a Garog and Adrian recognized him with a certainty that defied logic. This was the being he had just absorbed. This was the god.

Adrian became a silent observer, tethered to the boy’s life as it unfolded. He witnessed the moment of his birth on the planet Garogem, a world where the Garog race lived in quiet harmony.

From his earliest days, the boy was different. While other children played, the boy could effortlessly lift quarry stones that seasoned Garog workers struggled to move.

He saw things others missed, felt the flow of energy in the world in a way no one could explain. He was an anomaly, an extraordinary talent.

As the boy grew, so did his power. The elders of his clan watched him, waiting for him to reach his peak, to find the natural limit of his strength.

But he never did. At a young age, he was unrivaled, not just in his village but across the entire planet. His strength became a thing of legend, a force of nature that was simply unfathomable to his people.

They kept waiting for him to plateau, but his power was a constantly receding horizon; the stronger he became, the more potential he seemed to unlock.

A century passed. For the long-lived Garog, it was a significant but not unheard-of span of time.

For the boy, it was the period in which he became the planet’s sworn guardian. Despite his vastly superior strength, he never sought power or dominion.

Instead, he found profound joy in service. Adrian watched as he single-handedly fought off a monstrous hoard of skittering beasts that threatened a northern settlement, his four arms a whirlwind of devastating blows.

He saw him reroute a river of lava from an erupting volcano with nothing but his bare hands, saving thousands.

He settled disputes, helped build cities, and protected the weak. He was their shield, their champion, and he cherished the simplicity of their gratitude.

But time is a cruel master, even for the strong. As decades bled into centuries, he watched the world change. He watched his friends, the companions of his youth, grow old and wither.

He attended their funerals, a towering, silent figure of stone amidst a sea of grieving families. He saw generations rise and fall like the tides, each one a fresh reminder of his own unnerving permanence.

The joy he found in guardianship became tinged with a deep, aching sorrow. This growing loneliness resolved him to find an answer.

He began to train and cultivate with a ferocity that dwarfed all his previous efforts, seeking a way to halt the decay he saw in his people, to understand the mechanism of life and death itself.

His relentless pursuit led to a breakthrough. In a state of deep cosmic meditation, he transcended the physical.

His consciousness expanded, breaking the shackles of his planetary existence. For the first time, he saw the universe as it truly was: a vast, swirling harmony of stars, galaxies, and lifeforms beyond his wildest imagination.

He had elevated, becoming something more than a Garog. He had become a being outside their plane.

Even with this newfound perspective, he never abandoned his people. He watched over them as they evolved, their society growing more complex and intelligent with each passing generation.

He felt a father’s pride as he witnessed them tame their world, then build their first primitive spacecraft to reach for their moons.

They became a spacefaring race, their ships carved from asteroid cores, their culture spreading to nearby star systems.

And through it all, they worshipped him. He was their Creator, their Father, the Great One who watched over them from an unseen plane. Their progress filled his heart with a warmth that eased the chill of his solitude.

Yet, his core mission remained. He had noticed that the strongest among the Garog, those who cultivated more, lived far longer than the others, but none were truly immortal.

The finality of death was a law he could not break. His quest for the secret to true life, a way to grant his children the gift of eternity, had led him across galaxies, following whispers of power and cosmic anomalies.

It led him, eventually, to a small, blue-green planet...

Adrian’s ghostly consciousness pulled back, the long, lonely life of the Garog god coalescing into a single, tragic thought.

"...He kept on chasing strength, chasing an answer to save his people," Adrian realized, his own voice echoing in the void of his mind. "He chased it until he found his way here... until he met me."

But the story wasn’t over. Just as he thought the assimilation was complete, his perspective violently shifted again.

He was no longer observing the god’s life. He was seeing through the eyes of the high priest, the four-armed being from the dark chamber.

He felt the cold stone floor under his knees, heard the guttural chant of his own voice, and then felt the cataclysmic tremor as his god was extinguished from existence. He felt the being’s own horror, his rage, his grief.

Adrian watched as the priest slammed his foot into the ground, strode from the chamber, and addressed his brethren.

He saw fleets of starships waiting in silent orbit. He saw a civilization, technologically advanced and spiritually devout, a race defined by tranquility and devotion, now coiled with the promise of righteous violence.

He heard the final, chilling vow echo through the corridor, feeling it resonate not just in the air, but in the very soul of the being he was possessing.

"We will find where this blasphemy occurred, and we will exact our revenge." Adrian understood each thing they said word to word.

With a gut-wrenching lurch, Adrian was thrown back into his own body.

He breathed heavily as he tried to comprehend the sheer scale of what he had just witnessed.

A spacefaring race of powerful beings, driven by grief were on a quest for holy vengeance. A war was coming.