The Pillars of Eternity

Paradoxically, it was indescribably beautiful: a golden, radiant, softly roaring incandescence. Boaz knew this because he did not disappear into the depths of the pit as did the others. They must have been killed in a split second. He, by contrast, grabbed the lip of the pit as he fell, and with a strength he should not have possessed he hung on.

The gentle, beautiful light was not all he knew as he hung there. Ethereal fire only looked beautiful, with a beauty that masked its inner horror, its antipathy to all organic life. It was fire upon fire, fire within fire, fire impounded, compounded, almost playful in its ability to torture without limit, penetrating his body to the core, to the bones in fact, infusing every cell to some degree.

Boaz should have died within two or three seconds. So would he have, had he been engulfed in ordinary fire, for the heat was intense. His flesh would have turned to shreds of carbon and even his bones, those shining silicon bones, would have melted.

But ethereal fire was subtle, rarefied, as tenuous as perfume. It burned in a way that ordinary heat did not. The chemical changes attendant upon combustion took place but leisurely in its presence (the observation platform had been charred to disintegration; it should have been vaporized). Boaz, likewise, burned slowly with a burning that soaked deep into his body, into his mind, into his feelings.

Yet if that were all he had to suffer, he might have died in not too large a fraction of a minute. But it was not all. He also had silicon bones.

Nature bestows one merciful beneficence on the living creatures she generates and touches with waking consciousness. She so arranges their nervous systems that there is a limit to the degree of suffering they can endure. When agony or terror reach a certain traumatic point, the organism immunizes itself against further horror by means of daze, unconsciousness or death. Shock is the ultimate guarantee. The heart stops, blood leaves the brain, catatonia develops.

That was the mistake of the bonemakers, who proved themselves less wise than nature.

For the whole ten minutes that Boaz was engulfed in ethereal fire, his preservation function kept his ravaged body working after a fashion. It kept the blood pumping, the nerve cells firing. It insisted, with an implacable preprogrammed will, that the ascending reticular system which brings alertness to the brain should not close down.

Boaz was conscious the whole time.

Not only that, he was on rheobase setting three. Put simply, lowered rheobase meant hyperaesthesia. Every sensation was felt with an unnatural keenness – every datum of pain had that extra edge. Not only that, he was on felicity setting two. Everything he received with his senses was being shunted to his emotions.

Boaz grabbled in his mind. Instant insanity might have been a refuge of sorts, but the preservation function was charged with maintaining not only his physical but also his psychological health. Mental coherence was another matter, however. He called on his bones to help him, trying to mouth trigger syllables as though screaming prayers to the gods.

He was too overwhelmed with pain to have any real control over what his mind pronounced. The heat had probably affected the bone functions, too. Because he did not even have the syllable for what followed.

Felicity retuned itself to setting eight – three settings higher than the bonemakers had allowed him to experience.

His burden of physical agony, already inconceivable in terms of what human awareness can be expected to survive, crashed through the remaining gates of his mind to take possession of the entire gamut of his emotions. Pain that had already stripped his consciousness bare, that burned and whipped him, that transcended all thought or explanation, that became a living entity, a personality that spoke to him, played with him, raped him, punished him with its enfolding caresses, now had access to the ‘joy function’ – a reservoir of positive emotional energy. It instantly turned that energy negative.

Misery would have been too bland a word to describe the rivers of ultimate horror that flooded and ran through Boaz. It is not often that emotional pain can equal physical pain of even a normal kind. Yet he knew grief that arose from and was the equal of his physical torment. There were no hidden parts to Joachim now. Not a thought, not a feeling, not a memory was not dredged up and drenched permanently in that grief. He howled his suffering until that howl echoed in an emptiness which was his own self, and that self contracted around and became only one thing. PAIN, AGONY, SUFFERING, GRIEF, repeated and repeated and repeated, forever and ever. Amen.