by Ivan Kal
FALLEN STAR
THE ETERNAL PATH SERIES
BY IVAN KAL
Copyright © 2019 by Ivan Kal
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
At times I hear a voice whispering in my head, yet I cannot understand what it is trying to say. It comes between my visions of the future, and I know that it is tied to them in some way. It frustrates me that no matter what I do I cannot make the whispers sound clearer. At times I think myself mad, that all that I have seen is just a delusion of my mind, but I cannot take the chance. The end of all is coming—I know it in my bones. And so I write in my journal, hoping that my plan will work, such that I will have no need of it. Yet the future is never certain, and I cannot allow room for any mistake.
Recently I have been seeing something that confuses me. In the futures where I see hope of victory at the end, standing before the gate and the darkness that threatens the world, I am not alone. At times I am, and those are the futures where I know that we have lost, but more often than not, they are there: a man and a woman, and I know they are important. The man I see has two faces, two different bodies, and I cannot see him clearly. In some futures he shines brightly with blue, silver, and gold armor, and wields a spear made of light with lightning flashing in his eyes. In the others, he is shrouded in shadow, with monstrous wings rising from his back. In all the futures he pulses with power unlike anything I have ever seen or felt. The woman is different; she acts in a manner that tells me she is neither a warrior nor a mage, yet in some futures she is absent. In those, I feel a great sorrow from both my future self and the man standing next to me. I do not know what this all means, and that event is too far away from my present for me to even attempt to find clarity without risking burning myself out.
Something about the enemy from the other side of the gate shrouds my sight—I cannot see them clearly. The power touching them hides them from even me. In the end, I know only that we need to fight, that the army coming from the gate needs to be met…or all existence will suffer the price.
- Excerpt from the Journal of Vardun Con Aroch
The limited sense of her surroundings told her that her son, Khalio, had left the room she was being held in, and the Lifebringer, Mother of the Gods, felt a pang of weariness and regret—or as much as a piece of a soul trapped inside its own crystallized core could express such things. The slow turn of the aether surrounding her soothed her and slowly helped her heal from her injuries, but it was a slow process, one that had already taken eons; or at least she believed it had, as she had only a vague sense of the passage of time. She had some sense of the room she was being held in, and she knew that the only thing aside from her was a large crystal slab that held within itself a body. She had learned enough from her son’s taunts to know that the body he had stored represented the culmination of her plans—except that now she was not in any way capable of acting and setting into motion the next stage. It saddened her a bit, but still she did not despair. She knew that she could not afford to give up.
Even with her great injuries, and the state she was currently in, helpless to act or to even reconstitute her body, her soul was still in tune with this universe’s very fabric of reality. It was a faint connection, one that her crippled soul could not take full advantage of. She could not use her will to bend the aether around her and restore herself—not yet, at least. Her enemy had struck true, and only her experiments with the strengthening and cultivation of both her physical body and soul had saved her.
The Lifebringer remembered the assault well, the shock of her own son unleashing the attack that so clearly to her eyes held the power of her greatest enemies. She knew that Khalio did not realize what he had done, that he did not know what he was dealing with. And a part of her did not blame her son for it, for she knew that Chaos’s influence infected every decision that her son made without him even realizing it. She only blamed herself for not anticipating the enemy’s actions. While her connection to the fabric of reality meant that she could hear the song of the universe, that she could glimpse the many possible outcomes yet to come, the song could not anticipate the enemy. Their power was such that they could mask themselves from even the song.
When she had arrived in this universe in the wake of the calamity that had befallen it, when two different dimensions broke through the dimensional barrier and entered this universe, she found an opportunity. She used her power to shape the destructive power unleashed, to channel it into a great work of power. She split the universe into three parts, using the two invading dimensions as foundations to create what would later be known as the upper plane and the lower plane: two areas, rich in aether, with the laws of the universe more malleable therein. The third, mortal plane remained in the same image as most other physical universes, with stars and planets, following the more grounded laws. It had, however, suffered from her attempts to safeguard its worlds and mortal lives. She had been forced to draw much of the vital energy coursing through the universe in order to save it. She safeguarded many mortal worlds, not all, as she had not been fast enough to save them from the destructive wave of the collision. And her drawing on the power for her great work drained many worlds of all power, snuffing out all life, and in some cases turning entire worlds into cosmic dust.
That was one moment where she truly felt like she could understand the decisions her father had made and which she had held against him for a long time.
In the end, she had saved many mortal races who were all ignorant of what had happened. They had felt the changes, of course—many civilizations had collapsed in the wake of the cataclysmic changes that had occurred in their universe. A side effect of her saving the
universe had been that many worlds had been left with just a bare minimum of aether to support life, but not enough to support the magic that their civilizations had been built on. Some had fared better than others, but still, she had felt responsible. At the time she had been in a strange place in her life. She had turned away from the others, not being able to stand by her father and his actions anymore.
She did not wish to meet anyone, did not wish to speak with the others like her. And so she put in protections in the very fabric of the reality to prevent her universe from being invaded by her enemies, but also to bar entry to all but those she allowed in. She secluded herself for a time, staying in the upper plane and shaping wonders. She built entire cities made out of nothing but aether, she crafted weapons unlike anything that had ever been encountered before, and she made works of art that would bring tears to even the soulless.
But as the time passed, she realized that she was alone. The solitude weighed on her, and so she turned her eyes to the mortals. She watched them from afar for a time, not really having the will to walk among them, until she came across a small moon: a world which had suffered much from her actions. It had very little aether, and so the mortals living there had come up with something that she had never seen before. Intrigued, she had stepped down to the small world and walked among its people as one of them. She learned this new and wondrous way of gaining power, one which not even her father, with all of his might, had achieved. She learned, and later helped shape the Path. She outpaced the mortals quickly in the following of the Path, as was unsurprising, as she was far beyond them in both power and understanding. She had become something else, something more. The Path did not come without disadvantages compared to her previous state, but it was worth it in the end.
Her time among the mortals had awakened something in her—a desire for companionship. And so, she decided to make something that she had been yearning for since the time long before she had ascended. She decided to make a home and start a family. She handpicked children from the mortal races all across the universe, and she brought them all to the upper plane, to the wondrous realm crafted by her own hand. She left the little moon alone, eager to see what kind of other wonders they would manage to think up on their own.
She raised the mortal children she adopted, taught them, guided them slowly to become gods in their own name, keeping from the Path, instead guiding them to become what she had been before she began walking on the Path. Together with them she brought order to the galaxy and the crumbling mortal races. Over the eons, she let her guard down as together with her children she built up a world in the mortal plane. Eos became a bastion of hope and civilization in the universe, where many mortal races interacted with her children, their gods. There, she taught them all about the nature of the universe and the mysteries of existence as a whole.
For eons she had been content, until her son turned against her. Khalio had always been curious, even as a child. Now, she could see how it could’ve happened, how he could’ve been exploring, always looking to find something new and exciting and then run back to show her with an awestruck expression on his face, not realizing that there were very few things in existence that she had not seen. Still, she always indulged him, always made time for him. And so she had done when he had come to her the last time. She hadn’t known that he was already in the clutches of Chaos—she hadn’t felt the enemy touch her universe even with all the protections she had put in place. At the time she had recognized the enemy’s touch the moment she saw her son, she had believed that her protections had failed. Khalio accused her of hoarding knowledge, of keeping true power away from him and his siblings, and no words from her mouth could’ve convinced him otherwise.
He lashed out at her with an attack she had only ever seen once, an attack that she had known she had no hope of surviving—at least not if she had been as she was before. But since then she had walked the Path, and she had become more than she had been the last time she had encountered such an attack. As her physical vessel was burned away alongside with the planet they had stood upon, she pulled as much of her soul as she could inside of her core, used her cultivated power—her ki—to harden the outer shell of her core, and pulled her soul inside the inner core, a white crystal filled with the aether from her own soul. The attack slammed against her outer core, shattering it and spreading the pieces across the universe, but it did not penetrate her inner core.
Her power gone, her soul crippled, there was nothing else that she could do. And she lamented the loss of another universe at the hand of her enemies. But the end did not come—she found herself gathered by Khalio, with no sign of the arrival of her enemies. It took her a long time to realize that the enemy would not be coming. Her protections had worked; the enemy could not enter her universe fully. The only thing it had managed was the small tether, feeding her son its power: enough to corrupt and twist his mind, but not enough to truly turn him into a thrall.
She knew that the enemy would be able to feel her and her connection to the fabric of the reality. It would not risk breaking through her defenses until it knew that she was no longer here. It would remember what her father had done to Order, when it decided to enter his universe fully and force a confrontation. It could not know what state she was in, and she knew that if it could do more than just whisper at Khalio, it would have learned of her fate already.
She realized then that there was still hope, and she knew also that she needed to act. She used her faint connection with the fabric of reality to reach out into the universe, hoping to speak with her other children, but she failed. Her voice was too faint, and their minds too protected by her own teachings.
Time passed, how much she didn’t know, but then she felt something else. The fragments of her shattered core that had been scattered across the universe shone in her senses, and she could feel the mortal hands wielding them, using her pure ki as sources of power. She saw the opportunity and she reached out, hoping that her voice could be heard. But alas, it was not to be—she was still far too weak to accomplish any meaningful connection. But as she recovered and regained more of her power, she became able to send dreams to the few more powerful mortals. And so she used her faint connection to the fabric of reality to listen to the song of the universe, to glimpse at its possible future paths.
She had always been the most in tune with the song of the universe from those who were like her, able to discern among the many possible paths with far greater ease; not quite as much as her teacher, but enough. She had used this to guide the universe forward to more favorable outcomes. She had attempted to teach many of her children how to do this—through more mystical lenses, granted, but it was not a skill that could be taught quickly. All of her children that had any kind of “prophetic visions” had seen them through her as a filter, although they had not known it. She was the one that funneled the possible futures to their minds as a way of preparing them to see by themselves. Following her “death” she knew that all such visions would’ve stopped, as none of them had ever seen without her aid. By then she knew she had a chance of influencing the world beyond her core, by relying on these mortals.
She pushed herself as far as she was able, to send visions of the futures to those mortals strong enough to handle it. She could not send all that she saw through the song, only a few paths. She could only hope that what she sent was going to be enough.
And now was the time where she would see if her actions had borne fruit.
* * * *
Sao Ban walked among the tables in the great chamber of Tourran court. The party was nearing its end, and the patrons were slowly paying their respects to their Queen before they retired for the night. Ban lowered a pitcher and poured some wine to one of the nobles, but his attention was on the young Queen. In some respect she was not really young; her soul had been bound to this plane for a long time, but to a god such as Ban even that long a time was nothing. The young Queen, the Eternal Soul, was accompanied by a man and a woman, and Ban kept
his eyes mostly on them. He had “nudged” the events so that the three had met sooner than they ordinarily would, following the prophecies of Vardun Con Aroch, the Eternal Soul’s first life. In many of his visions of the future the three met, and almost always they were crucial to the effort of saving this world.
But as Ban studied them, he couldn’t help but feel a touch of wrongness. Things were progressing in a way that he hadn’t anticipated. In none of the visions Vardun Con Aroch had seen was the Eternal Soul supposed to become a ruler, and Ban did not know what he had done to elicit such a change. He was hesitant to act again for fear of making things worse. Mother was so much better at this, Sao Ban thought inwardly. He could remember accompanying her to the mortal worlds and seeing how deftly she adjusted the paths of mortals with smallest of actions. Now, he found himself to be less than her equal.
For the hundredth time, he wondered if he should just interfere directly, but quickly he abandoned that thought. All of them had kept abiding by Mother’s rules even after her death. If he acted openly, Khalio would do the same, and only mortals would suffer. Ban didn’t even know if he was strong enough to oppose his brother directly, not if what Vanagandr had found out in the lower plane was true. Their brother had amassed a great amount of power, and Ban knew that they would need an entire pantheon with the entire Gods-well at their disposal to face him. In any case, the journal of Vardun Con Aroch had records of the futures in which gods did act openly against Khalio on Enosia, and those futures did not end well.
He turned his attention to the man standing next to the Eternal Soul, the strange warrior from a small moon that Ban had watched fall to the Arashan. He wore a different body now, having lost much of his power in the process, but Ban could still see the strange power in him. He still didn’t quite understand what it was that the man and his people had done—the process of strengthening their anima and their bodies was foreign to him—but Sao Ban remembered well the power that the man had once wielded. In many ways he had been equal to the gods themselves; not in all aspects, of course, and not even in most. In fact, he had equaled them in only one area: martial prowess. He had held such power that even some of Sao Ban’s siblings would’ve been envious. He did not have the eons of experience and skill that most gods possessed, but he had been powerful.