The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  “We shall have to find you something suitable, then.” He strode off across the open chamber. “Tell me what has happened in my absence.”

  They trailed behind him, dragging hesitation with their steps. He sensed their reticence to explain.

  A look over his shoulder commanded their attention. “Never fear to speak the truth to me.”

  The Adepts exchanged a voluminous look. “It has been chaos, my lord,” Cian admitted, and they proceeded to tell him all.

  Darshan walked the passageways beneath the acropolis with Ean’s pattern of consequence hovering in his thoughts. The pattern’s whorls and tangles superimposed themselves upon the rough walls and floor, such that he might’ve been treading upon the pattern itself with each step.

  Ean believed that Darshan played an integral role in this pattern. The prince held this idea at the forefront of his thoughts most of the time—less of insistence than of faith, trust...a solid belief in his interpretation of the outcomes he was seeing.

  Through their binding, Darshan often shared Ean’s mind as a silent onlooker to the prince’s thoughts and choices. Seeing Ean’s responses helped him better understand humanity...and helped him find his own.

  Ironically, this was the type of connection he’d hoped to share with Kjieran. It wasn’t lost on him that had he acted upon his own instincts instead of letting Dore Madden guide him, the result would’ve been very different.

  Now Kjieran watched through Darshan’s eyes in every moment, observed his choices, stood privy to his thoughts. Darshan was doing all of this for Kjieran. He would that he saw and understood.

  After finding clothing for his new assistants, Darshan donned a tailored white coat that flowed long to his toes, another of the many garments Pelas had procured for him over the years. The patterns stitched into the fine, soft wool collected elae to gild the fabric in iridescence. The effect of its presentation suited his purposes that day, if not his mood.

  Having learned what had happened in his absence, Darshan churned a wide wake of turbulence as he strode the underground corridor, deep in thought. His two assistants walked close to either side of him. Their thoughts resonated strongly of purpose.

  “It’s the next door, my lord,” Cian advised.

  Darshan had learned that the dark-haired truthreader hailed from the Avataren city of Kell Ashkelan and was versed in physics and astronomy. But Cian’s loudly spoken thoughts confessed a truth his tongue would never have shared: that he would rather have served the Prophet Bethamin than remain a baddha of Avatar, bound and enslaved, considered subhuman, beneath even the pigs.

  For an instant, this idea struck Darshan with new resonance.

  How malleable, the human concept of reality, and how bafflingly disassociated it appeared to be from scientific truth.

  In Chaos, there was what was and what wasn’t. It was until he and his brothers unmade it; whereupon, it wasn’t. These were indisputable truths.

  Yet reality to these mortals appeared to be whatever convenient or facilitating factor most served society’s purposes. What everyone agreed...that was what was real to humankind, regardless of logic or science, even lacking the least evidential proof.

  Darshan wasn’t sure why this understanding struck him newly in that moment, but it seemed appropriate to his purposes in the now.

  Iron bound the door Cian had pointed out to him, but when Darshan reached it, he noted that the patterns warding the door were far more binding than metal. He seared both wards and door from the aether and strode through the vapors of their disintegration.

  The long chamber beyond smelled faintly of sulfur dioxide and more strongly of unwashed men. A few were getting to their feet as he entered.

  Despair made the chamber’s air fetid. Anguish stained the currents draining sluggishly out of the room. Few of the Adepts languishing there even recognized him, and those who did seemed to believe him a dream.

  Darshan’s gaze darkened measurably at their pitiable state.

  “Take them into the light,” he commanded his assistants. “Care for their needs. Ready them for my address.”

  “Your will, my lord,” Reide and Cian murmured together.

  As his assistants moved to help the truthreaders who’d been the Prophet’s Marquiin, the man who’d been the Prophet tore the fabric of the world and stepped into Shadow.

  If the scene beneath the acropolis had emulsified his compassion with a simmering anger, the scene in the basilica brought it to a perilous seethe.

  “This plague upon your city is a blessing!” The Ascendant’s words echoed in the basilica as Darshan stepped out of Shadow onto a balcony overlooking the east transept.

  The Ascendant was wearing robes sewn of gilded thread and was impudently orating beneath the bronze baldaquin where Darshan had addressed his chosen, back when he was playing the role of the Prophet.

  The Ascendant, in contrast, was addressing a hefty crowd of Tambarré’s well-dressed elite, using a carefully schooled tone of sanctimonious rebuke.

  “In the words of Our Prophet Most High:” and he read from The Book of Bethamin, held in his open palms, “‘Man achieves his highest expression of purpose in death. In this transition, he becomes expression, becomes his end and his beginning; his truth, transcending; that which cannot be kenned while corporeal, but which unfolds to its fullest percipient oneness in the moment of unmaking, wherein all infinity ceases while existing infinitely.’”

  The Ascendant returned a scrutinizing gaze to the crowd. “This blessing of plague has been cast upon us by our Prophet that we might know enlightenment! You who are so terrified to ascend—shame be upon you!” He reproached the crowd with an excoriating stare. “Divest thyselves of this fear, or else of the trappings of pride! Humble thyselves, that he and thee might know Our Fair Lord Bethamin’s forgiveness for your cowardice!”

  Two Ascendants rolled out a pair of gilded chests with coin slots in the top, while four others came forth carrying wide, shallow bowls full of blue-glass amulets. The people began lining up before the gilded boxes, and soon the rhythmic chink of gold could be heard as they ‘humbled’ themselves and received their protective nazar.

  It should not have surprised Darshan to find Dore Madden selling protection from a plague of his own making.

  In that moment, Darshan saw the vast panorama of his personal pattern of consequence unfurling before him, a tapestry woven of choices and their multi-faceted ramifications, each tendril curling into disharmony and oblivion.

  It hardly mattered that he’d been misled—nay, purposefully deceived—when he’d first entered the Realms of Light. He had chosen the wrong advisors. Could he be startled, then, when they’d led him astray?

  He reflected ironically on how often he’d heard Shail admonish him that if he meant to control a man, he must simply lie to him; yet it had never occurred to him to imagine that his brother had even then been applying the same stratagem to their own interchanges.

  He’d underestimated Shail’s capacity for ignobility and greatly overestimated his brother’s innate sense of honor. He’d been imagining that Shail harbored the same values which he himself held to. He had failed utterly to gaze through the lens of Shail’s viewpoint.

  Well...he wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Darshan stepped off the balcony and descended into his temple on steps of air. He let his voice be heard from the highest rafters to the lowest levels of the sacristy.

  “WHAT IS THIS PLAGUE I AM MEANT TO HAVE WROUGHT?”

  The words reverberated through the temple, rattled the windows, spilled dust from the stones and sent the people into a fright. Shock and awe flooded the currents, with a strong thread of dismay woven between them.

  Darshan followed that singular thread back to its owner, whereupon his gaze found Dore Madden standing in the west transept, gaping at him.

  Loud and fervent whispering filled in the echo of Darshan’s fading words, making a susurrant hymn of the Prophet is back!

 
Acolytes and Ascendants came flooding into the nave through every ingress.

  Darshan felt hundreds of eyes suddenly seeking him, hundreds of minds unknowingly reaching for the touch of his. He hadn’t realized the effect he’d been creating on these mortals over the years. Ean would’ve admonished him that it was an unforgivable violation of the First Law.

  The Ascendant who’d been speaking exited the baldaquin hastily, looking flushed. He threw up his arms in praise, shouting, “Our blessed Prophet returns!” But his voice sounded strained, and a sheen of sweat glossed his bald head. Darshan could smell his fear from the far end of the transept.

  Across the way, Dore Madden was running towards him in a shuffling gait.

  Darshan strode through the astonished crowd, who quickly parted for his passing.

  “Kneel before the Prophet, you wretches!” the Ascendant spat while struggling with his own robes to find said position.

  Everywhere in the temple, his followers began prostrating themselves, but the elite of Tambarré were apparently too shocked to do much beyond stare. Darshan granted it was a rare day they saw a man descend on steps of air, but it was hardly a feat warranting such open-mouthed stupefaction.

  He reached the kneeling Ascendant a heartbeat before Dore Madden came to a skidding halt on the man’s other side. “My lord,” the wielder panted, “you must let me explain—”

  Ignoring Dore utterly, Darshan raised his hands to Tambarré’s elite.

  “You are forgiven.” His voice resonated through the temple, bounced off the vaulted ceiling and fell upon them in absolving waves.

  He might’ve legitimately denied any knowledge of Dore’s eidola plague, which he’d already kenned much of from observing the currents. Yet, if Dore Madden worked a curse in his name, the act became his, whether or not he had any knowledge of it. Such was the providence of gods.

  “I am removing the plague from your shores,” Darshan told them resoundingly. “Return to your homes. Let it be known that the city’s excesses are forgiven.”

  “But-but my lord,” Dore stammered in a low whine, “with the efforts we’ve made to attend to the sick and needy, our coffers are low—”

  The denizens of Tambarré were still standing there, gaping at him.

  “GO!” Darshan thundered.

  The people fled.

  Darshan turned to inspect Dore coldly.

  The wielder occupied a black and necrotic stain on his personal tapestry. He was the canker rot that eats up the plant from within.

  Dore stood immersed in a tortoise-shell of patterns—the fifth strand interwoven with the fourth in plates that formed a formidable shield. Darshan’s power might’ve eaten through that shield in the blink of an eye. Yet, he saw that Dore Madden was as much his creation as the Prophet Bethamin had been Dore’s. They had molded each other mutually through their association.

  “Five minutes from now,” Darshan said to the duplicitous wielder, his voice softly ominous and harmonic of annihilation, “this basilica and everyone remaining in it will be ashes.”

  Dore stared at him for the flicker of a pink tongue.

  Then he spun on his heel and ran.

  As the wielder’s pounding footsteps were receding, Darshan looked to his followers, lifted his arms and commanded, “Rise.”

  The multitude of remaining Ascendants and acolytes got hesitantly to their feet. Fear deluged the currents. Their thoughts were trembling. All had heard him proclaim the basilica’s fate.

  Darshan looked with new eyes upon these men who had flocked to his temple, and he noted now a difference between those like Cian and Reide, who’d chosen to serve him because they saw in him a divine truth, and those who parasitically thrived on his power; those rather morbid souls who were attracted to the Prophet’s doctrine—purposeless souls, in fact.

  It made sense to him that those with an innate sense of their own purpose, like Kjieran, would have railed against his teachings, while those who could not conceive of their own spiritual immortality would have congregated to them.

  Again, he saw where his failure to apply the First Law had resulted in a consequence he would not have deliberately intended.

  Darshan cast his awareness through the hundreds standing in silence before him. He listened to their thoughts. He tasted of their minds, and in so doing, he sorted the wheat from the chaff.

  Directly into the minds of those he deemed worth saving, he commanded, If you would serve me of your own free will, kneel.

  They fell to their knees with muted gasps.

  He spoke into their minds, You have been chosen. Go and wash yourselves. Wait in the refectory for my summons. Think hard upon your actions, and upon mine here today. If you do these things, you will be safe from my wrath. Go now.”

  The men rose and hurried away, weaving between the others who’d remained standing.

  True to expectation, those others looked around at their departing brethren with disdainful smiles hinting of malice.

  These men had reveled in inflicting harm in his name. They’d never believed in his doctrine; it had merely provided a convenient means of terrorizing others. Now, as they watched those who were rushing off, they thought themselves chosen and the rest discarded.

  When the first group had all safely departed, Darshan cast his gaze across the remainder and said, his voice rumbling, “You have been found wanting.”

  It took a few seconds for the men to understand. Then their malice found new expression in snarls and protests.

  Darshan turned his back on them and strode towards the exit. His every footfall bled deyjiin into the stones, such that a violet-silver wake spread rapidly behind him, disintegrating the marble floor. Within moments, waterfalls of ash were spilling into the basilica’s underlayers.

  The acidic men behind him started shouting.

  Darshan let deyjiin flow from his form as heat from the sun. Violet-silver clouds billowed out to suffuse the nave. Screams soon accompanied the growing roar of destruction.

  Perhaps some of the men would escape. Most would not. A watching Kjieran whispered into his thoughts, It is in Cephrael’s hands now whether they live or perish.

  As the walls of his basilica turned to sand around him, Darshan looked down his personal path of consequence to inspect his newest decisions.

  His choices were less about right and wrong than about creating the future—as much as he could predict the tumbling ramifications of choice and chance—in order to sketch the pattern he desired.

  Previously, he’d paid little heed to the designs his actions had drawn or were drawing of the future. He hailed from the timelessness of Chaos, and this concept of architecting one’s future had been foreign to him.

  But he’d come to understand that he was operating now within the Realms of Light, where the Laws of Patterning offered the secrets by which that universe had been constructed. Henceforth, he would assiduously apply the First Law and know the effect he intended to create.

  Darshan strode through the cascade of rainbow silica that had once been the basilica’s rose window and stood on the molting steps, feeling the kinesis of deconstruction in his core, allowing himself a moment of resonance in that sacred echo of elemental unmaking, which was itself a harmonic of the static out of which all creation began. In the ultimate instant of ending, as in the instant of beginning, there existed an eternal harmony.

  Then, focusing his will anew, he cast a pulse of power.

  The basilica erupted in a mushroom cloud of ash that roared into the heavens. A miles-high hole opened in the clouds directly above the acropolis. The thunder of destruction echoed through the land.

  Darshan took several long steps and flung himself off the mountain.

  He fell through billowing ash, tasting its char on the tides of the fifth. Lightning flashed deep within the remaining storm, reacting to the currents of power charging the mountaintop. Thunder rumbled, but the roar of the collapsing temples rumbled louder still.

  Darshan landed in darkne
ss. Overhead, the storm churned with angry lightning, flashing faintly green. He cast forth his mind—claiming Absolute Being, in Ean’s vernacular, or framing starpoints in Rafael’s—and perceived.

  In the near distance, anguish flooded the currents on a tarry sludge: eidola in conversion. A mile or two beyond these, many of the creatures had collected. He sensed others more distantly.

  Darshan reached for the thread of elae that bound them to life....

  What he discovered gave him pause. These eidola were not linked to him; nor were the many doomed souls undergoing conversion.

  He found this surprising but not particularly relevant. Their end was near.

  Darshan used the pattern of the closest eidola to seek others of its same construction. He cast his starpoints far and permeated throughout...all the way to the walls of Tambarré; then farther still, spearing across the Saldarian moors, stabbing through the Dhahari...

  His attention stretched...lengthened...until he found the others he’d initially perceived. They were too far away for him to efface them.

  Withdrawing his starpoints back to focus around those eidola closer to him, Darshan spent the space of an exhaled breath studying the living souls wallowing in conversion. All were beyond the point of saving.

  Other sparks walked among those tides of darkness, but he found the minds of these living souls, as he had with many of those in his temple, sorely wanting.

  He formulated his intent.

  The eidola who had collected nearby began vanishing from his awareness—crossing a node, he suspected. Dore Madden was no doubt salvaging what he could of his army.

  Darshan inhaled his power.

  Then he razed the world.

  Living men became ash. Trees evaporated. Ruins blew into sand. The storm clouds vaporized beneath a sheering wave of negative polarity.

  Darshan let his awareness float along the unfurling edge of destruction, watching all things vanish beneath his will, cleansing Dore Madden’s stain from his domain... whereupon he perceived a shiny pebble huddling against his wave of unmaking and astonishingly resisting it.

  This mind, which clutched desperately to life, Darshan found worthy.