by Evan Currie
The odd trio made themselves scarce, leaving two cooling bodies behind in the process.
Life in a demon-controlled city was rarely just, but it did tend to be simple.
The trio made it out of the darkened alleyway and into the throngs of people just a few dozen feet away. If any of them had seen what had happened, no one wanted to get involved. That was about as expected. Seeing too much was dangerous in the city.
Jol laughed softly. Look what it got that “poor” overseer.
“You get into too much trouble, Jol,” Sindri told him gruffly as the three walked.
“I know,” the big man said glumly, humor vanishing as he slumped a little at the chastisement. “I’m sorry you guys got involved.”
“One of these days we won’t be able to save you,” Sindri continued, “and don’t expect the bitch to do it every time either. You’re a toy in her eyes. Sooner or later she’ll get bored with you.”
“Aw, leave him be, brother,” Brokkr put in. “Jol knows; he just can’t help himself. He still has that human pride.”
Jol winced at that, knowing that there was no denying it. Humans weren’t permitted pride in anything they did; it was one of the cardinal rules. Pride was the unforgivable sin for a human living under demonic rule. If you wanted to live, humility was the only avenue to pursue. He, however, just couldn’t do it. He was more powerful than many demons. His muscles were such that he could crush so many of them. How was he not supposed to be proud of that?
Demons were so sure of themselves, but they couldn’t deal with a human as big and powerful as he was.
Well, forget them. He would live his life, however long or short it might be, the way he chose. No one else would tell him what to do.
Sindri sighed, looking up at him.
“You’re doing it again, aren’t you?” the squat little man said, grumbling. “Rationalizing your faults. Jol, it will lead you to a bad end—and us with you, at the rate we’re going.”
That was the only thing that made Jol pause and consider for a moment.
He didn’t want to cause the brothers any hurt. They’d done so much for him over the years, from when he was a scrawny boy who barely looked evenly with the two short beings who’d saved him from a capricious demon. He knew the brothers weren’t human, not entirely so at the very least, but they’d never discussed just what they were and they’d never needed to.
They were as close as family. That was good enough.
“Sorry, Sin,” Jol said softly, a tone that most would have sworn couldn’t come from his bulky, muscled frame.
“Don’t apologize; just be better, Jol,” Sindri said, exasperated. “That’s all I ever ask. Be better than you are, even just a little. Do that enough times, and before long you’ll be better than us all, and that’s a goal worth pursuing. Now come on, we have work to do back at the shop.”
Jol nodded, and the trio made their way into the crowd until even their odd profile vanished into the complexity of the capital.
*****
“Fascinating.”
The first of the Triad stared at the world contemplatively, considering what it had just learned.
“Fascinating? Unbelievable, I would say,” the third commented. “Practically impossible to believe. One girl-child could not throw every calculation of the oracles into complete disarray like this.”
“They were gifted with free will,” the first said simply.
“Free will is a fine and wonderful thing,” the third grumbled, “but it means little without power to back it. You can choose that the universe turn to cheese, but that does not mean you have the power to make such a thing happen.”
The first looked slowly over at the third, a bemused expression coating its entire being.
“Turn the universe to cheese?” it asked, amused. “Where did you pick up an expression like that?”
“Never mind. I was making a point about free will and power. Let us stick to the topic.”
The first chuckled but gestured agreeably. “You are right, of course. Choosing to do something is different than actually doing it . . . yet this one appears to have done both. She put her will against the universe, and the universe bent in submission . . . if only barely.”
“I still say it is impossible,” the third grumbled.
“Yet it has happened”—the second of the Triad spoke up for the first time in the conversation—“and now we need to consider the ramifications.”
“Too little, too late,” the third pronounced. “We have no forces here to support her, and what’s left of humanity isn’t worth speaking of. If you want to reward the girl, I’ll kill her now so she can ascend and be done with it all.”
“Lay your will on her, and I will see you ended,” the first growled. “Do not steal from her the chance to be what she might become.”
“What she might become? Other than one of the circles once they finish securing this world and plane?” The third scoffed. “The best she might do now is die nobly before we seal this realm from the other side, and you know it. If she lives until after we seal the plane . . . pity on her soul, because the demons will have none.”
“That is not your decision to make,” the second said firmly. “As much as I agree with you on the truths, we do not make their choices for them.”
“Then this has been a wasted exercise.”
The first of the Triad was focused intently on something else entirely.
“Perhaps . . . not . . .” he said with deliberate slowness. “Look to this one and tell me what you see.”
“Another child?” the third snorted. “Is this really what we’ve come to? Dependent on children to . . .”
The third of the Triad trailed off, focusing more on the subject as the second did as well.
“Impossible,” the second muttered in shock. “How could we not have known a potential existed?”
“Perhaps something changed,” the first suggested snidely. “Our little girl is having a larger effect than imaginable. I move we give him a push.”
The second of the Triad hummed, considering, before finally nodding. “I agree.”
The third grimaced but finally shrugged. “There is no sense in arguing, I suppose. I still think that this is . . . a long shot, shall we say?”
“That is oftentimes the best way to describe our function. Almost as though on a wing and prayer, no? Push the boy. I will speak with the girl myself.”
“Agreed.”
“Agreed.”
*****
Ser’Goth looked over the carved face of the world set into the large table, markers showing that the long assignment to this world was approaching an end.
So why do I have a feeling of uncertainty all of a sudden?
She had climbed to her position by not ignoring such feelings, so Ser’Goth gestured violently to draw in the attendants who were waiting in the wings.
“Yes, my lady?” the first to arrive simpered as the rest lined up.
“Contact the lords. All of them,” she ordered. “I want to know of anything different in their regions. New uprisings, heroes of the people, whatever they may have noticed. Something . . . something has changed.”
“My lady?”
“Go!” she roared, sending them scattering and leaving her alone a moment later.
Ser’Goth planted her azure hands on the table and glared down at the map. Ever since that damn wave had struck down an entire division of the local lord’s forces, she’d had an itch she couldn’t scratch. It wasn’t one of the nice itches either. It was one telling her that a storm was coming . . . and for once, she wasn’t the one bringing the lightning.
Chapter 3
Elan closed the book, stretching slightly as she looked around the silent library of Avalon.
“Merlin,” she called out.
“Yes, child?” Merlin’s voice came back instantly, his ethereal form appearing as he spoke.
“Don’t call me that,” she grumbled.
Merlin just silently waited f
or her to say what she had called him for.
Elan finally sighed and rolled her eyes. “How many of the other redoubts are you still in contact with?”
“Ah, a good question,” Merlin said, “and one with a somewhat complicated answer. Simply speaking, other than a handful that were entirely destroyed, I am in contact with most. However, that contact is often extremely limited, largely consisting of system checks that mostly fail at every level other than being able to tell me such. I presume that you are more interested in functional depots, nexuses, and so forth?”
“Yes,” Elan sighed.
Sometimes when she wanted a straight response from Merlin, it was like trying to knock sense into Caleb’s thick skull. If he knew what she meant, why not just tell her what he knew she wanted to know? Elan closed her eyes. That line of thinking hurt, just a little.
“In total, I am in contact with forty-three surviving installations of varying degrees of utility,” Merlin answered, turning away from her. “I have been waiting for you to ask. Follow me.”
Elan frowned but clambered to her feet and rushed after him when Merlin proceeded to leave without looking in her direction. His pace was slow but steady, so she caught up quickly as he led her through the smooth, white corridors of Avalon.
“Why were you waiting?” she asked. “If you thought I should know, why not tell me?”
“There are many times many things you should know, child,” he told her, ignoring her irate glare at his back. “If I were to tell you all of them, we would likely never again see the sun.”
“But people are dying out there!”
“People are always dying,” Merlin said simply. “Nothing you do can stop that from happening; do not delude yourself. What you mean is that people are dying at demonic hands, and you feel that you might save some few of them.”
“Fine!” she said, exasperated. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” Merlin told her with a shrug. “It is an admirable sentiment, however hopeless in nature it is. If you had to choose, would you save one life now or many lives later?”
Elan started to blurt out her answer, then froze as she thought about what he’d said.
“Choose?” she asked quietly after a moment.
“Yes, choose. If you rush out now, you might save a life, some lives,” Merlin said casually. “One, ten, a hundred . . . However, if you prepare, if you plan, and if you are ready to act, then perhaps you save hundreds, thousands, or more. There is a time to act and a time to prepare for action. Learn to recognize the difference, child, and perhaps then I’ll call you by your name. Here we are.”
Elan, about to retort for his calling her a child again, froze and looked around the massive room they’d entered, awestruck by the immensity of it all.
“What is this place?”
“Central command,” Merlin answered before shrugging. “Or to be precise, one of many redundant backup facilities that could function as central command. The original command center was located in the capital city before the sickness brought the city down. This place, like that one, was a communications hub that allowed commanders to receive information and orders while being able to request reinforcements . . . when such was available.”
The dark room slowly lit up, section by section, somehow making it feel larger as Elan walked along behind Merlin in something of a daze.
They walked out on a catwalk that overlooked the room in all directions, a floating image of a ball in the center of a circular platform just ahead of them.
“What’s that?” Elan asked as they approached.
“That is the world on which we stand,” Merlin said simply, gesturing her forward as he stepped out of the way.
Elan hesitantly circled the floating ball, looking at brown and green and blue areas with incomprehension in her eyes. “I . . . I don’t understand.”
“If you claimed to, then you would be worse than a child,” Merlin snorted. “What you’re looking at is an image of the world as seen from approximately forty thousand miles away. We have lost almost all our remote imagers, but a few remain out beyond the reach of the demons’ abilities for now.”
There were so many things that he had just said that she was completely lost by, so Elan mostly decided to do what she commonly did with Merlin: largely ignore most of what he said and focus on what seemed more important, hoping that he would fill her in as needed on anything she overlooked. It was really the only way she could absorb even a fraction of what he kept throwing at her.
“This is . . . here?” she asked, trying to be sure.
“Yes.”
“So where are we then?”
Merlin reached forward and gestured with a flick of his hand, setting the ball spinning. Another gesture of his fingers, and it started growing, causing her to fall back a step as it took over most of the platform. It slowed to show a patch of blue that grew larger until a green dot was centered in it, and both continued to grow.
“This is the island you’ve named Atlantis,” Merlin said, not answering her question so much as redirecting it away from Avalon, “originally an unnamed research facility, long since reclaimed by the rising seas.”
Elan cocked her head. “The seas rose?”
“Are rising,” he corrected. “This world is slowly coming out of a deep cooling period that resulted from the massive exchanges between humans and demons at the end of the war. The ice and snow that had segregated water on the landmasses is melting and flowing out to the seas, and the water itself is heating and expanding. The seas are currently rising at a rate of approximately three-tenths of an inch per year and increasing.”
“Uh . . . how much is that?”
Merlin sighed, holding his thumb and forefinger up that far apart to show her.
“But that’s almost nothing!” Elan blurted.
Merlin laughed. “You think so, do you? Even a few years at that pace will change the face of the island you have made your own as storm surges push deeper inland and wipe out those plants that can’t adapt. On a larger scale, the shifting weight of the water as it moves into areas it previously hadn’t touched will actually move landmasses. A lesson, child: very tiny numbers spread over a large area will add up to very large numbers much faster than you could ever believe possible. That is not a concern for the moment, though it is one we will have to revisit in coming years if your new Atlantean community is to flourish here.”
“Okay?” Elan said hesitantly.
Merlin snapped his fingers, causing the ball to recede and begin spinning more slowly now as he pointed her to it.
“Right now, the lights you see are the answer to your previous question,” he told her. “Those are the facilities I still have contact with that remain operational enough to factor into any current considerations.”
“Um, okay?” Elan repeated herself, forcing her mind to focus on what little she understood. “So those lights are working redoubts?”
“Yes, they are what you refer to as redoubts.” Merlin sighed just slightly. “With functional computing power and full communications.”
“What about transport?”
“For that,” Merlin admitted, “we have somewhat less.”
He waved his hand again, and now the lights changed. Some to green, others to red, and a few to yellow.
“The green have full transport. All systems checks pass,” he explained. “Red sites are entirely unavailable. Yellow may or may not be functional. There are errors in the system checks, but nothing that specifically would cause failure. Even so, I would not visit those sites were I you. A malfunctioning transport system is not particularly pleasant to discover the hard way.”
Elan nodded absently, staring at the ball as she tried to get a sense of the scale of it all. She just couldn’t; it wasn’t something she could get her mind to accept.
“How . . . ?” She licked her lips, thinking. “How much . . . world is there?”
Merlin looked at her for a moment before finally admitting, �
�I do not know how to answer that in a way you could understand. You lack the basic understanding of the world, of large numbers needed to parse the information. On the scale of a human such as yourself, the world is . . . immense. In effect, at your current level of understanding, you could consider it unending. Give me a few years to educate you, however, and we could shrink it down to something far smaller.”
Elan frowned. “How do you shrink the world?”
“You do not shrink the world,” Merlin said simply. “You expand the mind observing it.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“You will.”
Elan wanted to complain about the double-talk he was using on her, but experience told her that the ethereal being wouldn’t be budged when he was like this. She sighed and tried to pull her mind back to the original line of thought she had been following.
“Food is limited on Atlantis,” she said. “The people, they can fish . . . and farm, but it isn’t enough, not really.”
Merlin looked at her for a moment, nodding slowly. “This is true. It will get better with time as they learn the best ways to leverage their environment. Humans are good at that. For now, however, you are correct.”
He then fell silent and waited to see where she was heading with that line of thought.
“Are there any places we could go for food, safe places?” she asked, looking at the map.
“Even Atlantis is not safe in the current climate,” Merlin cautioned her before conceding a little. “However, there are places with lower detected densities of demons. Properly equipped hunting groups could likely find food there.”
“Okay, good,” she said. “I’ll speak with Simone . . . I . . .”
She hesitated, looking at the ball as it floated there in front of her, trying to understand what it represented. She knew what he said it meant, but deep down Elan realized that it made no sense to her. How could she be on a ball, no matter how large? Was something holding it up? It seemed to be floating there in the room, but what did that say of the real world?
It was all too confusing.
Elan sighed, turning away.
“Thank you, Merlin,” she said. “I . . . I think I have to go now.”