Hades had gone pale as Janus had been speaking. What most people know of my father is that he could see into the past and the future at the same time. And on top of that, he can manipulate time a million times more adeptly than the Tempus. I knew the Tempus could unmake people, remove them from the timestream, but my father could do all that and much, much worse. This was a side of him I’d never seen before. My father had always come across as an adventurer, a being who wanted to see everything, who possessed a nearly child-like enthusiasm for all the periods in history. The look in his eyes right now, though, told me why Orcus and Hades were starting to sweat.
If pushed, my father could literally unmake history.
“I will restore him,” Hades said. I felt as if I suddenly had weight again. I glanced down at myself, happy to see I was solid again. I flexed the fingers of my right hand, surprised at how novel it felt to have physical form again, even though I’d only been a ghost for a few minutes. The stump of my left arm was the same as I remembered it; Hades had restored it to the exact point it had been in the regrowth process.
My father glowered at the lord of the underworld. “Time and tide, Hades, give the boy back both his arms.” Hades gave a reluctant bob of his head, and my arm reappeared, whole and unmarred. The sudden feeling of balance being restored to me was incredible. I flexed my fingers and started to smile when anti-apertus energy brands sizzled onto my new flesh, and I winced. My father gave a disapproving look at the brands but did not comment on them. He raised his eyebrows to Hades.
Hades spoke as if the smell of burning Vincent wasn’t permeating the air. “His body has been restored. I cannot return the possessions he had on his person, though.” I felt at my pocket and realized my switchblade and the soul crystal were missing.
“Understandable,” my father said. “And?”
Hades sighed. “And while he is on this quest, he will not tire or need rest. But I can’t give him back what Croatoan stole.”
My father’s posture relaxed as he settled back in his chair. “Nor did I expect you to. He and I will deal with that in time. Orcus, you will reset the clock to give Vincent his full sixteen hours. It is not fair to take him away from his quest and charge him time for this conversation. I will escort him back to the realm of the living, and he can continue from there. I have every certainty that in sixteen hours, he will be back here with his quarry. When that happens, you will restore him to the realm of the living, devoid of any debts to you, and free to go about his life. Are we clear on these points?”
The other gods averted their eyes and nodded. My father got to his feet and smiled, all traces of the darkness gone from his face. A portal appeared to his left. “Splendid. The table will return to its proper time once you both stand up from it. Now then, Vincent, come with me.”
I followed my father through the portal into a completely empty room. “So,” I asked as I looked around. “You live in an empty white box?” The light around my father flickered, and for a second, I saw a photo of my mom and me on the wall. It was replaced by a photo of Petra and me. Then it was a blank wall again. “Okay, Dad, what’s up with the world shifting around you?”
“Your temporal senses are finally awake,” he said with a grin. “I can see through time, both forward and backward, you know that. Now you’re getting a feeling for what the world looks like to me. Over the years, I have hung dozens of different photos in that exact spot.” He pointed to the blank space on the wall, which flickered again and showed a photo of my mom and dad sitting on the couch, Mom very pregnant. “And to my eyes, those pictures are constantly shifting through the past, present, and future.”
I glanced around the otherwise empty room. “So how’s that work then? You just have an empty room and then somehow use furniture, decorations, and whatnot from the past or future as you need?”
“Something like that.” My father grinned and waved his hand. In front of us, a series of images appeared, as if on a carousel, hovering in the air. My father gestured with his hand, spinning the carousel to the right. I watched images of living rooms, dens, kitchens, parlors, and game rooms from all times in history spin past. I saw one with wood-paneled walls, a pub-style dart board, and billiard table; another had a pizza parlor booth and a few dozen arcade games, Mortal Kombat II prominent among them; a third had a 1950s diner feel to it, with checkered counters and a Queen of Hearts pinball machine.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Every place I’ve ever lived, or will live,” he replied. “Past or future, Vincent?”
“Future,” I said without hesitating.
My father grinned and spun the carousel faster, then snapped his hand forward and the images stopped. We were looking at a picture of a game room, with neon signs on the walls and leather chairs. I didn’t get to take in much more than that before my father said, “That’ll do nicely,” and then tapped on the image. Immediately, we were standing in the room. It wasn’t like we’d been sucked into the picture, rather it was like the photo grew out around us. A plush blue carpet bloomed under my feet, a leather couch spawned next to me, and a glass coffee table grew out between us. My father took a seat in the recliner, nodding approvingly at the monster ballads coming through the speakers that had materialized in the ceiling. To our side, a twenty-foot-square area had been roped off, and a VR headset and gloves sat on a pedestal within. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to the couch.
As I sat down, a robotic arm popped out of the side of the couch and handed me a cold Pepsi. “Dad,” I said, accepting the drink, “I…” I trailed off. I had no idea where to start.
As if reading my thoughts, Janus smiled and said, “Let’s start at the beginning, Vincent. If I’m right, you’ve got two or three trains of thought barreling through your mind right now, and it’s just a matter of which one’s going to get through the tunnel first. For starters, you’ve got the problem of Croatoan. You’re likely also frustrated or angry with me because of the bargain I made with the Tempus, and you’re worried because the clock is ticking and we’re sitting here having sodas.” He said that last bit as a robotic arm appeared from behind his chair and handed him his own Pepsi.
“That about sums it up, yeah.”
“Don’t worry about time. I know you’ve been outside of time before with the Tempus, and right now, we’re outside of outside. Time doesn’t pass here. Take a moment. Compose yourself. Ask your questions.”
I took a swig of Pepsi and closed my eyes, letting out a breath and a whole bunch of tension along with it. I took a second to put my thoughts in order, trying to figure out where to start. I figured learning more about my temporal powers was a good place to begin.
“How do you get outside of time in the first place? How does that work? And then how do you go outside even that?”
My father smiled. “You know, I think this is the perfect opportunity to test out that Oculus Rift 5 that’s sitting over there. Come on.”
We got up and went into the roped off area, where my father helped me strap on the headset. It was lighter than I expected, and as the display snapped on in my eyes, the detail was crisp. I was looking at the game room.
“You have a game of your game room?” I asked.
“The Rift 5 can do both virtual and augmented reality,” my father replied as he stepped into my field of vision. “Now, to your question. Think about it like this. Time flows along a given path, like a river.” He gestured, and in my lenses, a river of glowing blue energy shimmered from left to right. A moment later, a rock appeared in the center of the river. Not big enough to block it completely, but big enough that it wasn’t just washed away. “If a rock or some other obstruction is placed in the river, what happens?”
“The water continues to flow around it.”
“Exactly. Think of being outside of time like that. Look at the bug on that rock.” A praying mantis app
eared on the rock, its emerald carapace gleaming in the virtual sunlight. The insect stalked about the rock as if looking for food. My father continued, “On the rock, you don’t drown in the river, heck, you don’t even get wet. You are outside of the river. The Chroniclers’ Citadel is like that rock.”
“Then where are we?”
“We are above the river.” And as if to reinforce this, the image in my lenses zoomed out, causing me to sway before I caught myself. “We are a bird in the sky looking down on that river. We don’t need to ever touch it if we don’t want to.” I turned my head left and right, and saw that I was, in fact, a bird, gliding along an air current.
“But shouldn’t that impede us, somehow?” I asked. “Like, light and sound need to be able to travel in order for us to see and speak to one another. Time has to be passing at some rate.”
“That part, Vincent, is magic. By the laws of physics that humans understand, the ones you’re trying to apply, you’re right, we physically shouldn’t be able to have this conversation. But we’re deities with the domain of time. Which means we can bend or break the rules. In this case, our little pocket of outside-ness has its own timestream. One that only exists here, independent of that one down there. It allows things like sound waves and light particles to move so that we can converse, but we don’t age here, nor do we impact events down there. We’re completely isolated.” My shoulders slumped in relief. “Feel better, now?”
“Knowing that I can actually relax for a bit? Yes. I haven’t had time to think since this whole thing started. But I have to know, how do you actually get outside of time? I mean, I understand what you just told me, but how do you do it?”
“The Tempus and his Chroniclers have ways of manipulating time’s flow,” my father said. “They do it with science that, honestly, I don’t understand and don’t have any desire to.”
“You’re not curious about how they do it?”
“When you microwave popcorn, Vincent, do you stop to learn all the physics behind that? No. You put a bag in the magic box, press a few buttons, and about two minutes later, you get a snack. The outcome is what matters. Same applies here. I know what the Tempus and his lot are capable of, so the hows aren’t as big of a concern to me. You and I, though, operate differently. Time has to obey our commands. It’s harder for you, because you’re half-human. You can’t affect time on the same scale that I can, but you’re still more than capable. Here, let me show you.”
I removed the VR headset and we stepped back over to the couch, where my father accepted another can of Pepsi from the robot arm. “Watch.” He popped open the can and inverted it. I felt a surge of tachyon bending around me, and all the color fled from the world, save for an aura of blue energy around my father’s hands. I glanced around and saw that color was still in the room off to my right, but it was as if the swath of the world my father and I were currently in had been redone in gray scale. The Pepsi poured onto the floor, spilling, but there was no sound as it did so. My father’s eyes met mine, and he held up a finger. The last few drops of the soda hit the floor and then the tachyon distortion was gone, and the world was in color again.
My father held the empty soda can and very deliberately looked down at the ground.
Which was completely dry.
No soda stain, no splatter on his boots, nothing to indicate that anything had been there.
I blinked. “So where’d it go?”
“When you take something outside time, Vincent,” he said, “you’re preventing it from impacting whatever timestream you’re inhabiting. That soda I spilled doesn’t exist here. It’s gone. It’s outside our timestream, outside all timestreams. It exists only in a temporal vacuum that I created, and have no intention to return to.”
“So it’s a disposable timestream?” I asked, dumbfounded.
My father smiled. “That’s not a bad way to view it. That soda is gone. It doesn’t exist here, or anywhere or anywhen else. I saw your eyes so I know you felt it when I distorted time. That’s how we do it. We bend, shape, twist, whatever word you want to use, we do that to time, and time has to obey us.”
I let that sink in. There were possibilities here that were staggering. I wanted to think about them, to talk more, to try bending time myself, but every time I did, all I could see was Croatoan. I ground my teeth. It had been so long since I’d seen my father, and all sorts of emotions were ripping through me at once. I wanted to just hang out with him, play some pinball or some video games, talk to him about what had happened to Commander Courageous, and yet the only thing my mind could lock on to was getting out of Tartarus.
“Dad, this is amazing, and I want to talk to you more about this—”
“But you’re on a mission and that’s all you can focus on right now.” He chuckled. “So much like your mother. All right, Vincent, I’m guessing you have a lot of questions. Let’s get to work on answering them.”
“Okay. Let’s start with Croatoan, and I’ll just ask straight out. Do I beat him?”
My father frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Dad,” I said. “Seriously, now is not the time for jokes. You can see into the past and the future simultaneously. It should be a cakewalk for you to tell me what’s going to happen.”
My father took a long drink from his own Pepsi before he replied. “If you were anyone else, Vincent, if you were anything else, that would be absolutely correct. However, you are a god with the domain of time. That means that time has to adapt to what we do.”
I nodded. “The Tempus told me something similar not too long ago. He said that time would adjust its path to accommodate my actions.”
“Precisely. What that means, son, is I can’t see exactly what’s going to happen in your life. I can see general possibilities, but not certainties. There are many potential futures for you that I can see, things like you’ll stay in Boston for most of your life, that you’ll likely marry Petra someday.”
“Dad, please, spoilers.”
My father smiled. “I doubt either of those is much of a spoiler, Vincent. What I’m saying is I can see generalities. You and Petra will likely be wed, but there are literally thousands of different paths that may take, and none of them is set in stone. Until you decide what to do, your future will remain in a state of flux, and time will be clouded around you.” My father’s voice became somber. “There are just as many possibilities I can see where you die before you get married. Or where you decide to be friends instead. Your nature clouds what I can see of your future, and it impacts people you’re close to, as well. I can’t follow Petra’s lines into the future because once she intersects with you, she becomes just as hazy.”
I rubbed my chin. “Recently, I learned how to use tachyon to control my Glimpses, letting me see a short distance into the future. See the possible outcomes.”
“And I can see those outcomes, too, but, until you decide something, they’re just possibilities. I can’t see how you defeat Croatoan, or even if you do.”
“So much for this being simple. Can I look forward in time? See what I’ll do and then modify my plans if things don’t go the way I want?”
My father considered this. “You can to a point. The problem is that you’re half human. Your human brain can’t handle the amount of input that would require. That’s why I asked the Tempus to block your temporal senses in the first place. The amount of raw stimulus coming from both directions of time would be so overwhelming you’d give yourself an aneurism. Now that you’re learning to control it, you can look a short distance into the future safely, but I wouldn’t try looking forward much more than an hour or two.”
“Okay, so that’s out. Damn.” I took another drink of Pepsi. Something felt… off. I was having a hard time pinpointing it. Rubbing my chin, I said, “Hades said something about Croatoan stealing something from me.”
“Croa
toan ripped your heart out, likely to gain some of your power.” My stomach tightened. That little fucker had stolen some of my power? My father grinned mischievously. “He’s in for a bit of a surprise, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Stealing another being’s heart is an old trick, one that goes back even before the Olympians. The idea is that you take another person’s heart and you gain all their powers. It works because a person’s essence resides in the heart, it’s why when we say you’ve given someone your heart, it’s such a powerful statement. A normal human, or a normal deity for that matter, has their essence stored in their heart. When they die, their essence leaves the body, becomes what we’d call the soul. But you, you’re a half-deity, and half-deities have two essences. In your case, one human, one divine. Croatoan didn’t know to look for more than one. From what I’ve seen of his life, he’s never encountered anyone like you before. So he found a piece of your essence, but not all of it.”
“What can he do with my essence?”
“Your essence contains your powers, remember? He’ll have access to the apertus energy you were blessed with and temporal manipulation. But because he doesn’t have the whole thing, what he can do will be erratic.”
“Which half does he have?”
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