Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle)

by Siana, Patrick

  Without warning he was thrust from the golden, etheric tunnel. A great force compressed him and he felt the density of his body once more. He found himself on one knee in a sycamore grove. He pushed himself up from the carpet of lichen from which the roots of the towering trees sprouted.

  The ground had a slight downward pitch and he followed it, hoping to find low ground, and his bearings. He cleared the grove in some fifty odd paces and stepped from the tree line and onto the parapets of a black stoned keep. He hazarded a look back to the sycamore grove, which sprouted directly out of a tower, half expecting it to have disappeared, but it remained.

  The keep had soft lines, its curtain walls and ramparts made from round and arcing worked stones. The design was pleasing to the eye and was a stark contrast to the angular, utilitarian designs of the castles of Agia. He glanced over the walls and saw a rugged surf beating against the base of the structure, but he couldn’t see far into the sea, for a dense fog encircled the keep in all directions. He decided that he was glad he didn’t come to the Wandering Isle by way of boat.

  He turned from the tower wall. He couldn’t tell what time of the day it was as the sky was a uniform grey with no bright spot to indicate the location of the sun. He made his way down the parapets in the twilight, stealing toward the central tower of the keep which was encircled by a wide walkway. A smear of yellow light cut the gloom in the distance. As he neared it he saw that it emanated from a doorway that stood ajar.

  He approached the blonde, smooth wood of the door and paused. This is the passage home, he told himself, you’ve made it. Despite this mantra, fear quickened his pulse. He had spent so long wishing for the day that he would reach the isle that he hadn’t given much thought to what he would find or what he would do once he reached it.

  He pushed the door open.

  Elias peered into a neatly appointed circular chamber lined with curved bookshelves and a large scroll rack against the far wall by the window. A man with skin black as obsidian and not a hair on his head turned from the open window. He greeted Elias with a warm, toothy grin.

  “Welcome to the Wandering Isle,” he said.

  “My name is Elias Duana. I have come here with the hopes of finding my way home.”

  “Wherever your home is, you are far from it, Elias Duana.”

  Elias took a tentative step through the doorway. “You are a time mage? Can you help me?”

  The other man padded across the floor and stopped before a mechanical apparatus that stood waist-high. Elias’s eyes lingered for a beat on the machine. It featured a crystal globe as wide around as a dinner platter at its center which was surrounded by a series of silver plates etched with numeric and runic scripts.

  “I am the last time mage. At least I was.”

  “I don’t want to appear rude, but can you help me? I am running short on time.”

  The time mage smiled, his teeth white as bone against the coal-black of his skin. “We are outside time. Time is finally on your side.”

  Elias made his way to stand opposite the time mage on the other side of the strange machine. His careful, cautious steps took him across a series of metal rings set into the floor, not unlike those that encircled the crystal globe of the machine. “We are completely outside of the flow of time?”

  “Utterly. Were the portal that took you here still open and were you to go back through it, you would find yourself right back where you were, at the exact moment that you left.”

  Elias relaxed a little, but he still felt ill at ease. At least that meant that he could go back for Teah—providing he could reopen the portal. “Are you alone here?”

  “I receive the rare visitor, but yes.”

  “You are the guardian of this place?”

  “I am.”

  Elias considered the man before him. His bearing reminded him of his father. He had a leonine aspect, both in his manner and in the frank way he made eye contact. And, like Padraic, he wasn’t one to waste words. Elias thought it must be a terrible and lonely existence living outside time, alone in a place between worlds.

  The time mage must have seen something in Elias’s expression, or else was a mind reader for he said, “Do not pity me, youngling. I’ve been better rewarded than most of my fellows for breaking the laws of nature.”

  “Is it true, then? Have all the time mages gone mad?”

  “It’s not untrue. Traveling through time is complicated, particularly into the past, as you’ve learned. I, fortunately, discovered in part why this is so, and it is how I won stewardship over this place.”

  Elias met his unblinking gaze. “Will you help me?”

  The other exhaled through his nose in a gesture than was not quite a sigh. “There’s a lagoon outside the keep where we can catch some salmon or bass for supper. I hope you like fish. It’s the only meat the isle has to offer.”

  The mage’s roundabout answers were beginning to fray on Elias’s already taxed nerves. “Good God, man, the world is on the brink of ruin. Will you help me?”

  The mage’s eyes flashed and an aura of profound power sprung up around him, which Elias could sense, arcane sight or not. “There are many worlds, boy, and a great many of them are on the brink of destruction, and a great many are not. Who are they that get to decide if they rise or fall? The answer to your question, if you require it spoken in plain words that you cannot help but understand, is that I haven’t decided if I’m to help you or not. I need to learn what kind of man you are first. And so we go fishing. Now grab that bucket by the door.”

  Elias complied without comment and then turned to face the time mage. “At least tell me your name.”

  “Rasen Motyl.”

  Rasen led him across the circular walkway in the half-light and then down a spiral staircase. From there an arcing pathway led to a gate of wrought-iron that curved to match the slope of the rounded barbican. In fact, thought Elias, everything about the keep was rounded or circular. He thought of the design of the central keep at Lucerne, how it created the spellform that had helped him defeat Sarad Mirengi. His mind went to the spellform that had taken him here.

  “This entire keep is designed like a spellform, is it not?” asked Elias. “Not unlike the one that created the portal that took me here.”

  Rasen cast him a sidelong look. “You are shrewd, I’ll give you that. Yet that is not a quality I always hold in the highest esteem. After all, your rival in reshaping the timelines is shrewd as well, and I don’t care much for him.”

  Elias tried not to trip over his own feet. “You know Mordum?”

  “I know a little of him, yes—and you.”

  Who was this man, Elias wondered, and what were the extents of his powers? “But how?”

  “I can see many things from here.” Rasen led him down a circuitous pathway that descended toward a rocky beach that sank into a crescent-shaped lagoon. “Here, watch your step. The scree is loose. Wouldn’t want you to break an ankle.”

  Elias bit his tongue and followed Rasen’s advice. It had become eminently clear that the time mage was going to enlighten him at his own pace, if at all. With this realization a wintry bloom of fear flowered in his bosom. If Rasen deemed him unworthy of passage back into the flow of time what was his fate to be? Would he be destined to while away eternity on the Wandering Isle with the tight-lipped monk until the end of time?

  The mage handed Elias one of the two fishing rods he had carried with him, and then cast off. He took a seat on a weather-worn rock, and it was Elias’s guess that the mage had sat there many times before, perhaps beyond count.

  “Have you fished much?” Rasen asked him, without looking up from his line.

  Elias found another suitable rock and joined the mage. “My father used to take me fishing now and again, but there wasn’t much water close at hand. The creek behind the house was narrow and had only small fish. The lake in town was bare of anything but the occasional trout.

  “Still we would take a rowboat out now and again. Never caught
anything, but my father seemed content with that. He was quite happy to sit out there for hours at a time. Truth be told, I was usually bored to the point of misery, though I never told Dad that.”

  “And yet your face lights up to tell the tale.”

  Elias shrugged. “I suppose you tend to think of the big things when you lose someone. Like the holidays they won’t be there for. The milestones they won’t reach, or that they won’t see you reach. But really, it’s during the small moments that you feel the loss the most.

  “You prepare yourself long before Midwinter that they won’t be there for the feast day. You steel yourself against that. It’s when you turn to ask them to pack the pipe after dinner only to realize that you’re alone. That’s when the pain sneaks in, because you’ve forgotten to put your guard up. It’s during the small moments you miss them most.”

  Elias blinked away his reverie, for in his mind he was back in Knoll Creek, alone in his family house and feeling the weight of silence and solitude pressing upon him. He felt Rasen’s eyes on him and glanced at the mage. A calculating look had stolen over his stern, angular features, and Elias had the sinking feeling that he had just been tested somehow.

  “You father sounds like the kind of man I would get along with,” Rasen said and then turned his attention back to his line.

  Elias decided to try and probe a little himself. “You must miss your family as well, as long as I imagine you’ve been here.”

  “I was taken into my order at a young age, as was the custom of my people. It was they that raised me up.”

  “And you never wed?”

  “Members of the order were forbidden to take wives or to father children.”

  Elias felt a pang for the mage. He at least had the memory of Asa. “I can’t imagine that. To never have the opportunity to love.”

  “My order would say that to dedicate one’s life in service to your fellow man is but a different kind of love, selfless, and noble in a way romantic love seldom is.”

  Elias was preparing a retort, with the goal of probing more into Rasen’s past and his order, when the mage shot to his feet and cried, “I’ve got one!”

  He reeled in a modest sized fish about as long as his forearm. “Salmon it is for us tonight,” he said brightly. He handed the fish to Elias who tossed it into the bucket. “Fret not, you shall have a chance to best my catch tomorrow.”

  Rasen Motyl clapped Elias on the shoulder and without further word began to trek back up the rocky slope that led to the symmetrical keep.

  Elias cast a long glance across the lagoon at the craggy shore on the other side before following the mage. The beach rose sharply to rugged peaks and beyond the unnatural fog that cocooned the entire isle. The fog pulsated so slightly that Elias blinked, wondering if it was a trick of his eyes. The thick curtain emitted a soft, diffuse light, and it dawned on him that the fog itself was the source of the grey half-light that lay across the breadth of the isle.

  The scant pulsing of the thick blanket of fog lent it the illusion of movement, but the barrier appeared to actually be fixed in place. Elias summoned his arcane sight, and it was without great surprise that the sky lit up in all directions with a tremendous arcane signature the likes of which he had never encountered. It wasn’t a fog, arcane or otherwise, that ensconced the isle but a type of magical shield unlike any he had ever seen or heard tell of.

  Feeling more than a little uneasy, Elias hurried after Rasen before he disappeared over the crest of the beach as he realized that he didn’t want to be left to his own devices out in the open.

  Rasen kept a small garden where he grew mushrooms, carrots, onions, potatoes and various greens. Elias wondered how he managed it considering the perpetual half-light which seemed to neither wax nor wane as the day wore on, but he figured this was the least of the wizard’s secrets. Rasen put him to task cleaning and cutting the vegetables while he busied himself preparing the fish.

  Elias attempted to make small talk as they worked. “When was the last time you had a visitor?”

  Rasen shrugged. “Before you were born I suspect. Now and again people do happen on the isle by mistake, which I expect is the only reason why the legend has endured so long. I usually send them on their way in short order.”

  Something changed in the wizard’s manner. There was something grim in his demeanor. “Not always though,” Elias said. “Sometimes they come here on purpose, or else want to know what this place is. They want to learn its secrets.”

  Rasen’s eyes flicked up from the fish, though his head was still bent over the table. “The power and knowledge kept in this place must be protected. It must never become known to the world.”

  At once Elias both respected and feared Rasen in equal measures. “And you’ve protected this place by yourself all this time? One man?”

  Rasen laid down his boning knife. “You’re one man and you’ve destabilized multiple timelines.”

  Elias looked the time mage dead in the eye. “And I’m here to fix that.”

  “There were other guardians, once,” was Rasen’s only reply, and then he would say no more on the subject.

  They sat down to a dinner of fried potatoes with onions, mushrooms, and tomatoes, and the salmon which Rasen had crisped in a cast iron skillet. “I do miss black pepper,” he said as he passed Elias a plate. “It’s hard for me to grow, though as you can imagine I have salt in abundance, and the rosemary and thyme does quite well in my garden.”

  “I’ve not had a better meal since I’ve left home,” Elias said.

  “You are a far way from your home, indeed. I think it’s about time you tell me your story.”

  “You seem to know something of it already.”

  “It is true that I am able to see much from here,” Rasen said, “but I am not omnipotent. Leave no detail out.”

  Elias briefly entertained editing his tale, but he could see little profit in it. While he wasn’t sure what Rasen’s chief agenda was, he needed his help and he expected candor was the best tactic in eliciting it. So Elias told him how Bryn had been poisoned and how Talinus had given him the Grimoire. He told him of Mordum and the Dark Fey occupation.

  Their plates had been forgotten for some while by the time Elias finished his tale. Other than the occasional question asked for clarification Rasen had remained largely silent. The mage began to clear the table after Elias concluded his story.

  “Well?” asked Elias, eager for any comment or scrap of advice from the tight-lipped mage.

  “It is fortunate that the imp didn’t figure out how to take the Grimoire across the dimensional boundaries to the Obsidian Queen. Things would be even worse were that the case.”

  “Leosis told me that the Grimoire was sent back in time. Is that true?”

  Rasen turned from the sink. “The Grimoire must be brought back here. If I agree to help you, you must swear to do this.”

  “Done,” said Elias, taking not a beat to answer. “Have you any idea where it is?”

  Rasen shot him a flat look. “I’d had thought you’d have figured that out by now. Your friend Mordum possesses the Grimoire.”

  “God’s blood.” Elias cursed himself for not having come to that conclusion himself. It made perfect sense. The Darkin had been one step ahead of him the entire time. Only Danica’s foresight had managed to save him. “What’s our plan?”

  Rasen went to one of his bookshelves. “We get some sleep. Time is with us, which is not something that Mordum can say. It is our advantage, and I might add our only one.”

  Rasen padded over to Elias and dropped a ponderous tome on the table before him.

  Elias took the book in hand. “The Infinitum Model: The Question of Probable Timelines and Probable Universes. Quite the title.”

  Rasen flashed him a smile that reminded Elias of Phinneas. He had a sinking suspicion that the time mage would prove an even more challenging tutor. “Just a little bed time reading,” said the time mage. “Now, let me show you to your room.”


  Chapter 46

  Temporal Arcanum

  Elias pinched the bridge of his nose, willing the headache he felt there to dissipate. Aside from the fact that the mathematics were largely beyond him, Rasen’s reading assignment contained esoteric philosophies that challenged the very nature of reality. The basic concepts of temporal paradoxes stymied him enough, but the Infinitum Model went into detail discussing the probability of myriad timelines which branched off from each other and crossed in a near infinite spider’s web of possibilities.

  The points at which a timeline split, due to either a watershed moment in history or else a temporal anomaly, the author called a vergence. He went on to discuss that these vergences bridged to other probable realities, which were like echoes of the original, sometimes different in only minor ways, while others couldn’t be more dissimilar. At the culmination of this line of reasoning the author suggested that at every decision in an individual’s life the doorway to a vergent timeline was born, leading to a virtual infinite number of probable realities.

  The idea that at every major decision in his life—or even minor ones for that matter—a vergent timeline or reality was born was more than Elias could accept. If that were the case then in how many timelines had he failed to take Talinus’s bait? Or was he cursed to perpetuate his blunder across infinity? Was there a probable reality where his father still lived? Were the whiteouts he experienced hallucinations, or was he actually experiencing other timelines or alternate realities?

  The beleaguered Marshal pushed himself up from the spare table in Rasen’s study, took his mug of cold tea in hand, and went outside. As the day before, the temperature and light seemed static. According to his pocket watch he had been awake for four hours, but Rasen was nowhere to be found. Elias knew better than to snoop around the keep. He could ill afford to risk the time mage’s ire, or to stumble upon something dangerous. Still he had made a cursory sweep through the main living spaces of the keep.