The tempest ended. Salim realized he was on his knees. "What..." He couldn't finish.
"I think..." Maedora sounded rattled herself. Salim looked over and saw the psychopomp still standing, but reeling slightly. "I think they just introduced themselves."
"They what?" Salim pushed himself shakily back to his feet. "Those were their names?"
"They don't have names." Maedora extended an arm, pointing at the one on the left. "They're not individuals. Each of them represents a dichotomy, a balance that must be maintained. That one is an akhana, the balancer of birth and death." Her arm moved to the one on the right. "That's a theletos—it balances freedom and fate." She dropped her arm. "The one in the middle is a pleroma—the bridge between creation and destruction."
The way she said the last one made Salim's skin crawl. He'd seen a surprising amount of emotion from Maedora over their brief acquaintance, but this was the first time he'd ever seen her nervous.
Still, at this point, Salim would take what he could get. He took a step forward. "I am Salim Ghadafar, a human of Golarion, on the Material Plane. This is Maedora the psychopomp, from Pharasma's Spire. We both act as agents of the Lady of Graves, but we're in need of assistance."
None of the creatures moved.
Salim tried again. "These collars," he pointed to his own, "they keep us from contacting the Lady and doing our jobs. We were sent here by our enemies, and only found you by chance. If you can help us, both we and the goddess herself would owe you a great debt."
Still the creatures said nothing, nor gave any hint that they had even been spoken to.
Salim felt his anger rising. He turned to Maedora. "What's with these guys?"
The psychopomp shook her head. "From what I've heard, the ways of aeons are beyond the understanding of even the gods. They might save a man's life one day and slit his children's throats the next, without ever explaining. More often they do nothing."
"Well, that's just great." Salim looked back to the tower, with its jagged spire and line of searing energy stretching up into the sky. "Clearly they're doing something here. Something that they care about enough to get a thousand of them in the same place." He turned to the central figure. "So what is it? What are you doing here?"
There was a pause, as if the creatures were silently deliberating, and then another series of images flooded Salim's brain. Lightning strikes. Salt crystals growing. Pearls. A blue, eyeless humanoid painting on a canvas. A cliff collapsing. A riot. A fish with vestigial legs being attacked by its legless kin.
"Stop!" Salim put a hand to his temple, pressing as the images faded. He turned to Maedora again. "Did that make any sense to you?"
"No." She frowned. "Although that presumes it was meant to. Aeons aren't necessarily logical beings—to be so would place them on the side of law rather than chaos, which would ruin their impartiality."
Salim's irritation grew. Here they'd finally found someone who could help them—someone powerful, by the look of it—and they turned out to be totally incomprehensible, unwilling to take any action unless it served to protect some great metaphysical—
Balance. Of course.
Salim addressed the central aeon again, doing his best to sound calm and collected. "Your Graces, Maedora tells me that you're creatures of balance. Yet so are we. As agents of Pharasma, we exist to maintain the balance of power between the planes, between life and death. Even now we're on a mission of vital importance to maintaining that equilibrium. By helping us, you further your own goals."
The response was another flutter of images, battering bird wings against the inside of his skull. He saw a bridge falling down. A child wearing a blanket cape and waving a stick like a scepter. A woman confronting an unfaithful lover, and an apprentice glassblower as his glowing-hot bottle shattered. Most of all, there were faces—a thousand different ones, not all human, but all bearing distinct looks of distrust and uncertainty. Of doubt.
This time, the message was all too clear.
Salim's temper broke. "You don't believe us. You don't think we're capable of fixing things, or keeping that balance."
Maedora's hand fell on his shoulder. "Salim—"
He shoved it away. "No, Maedora—you saw what they think of us. Children playing at our jobs. Unfaithful. Untrustworthy." He focused on the cloak-thing once more. "If you can put images in my mind, can you see things as well? Because if you can, I suggest you take a good, long look. I've devoted my life—a life longer than any man should be forced to live—to upholding Pharasma's balance. It's what I am, every bit as much as you."
This time there was only a single image, one pulled from Salim's own memory. He saw himself back in the inn the night Ceyanan had first come to call in his debt. Saw the blood spill from his throat.
"I never claimed I didn't fight it," Salim snapped. "But those days are over. Now the job is all I have. And you know what? I'm good at it. Damn good." He was surprised to find how right the words felt. He looked to the misty eyeball with the four arms. "You're in charge of birth and death? Well, I hunt down those who'd break the system." He whirled on the eight-handed crystal. "You're freedom and fate? I spent a whole lifetime fighting for freedom from the gods, freedom to break out of the chains of fate, and a century since then keeping folks imprisoned—how's that for a dichotomy?"
Finally he turned to center aeon, advancing until its dark bulk filled his vision. Inside its depths, a spray of stars spiraled and scintillated. "And you—I may not be much on creation, but I promise you this: if you don't help us, there will be such unbalanced destruction as you cannot imagine. Starting with you and me, right here."
Behind him, Maedora swore softly. As if breaking a spell, the epithet cut the strings on Salim's rage, letting it drop away. In its place came the realization that he'd just threatened a tangible embodiment of the concept of destruction. In front of its friends, no less.
Salim forced himself not to blink as he stared up into the hollow shadow beneath the thing's hood.
Slowly, one night-black hand moved forward, stretching out until ephemeral fingers wrapped around Salim's throat, as smooth and cold as the breeze from a glacier's shadow. They tightened.
The collar fell away.
Salim choked as Pharasma's taint flooded back into him, a mudslide into a crystal clear pond. Yet never had that foulness been so welcome.
The dark aeon reached past Salim and touched Maedora's collar as well. The bronze loop split in two and fell away. At the same time, the psychopomp's severe, eyeless face split into a broad, surprisingly warm smile. She held her hands palm up before her, as if cradling something. "She's back." Then she flung back her head and shouted, "She's back!"
Salim turned to her. "Now that the collar's gone, can you get us back to the Material Plane?"
The psychopomp's smile faded. "No. That magic is beyond me."
"You're kidding." Salim stared. "The Lady of Graves creates a whole race of creatures to help her keep order on the planes, and she doesn't even give you the means to move between them?"
Maedora bristled. "I had a talisman, same as you. The angels took it from me."
"Yet why make you rely on an item that could be stolen, rather than just giving you the ability along with all your other magic?" He laughed, short and sharp. "The gods hamstring us, Maedora. Maybe it makes us more interesting to watch."
"I'm sure the Lady had her reasons."
"I'm sure she did." Salim turned back to the aeons, bowing. "Thank you for your assistance. I'm afraid I must ask another favor. Our means of transportation were stolen, and we have no magic to travel between the planes ourselves. Can you help us?"
Their response was another jumble of seemingly random images.
This was hopeless. Just trying to hold all of their images in his mind was impossible, let alone trying to decipher the pattern.
Unless...
Salim's position in Pharasma's stable required him to talk to a staggering array of creatures, in more languages than he could le
arn in a dozen lifetimes. As such, he'd often relied on the goddess's magic to interpret for him. Always before there had been actual words to translate, but perhaps...
He reached for the dark, newly replenished pool inside him and drew its cool magic up into his mind, oil-slick and clinging. Instead of filling his ears and mouth as usual, he painted it across the walls of his skull.
"Can you understand me better now?" he asked the aeons.
A faint tremor of surprise, and then another barrage of images, still as jumbled as ever. This time, however, the images came with a surge of affirmation that set his bones humming.
His brain immediately began filling with questions, but he asked the only one that mattered.
"Can you get us home? To Golarion, on the Material Plane?"
The tide of affirmation ebbed, but didn't retreat entirely. In his mind's eye, he saw two images of himself—one nodding, the other shaking his head.
He frowned. "What does that mean? Can you send us back or not.
The central aeon swirled and pointed a half-real arm at the tower.
"That thing can?"
The honeybee buzz of agreement.
"Okay," Salim said slowly. "So what does it do?"
The response contained more creation and destruction symbolism, children's teeter-totters, plus pictures of the shaped lodestones that pushed and pulled each other with invisible forces. Yet one repeated image was instantly recognizable: a twisted spire of rock, impossibly tall, broadening near its flat top to support an endless graveyard, a shining river flowing through the air toward its center.
"Pharasma's Spire," Salim said. "The seat of judgment. This thing balances out the Boneyard?"
Silent applause.
He looked sideways at Maedora. "Do you understand what that means? How do you balance the cycle of souls?"
Maedora looked troubled. "Pharasma is balance. Soul energy comes from Creation's Forge and takes shape as mortals on the Material Plane, then passes on to Pharasma's Court, where it's divided among the Outer Planes. In a sense, the whole of the Outer Sphere is made of that soul energy. And Pharasma keeps the balance."
The images in Salim's mind shifted: Endless precise rows of crops. Grids of identical buildings. Insectile creatures and mechanical men working in perfect, synchronized lockstep.
Salim suddenly understood. "It's the order."
"What?"
"What Pharasma does—the distribution of souls—maintains balance between the Outer Planes, but it does so by imposing order. There's structure, and deliberation, and precision."
The psychopomp frowned. "That's what I just said."
"Exactly. The aeons need the multiverse to be balanced in all ways, which means it needs to be unbalanced as well—both ordered and chaotic. On their own, mortal souls as a group are neither chaotic nor organized—they just are. That's why the Material Plane is the way it is. But once they die, things become neat and orderly. The aeons can't allow that."
Maedora's frown deepened, and she turned on the aeons. "So what—this tower is supposed to interfere with the cycle of souls, like those damn angels? If so, it's failed so far."
The wave of images inside Salim's head rose into a tsunami—perhaps the aeon's equivalent of raising its voice. Lightning hitting a flat primordial sea, stirring up steam and bubbles. A pearl forming around a single grain of sand. An anthill kicked over, sending insects scurrying every direction. New growth poking up through the ashes of a wildfire.
"I don't think that's it," Salim said slowly. He turned to the aeon and pointed to the frantic, pulsing shapes swirling behind the sky, bleeding down from the hole pierced by the tower. "That's the Maelstrom, isn't it? The sea of chaos beyond the edges of the other planes?"
Teachers patting children on the head. A runner nearing the finish line.
"You're harvesting it. The chaos. That's what those shimmering blobs are—bits of primordial chaos energy. Your tower gathers it in and then sends it...where? The Material Plane?"
A cheering crowd. A wizard perfecting a new spell.
Maedora grabbed Salim's shoulder and spun him around. "Explain."
"This tower—it's like an irrigation canal, but for chaos." Salim waved his hand at it. "The Spire draws energy from the Material Plane in the form of souls and organizes it. This thing is its opposite. It injects pure chaos energy back into the Material Plane, to keep things stirred up."
"Why?" Maedora's eyes narrowed. "It sounds like a protean plot. The chaos snakes will do anything to spread their madness."
Salim shrugged. "If a pond stays stagnant long enough, the fish die. Without an irritant like a grain of sand to start with, an oyster can't make a pearl. Maybe the multiverse is like that as well, or at least the Material Plane—if we don't get shaken up, we solidify and stop working."
"Chaos." Maedora still sounded dubious.
Images again, this time of artists painting, bards singing, a sculptor studying stone.
"Maybe it's not just chaos," Salim interpreted. "Maybe they don't just transfer the chaos but refine it, like beach-dwellers harvesting salt from the sea." He pointed to the line of energy blasting its way through the roiling sky. "That could be a pillar of pure creativity." A sudden inspiration struck him. "That must be why the area we arrived in was so barren and bland. The tower must have already harvested all the chaos out of it, maybe before it ever really got a chance to become anything. That's why the sky seems so strange, too: it's not really a sky. More like we're in a soap bubble, and that's the ceiling."
"Fine. Whatever." Maedora clearly still wasn't pleased at the idea of anything opposing Pharasma's work, even in the name of balance. "They said this thing can get us back to your plane. Ask them how."
Salim was surprised that she let him play translator, but perhaps it made sense. As a mortal—more or less—he came with all the inherent dichotomies and cognitive dissonance that entailed. Did that make him naturally better at interpreting the aeons' waves of abstract concepts and images? Even with the goddess's magic inside him, it was still closer to trying to make sense of a dream than any real language.
"How can the tower get us home?" he asked.
This time the flashes were all of the tower itself, the streams of chaotic energy swirling up and around its sides before firing off into the tempest above. He saw a flash of himself stepping into it, a sensation of being swept along in its current.
"Um." Salim was momentarily at a loss for words.
"Well?" Maedora demanded.
"I think we have to ride it. Submerge ourselves and let it carry us along."
For a moment she just stared at him. Then: "Do they think we're stupid? Look at it!" She pointed to the crackling currents climbing the tower. "Your metaphor was wrong. That's not a canal or a stream. That's lightning made out of pure chaos. We'll be torn apart!"
Salim smiled, more confidently than he felt. "Well, now that the goddess knows where we are again, that just means we're back to your original plan, right?"
Maedora paused, considering. "I suppose."
Salim bowed deeply to the aeons. "On behalf of myself, my companion, and the ruling powers of several planes, I thank you for your assistance."
The three creatures stood still for a moment, with only the prickling on the back of Salim's neck to suggest that they were studying him. Then they turned in unison and sailed off in separate directions.
"Not much for social graces, are they?" he observed.
"Etiquette is a construct of weak and idle races." Maedora began walking purposefully toward the nearest tributary, forcing Salim to hustle to keep up.
They reached the edge of a chaos stream and stopped. Up close, it was even stranger than before—a transparent current that rippled like water from a fountain. It surged along a dozen feet tall and several feet off the ground. Inside it flowed a rainbow of colors and half-suggested shapes that never quite resolved: faces and flames and mountains and jellyfish and symbols and flavors and concepts and...
; Vertigo seized Salim, and he turned his head away from the shimmering, flexing serpent of energy. "Don't look too closely. It's...unsettling."
Maedora smirked. "I thought your kind were supposed to have an easier time dealing with chaos and uncertainty than us psychopomps?"
"We do," Salim said. "This is just...brewed a little stronger than I'm used to, is all." He shivered. "I don't know what'll happen to us when we touch it."
"Only the Lady knows all." Maedora spoke the maxim with perfect conviction. Then, more hesitantly, she reached over and put a hand on Salim's shoulder. "If it helps you...the Lady must have known this would happen. Even if this destroys us and we never make it back to the Material Plane or the Boneyard—we know that Pharasma foresaw this. One way or another, we all serve the threads of fate."
Salim grimaced. "You know, for someone who shepherds the dead, your comforting platitudes could really use some work." Still, the gesture was surprisingly touching. He reached up and took the psychopomp's massive hand in his own. The silk wrappings were smoother and softer than the finest glove.
"So we don't get separated," he said.
Maedora looked down at their joined hands dubiously. "You think this will help?"
"Probably not," Salim admitted. "But at least it'll keep you from backing out and leaving me to be blasted into little fleshy nuggets all on my own. If we're doing this, we're doing it together."
"Together," the psychopomp agreed.
"Alright then." Salim took a deep breath. "On three?"
Maedora cocked her head sideways, like an eyeless bird of prey. "Why would we wait?"
"It's a mortal thing." Salim felt suddenly foolish. "For luck."
"There is no luck," Maedora said. "Only chance and fate. But have it your way. On three."
"Okay." Salim turned back to the stream of energy barreling past them faster than a galloping horse. "Here we—"
"Three." Maedora stepped forward into the stream, yanking Salim with her.
Pathfinder Tales: The Redemption Engine Page 31