by K M McGuire
“What can we do?” he heard Andar ask. It took a minute for Voden to realize it wasn’t his own thought, though it seemed too similar to what he had been feeling.
“Wait, I guess,” sighed Vec.
Voden took that as an invitation to sit against the wall. He could see a rough outline of his friends, a dull purple line shimmering on their skin, but he felt no matter how close they were, nothing was lonelier than realizing how close one was to death.
“What did Scelus say to you?”
Andar remained silent, unable to answer Vec’s question. Voden felt the room had expanded. The longer they sat in the silence, the more the pain thrust itself inside Voden’s mind. Voden knew there could be mountains of words he could utter, thousands of written scripts meant to bring hopeful insight to those trapped in despair. If only to bring some satisfaction to himself, it would be better. He felt the crust of blackened blood on his cloak, crumbling at his fingers, the scents of solidified iron brushed his nostrils. His eyes became tight as guilt and sorrow drove into him from somewhere behind the wall he leaned on. It tore through him as the turbulent emotions broke him open, vulnerable to emptiness. He felt this nihility was now his final home. It would have been better to be a shell; at least then something could be filled. He was shattered, the teardrops now loosing themselves from his eyes like arrows on a battlefield. He quivered at them being notched, trembling at their launch. He wallowed in their wake.
“Voden,” Vec whispered, “I’m sorry about all of this. I wish I had known better…”
Voden left the comment to fade to darkness, unwilling to open his mouth. He could no longer bring himself to say anymore to anyone, even Yael, and hardly recognized any of the conversations or plots the trio eventually discussed, which only seemed to be a pointless distraction. Yet as he came to terms with their fate in that din, their voices soon went silent. Misery never seeks company, not when it only finds itself. Misery seeks comfort, which could have been the whole reason they exchanged only air. It was better to crumble alone than to cause more pain with words that only compounded their doom. Voden remained like this, alone, succumbing to his fears and sorrow. Finally, his eyes grew heavy enough to grace him with sleep.
Drifting through water was the strangest dance with vertigo. How calmly the liquid took Voden’s senses and spun them through the ripples of the waves to where it almost felt natural to observe. He lost direction and chased confusion through the wake of his sensations. He could only give his attention to the shadows cast by the lights, and lights tried to hide in the shadow. It all felt obscure, that lucid black surrounding the distance his eyes managed to see (if darkness truly was in any capacity to be seen). He fell or floated through the thick ether. Slowly, his body adjusted to the tide of it, where his eyes were now able to spot pricks of light puncturing through the canvas of blankness. Starry milk splashed against the velvet black landscape, and cherry cordial melded with it, blossoming swirls of twinkling stardust. It was like a blind man’s impression of what the ocean floor could hold, if only its vastness was equal to the space above the earth.
The cosmos was alive with a slow churning of the celestial clock. Busy stars twitching bright at the turn of Voden’s head, and colorful marbles that could allow for life to exist loomed boldly in the expanse. Yet, among the vastness and beauty, loneliness pervaded stronger than the closest star’s radiance. He could watch the smaller rocks, pocked with scars caused by its more violent little sisters (who could not keep pace with the larger frozen masses). Voden felt that time lingered in painful trudges; dust particles unwilling to concede to gravity.
He felt words wash through his brain, unable to catch their essence, each like a note from a song, ringing a distance away, but hardly loud enough to catch the melody. An echo would disrupt his thoughts, and soon they grew muddied, overwhelmed by the colors and beauty. The tiniest note to be played was the one his mouth was unable to speak into the ether. It was in this striking moment, wishing to utter something, where he felt the words form on his tongue, ready to take their chances into the unknown, as the ether swept beneath the syllables and stole them from his mouth. He could feel the thought of what he wished to say, the motion of his jaw—even the clench of his teeth against themselves—but the viper of the ether allowed only silence in this domain, the strictest of the librarians.
The stars could speak. Not in word, but it seemed they almost hummed. Perhaps it was the sublime essence of the light they gave, unfettered by atmosphere. It could mock in a language so potent, that again, Voden found how vulnerable he was amid the monsters of ether. He turned his eyes from the taunting wanderers— the star-stricken rocks—listlessly turning away from his dread, a foolish prospect, he soon found out. He was still trapped in that same environment. If only credit was earned for trying. Yet here, the only thing earned was a deeper knowledge of abandonment.
His eyes now saw something that did not belong. Maybe it did, though it was densely strange against the dark void. Light hit the form, the thin, tiny thing, and it drifted as lonely as he. He shifted himself, hoping it would guide him near, and slowly he moved closer. Details formed at the same pace he moved, which was absurdly slow, but it was better and more interesting than any other object. The shape grew familiar. In fact, its color became clearer, close to the shade of his own skin. Soon its hair looked strikingly similar to his own. He glanced down at his own body. Yes, the form floating in front of him wore the same brown shirt he had on. His drifting stopped and his mouth fell limp as he gawked at the person, unable to wrap his mind around how he could be staring at his own profile.
Talons of fear drove through his chest, and flutters of paranoia scratched at his skin. It must have been a trick. He could not be doubled like this. Madness beckoned him forward; a siren he failed to wrench his eyes from. It made him see a figure as lonely as himself, and depression expanded like a failing star. He quickly looked over his shoulder. He couldn’t explain why he felt inclined to, as instinct hardly had motivation. But there he was, staring back at himself. Now he had become his own profile, and the other faced him over his opposite shoulder. They had switched at the turn of a neck! He snapped his head back round, to see himself in profile again, becoming more confused than he’d been a moment ago. So, he kept staring forward at himself, transfixed by wonder.
Fragments of ice—capsules filled with glistening life—spun between Voden and his doppelganger, glittering like jewelry, stealing his attention with its surprising interruption. Soundless, it moved, and it took his thoughts with its frigid wake. In the moment, it stole his attention, and he finally focused back on where his doppelganger floated. He found the space void, where his other no longer drifted. Only a black space against the silky sheets of galaxies of incandescent polychromes remained. Again, even a spectacle able to pull the breath from the Ones Beyond could not quantify how deeply alone Voden felt, and the beauty stretched the sentiment.
Queued by imagination, the space Voden’s doppelganger had once occupied shifted. Swelling and blurring blackness tore color and space, like an inky vortex slowly being born. The ellipse grew; the tar draining light into its maw, distorting his conception of the known universe. Flecks of thick, charred particles detached from its orbit, breaking apart as it drifted lazily from the center. And it grew, the heavens swallowed from the inside, leaving a literal blotch of nothing in Voden’s presence. It grew to match his height, whirling the edges to join the gloomy opaque finality of the blackened center, breathing inches before him. It stared deeper into him than he could into it.
It burst into twitchy fits of miniscule dots of light, chasing one another across the surface of the ink, until it finally flickered fully awake, where another image of another part of the universe set inside it. It was filled with massive galaxies, more regal than the ones that surrounded Voden. They seemed new and alive and more chaotic. It was as though color had lost hope, and this black window showed when and where it had gone, or perhaps where it had come from.
Voden looked at the swirling edge of the form, desperately wondering what it was, when a brilliant purple burned against his eyes. He pinched them closed, but even through his lids held tight, the ray etched its presence into his retinas. He peeked through the crack he made with eyelids. Concern pulled them all the way open, staring at a glinting gold orb, feverishly scanning from edge to edge of the ellipse. He felt he had stared into it before. At the center, a glassy circle shifted with a bloody, purple light, set deep inside the brazen ball. It was an eye, for sure, stunning Voden with its size. The purple glow was squelched for a second by a gold aperture that pinched the light to nothing. But only a second: a blink that was much too unsettling to seem reasonable to call its owner alive. The beaming gaze scanned a ribbon of dooming light across Voden, where its focus rolled to a halt on his pale face. It was hard to stare into it. The center grew brighter, imprinting color upon every corner of Voden’s brain.
The portal smeared to blurring gold, shades merging the shadows with the reflections of the brilliance of the world inside, until it finally stopped moving, revealing a metallic owl, head cocked slight. It stared at Voden. Only its head was visible, the clockwork of the cosmos at its back. Its beak was sharp and segmented, layered in gilded sheets of splendor. It looked as though every feather was carved or placed individually, though it was mesmerizing trying to decipher its truth. Either way, the feathers—if they were that—seemed to sway like they were caught in the wind. Voden hardly focused on much of that. He saw the golden eye, sitting center to the owl’s forehead, tucked between filigree-like horns that smoothly crowned its head. It moved and stuttered, always scanning, scrutinizing every changing particle that happened to fall into its beam.
But it was not the mechanical or metallic parts that felt so strange. Instead, Voden furrowed his brow, sucked into the only organic things he could find in the portal. The eyes, placed where one normally expected to hold the gaze of another, were deep and dark, filled with compounding voids. And how the darkness stared! On and on, it darkened the shades, where shapeless tendons (that appeared to once stretch to capture light) hung lame and useless. It was as though they could absorb the viewer or anyone foolish enough to look at them, casting them into the depths (which made Voden wonder if he was trapped in its eyes now). Those dead eyes allowed for only the glistening stars to reflect off their lenses. Not even the stars could make a home inside—those orbs that rejected light so profoundly.
“Who are you, boy?” the golden owl hissed, its voice steamy and hollow, caught in the echoing chambers buried in the beast’s chest. Voden saw boiling purple clouds lofting from its beak. The voice surprised him, curious how this thing could talk through the ether.
“Voden,” he croaked. He did not understand how he was able to speak now, but the tilted head of the owl made it hard to think of anything beyond its piercing eyes. The portal shuddered, shaking the owl and it rested slightly off from where it was, as though it teleported all but a foot from where it had been. As Voden tried to understand the strange jolt of repositioning, the owl trembled once more, its eyes jittering out of place.
“Yes,” the owl breathed knowingly, its head shaking starlight across its surface. It seemed to have not noticed its shifting. “This moment will be long past when you finally receive it.”
Voden hardly understood what that meant. The owl chuckled, nodding its head slowly.
“Confusion,” it whispered. It wasn’t a question. The owl made the comment like it was jotting down information. It stuttered, the cosmos behind the owl shifted, the colors cooling, and now the portal displayed a mass of star clusters, perhaps far away from where the owl was first seen. “It is funny to me that you forget who I am.”
“How do you know that?” Voden asked, knowing the owl was speaking truth. It then sparked in his mind, the dream he’d had in Septium, where he rode on the owl’s back. But the name was lost. “I-I dreamt of you…” he whispered.
“Only here I have seen you. At least, thus far on my journey,” the owl responded. He shifted again backward and forward, static lines disrupting the owl’s features for a second. “I am Kintza, the Seer of Futures, the Keeper of Knowledge. I am the Amethyst Prince of the Keepers. It is time that I speak to you.”
“About what?” Voden asked, still unsure of the beast. He felt a presence so deep and large, he trembled through his capillaries. Perhaps it was the consternation that came with this beast.
“First, I must start by asking if you understand the Ether,” Kintza said, blazon eye burning purple waves across Voden’s face.
“I suppose you’re speaking of what we are in,” Voden said, holding his arms out. “But more than that, I could not explain.”
“You are correct,” Kintza started, the fog of language spreading around his golden face. “As is all of creation. The Ether is a gel, a liquid and a solid that sets everything into function. In a word, it is what allows for the cosmos to be well-oiled and lubricates the wheels of time. It is the cohesive realm that binds everything together—from the realms of the Sentients to the Collapsing Plane, even the rim of which touches the fringe of the Beyond: Th-the lantern hanging at the edge of all that is known.”
“I don’t think I understand,” Voden said.
“Let me phrase this differently, then.” His head shifted back, a quick flicker of the portal seemed to fragment Kintza’s face, and when the image was set right, he continued. “Every moment of time is expanded and will expand in the Ether. Every being created is connected through this sphere, from beginning to end, as far as the cosmos can reach. Space and time encompass it all. Time is not just a thought. The Ether proves it to be a line, a shape, a body. It can be pulled and twisted, and if done properly, two points on the line can be pinched together-er-er,” his image jolted again, “so that both ends may see each other. You cannot, however, break the membrane that separates the two. Time is firmer than your own body. That is why you can move linearly like the grain of wood. Existence is a ghost, walking through and possessing time for but a moment, and in that way, we can form the entirety of purpose. We control the outcome.”
“So, we exist for the sake of time?” Voden asked.
“Of course not,” Kintza laughed. “We exist to make time our captive! When it is done and finally breaks, the one who masters it will reign supreme!”
“Then you wish to overthrow the Great Beyond,” Voden argued.
“There should be no form of cruelty that created this vile fate worse than the entrapment of this prison we are taught to believe as time!” Kintza looked hard at Voden, the center eye focusing the beam on him. Voden felt it was beginning to burn his skin. The portal shook smears of gold, and the purple beam settled. “You are curious to me. I have found this moment as I travel further through the Ether, yet I can see no further than you. I have seen this moment over and over, responding to the different reactions you create, seeing how this moment in time is the only alteration of my visions. I do not know enough of you. Rarely, I become obsessed, but you must be the key. I must—” The portal vibrated violently, the galaxies shifting back to red, back to dull, faded palettes while Kintza flicked through dozens of positions.
Voden thought he could make out a word, a name, but it was garbled. When the paroxysm finally stopped, Kintza stared at Voden and said nothing, while the pale galaxy churned in the background.
“It is too late,” Kintza said suddenly, shifting back so his magnitude could be seen. His wings spread wide, as bright flickers of pinkish, purple polygons burst to life, forming strangely shaped wings. They looked like fractured polygons where purple static pulsed across the surface and fragments of different galaxies spread out in each of the shapes that made up the wings. The portal filled to a vivid purple, Kintza becoming a silhouette against the light. Shadows of what appeared to be men and women stood before him.
“The future is coming. The One Who is Buried, the Father of the New Age will awake, and our legions will cause him to rise!”
&nbs
p; The men and woman cheered, raising their arms, as a mass stood behind Kintza, darker and larger than Voden’s mind wanted to understand, and he now was aware that those before Kintza and the shadow had become part of the Azuchon. Suddenly, Kintza’s chest pulled apart, revealing a pulsing light where black shapeless tendrils stretched inside. They congregated around a mass in the center, wrapped in a twisted, cancerous black cocoon. The tendons pulled, and the mass unraveled a flaming purple cube, spinning like a top in slow-motion. The center shape burned yellow; the octahedron’s corners were at the center of the square’s faces.
“We will gather his particles—his Azucrepyhs—his ashes and draw his essence back to break this prison. For this is who we are!” Kintza cried out to the army, and the light snapped away, leaving the galaxy to stir in the background.
The army had vanished, and Kintza drew close to the portal. The red galaxy began losing its luster, slipping into the black that surrounded it, and smoking umbral tentacles stretched out to the surrounding clusters of stars. “Your time will be at its apex when you receive this, Voden,” Kintza whispered. There was no emotion left in him.
The Ether started filled with strange metallic shapes, like massive seeds, and glowing squares riddled the smooth surfaces. Voden knew they were nothing like seeds, but he had nothing to compare them to, as the large mass split at the bottom, and black speckles drifted from it like snow. Lights sputtered to life from inside them and sped forward and away from the golden giant.