It reached up as if seeking to grapple with Pug and Ashen-Shugar. And a distant sound of hollow anger reverberated from below, rising quickly and growing in volume until it shook the walls of the pit.
Pug looked at Ashen-Shugar and saw that his face was contorted in concentration and rage, with perspiration running from his brow and cheeks. Pug released his hold on what had been Tomas, as the fully empowered Valheru no longer needed Pug’s protection from the attacking fragments of the Dread; indeed, his expression showed he considered Pug a trivial concern in the face of the monster attempting to climb out of the pit below.
Ashen-Shugar held tightly to his sword, its point downward, aligned with the creature below. Not a shred of humanity remained in the face Pug now beheld. It was a snarling mask of hatred and wrath unlike anything Pug had seen since confronting the Demon King, Maarg. And it was all the more chilling to see it displayed on features so well known and beloved.
Ashen-Shugar stared at the titanic figure of the Dread below him and screamed, ‘Into the void again with you, monster!’ The last Valheru threw himself into battle, leaping into the pit, to grapple with the thing striving to enter Midkemia.
Pug pulled back slightly as the two titanic figures of power wrestled with one another, both ignoring the relatively insignificant magician hovering nearby.
Pug held his position a moment, gauging his next best course of action. He reached out mentally and examined the surroundings, his protective sphere destroying the few attacking flying Dread.
He still had difficulty realizing the Dread was a single entity, with all the embodiments of it in a variety of forms around him. He also had trouble mentally reconciling the notion that every manifestation of the Dread across space and time was happening ‘now’ from the Dread’s point of view, or why this manifestation, this ‘Dreadking’, was the key to the struggle. Pug wasn’t even sure after understanding that much that he knew what was happening to those parts of the Dread they defeated. Were they destroyed? Could any part of the Dread be destroyed? Or were they merely returned back to where they started, to work their way back to this plane and attack again?
For a brief instant Pug felt an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. How could his plan possibly work?
Magnus felt the net of magic stabilize, and knew that everyone who would be providing Pug with the magic he needed to convolute the rift spell was now linked in. He used his own prodigious ability to quickly move from point to point along the lattice of magic, for a brief instant touching everyone to judge their endurance and ability to contribute. It took him only a minute, but when he finished he realized how much this was taxing everyone and how limited their opportunity was.
He took a moment to consider the fight before him, as the rate of attack from the dome seemed to be increasing dramatically. Mentally, he called out to Ruffio, Any moment now, be ready.
Before him, Arkan raised his bow and shot a smoky shape, attempting to approach the black-clad magician.
Father, he sent to Pug, we are ready. We have little time, mere minutes, I think.
Pug heard Magnus and replied, I’m going to begin. I will not have time to say anything until you hear me tell you to unleash all the energy at me. Then do what you can to get as many people as you can free of this area.
He didn’t wait for a reply, but extended his senses to the boundaries of the rift-spell and where it was transformed into the ruby energy that formed the dome. He wished for more time to further examine the lattice of energy and how it intersected the dome, but he knew time for study was passing and he had mere minutes in which to act.
Ashen-Shugar and the Dread were now fully engaged, with the Valheru striking furiously at the void monster. Pug realized they seemed to recede, moving deeper into the pit. He wondered if the struggle was forcing the Dread downward, or if this was merely a trick of perception and perspective. He willed himself downward, following them.
A sudden burst of energy from below the combat took Pug by surprise and he felt himself lifted slightly upward. He saw it was more of the floating wisps he had seen coming up from the pit. He focused on one of them and in a moment understood. He wasn’t looking at anything, but rather through everything into the void itself. These wisps were really small tears in what Pug had thought of as reality until recently. The ‘smoke’ or ‘wisps’ were simply three-dimensional shreds of reality. Now he understood. The void surrounded the Dread. The void was the invisible glue that bound Mind and the Dread together. That was how the universe would end, the void slipping through millions, billions, of tiny rifts like these to pull reality as Pug knew it back into that perfect, harmonious, blissful ball of everything.
Something called to Pug, something deeper in the pit. He watched as Ashen-Shugar and the Dread struggled, gripping one another like wrestlers in a clinch.
Pug felt a pull at him again, and quickly measured his control of the energy Magnus was sending, then turned his attention to the source of what was pulling him. He hovered, relatively motionless, while it appeared that the struggle continued to carry Ashen-Shugar and the Dread deeper into the pit.
Then a realization came to Pug: really, there could be no ‘deeper’ to this pit, for it was an open doorway into the void. While the shreds and wisps might be parts of the void, and the smoky monsters part of the Dread, here was the clear threshold between the objective world and the void. Once the threshold was crossed, one should either be in the void or in this world.
Then Miranda’s lesson as she had told it came to him: it was a matter of perception.
Pug tried to shift his perceptions, as he had at other times in dealing with beings living at different levels of energy, especially when he, Magnus, and Nakor had transitioned to the Dasati home world. Then he found the state he sought. His perceptions shifted.
Suddenly, a complete change to the context around him struck Pug almost like a physical blow. There was no up or down, no large or small, just energy flows, and the struggle was now a massive upheaval in competing states of being.
Lines of force both majestic and delicate, pulsing with energies in colours impossible for the human eye to comprehend, enveloped Pug. The beauty of them was heart-wrenching. Pug felt awe. His mind became a thing apart, able to reach out and touch fluctuating states of existence. He understood in part what Macros had sought to achieve when he was elevating his consciousness to that of a god.
Pug also understood the trap. The human intelligence, even one as prodigious as his own, wasn’t equipped to deal with this level of apprehension and awareness. Like a moth to a flame, to linger too long in this state would result in being consumed by fire.
Pug forced himself back to his previous state and watched the struggle for a moment longer. He could now achieve awareness of these states, but he couldn’t understand them, nor did he have the time to try.
Then it came to him: the void existed without time. Time had left the void with the creation of his reality, and what was left behind was able to perceive time because it was not caught up within time! Pug immediately shifted his perspective back to a different energy state and saw the tendrils not as empty spaces in his normal perception of reality, but as shreds of that which had been left behind, that longed to join with what had created the universe, to return it all to that fundamental blissful state.
Pug reached out and pulled himself deeper into the void, and felt a sensation he had experienced for the first time when he had ventured into the void to destroy the Tsurani rift into Midkemia. He used his tether to Magnus to communicate with him. Can you still hear me?
Yes, Father.
I think I have discovered something, Pug said. I need you to measure the passing of time for me.
My childhood counting trick?
Yes. Start now.
Pug found it almost impossible to negotiate the void without falling into the habit of human perceptions demanding a frame of reference. He was ‘descending into’ the void and he understood abstractly that he wasn’t moving a
t all and that time and space were both meaningless here. But he was trapped within his own human perceptions. He closed his eyes in acknowledgement of his physical limits, and discovered that it helped. His mind saw a play of images in oddly muted colours against black, like lingering afterimages, and they raced across his subjective field of vision. There was a fever-like quality to them and yet they were somehow familiar. The face of Princess Carline shifted into that of Katala, his first wife, then that of a student he had first taught at the Academy a century before. Distorted landscapes and twisted images of places flowed around him: a street in the Holy City of Kentosani appeared upside-down above his head, the white walls now black, the colours reversed, with red now green, blue now orange, and the people with distorted, flowing shapes.
Suddenly he knew.
Magnus! How much time has passed?
None, Father. I just counted ‘one’ and now you’re back.
I understand, said Pug, and he entered time.
Nothing moved. Pug was fascinated by his new perception. Ashen-Shugar and the Dread were motionless, locked in a struggle, but frozen in the moment. Pug wondered if this was how the Dread saw time.
He was still limited by human perception, but as he exerted his will, he found Ashen-Shugar moving in reverse, and he realized he was moving backward in time. He moved forward and returned to the second at which he became aware of his ability to move within time.
For a subjective moment he hesitated, wondering at the consequences of his actions. He studied the struggle around him and probed with his mind above, where his son and the others waited, and came away with an oddly dissatisfying realization: his ability to not move with time prevented him from interacting with any of those moving normally through time. Something about all of this seemed wrong, but he didn’t know what it was. Then, Pug realized, he had all the time he would ever need to study the problem.
Beginning with the shreds of the void fluttering around him, Pug began to examine … everything.
Magnus waited after his odd exchange with his father. The question about how much time had passed in the midst of a battle of colossal proportion was as strange as anything he could have imagined.
Magnus had prepared himself for his own death as well as for the death of his father, given the circumstances surrounding this conflict. Now, he worried about others: Miranda, Nakor, Calis, even the aloof moredhel leader of the Snow Leopards. If he could contrive to get any or all of them away when his father had finished with whatever he was doing in the pit, Magnus would give his life finding a way. After all, he conceded, he was his father’s son.
Pug found his consciousness expanding as he moved along the timelines, and found it an almost dizzying experience. He looked at Ashen-Shugar and the Dreadking locked in a frozen point in time and found he could negotiate around them, make them appear gigantic or tiny, move away and toward them from any angle. If he shifted his perception, he could see billions of strands of time and space moving away in every conceivable direction. He was able to follow them, too: he could see billions of branches of potential consequences to any action. It was an overwhelming sense of vision and power.
He felt euphoria rising up, despite the horrors of the war. Now he knew what it meant to have god-like powers, yet he understood that with that godhood came an absence of self. Now he understood what Macros had sought to achieve on the banks of the lake many years ago. He realized the trap of power, knew he must not become indulgent in this examination of new knowledge, for to linger with the sense that he had for ever to learn, study and contrive a better solution was also a trap. Somewhere he would realize he was lost in this new understanding, or worse, he would not care if he was lost.
He created a beacon of magic energy, freezing it in a state that anchored it in place, much as the Dread had created the Sven-ga’ri as markers, or the taredhel had placed their portal flags, so that he could find his way back to this particular intersection of space and time. Then he moved along one strand of time. He saw Ashen-Shugar vanish above with himself at his side, and followed the Dread backwards to the creation of the rift, the blinding explosion of energies that tore apart the barrier between the expanding universe of reality and that which was left behind: the Dread.
Suddenly Pug realized, I can stop this before it starts! Certainly he had enough power simply to destroy the taredhel portal room before the Regent Lord betrayed his people.
That is forbidden, said a very familiar voice in Pug’s mind.
The Oracle, said Pug.
Yes, came the reply. Now you understand the secret and the burden of my people. I have given you this perspective so that you can fully understand why what you are about to do is vital.
But why not let me end this before it begins? asked Pug. I can prevent the deaths of thousands, tens of thousands!
Because, as horrible as your current course is, it is the best of those available to you.
Suddenly Pug’s mind filled with a kaleidoscope of images and feelings as countless possible timelines unfolded from each point at which he chose to take action. Each image, choice, and result flickered for the briefest instant, yet he understood fully what he saw. He was witness to horrific consequences, worlds going dark, suns being devoured, and in only one did he see his world emerging intact. The timeline he was currently on, doing what he was fated to do.
But at a terrible price.
Why? he asked.
My race is the eldest in the universe, Pug. We were the first to achieve sentience when the first shreds of reality were formed. We witnessed the clashing forces of creation and destruction, what your lore calls the Two Blind Gods of the Beginning.
We saw the very structure of reality being woven for the first time as new beings of power arose, and we alone could see the earliest manifestations of time as it was unfolding from the core where all was born. We alone could take time and see down the pathways into a seemingly endless range of possible futures, and judge the most likely outcome.
It is why we are still here as the universe is moving into a new phase of existence, while the last vestiges of that creation, the Valheru, the elder gods, the first born, the ancient races of a billion worlds, are fading into the past.
You are here to do one thing, and lingering here and exploring, no matter how long you look, will not change the outcome, for when you finish your exploration, it will be precisely the same instant you left, and nothing will be changed. We have witnessed every conceivable choice, and there is only one outcome that doesn’t reverse the expansion of reality, returning everything to as it once was, before creation.
Tomas had to die so that the full fury of Ashen-Shugar could be turned upon the Dreadking, a rage unhindered by human sensibilities.
Pug paused, his heart sinking, and he realized now the one piece of this he hadn’t understood until now. Ashen-Shugar hadn’t been needed as a mere distraction so Pug could come into the pit and explore the void and its intersection with reality, freeing Pug of the Dreadking’s attention; rather, the Dragon Lord was the only entity on Midkemia powerful enough to become that one thing, that one moment of distraction, towards which all the Dreadking’s attention would be turned, letting go of everything else across space and time, thereby robbing the void of other opportunities to successfully achieve its goal. Ashen-Shugar and the Dreadking must remain locked in this moment for eternity.
Magnus! Pug sent to his son. What is happening?
Magnus saw the smoky tendrils and shadowy creatures pouring out of the fractured dome, and then suddenly they were motionless, frozen in place.
Father, the attacks have ceased!
Get as many away as you can, Pug sent.
The Oracle’s voice came again to Pug. You must now lock them into a struggle that will endure to the end of time. Only in that way can the mindless obsession of the Dread be for ever focused into a single, fixed point in time, and then can the rest of creation grow.
I know, said Pug, and he realized with resignation that n
othing had changed, except more of those struggling above might survive.
When you are finished, I will awake in my cave beneath Sethanon, and from there I will see a new series of time-lines, choices, and possibilities. But only if you finish this.
Pug was silent, then said, I know.
If it will comfort you, there is one thing you must understand above all: that one thing separates the realm in which you live, the moving and evolving world, from that which was left behind, that which hungers for that perfect timeless bliss. You do what you do for love. You mortals make terrible mistakes for love, and you suffer for love, but you have love. The Dread only has longing, and longing drives frustration, and that drives anger, and in the end nothing is left but rage and hunger. Self-sacrifice is the highest form of love.
I understand, said Pug.
Magnus waited with the moredhel warrior Arkan standing in front of him, his empty quiver and his bow lying on the ground as he stood with his sword, ready to face the next wave of the Dread.
Now! came his father’s voice in his mind, and Magnus took every bit of the energy in the matrix of magic and channelled it to his father.
For a long moment there was a pause, as if the universe held its breath.
Then chaos was unleashed.
The flood of magic Pug unleashed on the Dread and Ashen-Shugar was like a sledgehammer striking a nail, driving it through a board and out the other side. Both powerful beings were struck so hard they almost vanished as they were blown down into the pit, cast out of this universe, out into the void.
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