by R S Penney
“So, you offered to take her place?”
The two young men shared a fond smile, and then – to Desa’s delight – they kissed each other on the lips. “Cody wanted to teach me the recipe,” the lanky one explained. “He said you taught him a few years ago.”
Seating himself on a wooden stool, Sebastian held his coat against his chest. He chuckled softly. “I did,” he admitted. “But Cody makes it better than I ever could. Run along now. It’s your free day.”
The boys hurried for the door.
“Actually, Cody!” Sebastian called out.
The shorter lad skidded to a stop, twisting around to look over his shoulder. Something about his demeanour made Desa pause. He was happy. If she understood this situation correctly, these two had both lost their parents and yet they were happy here. A rarity for boarding houses.
“Linger a moment,” Sebastian said. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Desa stepped into the kitchen and nodded to the young man. “Hello.” It was all she could think to say. She felt ludicrous standing here in clothes that marked her as a relic of a bygone era.
“This,” Sebastian said, “is Desa Kincaid.”
The boy’s face lit up. “No way!” He slammed his hands down on the table, leaning over it to peer at her. You might have thought that he was looking at a character who had leaped out of the pages of a storybook. “It’s really her?”
“It’s really me,” she confirmed.
“Oh, Sebastian told us everything!” Cody exclaimed. “How you fought off the sheriff’s men and freed him from that cell. Can you really fly? He said that you can fly! How do you do it?”
Clearing her throat, Desa shot a glance toward Sebastian. “Everything?” she asked. “You told them everything?”
“Everything,” he insisted. “Including the part where I betrayed you.”
“And…what happened after that?”
“Oh, they know all about my life after I fled Ofalla,” he said grimly. “The years I spent wandering, getting involved with the Eradian Army in their campaign against the southern continent, working in the steel mine…”
“I see.”
Rising slowly from his stool, Sebastian offered a sad smile and a slight tip of his head. “One lesson that I’ve learned,” he said. “It’s no use trying to run from the truth. You have to face it.”
He returned his attention to the boys. “Run along,” he said. “I need a moment with Desa.”
They were much more reluctant to leave now that they knew who had wandered into their kitchen. After a few false starts, they both went for the door, ducking into the backyard.
Sebastian moseyed over to the stove, taking the spoon and stirring the pot. “Dinner will be ready shortly,” he informed her. “They did a fine job getting it started.”
Ten minutes later, Desa had a hearty bowl of beef stew with carrots, green peas and potatoes sitting before her. And a good thing too! She was famished! “Sebastian,” she began as he claimed the stool across from her. “I’m afraid that my memory isn’t what it used to be. May I ask a difficult question?”
“Of course.”
“What happened that night in Ofalla?”
He closed his eyes, exhaling slowly through his nose, visibly gathering his courage. “You found me in Bendarian’s townhouse,” he said. “You pointed your gun at me. For a moment there, I thought that you were going to shoot me.”
“But I didn’t?”
“No,” Sebastian replied. “You told me to leave Ofalla and to never come back. You said that if you ever saw me again…”
He shuddered.
Reaching across the table, Desa laid a hand on his forearm. Her touch seemed to calm the poor man. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For threatening you. I hated Bendarian, and you…No. There’s no excuse.”
His answer to that was bitter laughter. “Desa, it’s no more than I deserved,” he insisted. “You risked your life to save me, and I repaid you with betrayal. It took a long time for me to realize that I hated you for all the wrong reasons.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
“There may have been a bit of that,” he admitted. “But the truth is I hated you for being all the things I wanted to be. You never hid your attraction to other women. You openly practiced magic – I’m sorry, Field Binding. You lived the kind of life that you wanted to live, making apologies to no one. And I resented you for that.
“One day, about ten years after we parted ways, I realized that if I wanted to be happy, I had to accept myself. After that, I refused to live in shame.”
She took a moment to appreciate the home he had created: the sound of laughter from the floor above, the good food, the children who were free to be themselves without fear of judgment. Sebastian had done this. “Well,” Desa murmured. “It seems like you’ve done pretty well for yourself.”
He laughed again, but this time, there was no bitterness in it. “Thank you,” he said. “I created this place to be a home for people like us. Boys who fall in love with other boys and girls who fall in love with other girls. Some of them are cast out from the homes they knew as children. Others flee. They come here, and they feel safe.”
“That’s wonderful, Sebastian,” she whimpered, unable to hold back her tears. “You should be proud of yourself.”
“Thank you.”
The vision ended abruptly, the kitchen fading away to darkness. She found herself lying on the raised floor in Mercy’s pyramid, curled up on her side and sobbing. And she understood.
At long last, she understood.
Ten minutes later, Desa sat on the edge of the platform, hunched over and pawing at her face to wipe the tears away. “Thank you,” she choked out. “I know why I needed to see that.”
“It can’t have been easy,” Mercy said behind her.
Twisting around, Desa held the other woman’s gaze. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “It wasn’t. But I understand now. That is what he would have become if I had let him live.”
Mercy stood there like a teacher whose student had come oh so close to the right answer without actually finding it. “No, I’m afraid you don’t understand,” she countered. “That is what he could have become if you had let him live. The future is not written, Desa. We make it every day.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are millions of different paths,” Mercy said. “Millions of ways that his life could have unfolded. In some, he becomes a murderer, in others, a healer. We are the sum of our choices, Desa. The point is that Sebastian had potential, potential to become greater than what he was when you knew him. You robbed him of that opportunity.”
Desa forced herself to stand, turning around to face the other woman. She couldn’t bear to lift her eyes from the floor. “What are you saying?” she whispered. “That I should never take a life again?”
“No,” Mercy replied, shaking her head. “It’s not that easy. Life cannot be reduced to simple rules. Killing Adele, for instance – if you can manage it – might save millions of lives. I am saying that you must use violence as a last resort.”
That made sense. Truth be told, she had never been cavalier about harming other human beings. It was a luxury that Field Binding afforded. You didn’t have to shoot first if you could stop bullets. Wait…
Something Mercy had said rattled around in her brain. Something she had glossed over. “What was that?” Desa asked. “About killing Adele?”
The goddess sighed. “It’s time for you to learn the truth.” Just like that, the world changed. Everything vanished, leaving her alone with Mercy in a void of infinite darkness. And yet, she could still see the other woman. Her first instinct was to panic. If there was no air, she would be unable to breathe. But she felt no pressure on her chest.
Stumbling backward, Desa looked around frantically. “What is this?” she panted. “Where are we?”
Mercy spread her arms wide, gesturing to the infinite nothing all
around them. The goddess almost looked eager. As if this were a story that she had wanted to tell for a very long time. “This is called cosmic inflation.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The expansion of space and time.”
Confusion settled over Desa. There were scientists in Aladar who believed that the universe was expanding, but she couldn’t see what that had to do with Hanak Tuvar.
Before she could say a word, Mercy receded into the distance, vanishing into the endless darkness. It happened so quickly that she almost missed it. “Hey!” Desa shouted. “Where did you go?”
“I went nowhere,” Mercy said, coming up behind her. The woman’s sudden appearance made Desa stiffen and reach for a weapon that she was not carrying. “I was perfectly stationary. The space between us grew.”
“Rather quickly, it seems,” Desa observed.
The goddess hummed a jolly tune as she strolled through the emptiness. “Yes,” she said, twirling around so fast her skirt fanned out. “You might say that this was the cradle of existence. Space expands and expands in perfect uniformity, but then…Look.”
Desa examined her surroundings, unsure of what to expect. It took her a moment to find what the goddess was trying to show her. Orange dots appeared, hundreds of them in every direction. There were even more above her and more below as well. These too began to expand.
The space between them grew even faster so that they never collided. Each dot swelled to the size of a pea and then to the size of a marble. And finally, to a ball that she could hold in the palm of her hand.
“What are they?” Desa breathed
Mercy giggled, leaning sideways to peek at her from behind one of the glowing orbs. “Universes,” she said. “Millions of them, all taking shape, developing a unique set of properties.”
Desa turned slowly on the spot, taking in the sight. “Millions of universes,” she whispered. “I never dreamed there could be so many.”
“Most are inhospitable to humans.”
Desa reached for one. Just before her fingertips brushed it, she heard whispers in her mind. Harsh, discordant. Like thousands of voices all speaking incomprehensible words. Somehow, she understood what it meant; this universe was home to life, but it was completely alien to her.
The next one produced no sound whatsoever. Nor did the one after that. Dead universes then? If what Mercy said was true, some of these might have properties that would preclude the existence of intelligent life.
“Here,” Mercy said, standing behind one of the pulsing spheres. Its flickering light cast shadows over her face. “This is your universe, Desa. Come and see!”
Approaching with caution, Desa reached for the ball of light. Once again, she heard voices in her head, but these were intelligible.
“Friends, we have traveled long and far,” a woman boomed. “This island will be our home, a testament to the glory of our matron goddess. We are the Al a Dri, the people of Vengeance.”
“One hundred ships to sail across the Great Anrael,” a man declared. “To settle the savage continent and tame it in the name of the Crown. It shall be called Eradia, the new home of our people.”
Desa recoiled, shaking her head in disgust. “That’s quite enough of that,” she growled. “I know more about my world’s history than I would like to.”
When she turned around, another universe hung in the infinite blackness, glowing and pulsing like a giant firefly. Maybe she was imagining it, but she almost thought she could feel the warmth. Curiosity made her stretch her hand toward it.
“The snow,” a voice whispered in her mind. “The storms have come. Many still pray to the gods, but there is no longer any doubt in my mind. They have forsaken us. The world freezes…”
She left that universe and moved on to another. There was nothing to distinguish one from the next; they all looked the same. But somehow, she could sense which ones contained human life. Those were an extreme minority: dozens out of trillions.
“The imperative is clear,” a woman declared. “Expand or die. We will not know stability until the Empire’s borders stretch to every corner of the map.”
She abandoned that universe, wandering through the blackness. It was a relief to know that her world was not the only one to contain violent, war-like cultures, that her people were not an aberration.
She continued her exploration, passing several more universes before one caught her eye. She wasn’t sure what had drawn her to it. Intuition, she supposed. When she reached for it, a man’s confident voice spoke in her mind.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Well, that was positive, at least.
Letting her arm drop, she turned away from the ball of light and made her way back to Mercy. “All right,” she said. “I am humbled by the majesty of creation. But if you will forgive my impertinence, what does any of this have to do with Hanak Tuvar?”
Mercy didn’t answer her with words; she just pointed into the void above her head. Desa had to strain to see it, but once she did, a lump of fear settled into the pit of her stomach.
Tendrils of darkness slithered through the gaps between universes, blacker than the blackness. Greedy tentacles, slick and oily, they searched for something – anything – to grasp. Desa had encountered many things in her travels, but these filled her with a terror like nothing she had ever experienced before.
“Hanak Tuvar does not come from another universe,” she mumbled. “It comes from emptiness between universes.”
“It is a creature of the void,” Mercy confirmed. “Of the primordial emptiness. We have intruded upon its solitude, and it wishes to punish us for our transgression.”
Desa would never have believed that such a thing was possible. She knew little of the grander cosmos. If Hanak Tuvar predated not just her universe but every other one as well, there was no telling what it might be capable of.
The vision that Mercy had created faded away, leaving them once again inside the pyramid. The air was warm, but Desa still felt as though her blood had been frozen solid. She had no idea how to fight this entity.
“My people discovered that the Unifying Field can bridge two universes,” Mercy explained. “Hanak Tuvar detected us and followed one of our expeditions back to our world. It came through the gateway, destroying everything in its path, reducing the capital city rubble.
“We counterattacked, but even our most powerful weapons were useless against it. In less than two months, it had rendered over thirty percent of the planet’s surface uninhabitable.”
Desa felt the blood draining out of her face. “How?” she asked, storming up to the other woman. “It can’t be that powerful.”
Shutting her eyes, Mercy drew in a calming breath. “Do you recall what happened on the day that it took possession of Adele?” she asked. “How the light changed and your metal tools melted?”
Desa nodded.
“In its true form, Hanak Tuvar can alter reality itself. It changed the laws of nature, leaving pockets where organic life cannot survive. Nearly a dozen people volunteered to be part of my Transcendentalist Project, hoping to become strong enough to challenge Hanak Tuvar. Dri was the first to succeed, and I followed soon after. But even together, we were overmatched.
“I began to search for a compatible universe in the hopes that some of us might escape and live on. We found a pristine world, untouched by human civilization. Dri and I led two million people through the gateway. Two million out of eight billion. We saved as many as we could.
“For a time, we thought we were safe. The survivors divided into three groups: those who would follow Driala, those who would follow me and those who wanted nothing to do with either of us. It was inevitable that conflict would arise.
“Thirty-seven years after we came to this world, Hanak Tuvar followed us through the gateway, hopi
ng to finish what it had started. The three tribes united for the last time, making a final stand. But their efforts were for naught. Hanak Tuvar cannot be destroyed.
“In a last act of desperation, Dri and I created a pocket within the Unifying Field, and together, we lured Hanak Tuvar into our trap. Once we had it contained, we sealed it away in a bubble, floating at the very edge of this universe.
“The decades passed in relative peace, but without a common adversary, the three tribes fractured. Old hatreds began to fester. I built this school to teach the Great Art to anyone who would learn, hoping that the crystal would accelerate the process. This city flourished, and my people regained much of what we had lost.
“Then the first attacks came.
“Driala’s people had used the Great Art to create terrible weapons. I was horrified to discover that she had created a school of her own. And that she had used it to teach her students how to kill. And all the while, Hanak Tuvar whispered in the minds of those who were susceptible to its evil.”
Unsure of what else to do, Desa threw her arms around the other woman. The warmth she felt when Mercy returned her embrace was surprising. It was like being hugged by her mother. “It’s not your fault,” Desa whispered.
Chuckling, Mercy pulled away from her. “The student becomes the teacher,” she said. “No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“You said that killing Adele might save lives,” Desa pressed. “How exactly would that work?”
With a sigh, Mercy looked up at the crystal, colourful light falling on her face. “The prison we created was designed to pull Hanak Tuvar back in,” she said. “Adele is its only anchor to this universe. If her physical form is destroyed…”
“That’s it?” Desa spluttered. “All I have to do is kill her?”
“It’s no easy task,” Mercy admonished. “You have inflicted grievous injuries on her, and yet she survives. Hanak Tuvar can repair the damage.”
“Then how?”
“There may be a way,” Mercy said. “But you will have to lure her here. Come. I will show you.”
Mercy led her to the roof of the pyramid, where the giant crystal glittered in the sun. Desa could feel it pulsing, singing to her in her mind. If what Rojan said was correct, this thing contained some of Mercy’s essence.