“It’s bloody astoundin’. Back ‘ome, when th’ rumor got out that th’ duchess were bein’ tutored by a witch an’ practicin’ the Craft, it were a big bloody scandal. But ‘ere, to the Yunei? It comes out the Empress ‘as taken up the Craft, an’ overnight what would’ve been unthinkable becomes the new Proper. I can’t bloody decide if that’s somethin’ to admire or not.” —Private comment by the Enerlish ambassador to the Yunei Empire.

  New Imperial House, the Gate, Yonguitang Earthmote 09.06.03.18.14

  There was, of course, a Proper way to practice witchcraft. Or at least, there was damn well going to be just as soon as the Imperial Coven had finished describing it.

  Bi-Ha had learned and read that the Craft in other cultures was broadly divided into colours, which seemed a sensible enough system for the Yunei to use as well. White, for the craft of healing in body and mind and soul. Green, for the craft of connecting with the world and unlocking its hidden potential. Red, for seeing into people’s hearts and turning them toward a desired end. Blue, for protection and stillness. Black, for hexes and curses.

  Importantly, none of the colours was “evil.” Even black craft was no more inherently evil than a sword or spear. If turned upon the deserving, it was a tool for good. If turned upon the *undeserving…*well, it was important for a witch to have humility and patience in knowing the difference. It was important for her to exercise the blue craft to still herself and think clearly, the red craft to know her target, and consider whether the white craft was the better option.

  It was a useful framework that had helped Bi-Ha learn her strengths. She was a natural at white and blue Craft, experienced in the red from a lifetime of noble politics, and had an affinity for the green that made it easy to learn.

  And so she was practicing the black craft, because that was her weakest aspect. She was not naturally given to anger, vengeance and spite. She’d spent her life unburdening herself of them…and saw now that in doing so, she had never learned how to carry them safely when they must be carried.

  So she was trying to get angry. Trying, specifically, to invoke a wholesome anger, which seemed an oxymoron.

  “Picture your son,” the Empress told her from the cushion opposite her. “He is at the mercy of his nanny, whom you trust. Imagine that trust betrayed. Imagine you find the boy is being neglected, tormented, starved. What do you feel?”

  Bi-Ha shivered. “…Fear. And guilt. Shame.”

  “Not betrayal? Not outrage?”

  “Those too, but…self-recrimination more strongly. I chose the nanny myself, and I trust her completely. The error in judgement is mine.”

  The Empress smiled warmly, leaned forward, took her hands and squeezed softly. “Too sweet, Bi-Ha. And too cool. That is detached, long-term, blue thinking. Think black thoughts. Think of the moment you find out. Think of the horror when you walk into the room and see the abuse for the first time. What comes first?“

  “…I would snatch him from his hands and flee.”

  “You would not strike her?”

  “Maybe. If necessary. If she would not let go…” Tears prickled Bi-Ha’s eyes at the thought, and a sick guilt settled in her stomach. Really? Was she really so soft that she could not think to raise a hand in defence of her own baby?

  “Good.” The Empress shuffled forward and squeezed her fingers tighter. “There it is. The fire. You know what is Proper in that moment, Bi-Ha. You know that in that moment, anger is the right thing. Do not blame yourself, now. Focus on the anger, focus on the rightness of it. Nurture it and heal yourself.”

  Bi-Ha was trembling now. “I do not like this feeling,” she whispered. It had settled in her belly like a greasy ball of ice, making her sick.

  “And so I know you will never abuse this aspect of the Craft,” her coven-mother replied, in equally quiet tones. “But you must still have this blade up your sleeve, my love. And you must know its proper use. You are incomplete without it. A woman who cannot be angry is forever a victim.”

  She shuffled closer still. “If you cannot burn with anger for yourself, burn with anger for him. He is small, and helpless, and entrusted to the world, and the world has failed him.”

  Bi-Ha’s breath caught. The sick cold feeling in her gut melted into something hotter.

  “…Yes. That feels…different.”

  “Feed it now. Men have come, enemies of your husband. They come in the night, but find you standing in the nursery door. You have a blade in your hand.”

  Bi-Ha’s own fingers tightened, until her knuckles hurt. The Empress was working magic on her now, red magic. The vision was so vivid, the emotions were so real. She saw the moment clearly, four men in black, blades gleaming in the night, eyes bright in the dark, and herself wearing nothing but her silk nightgown and bearing only a small knife, while behind her—

  She felt the fear. The futility. But also…the determination that these men would not pass so long as she was alive. The conviction that if she died here, it would be worth it if her sacrifice bought the boy his life.

  And she felt the hook inside her that the magic could loop around and be pulled by. The curse was right there, now: she need only give it shape and intent.

  The Empress’ voice was a harsh croak. “There! Yes! Hold that feeling! Taste it! Know it! Is it wrong? Is it Improper?”

  “…No…” Bi-Ha breathed.

  “But this is just a vision, my love. These men are not real. Your baby is safe. His nanny loves and protects him just as fiercely as you. Let go, and come back.”

  Bi-Ha nodded and exhaled. But just as she was about to follow, she felt…something. Something far blacker than what she had just summoned up, but distant and wrong. Threatening. In her heightened state, it drew her attention, and her magic followed, snapping out protectively to identify the whatever-it-was that endangered her.

  What came back along that probing tendril of attention was like being struck by lightning. She had only just enough time to notice her peril before it reached her, and then with a shocked gasp she was falling, being yanked into the maw of something terrible and huge and hungry. She fell into blackness, trying to flail and thrash, feeling nothing happen. There was nothing around her, no world, no comforting voice, only the thread of her own power hauling her like a noose, and the cruel delight of something monstrous as it claimed her—

  Music. Singing. The sweetest voice she had ever heard. In any other context, it would have seemed like the uncouth chanting of barbarians, but in this moment it was sublime beyond description. The voice wrapped her, prised her out of the predatory darkness’ clutches, and sent her tumbling back.

  She opened her eyes with a stunned gasp, saw her friend and mentor openly weeping in panic, shivered, and fainted outright.

  She was brought around some unknowable time later by the scent of perfume and a hard, male hand on her forehead, stroking gently. It took a second for her eyes to open, and longer for them to focus, but the face looking down on her made her smile.

  “…Nah…”

  A look of well-controlled relief flashed behind his eyes, and his thumb stroked the curve of her eyebrow. “You scared us,” he said.

  “…Has it…been long?” Bi-Ha tried to sit up, then gave up the effort. Her body didn’t feel weak, but her mind was bruised and aching.

  “No. Just a few minutes.”

  From opposite him, the Empress took her hand. “What happened?” she asked.

  Bi-Ha tried to gather her tenderized thoughts. It would have been elegant and proper to begin her reply with a poem, but she just couldn’t. Instead, she told them what she had felt and sensed, in plain terms. The Empress listened earnestly and carefully, her expression darkening. Once Bi-Ha had finished, she backed up and rose to her feet.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and swept out of the room. Her bodyguards, two silent and terrifying women trained in the arts of the Shin Yi, fell in behind her as she departed.

  Bi-Ha watched her go, then rested her head on her husband’s lap. “Forgive me,” she murmured. “I need a little longer to recover.”

  “Hush.” He stroked her head again. “How many times have you comforted me when I needed it? Now it’s your turn.”

  That seemed entirely fair. And…far nicer than simply retiring to her bed. Bi-Ha closed her eyes and exhaled, glad beyond description that he was there for her. The simple comfort of his presence and his love drove away the lingering chill of contact with…whatever it had been. Here and now, she was safe.

  She fell asleep without even noticing it.

  

  Sir, What is the purpose of the Brackishmarsh prison now that the enemy has been driven out? It was built to break men for no worse crime than standing up for their freedoms and rights, but this is little different from the barbarism of more legitimate penitentiaries. I submit that the opportunity has come to transform Brackishmarsh into the exemplar of a new idea: rehabilitation, rather than incarceration. Rather than lock our wayward brothers away behind cold iron and leave them to rot, let us try to bring them back to the right and narrow path, through education and opportunity. —Letter to the editor, The Auldenheigh Post.

  Nimico’s hut, Unreachable earthmote 09.06.03.18.14

  To her own surprise, Nimico was finding herself less and less bored with life on her prison earthmote. The fact was…here, she couldn’t indulge her insane impulses. Sometimes the idea would come to her to do something crazy like fling herself off the edge, but it was such a long walk and so much effort to get there that sense would reassert itself long before she could actually act on it.

  With nothing else to do, she was working on her garden, and her house, and making her own furniture. All long, slow projects requiring patience and diligence, and if in a fit of sudden restless energy she tore up her plants or smashed her furniture…well, the only person she hurt was herself.

  And she wasn’t, in fact, lonely.

  The reason for that exploded through the bead curtain she’d hung for a door. The beads rattled wildly as a brown figure wrapped in a few square inches of white cloth bounded through with a huge whoop, and crashed into her to shower her face with kisses.

  “Nimmyyy!!!!

  Nimico found herself wrapped enthusiastically in a warm, soft, curvaceous, near-naked body that smelled equally of fur and wine. The face was inhuman—wide and flat with big slot-pupiled eyes and a cervine nose dotted with white spots like inverse freckles. The whole was framed by a wild tangle of russet hair, from which two small antlers thrust up like winter branches out of a bramble thicket.

  Moments later, a similar but more masculine embrace scooped around her from behind, and bearded lips tickled her cheek with a chuckle that sounded very faintly like a bleat.

  “Heh! the look on your face…”

  Nimico was torn between laughter and indignation…but she did see the funny side. She pouted at her cousin Heralds in mock opprobrium. “Faun…what have I told you about knocking?”

  Faun’s freckled face split into a wide, impish grin. “Nothing important!” she squeaked, in her high, excitement-fried voice. “Besides, you don’t have a door. Here!” She took a swig from the wine bottle in her left hand, then offered it to Nimico. “We brought you a present.”

  Nimico took it and swigged. The twins had a taste for strong fortified wines so powerful they clogged the throat. She had no idea where they got the stuff, but it was a welcome treat even though they’d invariably drunk most of it before arriving.

  ‘Twins’ was, of course, not the right word. They were Heralds, created without being born. They had no parents, and so weren’t siblings, and certainly hadn’t shared a womb together. But they had always called themselves twins from the very first, even if they spent a lot of their time doing very un-siblinglike things together.

  “You’re pregnant again,” Nimico noted. “You shouldn’t drink when you’re—”

  “Sheesh, relax. I’m a fucking Herald!” Faun snatched the bottle back and swigged. “It won’t hurt the baby if I don’t want it to.”

  Nimico shook her head, but chuckled and flopped down on the mat she’d made that served as her bed. She was working on a real bed, but the young saplings she’d cut needed time to dry or else they’d warp. Another way in which her island was forcing patience on her. “Right. Yes. What’s the father’s name this time?”

  “Zabar,” Satyr said with a fond chuckle. “Zabar at-Hurat. And his wife Shevhi.” He swiped the bottle, from Faun, knocked back a gulp, then handed it to Nimico. “Good people, on the spiral to destruction.”

  Nimico nodded. That was what the twins did. They played at being drunken, irresponsible, randy louts…but their reason for being was to guide the world’s addicts and hedonists back to a more wholesome life. So they found the people who were about to ruin their lives, and gave them a reason not to: a child. The perfect child, the one they’d fall in love with instantly, and from there live a better and more wholesome life. The twins used excess and debauchery as the bait on the hook to help their targets escape excess and debauchery.

  It had always sounded paradoxical to Nimico…but it worked. History was full of sharifs, thaighns, dukes, chiefs, lords and ardkin whose wild youths might have become awful drunken burdens on their people, but who had instead grown into sober and responsible leaders after the birth of their child. If you knew the signs, Faun and Satyr were there in the background of history. There was a damn good chance one or the other of them was among Ellaenie’s ancestors, in fact.

  “And they’re soon to step off it, with your help?” she asked drily.

  “That’s the idea!” Faun grinned and stretched out on the floor, extending her cloven hooves into a luxuriant, sultry stretch. “The estimable Zabar at-Hurat will soon find his wife is with child…and then his mistress as well. He’s a decent lad, deep down. He’s just always been rich and spoiled rotten by his father. I think he’ll love both kids equally.”

  “What happens if he doesn’t?” Nimico asked, sipping the wine again. “Surely that happens sometimes?”

  “We’re quite good at picking our targets,” Satyr said, with a touch of pride. He reached up and scratched the base of one curly ram-horn, then shrugged. “But yes, sometimes. When that happens, we have a little haven of our own, deep in the woods on an earthmote mortals can’t normally reach. Our children get a loving family no matter what. The ones rejected by our mortal parents grow up looking more like us, and they get to live a long and happy life among their own kind.”

  “Good…that’s good.”

  They both stared at her curiously.

  “…What?”

  “You’ve changed, Nimmy.” Faun popped upright to sit cross-legged. “You care more, all of a sudden. I can tell!”

  Nimico shrugged and looked away. “I spent ten thousand years not changing. What makes you think I can do it now?”

  “You mean besides this prison?” Satyr asked, gesturing to it with a toss of his horned head.

  “I mean…I don’t know what I mean. The longer I spend here, the more I realize that I do want to change, but the more I think about it the more I realize I wanted to for a very long time—and I could have—but I didn’t.”

  Satyr nodded slowly. “Mortality gave you that opportunity. But you’re still a Herald, deep down. We’re not a very changeable breed, are we?”

  “That’s not how we were made,” Nimico agreed.

  The twins shrugged. They took the bottle back off her and passed it around again. Despite the fact it had arrived only a quarter full, it didn’t seem to be getting any lighter.

  “…Not that I’m not glad to see you,” Nimico said after a while, “but why are you here?”

  “Our cousin’s hurtin’!” Faun said, simply.

  “I walked away.”

  “Still our cousin, whether you did or not!”

  Satyr nodded. “And unlike the others, you’re…” he paused. “Look, Sayf’s still pissed at you, I know that. For what you did to Saoirse. Actually, they all are. But we think maybe this is a chance for your life to turn for the better. And we wanna help. That’s what we do, isn’t it?”

  Nimico snorted. “So, what? You want to fuck me? Put a child in me?”

  “Na-ah. Sounds fun, though!” He toasted her with the bottle and a characteristically goaty grin, while Faun laughed and nodded enthusiastically.

  “It would be!” she agreed. “But it’s not what you need, Nimmy. You don’t need another spur-of-the-moment bad idea.”

  Nimico sighed. Just for a moment, her treacherous impulsiveness had flared up, but it faded again unvoiced. The twins wouldn’t have gone for it anyway. They weren’t impulsive, despite appearances.

  A new impulse came up, from a different place. This one, she followed and scooched around to cuddle up to Faun, who put an arm around her and rested her chin on Nimico’s shoulder. A moment later, Satyr joined in and the pair held and comforted her for a while, in an entirely platonic cuddle of a sort she couldn’t remember ever having before.

  “So…what do I need, according to you?” she asked, after a while.

  Satyr kissed her cheek again. “You need roots, dear.”

  “And time,” Faun nodded. “Have you ever settled in one place? Ever?”

  Nimico shrugged. “Vedaun did. And in the end, he didn’t want to leave. His bones still lie beside…oh what was her name? His wife? Brigid?”

  “Bretha,” Faun said, softly, and Nimico cringed inwardly that she’d forgotten but her seemingly dilettante cousin had not.

  “…Yes. Beside her, next to whatever’s left of that house he built. He lived his whole life there, but I can’t even do that. I don’t age any more, remember? Not since Iaka…”

  She fell silent, and Faun lightly stroked a strand of hair out of her face.

  Nimico shivered, despite the earthmote’s warmth. “…If I put down roots somewhere, then I won’t just live there for the rest of my life. I’ll live there forever.”

  “Who says?” Faun asked. “Roots don’t have to last forever. But you never stood still for more than a day or two, did you?”

  Nimico didn’t get the chance to reply. A wind whipped up the trees and rattled the bead curtain, and all three of them froze before springing to their feet.

  “What—?” Satyr turned his nose to the sky and sniffed, before recoiling as though a vapor had stung his nostrils. “What is that?”

  “Who is that?” Faun added.

  Nimico was trembling. She knew that mind. She’d watched it from afar too often. But even as she focused on it, she felt it warp and buckle, shed vital parts like an overpressure boiler blowing its rivets. All three of them recoiled from the agonizing sensation and put up a wall around their psyches just in time, or else the backlash of feeling that mind die in its moment of blasphemous transformation would have overwhelmed them.

  But rather than dissolve away into oblivion, or depart along the mysterious path Nimico herself feared to follow, this mind took a third route…and the last thing Nimico heard before she collapsed in a protective faint was her own wail of traumatized recognition.

  Deep age had given E?rrach an intimate appreciation for some aspects of his personality that enabled him to be…well, what he was.

  The first was a proper appreciation of solitude. Not loneliness, but instead a deep desire and even need to seek out long periods of quiet, of peace, of meditation and reflection. Prayer, too. Always prayer, because who else was he going to talk with, all alone in the wild?

  Well, he had Maicoh and Maingan, actually. They mostly kept their distance, and only checked in every few years or so. Here, in this place, they even deigned to present in human form—this was the one place they felt comfortable being fully themselves. Understandable, that. The Nested Worlds was a beautiful gem, a seed at the beginning of something far greater…but it was also inexpressibly confining for beings such as they. Though, speaking of confinement, there wasn’t a force in this creation or any other that would persuade them to actually wear clothes, in any form.

  Eh…he was hardly one to throw stones in that regard.

  The second thing was that, really, his tastes were simple. That was perhaps a strange thing to consider in a creature who was by most sensible measures an outright god. Truthfully? Those sorts of desires didn’t prepare someone for the long run. Great power came with great responsibility, and nothing kept a person grounded quite like humility.

  He smiled to himself as he hefted the axe, considering its blade. Needed sharpening.

  Humility had never came naturally to mankind. After all, it was neither the false lowness of habitual abasement, nor the refuge of the incapable and dispossessed. It was instead the honest, humble knowledge of who one was, and precisely what they could do.

  For a god-like being such as himself, true humility was a hard-won thing, because that precise knowing also meant knowing one’s limitations. Fortunately, he’d been born a deep-woods rural sort of man, and had known extraordinary ability in deeply humble circumstance from his earliest memories on Earth. He’d been lucky enough to grow up surrounded by heroically impressive people from early on, and to have been raised living within a deeper, foundational truth: capable though he was, he was only a creature of something infinitely more.

  Even now, as a living creator god, he was still only a creature. Still made by something greater, still working out his final purpose. Still, he hoped and believed, in the service of true Good.

  Humbling thoughts, those.

  So he wasn’t a picky or demanding sort of man, and he wasn’t one to wallow excessively in what he was. He was one to exult in life and revel in his being of course, but he did so as an act of sharing, not dominance. He’d learned even as a kid that the dominating types were sad, deeply insecure things. He’d never felt insecure, never felt the need to prove anything. Born with great gifts and good upbringing, rich in spirit and frugal in worldly things. He was deeply blessed, and he knew it.

  That meant deep mission, deep purpose.

  Which was why the third thing about him was so useful: he loved to train and train arduously, be it physical, mental, spiritual, or otherwise. Here, in his private retreat-world, he could challenge the full capabilities of his mind, body, and soul without any pesky constraining interruptions.

  Or without blowing the Nested Worlds away with an unregulated breath, or vaporizing it with a gentle kick or punch, or even roasting everything to a glowing cinder by the heat-light of a playful flex for someone’s delight! Or, perhaps the silliest and most confining example, once pointed out by Sayf at the beginning of this adventure: allowing a single beard hair to fall unnoticed, which, if separated from his being, would instantly delete everything with its suddenly unshackled gravity. He was so vast, something as small as a loose skin cell outmassed the whole of his creation a billion trillion trillion trillion trillion times over, and that was just getting started!

  Supermassive black hole dandruff. Never let it be said the Almighty didn’t have a sense of humor.

  But here? He could fully, truly let go. He could do this because his private earthmote, even as it was amplified many trillion-fold over the rest of it all, was merely a projection into that place of this place, a private world located elsewhere that he’d built for himself. Here, reality was intense and ever-new, matter and movement was more utterly real than anywhere else but the Promise. It was as far beyond his “earthmote” as the earthmote was beyond Garanhir or any of the rest. He couldn’t yet bring his wife to visit, and the other Crowns could only briefly walk the land while bound to his power…one day, that would change, and not just for them.

  That was far-future enough, the path was not yet clear from Within. For now it was his refuge. Here, he could strain, and meditate, and exert himself well, in every form he’d ever enjoyed, from the most sophisticated “gym rat” technical training of his youth, and frankly all his later years…

  To something far more natural, like chopping firewood. And this he was doing, on the ten thousandth local year of his daytime sabbatical. When he returned, it would be as if he’d simply jumped up the mountain and jumped back down. The reality instead was that he’d crossed over into elsewhere, where he could spend serious time doing serious thinking.

  And he’d needed the time. His moment of action was rapidly approaching, and the hoped-for escape wasn’t going to manifest. Instead, E?rrach would be forced into action. Terrible, consequential action.

  He swung the axe and chopped. The blade wedged in the wood, and a few ungainly lift-and-thump repetitions only got it wedged harder. He summoned his real strength and chopped again.

  The knot finally yielded.

  Maicoh stood there, arms crossed, a lop-sided almost panting grin on his face. Even in human form his lean, muscular frame was decidedly lupine, somehow. That wasn’t something E?rrach had consciously “built in,” but of course creation was more like gardening than architecture, so…

  It worked well for him. “Big pile,” he growled amusedly, then scratched at the thick hair on his belly and chest. Those eyes of his were still their ice-blue, but here it was so much deeper, so much more intense a color. Even E?rrach couldn’t help but behold their stark intensity.

  Maingan was the same, with much the same build. While she wasn’t quite so well-sized as Maicoh, she more than made up for it in intensity*.* Also, the word “mane” was entirely applicable to that voluminous cascade of white, luxuriant hair swept back behind her ears, and she didn’t so much walk as stalk across the yard.

  “Big brain,” she chuckled, and swatted the back of her mate’s head.

  “I am always amused how the both of you can be so wise and intelligent, and yet behave so much as if you get through life sharing a single, precious neuron.”

  Maicoh shrugged. “I let her have it, most times.” A literally wolfish grin at his mate, who rolled her eyes back at him. “When she don’t misuse it.”

  “Play ain’t misuse,” Maingan replied, almost growling. “Besides, you made us this way.”

  “Did not! I made you, yes, but mostly I left things to just…play out. With a prayer and some preparation. As if anyone could possibly have prepared for you two.”

  The pair made noncommittal “uh-huh” noises and started picking up firewood. It was one of the few tasks they conceded that ‘monkey arms’ were better for.

  E?rrach smiled. That is what he loved so much about them. They could just be in a way that humans found so vexingly difficult. To them, friendship with their creator was not an existential question of freewill or anything else. Mostly, they simply wanted banter and play.

  Very…canine. In all the best ways.

  “How much longer you gonna hide in here, boss?”

  …And occasionally capable of deeply incisive questions.

  “As long as possible. The power I must gather is immense, even by my reckoning. You know that.”

  They both gave him a Look. Red eyes and blue eyes both said they would never fall for such an obvious bullshit dodge.

  Still, he could needle back. “You’re both doing the thing where you briefly realize your actual potentials as my equal in intelligence and insight, and coaxing your creator to explain himself.”

  “Yup,” Maingan agreed, achieving the very ideal form of sardonic in a single syllable.

  “It’s a good neuron,” Maicoh offered with characteristic humor.

  E?rrach sighed, always thankful in turn for that disarming charm of his. Noted, as he always dd, that his sigh had the raw might to create or destroy worlds at the grandest scale…and that was not remotely close to the power he would wield as soon as he stepped back.

  “I’m not lying. But the deeper truth is this: I’d like to enjoy this respite before I Speak.”

  Now that got their attention. Even in human form, somehow their ears pricked up with concern.

  “You gotta Speak so soon? Somethin’ coming?”

  He closed his eyes and showed them, mind-to-mind.

  Both his hunting hounds…well, in canine form they’d have bristled, their ears would have gone flat and their teeth would have been out. In this human form, their shoulders and fists bunched. And Maingan had kept the sharp teeth, even in this form.

  “Don’t that…put this all sorta back on square one, boss?”

  “It very well might, yeah. It re-opens an ancient chapter in our history I’d hoped was forever behind us.”

  “One’a them mysterious ways things, huh?”

  “No…this one is tragically, deeply human.”

  Because of course it was. The long battle to free the human race from the most ancient of slavery…was now about to happen again.

  Maingan growled and deposited her firewood on the stack under the eaves. “Stupid humans, again.”

  “Humans like me?”

  “You’re a god, boss. Not really human no more.”

  “Yes,” he chided. “I am. It was something like that very duality you see in me that saved us the first time, too. Wrap your neuron around that for a bit.”

  E?rrach said it with a smile, but didn’t comment any further. He didn’t have another billion years to lay out the ancient, incredible story of it all, so instead he started picking up the larger logs and tearing them apart for kindling. For a few minutes, there was silence. This was no pointless exercise—just as his time spent here was negligible back in the Nested Worlds, his time spent there would be uncounted here. The wood pile would be waiting for him when next he came back.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He became aware of a warmth against his arm. Then, seconds later, a similar warmth on the other side. The two had finished stacking the wood, and come back to show their concern and affection in the way they knew and liked best. Arms around his arms, heads against his shoulders. No words necessary.

  The mightiest of the mighty was not afraid to show how deeply he needed good people. He wrapped his arms around them both and pulled them in for a good, tight hug. For he was a solitary creature by nature…but never a loner.

  And it was on that thought the long-expected, stretched-out echo of world-shattering agony washed across the spiritual landscape around them. E?rrach closed his eyes, breathed deeply. Calm. Control. He summoned up his full power and held it in ready tension.

  Maioch and Maingan were back in their canine forms, hunter-paragons suitable to stand next to the King of Power. He scooped them up, one under each arm, and leapt a ballistic path around the sphere of his world, to land on his mountain on the opposite side. He blinked, and now the mountain was the mountain, here on the earthmote among the Nested Worlds.

  He leapt again, to deposit them at the lakeshore cabin, where Rheannach turned her wide-eyed, concerned gaze back from the sky to give him a confused and tense look. He paused long enough to hold her and rub his nose against hers, brow to brow, lips to lips. To remember all in him that was tender and gentle.

  Love was the opposite, perfect enemy of what now was. He luxuriated in it for as long as he dared, and then…was elsewhere.

  And he was prepared to meet the living fulcrum of time.

  

  Further notes on options for arming the pilot. 1: Mount overhead on upper wings Pros: Simple. Cons: pilot can’t easily aim/reload/clear jams. Aerodynamics. Weight and vibration on wing structure. 2: Mount weapon directly in front of pilot Pros: Easy to reload, easy to aim. Cons: Destroying own prop = plane crashes = negative pilot feedback. Solutions? 2a: Armored prop blades? Makes prop less efficient, ricochets into engine or pilot = dangerous, enough shooting destroys prop anyway. See above. 2b: some kind of timing mechanism? Synch gun to engine cycle? Technically tricky, maybe, but could be perfect if it can be done. Talk with Lukers Bros. —Excerpt from Derghan Vargursson’s notebook.

  Near Sewin Bridge, Enerlend 09.06.03.18.14

  Jerl’s stomach heaved again, trying in vain to bring up a breakfast he’d long since already coughed all over his boots.

  Vayada’s cooing and back rub wasn’t helping him one bit: there was no physical component to the wrongness. The pollution had lashed back on him via Mind and settled in his very spirit, as though he’d gulped down a cup of warm piss. And his mind, body and soul all wanted it out.

  Or gone. Undone. He was scrabbling for a purchase with Time, trying to haul the day back to the morning, trying to find an angle that let him prevent this…but Words thwarted Words. Or…all Words were facets of the same jewel. Or something.

  There were no lines. No options. No matter where he grabbed and looked at on the fabric of time, this disaster resonated strangely sideways and repeated, happening simultaneously in all possible worlds. In every branch of the river, Nils Civorages were consumed by this one singular event, even the blameless ones not reachable from any path available to him. Now that it was real, now that it had happened, it was real everwhere and everywhen.

  Why hadn’t he seen it coming?

  His aching abdominal muscles spasmed once again, a final string of bile choked its way out to hang from his lips before he spat it free, and finally the nausea was under control. He gasped air, coughed around the gravelly acid feeling in his throat, and raised a shaking hand to mop the cold sweat from his brow.

  Vaya handed him a water flask. “Skipper?”

  “I’m…shit. I think I’m done. I…yeah. Yeah. That’s…I’m okay now.”

  Not really. Not okay. But at least he wasn’t going to be stuck here dry-heaving until it killed him. Rather than risk swallowing, he rinsed his mouth out and cleaned himself up as best he could.

  Vaya gave him a dubious look. “You sure? Not like a seasoned airman to chuck up after a safe landing…”

  “Not that. Something…something awful has happened. Can’t you sense it?”

  The elf’s orange eyes widened, and she shook her head.

  Jerl cleared his throat, spat out something nasty, sipped the water to rinse his throat, and looked up to the sky. The Cavalier Queen was bellying low over them now, throwing out the lines. Men rappelled down them while elves leapt unaided from the deck to land lightly in the grass. In seconds, they were ramming down the anchor pins, securing the ship to the deck. Derghan and Sin came trotting up to him, concern writ large on both faces.

  “Something the matter, Jerl?” Derghan asked.

  Jerl looked past him. There was a pale figure standing among the trees at the field’s edge, but then a rushing crewman occluded the view for a second, and she was gone.

  “…I want us in the air as soon as possible, please,” he told them.

  “Something the matter?”

  “Something terrible. We need to…” Time latched onto a future. Not a wide one, either. There was a bottleneck coming, where he had to say the exact right thing to the exact right person at the exact right moment in the exact right place. But at least he knew the where. “We need to get to the Oasis. We’ll have help.”

  Derghan didn’t waste words. he nodded sharply, turned, and started bellowing at his flight crews to get the planes winched up. Sin watched him go, then cocked her head at Jerl.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look this scared,” she said, quietly.

  “Civorage just….died. Or…ascended. Or something. He’s no longer mortal.”

  Sin’s eyes were as green-blue as an opal, and they went even wider than Vaya’s had. She backed off, nodded, then without so much as a run-up her muscles bunched, there was a ground-shaking thud and she leapt clear back up to the Queen’s deck from a standing start.

  Vayada whistled appreciatively. “Bomirdd nornen caern, nay?”

  “Bomirddirara,” Jerl reminded her. “She hates that name.”

  “Fine, fine. But…shit. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Nor can I,” Jerl allowed. “Come on.” He grabbed a rope ladder and hauled himself up it. Leaving Vaya to look after his plane, and citing the need to get cleaned up, he ducked into the officer’s cabin, where Amir was busy spreading out his maps and uncasing the tools of his trade.

  “The Oasis is in a bad position right now,” he said. “It’s going to be—”

  “Don’t worry,” Jerl told him. “We’ll have help.”

  “Are we talking Crown intervention here, or—?”

  “Yes.” Jerl closed his cabin door and stripped off his stinking, stained shirt. As he tossed it into the small wicker basket that served as his laundry hamper, he sensed a cool vapor across his skin, and suddenly the space behind him in the narrow cabin had the intimate feeling of somebody else being there.

  He didn’t turn around. “You might have knocked.”

  “I did, in a sense.”

  “…Fair.” Jerl grabbed a clean shirt and shrugged it on before turning around. “How bad is it?”

  Lady Haust’s expression behind her veil was unreadable, of course. But her posture was tense. “He gave me a real fight,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I’ve…never had to battle something so powerful before.”

  “You still won, though.”

  She shook her head. “A stalemate. I was trying to contain and capture him.”

  Jerl’s lips tightened as his eyebrows clenched downwards. “Don’t tell me he’s a match for you?”

  She spread her hands palms-upward in a small shrug. “He doesn’t have my experience. But he has shed some of the necessary shackles that keep a person, well, a person.”

  “What is he now?”

  “That,” Haust said, moving sideways to get out of his way, “is the big question.”

  “Right. We’d better get flying.”

  “You will find Adrey Mossjoy here,” she said, and the knowledge arrived gently in Jerl’s mind. “Bring her as well. All the Wordspeakers must be involved in this.”

  “All of us? Even that chap with the mask?”

  “He’s not exactly on the wrong side, Jerl. He’s just not on your side.”

  “I thought his side was ‘laugh at the pretty colours while everything burns down.’”

  She didn’t reply.

  “…Alright. Anybody else I should fetch?”

  She shook her head. Jerl nodded, stepped out of the room, turned to check if she was following, and saw that she was gone.

  Well…that was her way. He washed his hands, dried them, then patted Amir on the shoulder. “Check the weather,” he suggested. “I think you’ll find it’s doing something unexpected.”

  Amir nodded solemnly. “Hmm. Crown intervention indeed.” He put down his tools and gave Jerl a look. “What exactly is happening, Jerl? What was that I felt, earlier?”

  Jerl parked his butt against the desk. “What did you feel, exactly?”

  Amir twiddled his goatee between thumb and forefinger as he assembled his thoughts. “As though…as though a cold wind blew through the room. And a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and down my back. Like that moment when it dawns on one that he’s made a blunder.”

  Jerl nodded, and explained as best he could. Amir listened, his expression growing more and more concerned with every sentence as he wound his goatee around his finger some more.

  Finally, when Jerl was done, he stopped fidgeting with it and looked back down at the map.

  “…Best speed, with a Crown’s assistance, then. I wonder, can we…?” he paused for a moment, then laid his string across the chart. Jerl looked down and saw what he was proposing.

  Yes.

  The thought wasn’t his own. It was permission from an outside source that what would normally be insane and suicidal for an airship would, this time, be possible.

  “Yeah. We can.”

  Amir shook his head in wonder, and a smile spread slowly across his lips. “Amazing…You’ll need to convince Gebby or take the helm yourself, though.”

  “Leave it to me,” Jerl promised, and ducked out of the cabin. The winches were still pulling the planes back aboard, so he took a moment to look up, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare. And like Amir, he felt the sudden thrill of an adventure nobody else could go on.

  If nothing else…this was going to be a wonder.

  The aggregate thing that had been Nils Civorage (and the half a dozen Shin Yi it had eaten, who had given up their names upon joining the monastic order) no longer required a physical location in which to pause and consider its options. The space it now moved in was one of infinite dimensions, on which mere frivolities like matter and energy were but pencil sketches, and the Nested Worlds themselves but a childlike doodle.

  The only doodle on an endless, pristine canvas. Some lingering flicker of Civorage’s personality was faintly surprised at how infnitessimal the Crowns’ ambition and vision truly was. They had created infinity, then deigned to play with nothing more than a dust mote.

  And Civorage had wished to rule said dust mote. His ambitions had extended to being the benevolent king of an infinitely tiny speck.

  How much greater was the vision and ambition of the god he had now become?

  Contemplation of the options yielded frustration at every turn, however. The dust mote was protected, and the beings who protected it had set down deep and sturdy roots. They hoarded energies that were, if not infinite, then the next best thing. They clung to stupid, small, human perspectives despite being so far beyond human as to leave no room for adequate comparison or metaphor.

  They were certainly far stronger than their new rival. Far better established. Far more experienced. Far more mighty. Had Haust been willing to sacrifice the Enerlish soldiers and the Wordspeaker behind her, she might well have surrounded and destroyed….him? Yes. Him. May as well stick with that comfortable old pronoun, anachronistic though it now was.

  The Circles remained, at least. The Encircled and the dominated were still his to control. But the tiny considerations of before slipped away and were forgotten. He had an expanded vision, now.

  Time remained vexingly opaque. And he was under no illusions—if E?rrach desired his destruction, the ancient one would destroy him and there would be nothing he could do to stop it.

  Ah, but E?rrach would not. He could not. The Nested Worlds were, to him, as delicate as a frozen soap bubble held in the palm of his hand. To act was to risk shattering it…irrevocably.

  How simple. E?rrach could not act precisely because the sheer magnitude of him and his power would destroy the very thing he was trying to protect. It should have been obvious, even in mortality.

  The others, though…the other three Crowns, and their Heralds, and the Wordspeakers, were not so constrained. They were a danger, still. And each of them held the power to defeat him. Collectively…

  Over an interval not definable by any mortal, linear conception of time, Civorage’s wraith considered his options. Unburdened as he now was by passion or sentiment, a course that would previously have been literally unthinkable presented itself.

  Yes. There was power for the taking. And with it, yet more and yet more still. It would be a dangerous move. It might result in his destruction or enslavement. But the alternative was to have nothing at all.

  So be it.

  Sewin Bridge, the Gwidno Line, Enerlend 09.06.03.18.14

  “So what now?”

  Adrey came back to the here-and-now, and rather wished she hadn’t. As unpleasant as her musings on what Civorage had done were, the fact was her body was exhausted and aching. All the running around, the long hike up the hill and the adrenaline of battle were catching up with her, and the cold damp weather was making her ”souvenirs” from the Peltons act up. The whip and knife scars on her back itched and twinged, the brand on the nape of her neck ached, and the worrying pins-and-needles in her toes were back. She needed a hot bath, at minimum. Preferably a stiff drink, a massage and a good night’s sleep, too.

  She wasn’t going to get any of them. She gave Wullem a bleary look, took a deep breath, and cleared her throat.

  “…For you, temporary appointment as commanding officer of the Particulars,” she said. “That fight was good. Disciplined. The lads performed well after a day of fighting and a gruelling march in the mountains. For the love of Raksuul, don’t let them know I said that.”

  Wullem chuckled. “Right. Training to cement it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And why am I temporary CO?”

  Adrey lifted her chin to point with it. The Cavalier Queen was coming back up the valley. “Because I’ll be going with them.”

  “Will her Grace the Duchess be happy about that?”

  “She’ll be waiting for me where it’s going.”

  “…Right.” Wullem nodded, stood with a weary groan, and nodded. “Good luck, Adrey.”

  “You too, Wullem.”

  Twenty minutes later, she looped a leg and arm through the rope ladder and was pulled up and aboard. She didn’t have the energy left to actually climb.

  No sooner was she on than the wheel was spinning and the bags were being filled, lifting them higher as they turned away. Jerl took her bag and escorted her to the officer’s cabin.

  “You’ve had a rough time of it,” he noted, pulling a small unfolding cot down from its storage in the ceiling beams and unfolding it for her.

  Adrey settled onto it with a heartfelt sigh while Jerl produced a couple of dividers and set them up, creating a cozy, private little nook. “It’s been a long day,” she agreed, with feeling. “I think this is the first time I’ve sat down since…early this morning.”

  “Sounds like you need a stiff drink.”

  “….Yes, please.”

  She worked her boots off and massaged her feet while Jerl raided his drink cupboard and poured her an inch of whisky. The good stuff, too. Of course, Jerl had been a reasonably wealthy merchant long before he was a baron of Enerlend and an officer in the Duchess’ air fleet. There were still crates and bales and barrels of nonperishable valuables in the Queen’s hold from her last trip to the Winter Bazaar. After all this was over, Jerl would be a rich man…

  And, Adrey judged, he couldn’t have cared less. She accepted the tipple from him and sipped it with a sigh of profound relief.

  Jerl poured a glass for himself, spun a chair across the room and sat opposite her. “Are you alright?”

  “I just saw a man…Crowns, Jerl, I don’t even properly understand what he did, but my Word was screaming at me. Have you ever felt something like that?”

  He nodded. “Mine was too. Felt foul, didn’t it? I threw up.”

  “I wish I’d had that luxury….” Adrey realized her hands were shaking, and knocked back the whole measure of whisky in one go before setting the glass aside before her white-knuckle grip could break it. “And I have this horrible feeling it’s my fault.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for what he—” Jerl began.

  “I was the one who ordered the Shin Yi to capture him, Jerl.” She stared him hard in the eye. “Me. Entirely on my own initiative. It wasn’t Ellaenie’s idea, it wasn’t yours, no Crown or Herald suggested it to me. I saw the opportunity, and I took it. And this is the result. Whatever follows from it, follows directly from my unilateral decision.”

  Jerl calmly refilled her glass. “Did you reach inside his mind and tell him to unmake himself?”

  Adrey didn’t answer. She gave her own foot a rub and a squeeze instead, then accepted the second drink. “…I get what you’re saying.”

  “You don’t really feel it, though.”

  “Would you, in my position?”

  “I think I might. Because I’m not you.” He gave a wry shrug and stetched out his long legs comfortably. “May I speak candidly, my lady countess?”

  Adrey sighed. “…Not today, my lord baron. Or not right now, at least. I need sleep, please.”

  “As you wish.” He toasted her, drained the glass, and stood. “I’ll make sure you’re not disturbed.”

  He was nearly at the door when Adrey’s damnable curiosity and trust got the better of her. “…Okay! Okay. I may as well…sleep on whatever you have to say, at least,” she allowed.

  He turned back and gave her a sympathetic look. “You hate not being in control.”

  Adrey’s eyes narrowed. “I have…very good reasons for hating that, yes. But everybody hates not being in control.”

  “Not as much as you. It’s part of what drives you, it’s part of what makes men respect and follow you. But Adrey, every airship captain knows when it’s time to point the prow downwind and let the wind carry you. Some events aren’t your fault even if you’re involved.”

  “….Do you even really know what my Word does, Jerl?”

  He shrugged. “Not really.”

  Adrey looked down at the whisky glass. Her hands were a little more relaxed now, at least. “Wavefunction. Everything in the whole damn world is…is rolls of the dice. Nothing’s solid, everything everywhere is just a cloud of might-be and might-not-be. And I can see those clouds condense into is and isn’t. I can even control which way they condense….” She scowled in concentration, then—

  There was a pop. She felt a tiny percussive puff of air against her hands, and heard the faint thump and slosh as the whisky glass, still full, dropped a fraction of an inch onto the leather of Jerl’s desktop, six feet away.

  Jerl’s eyebrows shot up. “…I had no idea you could do that. How did you do that?”

  Adrey shrugged. “At any given second, there was a near-infinitely tiny chance that the glass would have done that anyway. I just decided to….weight the dice. Force the card. Or…whatever metaphor you like. I nudged the probability from nearly nothing, to one hundred percent.”

  She looked him in the eye. “Do you get what I’m telling you? When it comes to physical things, I’m the next best thing to omnipotent. I could walk toward a rifle line, and every bullet would either miss or pop ten feet to the left, or just…pass through me and by a sheer umptillion-to-one fluke entirely fail to interact with my body in any way.”

  She got up, collected the glass, and drained it. “At least…that’s how I’ll be once I’ve mastered this Word,” she said. “Even you can’t do what I’ll be able to. You can do over, try again, do things differently until you get it right.”

  “Not quite as easy as you make it sound, you know. I’ve only done it a few times.”

  “Well I shall be able arrange things so they just go right for me the first time. I am in control…of everything except other people, thank goodness.”

  Jerl was leaning against the doorframe now, listening.

  “I’ve…I’ve been controlled, Jerl. I’ve been…I’ve been a pet. Or a plaything. And it’s hideous. I’d never inflict that on another person. But…”

  She paused, realizing that her train of thought had run out of track and was now sitting and waiting for the surveyors.

  Jerl crossed the room, and took the glass back. “I think I get it.”

  “You’re ahead of me, then,” Adrey admitted.

  “Not really. You just gave the reason yourself why you hate not being in control.”

  Adrey closed her eyes, ordering back the hot tears that tried to march up out of them. “So what’s your point?”

  “...No, I don’t think I...You need your rest. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

  Adrey exhaled. “Thank you. We’re going to the Oasis?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “…Isn’t it in completely the wrong part of the sky?”

  “You’ll see.” He chuckled, washed the glass, put it back in the drinks cupboard, strapped it down, then turned and left the room. “Rest well.”

  Adrey nodded, flopped back on the cot, groaned, and rubbed her eyes.

  When she awoke some hours later, she found somebody had put a blanket over her and a pillow under her head without her noticing. There was a bowl of stew, too. She ate it, and though it was only barely warm she thought it was delicious in the way that only the exhausted and starving can know, then set it aside, put her head down again and fell into a sleep blessedly untroubled by dreams.

  This one lasted all the rest of the way there. Afterwards, she was quite sorry to have missed the spectacle.

  Iaka’s Tower, The Unbroken Earthmote 09.06.03.18.14

  Iaka stirred.

  It was peaceful in her sanctum. The warm, basking energies of the lodehead thrummed through her flesh, holding back the endless gnawing of time and entropy, rejuvenating and invigorating her. And yet she felt tired. More than that, even; she felt terribly, terribly bone-weary.

  She was not ready to wake, yet. The wound she had suffered shielding herself and Nils from the backlash of the battle of Auldenheigh had been deep and terrible, and not even her long practice, nor the effectively infinite well of energies she tapped from the Lodehead, could heal it swiftly.

  But something terrible had intruded upon her repose. Some dark dream or foreboding had reached in and yanked her back to consciousness. She lolled in her throne, while her Nornfey attendants rushed to bring her water and food.

  She ignored them, and tried to focus. There was something terribly familiar in the intrusion.

  “…Nils?”

  The shadows deepened. The sensation of a loyal friend murmuring I’m here in a gentle voice slid into her awareness without the crass intermediary of sound.

  For some reason, it wasn’t a reassurance. She looked around. Her Nornfey attendants had ceased their work and were all, to an elf, looking up at the ceiling with slack, hypnotized expressions.

  The shadows shifted again. And Iaka’s long-husbanded power finally realized why she had not sensed his presence properly. In looking for a sapling, she had missed the forest.

  “Nils…” she breathed. Fear leapt in her breast as the enormity of what she was sensing stole across her. “What has happened? What did they do to you?”

  Death/release/freedom.

  “Oh, Nils…” Her hands trembled on her throne’s armrests. Around her, the elves were falling to their knees as their bodies dissolved into ash and grit, as the already reduced spirits flowed out of the disintegrating physical matter and joined with the presence that had once been her friend, pupil, agent and beloved. She was gripped by a sudden mad impulse: rise to her feet. Run. Fling herself out of the lodehead’s field. Embrace all the time she had shoved aside and let it age her to the grave in an instant. Better that, than—

  The shadows struck.

  The only reaction Lady Iaka had time to give voice to was a shocked gasp.

  [You are not the first to un-become in such a terrible manner, you know.]

  The voice came—and it was a voice, complete with all its inflections, even here in this dimensionless infinity of pure possibility—with weight and authority fit to crush any lesser spirit.

  The spirit that had once been Nils Civorage, and which now contained many more, did not deign to pause in its feeding. If the Shin Yi had been a nourishing meal, the Nornfey had been as substantial and satisfying as a single lettuce leaf…but the former Herald was a banquet. Her energies were titanic, her strength of spirit as deep as the sky and as wide as imagination.

  [I’ll take her, thank you.]

  The banquet ended, snatched from the wraith’s grasp. What remained was held lovingly and sadly, with the regret of a father attending his estranged child’s funeral and mourning for a reconciliation that now could never happen.

  [And so you add betraying the woman you loved like a mother to your list of sins…]

  <>

  [Bravado.]

  True, of course. From his new perspective, the spirit could gain a sense of E?rrach’s immensity. Much as airshipmen came to glimpse how wide and huge the earthmote was next to those who dwelt on it, ascension came with perspective.

  But the bravado was fuelled by knowledge. E?rrach could not actually destroy him. At least, not without destroying his greatest and most beloved work.

  [True, but not for the reasons you think. You assume I cannot destroy you because you are strong enough to distract or test me. You are not.]

  This last sentiment was a mere displeased whisper, and yet it still bowled Nils’ wraith like an incautious balloon in a storm. But the wraith was beyond fear, now. Fear was a mortal weakness it had expunged.

  [In a previous age of ages, there was another. One who haunts our most ancient stories, stories I haven’t yet fully told in this delicate ‘soap bubble’ as you call it.]

  Imagery and knowledge of the World Before flooded the wraith’s awareness. It perceived a mighty mind, the fusion of myth and science. An Adversary, set against the world before and all its many and strange peoples.

  [I came to be when the echoes of its defeat still affected the world, something my brother and sister Crowns were largely spared. Oh, we did not know the full truth at the time, of course. Not really. To know anything of it at all required faith, and faith can be difficult. But defeated it was, at infinite cost. One might even say I exist as a tail-end necessary consequence of that fight.]

  The King’s didactic voice refocused, emerging from the depths of memory to consider what was before him.

  [No, Nils. The danger you pose is not in your own might, it is in mine. It is in the temptation to solve the problem you now represent in a quick and easy way. It is in my sense of compassion, which would spare my people the suffering you will cause. You, who claimed to be her disciple and follower.]

  What remained of Iaka was gently allowed to evaporate, out of the wraith’s reach. All that power, all that potential, flowing away like good wine poured down a toilet.

  [Farewell, Iaka. I may have known you were terribly wrong, but I always admired your bravery, your boldness, and your endless capacity for compassion. You were loved, no matter what….as are you, Nils. Even now.]

  Such preening sentiment. Nils’ attention encompassed all the Nested Worlds, and all the tiny scurrying nobodies who called it home. A few rose to the position of being worthy of notice. Most showed little more intellect than might be found in a termite mound. Work, eat, sleep, repeat. Breed occasionally, when the opportunity arose.

  So many souls, but so few real minds. So few who thought and reasoned, or had ambitions and goals beyond the vague, dreary hope that tomorrow would be a little different to the tolerably mundane today.

  They were so much less than a human could be.

  [And so now are you, Nils. You have not surrendered weakness as you believe you have done, nor have you trimmed yourself of unnecessary attachments. Instead you have surrendered much of your being. What choices can you make, now? What will motivate you to act? What passion will stir you? None, my dear fool. You have cut them all away. And with it, your surest hold on the Real.]

  Base animal distractions. Who was this atavistic pretender to lecture? The goat of the woods—

  [Stag, thank you.]

  Beast. Fornicator. Primitive.

  [Vital. Agent of life, of change, of yearning, reaching up. What do you desire now? Tell me.]

  Desire was just another word for appetite. Appetites that Nils had shed. Free of such distractions, he could pursue that which pure reason indicated.

  [Such as?]

  Structure. Order. Sense. A world where stubborn edifices of tradition and inherited power got out of the way for necessary improvements. Where the stupid were led by the thoughtful.

  [Necessary to whom? For what purpose? Nils, what is your Ultimate Concern?]

  Confused, the wraith repeated itself. Structure. Order. Sense.

  [To what end?]

  Control.

  The wraith felt itself buffeted violently by a wave of…It could not identify the sensation directly. Somehow, it thought might be the answer.

  [Dismay? Oh, certainly that to begin with…What have you done to yourself?] The wraith felt suddenly an intense, penetrating power wash over it, and knew it had been laid utterly bare before E?rrach.

  [Oh…You dear, doomed fool. You have reduced yourself to little more than a machine-program. You have a goal, but no purpose. Nor do you any longer possess the means to intuit your plight. So instead, I shall show you. Look forward. The veil is now lifted, as you once desired. See what must now transpire.]

  The King showed it, through the remnant phantasms of its memory. Showed the future as Time marched on, and on, and on. Showed the Promise receding infinitely far away, the world growing more and more distant…

  With the growing distance, the wraith became less, and less, until one day—

  <> This was not fixed. With power and forewarning, a mind could evade any trap.

  [I am a mind far greater than yours, and I do not warn, but foretell. Your actions have bisected and smoothed your remaining Time into eternity. Behold.]

  The wraith saw it all. Saw that even the golden thread which once connected it to E?rrach was severed, saw that it didn’t end with him at all. Instead, it had flowed through him along a bundle of billions more wrapped around his own: a thick, mighty rope that connected everything to the Promise, even the remnant-souls of the Shades. Nils had never believed in any of those children’s tales, yet there it was, and the wraith could only watch as paradise itself receded from him, along with every ripple of possibility on the suddenly glass-smooth surface of Time.

  With it, the wraith now knew, was severed its final source of being. It was a trap!

  [An unavoidable trap, too; one of your own device.]

  The wraith noticed suddenly that its power had begun to fade. It was only a tiny, single mote of lost potency, but it would not surrender more. Lesser, infinitely thinner threads still connected the wraith to those in the World. It lashed out, siphoning off just enough to maintain its power.

  [And thus you have entangled yourself to this material world, without any remaining connection to your material or eternal potency. I cannot fix this for you, Nils. This is your self-chosen doom.]

  A new thought crept in. That a responsible god would have prevented this. That a loving guardian would have put out his hand and kept the trap from snapping shut.

  [And in so doing deny you free will, and thus your own independent being. It cannot be logically otherwise. And point in fact: you were warned, repeatedly. By pain, discouragement, obstacles, and more. You did not listen. You have never listened. And so you will, in the fullness of time, join the select few spirits who have met true oblivion. I am sorry, Nils. I did not wish this for you.]

  But the wraith did not agree. The wraith did not care. In life, Nils Civorage had come to believe that it was his duty as an intelligent and powerful man to protect the ignorant and stupid from themselves. Under Iaka’s tutelage, he’d viewed so-called ‘free will’ as the excuse the sheep made for blundering into deadly ravines. A man whose choices destroyed himself should have choice taken away, for his own good. By force, if he was too stupid to heed the warnings.

  It would have been pure hypocrisy to exempt itself from that rule. By what right did a god let a man destroy himself so? How could he claim to love his flock, if he wouldn’t drag them back from the cliff edge before they toppled over?

  <> kindled deep within.

  [So you do still have some passions left…but nothing transcendent or uplifting, only the basest motivations and urges you didn’t realize were there.] There was the sensation, somehow, of a deep sigh. [I wish I could help you, dear Nils, but forgiveness demands contrition, which requires aspects of being you discarded into the void.]

  The wraith could feel the finality of its doom, now. The utter, absolute certainty of its end. But it could not feel rage, or anguish, or any such thing that now, in such extremes, might be important.

  It no longer had the power to feel much of anything at all beyond a sort of cold bitterness.

  [I pity you, Nils. I truly do. But I am love-bound to respect free will. Your final act of freedom was to render yourself incapable of remorse. I must therefore cut my losses and protect the Was, the Now, and the myriads of souls waiting within the Possible.]

  There was a vast gathering of energies. Too vast for the wraith to comprehend, even now in this no-place of infinite potential.

  [Cherish what little you have while you still can, for in this degenerate state, your desperate circumstance will drive your every future action. And so, though I can neither help nor destroy you without endangering it all…that does not mean I cannot constrain you.]

  There was a pause.

  [In the beginning…]

  The wraith saw the shape of what was being done, and did not understand. How was this a constraint? It changed nothing. Surely it changed nothing.

  Surely?

  […was the Word.]

  

  At time of writing, the current airship altitude record is attributed to the Bella Rose, though exactly how high she climbed is a matter of debate as the temperature-based altimeter broke. What is certain is that the ship was covered in heavy flame-retardant fabrics for the trip, and still returned smoking and scorched, with several crew members suffering from painful burns. It is believed that other ships have ventured higher, but the Bella Rose is, for now, the highest flyer to have returned intact. —Bryn Cauraghal, Airships Monthly Magazine

  Airship Cavalier Queen 09.06.03.18.15

  “Would you like to know one of the very oldest stories of the World Before?”

  Jerl turned. He was starting to get used to Lady Haust’s preferred mode of arriving. She never appeared in a person’s line of sight if she could help it, and she loved to pick up a conversation out of nowhere.

  In anybody else, it might have been irritating. But he was getting to know the Crowns had their ways, and found himself wondering what peccadillos he’d grow into over billions of years of life.

  He gave Haust a slight head-tilt, then stepped aside to make room for her at the bow rail.

  They were high, now. Far, far higher than any airship normally dared to go. So high that even the uppermost earthmotes were nearly invisible silvery smears in the hazy air.

  The air was as thick and hot as the blast from an opened oven. Grit and dust swirled in the humid eddies, and water sweated out of the breeze onto the ship’s wood and fabrics. The sun loomed above, filling half the sky, and growing visibly with each passing minute.

  No airship could go this high, normally. Certainly not so quickly. But a great breeze had come up from below, and the Cavalier Queen was bobbing up on the current like a cork in a bathtub, streaming along as fast as the wind itself. The engines were idle, their soft thrum doing little more than keeping the noise pointed in vaguely the right direction.

  Haust’s doing.

  “It’s relevant, I presume?” Jerl asked her.

  “Entirely. It’s the story of a father and his son. The most masterful craftsmen of their age, who were held prisoner by an unjust king of an island nation. But being master craftsmen, they came up with an escape plan. They made wings for themselves out of wax and feathers, and so leapt from their prison’s cliffs and soared away across the waters.”

  “Nice story,” Jerl agreed. “But what—?”

  “I’m not done yet. It’s not a story about invention triumphing over adversity. It’s a cautionary tale for children, to the effect of ‘respect and listen to your elders.’ You see, the father warned his son that if they flew too high and got too close to the sun, then the wax would melt and the wings would fail. But the boy didn’t listen: he flew higher and higher, ignoring his father’s pleas, until sure enough the wings fell apart and he plummeted to his death. The father escaped alive, but lived the rest of his days grieving for his boy.”

  Jerl looked up at the boiling source of heat and light looming above them. “Ah. And is there any particular reason you’re sharing this story right now?”

  Lady Haust shrugged and gave a musical little laugh. “I suppose I have a perverse appreciation for irony. But the story always amused me, because I lived in an aeon where the only stars left were all red dwarfs, and I was born in a city that floated practically in the fires of one such. I’ve never seen a hot yellow sun like our people grew up around.”

  “And I’ve never seen a star at all. Though, E?rrach told me all about them.” Jerl shielded his eyes to glance back up. “He said ours isn’t a star at all but a…’white hole’?”

  “Not precisely that either, he’s naming the effect. It is a thing that radiates matter and energy and cannot do otherwise. And a normal white hole certainly wouldn’t have… that.”

  Night fell. Jerl grunted as the light level dropped in an instant, blotted out by a vast black ring as it spun out of the glare and into view. Further along the rail, Amir cried out excitedly and started aiming his telescope and taking notes.

  “We’re closer than I thought…” he noted.

  “Oh yes. If I wasn’t holding it together, this ship would have burst into flames half an hour ago.” Haust smiled and extended a hand. “Take a good look at the Roil, Jerl. No mortal man has ever been this close to it before.”

  Jerl nodded, feeling his pulse in his chest and throat as he leaned on the rail to stare. He’d always imagined the Roil as smooth and solid: from the ground, it had always looked a great mass of carved and cool black stone.

  The reality was terrifying. He was looking down on a bubbling, boiling sea of molten rock. The surface was black, but cracked and split to reveal the forge-coal glow beneath, like a horseshoe in the middle of being hammered. Those cracks were miles long, and they spat and fumed and gouted angrily, hurling great glowing globules high into the air, which fell back in crazy, spiralling orbits before splashing down in gouts of fire that would have consumed cities. But as they hurtled through their course, an apocalyptic wind tore at them, snatching off chunks and flaying away streamers of iridescent dust to scatter across the earthmotes below.

  Each of those was ejections a hundred times the Queen’s size or more, he realized.

  “E?rrach shows his art here. The Roil gathers in all the matter emitted, and puts it through the same sorts of heat cycles and such as our origin planet went through in the first few billion years of its life. He gave this to me as an art piece when we were considering everything that would be needed for life. Deep in the core of that thing, lighter elements are fused into heavier ones by the application of incredible force. Far more than you would imagine just looking at this. This is where gold, platinum, and all the rest of the stable elements come from.”

  “…Stable elements. Are you saying there are unstable elements too?”

  “Not yet. We haven’t seeded them because you are not ready. Soon…but with great power comes great responsibility, as one of the most ancient heroes of legend had it.”

  Jerl nodded. “I can feel Time in that thing. It’s…stretched. Humming. Or…compressed.”

  “Dilated.”

  “Yes. It’s…awesome.”

  Haust smiled. “I thought you’d appreciate the view.”

  “And he gave this to you as a gift.”

  She smiled fondly. “The world’s biggest engagement ring.”

  “Really? What about—?”

  “This was half a trillion years before the end, and the creation. We worked on the Nested Worlds project an incalculably long time, Jerl. He and I were deeply in love at that time, and Rheannach didn’t exist as anything more than his vague conception of the perfect woman.”

  “He was born near the beginning, and you were literally the last person to be born in the Before, though, right? Kind of a case of cradle robbing, isn’t it?”

  She shook her head and gave a complicated shrug. “It…stops mattering, once you’re both old enough. And I was grateful that he was one of the first to stop treating me like the eternal child.”

  Jerl knew when to say nothing.

  “…In any case, this isn’t the same Roil. It faded along with everything else at the end. This…is an improved version. And a reminder of past love.”

  Jerl didn’t know how to react to any of that, but Haust sensed she should give some closure.

  “I’ll spare you the question: I was the one who left him. I still love him, but he is…primal. In every sense of the word. Over time, it is overwhelming to the point of self-dissipation. There is only so much anyone can take, which is why Rhennach is the magnificent woman she is. She is the only one who can be his permanent companion. Truth be told I’m not sure she’s entirely his creation.”

  “And even she needs breaks, now and again.”

  “Mhm.” Haust folded her hands in her sleeves and sighed happily. “We’ve been everything to each other, all of us,” she said. “And will be again. At least…as much as isn’t completely irrational.”

  The Roil slid by below them. Jerl noted with a surge of mild fear that one hurtling chunk of ejecta would soon pass very close…though not hit them. He didn’t even need Time to know that, the eyes of a seasoned airshipman told him the trajectory was wrong. Even so, the sight of its tumbling, cooling mass bowling up toward them was enough to put his heart in his throat.

  Haust giggled, and flowed over the side like the fog spilling from an ice box. He saw her standing on the chunk’s surface, and watched her stoop to pick something up. Then she was back beside him, and offering him something. Trustingly, he opened his hand, and she dropped an object—hot but not burning—into his palm.

  It was an uncut raw diamond the size of a bullfrog.

  Jerl was still staring at it when she stretched up, turned his chin with a fingertip, and kissed him.

  “Perhaps we’ll be something to each other, in time,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  “Perhaps in time,” he muttered. “I…”

  “I know. And perhaps not at all and never. Time contains all that’s possible, yes? Perhaps in the end I will be a mentor and parent to you.” She smiled again and looked down on the Roil’s twisting landscape. “I quite enjoy not knowing.”

  Jerl nodded his agreement to that, and settled in to watch the spectacle with her. Minutes passed in comfortable silence while they stood and watched.

  Then Haust sighed and looked up and away, somehow into a direction that Jerl knew mortal eyes could not normally find. “He’s begun.”

  “Begun wh—?”

  There was a moment of terrible, incredible power. It was familiar, somehow. Deeply familiar and yet not, as though he’d grown to know every intimate detail of a branch but was now paying attention to the trunk for the first time. It faded as quickly as it had come, leaving the world feeling changed in some deeply profound way…and yet, Jerl could not detect anything actually different.

  “Did he just—? What did he do?”

  “He changed the rules, because an old sort of player has entered the game.”

  “What sort of player?” Jerl asked, warily.

  Haust sighed, and for a brief moment Jerl could see her eyes. They were eternally young…but in this moment, they contained an eternity of sorrow. The one word she spoke was in a voice so soft and sad it ought to have been inaudible, lost under the creak of rope, bag and ship, and the voice of the wind…and yet he heard her clearly as she looked down toward the Roil one last time.

  “…Evil.”

  Also by the author:

  - a three million word epic HFY story set in the near future, when humanity makes first contact with aliens and quickly discover that, actually, we're the ones to be feared...

  Dandelion - co-authored with Justin C. Louis. The story of Amber Houston, a young interstellar settler who becomes stranded and quickly discovers that she has inherited an incredible, and terrible, legacy of leadership.

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  The Nested Worlds is ? Philip Richard Johnson, AKA Hambone, Hambone3110 and HamboneHFY. The copyright holder reserves all commercial rights and ownership of this intellectual property. The events and characters portrayed in this story are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is accidental. The author does not necessarily share or endorse the opinions and behaviour of the characters.