The Second Sorrow of the Platinum Dragon

In his great mercy, the Platinum Dragon conceived of the plane of imprisonment. In his great wisdom, he crafted the Tarterian Depths. In his great honour, he sought the aid of the Allhammer to forge from adamantine a gleaming triumvirate: the gates, the shackles, and the authority of the warden. The Platinum Dragon watched, and poured his essence into the three, so that they were joined to him and part of him.

All three the Allhammer wrought, though he had shorter time to forge the last, for the first of the Platinum Dragon’s great foes was defeated, and needed a prison. The foe, whose name since was lost or hidden, was placed inside the prison even as the Allhammer polished the authority. At this moment, the Cloaked Serpent approached, and asked if the kin of the Platinum Dragon and the Allhammer might also use the Tarterian Depths for their own foes.

And so the kin met, and so the kin made a pact: that all of the kin may use the Tarterian Depths, and that none of the kin would interfere with the prisoners of the others. Mayhaps the Cloaked Serpent schemed it that way, and mayhaps not, for either way the discussion caused the Allhammer to forget the weakness of the authority, and the flaw departed from his mind as the kin waged that almighty war at the dawn of the cosmos.

The ages marched onward, and the kin found less and less need for the Tarterian Depths, though the Platinum Dragon thought often of the pact they had made, and how he wished the Cloaked Serpent had no prisoners there. Eventually, he too turned his mind from the gaol. When he did, the influence of the first great foe began to spread, corrupting and corroding the Tarterian Depths. It rusted the might of the gates. It rusted the strength of the shackles. It rusted the purity of the authority.

The warden of the Tarterian Depths soon lost control of their mind. They had learnt of the flaw in the authority that they wielded, and their madness drove them to betray the Platinum Dragon. Whispers spread through Baator, reaching the ears of the kytons – if any of their number could control the authority, they could unlock the shackles and open the gates.

For this dishonour, the Platinum Dragon cast down the warden and hid the authority away, though he knew that this would not dissuade the kytons from seeking it. The Platinum Dragon looked and saw what had become of the Tarterian Depths, and saw how it had been twisted by the power of the first great foe. In anguish, he gave his creation a new name:

Carceri, the Red Prison.

A Yew Leaf

Above her, clouds took on the forms of crashing waves and cutting rocks trying to sink a ship, the moon, as it sailed through the sky. The wind tugged at her cloak and tried its best to force her own hair into her eyes, her nose, her mouth. For a moment, as her metal boot sunk deeper into a puddle than expected, she wished she hadn’t agreed to attend, but quickly forced that thought away.

Lady Fate wants this, she reminded herself, tracing her mistress’ three wavy lines across her breastplate.

Soon, as the wind started to call its colleague, the rain, to drive into her face, she was at the door to the Duke’s hall. She raised her polished gauntlet to knock, just as the door was opened by the Duke’s son, who promptly took the opportunity to look her up and down. For Fate’s sake, I’m in plate mail, you can’t see a thing! she wanted to scream into the man’s face.

Instead: “Your Grace. The Lady saw fit to encourage me to join your gathering tonight, let’s not dally at the entrance.” She gave a smile engineered to be polite in the extreme, so polite that it almost looped back around to rude. Almost.

“Then please come in, it’s a pleasure to see you again,” replied the scruffy youth, his words doing little to hide the stains on his lace cuffs. “And in your formal attire no less, we are honoured.” He opened the door wider, and the heat of the room washed over her, a heat that came purely from men eating and arguing and drinking and laughing. She noticed that the lordling had let her past, but clearly out of a desire to assess her from behind rather than to be courteous. If I wasn’t here on business he’d be staring at my sword point… Again, she squashed the thought.

It didn’t take long for the Duke to notice her. After a slurred introduction from His Grace to the brazier-lit room and cheers from the assorted guests, she was seated beside him and left to assess the quality of the food in front of her. After chewing a couple of times she decided that the lamb was passable, though the green sauce was not.

She frowned. The Duke said it would be redcurrant sauce… In panic, she sprayed her last mouthful of food out across the table, to some surprised applause from her right. She grabbed the carafe of water and rinsed her mouth as thoroughly as possible.

Hurriedly, she pulled a yew leaf from the pouch at her belt, and chanted a prayer to Lady Fate, beseeching her to twist the weave that she might see the unseen. After a few seconds, feeling the usual lurch in possibilities, she brushed the yew leaf across her eyes, and her perception of the world shifted.

The sauce was poison. It contained some form of distilled wyvern venom. She scanned the room, searching. The alcohol was giving off signals, but it always did when her eyes were able to detect poison and disease – if that wasn’t proof the stuff was bad for you she didn’t know what was. The Duke had no trace of poison around his lips, thank Fate, but his son… Those stains on his cuffs were an exact match.

She narrowed her eyes. Why did it always have to be politics…

A Snake’s Tongue

Her hands danced across the strings of the lute. Its music coursed through her body as sweat began to bead on her brow. She was dimly aware that this was probably the best performance of her life, but that thought wasn’t for now. That thought could be processed later, when the lute was packed away and the night was over. Right now the notes were all that mattered, the melody and its counterpoint weaving around each other and entwining her, embracing her.

With a flourish, she plucked the final notes and grew still, drawing in a deep breath. For one perfect moment there was quiet; quiet created by the absence of her playing, quiet filled with the weight of what had come before it. These were the moments she cherished.

This was why she performed.

“Two more o’ them again”, slurred the elderly gentlemen at the bar, his cheeks red beneath his wrinkles, his voice cutting through her reverie. She glanced around at the handful of patrons in the dingy tavern, and not a one seemed to understand what had just transpired. She had been electric, but they had just continued muttering into their cups, playing dice, or – or passing out on the floor apparently.

She sighed. It was obvious that this place had seen better days. The walls were peeling, the carpet was a masterpiece in mysterious dark stains, and she wasn’t even on a stage, just standing in an area cleared of furniture. Her being here was clearly a desperate attempt by the owner to draw fresh faces in. That was fine by her, she’d even get a few silver out of it, but couldn’t anybody in here show some appreciation? She’d been playing for hours, her fingers were numb, and she’d gotten barely a glance all evening.

One greasy-haired man yawned over his tankard. And then belched, loudly.

With that, her mind was made up. Whatever trouble it might bring – again – she would have her audience, and they would enjoy her music. She reached into one of the pockets of her troubadour cloak, resting her fingers on a snake’s tongue and a bit of honeycomb, and cleared her throat.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” she declared. Nobody looked up. “Now for something very special, something I know you’ll all enjoy…” She paused, partly for effect, but mostly to focus on the song within, that ever-pulsing, ever-changing, ever-flowing piece of herself. Her contact with the tongue and honeycomb encouraged its soft thrumming to find the particular resonance she needed. She continued to speak, her words now laced with magic. “You’ll all actually listen to what I’m playing instead of treating me like dirt!”

For one awful second, nobody responded to her suggestion, and her stomach lurched with fear. Then, one by one, the patrons of the grimy place turned, their eyes fixed on her, their heads cocked to hear her better. She smiled her best smile, and strummed a simple chord. Then another. And another, faster this time. With the fourth she launched into a ditty about a fox and a demon, her audience listening with rapt attention.

An audience worth performing for.

A Piece of Cork

Waves lapped around her bare feet, their soft susurrus matching the rhythm of her breaths. The chill of the water was pleasant against her skin, and the salt’s odour lingered gently when the water receded. Bit by bit that strange dark speck just below the horizon grew, revealing itself as the ocean inched itself away from her.

She waited.

Soon the tide would be at its lowest, the only chance she’d have. Her fingers traced over the piece of cork in her hand, its texture a welcome and familiar roughness. She brought it to her nose and sniffed gently, knowing the sweet aroma was gone but smelling it anyway. Then, she planted her feet, firmly.

Uttering the syllables that heralded and enacted change, she moved the cork through the air fluidly yet precisely, a well-practised motion that she know would have the desired effect. After the barest of pauses, the magic of the land began to coalesce around the cork, began to draw out, began to take shape. If it were visible, she had no doubts that it would be beautiful, but she was content to simply feel the weave settle into her body instead, and not for the first time she wondered if she imagined it feeling stronger in her feet.

With a gratifying tingle, a cool wave slid beneath her, lifting her atop it. It carried her up the beach a short distance, and she rode it back down, stepping deftly onto the next wave, and continuing to walk forwards. Soon, the beach was behind her, and she picked up her pace. If she was going to reach that mysterious jutting object she’d need to be fast – water walk would only last an hour, and she wouldn’t be able to cast it again in a hurry.

So she ran. She laughed as the water’s rolling surface made her stomach lurch, and she grinned as her sense of connectedness with the ocean grew.

But when she drew near to her goal she frowned and grew uncertain, her footfalls faltering. Why was there a chunk of castle wall protruding at an angle from the seafloor below? How long had its broken stones been here to become so encrusted with barnacles?

And what was inside the battered wooden chest that nestled within the drowned masonry?

Noé

Noé screamed as he drove the dagger forwards, piercing through flesh and scraping against bone. The scream was the only thing that stopped him vomiting, a guttural involuntary sound. Suddenly it stopped, and he staggered backwards, his bloody hands slipping from the blade’s haft.

The world cascaded back into his awareness.

In front of him, a dark cloak fluttered as the witch wearing it collapsed, crimson flowing out from around the dagger now embedded in her chest. The air that had been warping around her – the only sign that she had been uttering some enchantment – rippled into stillness. People surged away from her crumpling form, and shouts rose up, though Noé couldn’t make sense of them.

Rough hands grabbed him, whether they were there to lead him to safety or stop him from fleeing he didn’t know, but he felt no desire to resist. His vision began to blur, and his breaths came fast, too fast he knew, but he had no more control over his body than he had had in that moment, when the witch had started to mutter, gaze intense upon the lizardfolk ambassador. She was going to jeopardise it all, send them back to war. He had stopped her. He had stopped war.

Hadn’t he?

Words floated into his awareness.

“…calling for his head, and worse!” said one voice. It was behind him, and it was scared.

“What did you go and do that for! When the lynching finishes we’ll be back worse than where we started!” This voice was scared and angry.

Its owner became clear in his vision. Not his mind’s eye, he realised, but his actual vision. The portly woman paced back and forth, heedless of her ward-scarf trailing on the ground behind her. She was important, to have a scarf like that. Noé noticed there was a cloak wrapped around him, and he was sitting on a chair in some kind of wine cellar.

“The witch,” he muttered, hoping to stave off the anger. “The witch was doing something…” He trailed off as the woman glared at him, her fear bubbling into rage.

“Of course she was doing something. Her job was to keep the ambassador safe!” Her words were laced with something dark and feral. Something that she usually kept hidden, if his instincts were right.

“But I saw the magic,” he said, stammering, as if that explained everything. “She was looking right at the ambassador…”A hand tightened on his shoulder. He couldn’t look around for some reason, but he knew that it belonged to the owner of the first voice.

The woman stopped dead, all excess emotions drained away in an instant. She quietly arranged her ward-scarf and brushed it down, before pulling up another chair and sitting in front of him, leaning in close. For a moment, she just sat, looking into him, deep into him. He couldn’t meet her gaze, so glanced at his hands. Apparently they were dark red now. And bound with thick rope.

“Are you trained?” she asked. Her tone was one that expected an answer, no matter how little sense it made to him. How little sense it all made to him.

“I can make a barrel as well as any of the other apprentices,” he replied, frowning. He didn’t think that was what she wanted to hear. Surprisingly though, she smiled.

The air around her warped.

Branch and Year Unknown

…before the Resonance of the early 21st Century, this was of course all glossed over. When strictly in the realms of fiction, time travel can do away with questions that are unavoidable in reality. Is there a net change in the total instantaneous mass of the universe when an object time travels? Does the ‘speed’ at which one travels through time incur relativistic effects? What happens when one attempts to interact with an object that moves at a different rate through time to oneself (be it a positive or negative rate)?

This last question had always bothered me the most, and I would partially learn the answers when I attempted to evict one of the – woefully named – ‘histourists’ from what was originally known as the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.

As I’m sure can be expected, once time travel became technologically feasible people flocked to those periods and places that had most captured their cultural imaginations. Citizens of countries that had been involved in colonialism ventured back to those proud frontiers to experience first-hand the exploration of new worlds and savage peoples. (Not my own feelings toward the matter, I can assure you.) Citizens of countries born from colonialist ventures travelled back to take part in various wars of independence or to try and inspire their forefathers with their forefathers’ own words. Others would travel back to ages before man, to see with their own eyes the ancient megafauna, mammalian or otherwise.

Needless to say, there was an epidemic of paradoxes and paradigm shifts. Primus Tempus Terra was never the same, if such an assertion involving the passage of time even makes sense, and the tree of the continuum was born, countless branches erupting from the trunk that had suited humanity so well up to that moment. (It should be noted that I am here deliberately not yet using those tenses which were developed for nuanced understanding involving time travel, as they will come later in these writings.)

One of the first histourists that I tracked had left very blatant marks on Egyptian culture, using 21st Century technology to institute himself as a member of their pantheon. (I laughed when I finally realised that he had added a symbol to the hieroglyphics of the time that was a direct copy of the crest worn by First Earth’s Superman.) Having gently integrated myself as a prominent member of the court in Thebes, after as long as two weeks the man recognised me for what I was.

Using his wrist-mounted travelling device (which I hope is never developed in any continuum branch again), he panicked and initiated a backwards travel. The next – or rather, the previous – few days are still confusing, having only recently acquired my time-con, and never having used it in the field. Without it, I’d have been stuck in those sub-branches (now known as the Pharaoh Odin Collection) for all eternity.

As far as I can tell, the first thing he did was to attempt to incapacitate me a day earlier, even as I watched him butcher a speech in Middle Kingdom Egyptian with a bizarre U.S. accent. I fought him off, causing him to jump back to the same moment to try again, emerging from time twice in the same place (at the same time). Even though he had been travelling backwards in the same location, his two selves only interacted when his rate of travel became standard (i.e. the normal rate of travel through time that most objects experience).

After witnessing that mess, something broke in the mind of the current man, the one that had yet to jump back after discovering me, and he all but begged me to take him back to a stable modern timeline. But it got me to thinking: is it all to do with being out of phase? Do we travel through time in a manner analogous to polarised light, and with the phase proportional to the rate of travel?

After dropping off the now-babbling ex-pharaoh, I…

 

Excerpt from Temporal Tears – Reflections on Putting History Back Together by John H.G. Smith; Branch and Year Unknown, suspected Primus Tempus Terra

Titans – I

That smell.

Familiar. Familiar yet different.

Was it time already? It seemed as though she had barely closed her eyes. But… there was no smell.

Ah, it wasn’t a scent hitting her nostrils; it was that feeling, an affinity for a certain something. For awakening. Or rather, Awakening. It paid to be precise.

Secretcarver flexed the muscles along the entire length of her body, judging the years by her stiffness. That wasn’t her favourite name, though it was the one she had worn for the longest. Godlings and sentients alike had gifted her with many through the ages. Lord of the Verdant Wastes, She of the Unbroken Word, Liemonger, Wyrm of Wyrms – it mattered not what they called her, and she cared not. Names were a distraction, and that was how she used them.

The press of soil and rock above her was heavy, so she did not yet open her eyes. Patience in all things was the way. To always the think of the long game, how best to dominate without resorting to crushing snapping biting violence. To never kill in anger, only in cold-blooded calculation.

She sniffed mentally. The Aether was strong in this age, and many sentients had learnt its secrets. Godlings could make use of their almost limitless potential in such a world, could wreak havoc and prove her final undoing. Well, they could try. Even the mightiest of the last cycle had been forgotten now, though of course many would already be gaining a following.

A chill ran through her, and too late she withdrew from the Aether. He knew she was awake now, that one of their kin who had mastered the ethereal like no other being ever had. Even though she had put her own life at risk to watch him die, assaulted by the great cataclysms wrought by advanced sentients, he had survived. She respected him and hated him for that.

Suddenly, she longed for the sun again. With powerful motions that would probably be felt on the surface, she forced a path through the earth, snout digging in and driving boulders aside. It was good to feel her strength. After several miles and several minutes, she erupted forth, her gargantuan mass launching high into the crisp air.

Light seared her vision as she finally opened her eyes, saw mountains in the distance, farmlands stretching away to great walled cities. She crashed into the ground, gouging it, her long body splintering trees and brick houses alike.

She of the Unbroken Word reared up and hissed, a sound she knew to be terrifying. She hissed at the world for the slumber it had forced upon her, and she hissed at the world to assert her ownership. Then, she composed herself. There would be no more fits of passion. After all, there was one other titan already exerting influence, and there were bound to be others.

Her scaly lips stretched back into a fearsome approximation of a sentient’s smile. She had remembered her favourite name. Jormungandr.

It was good to be back.

Darkweaver – I

Ras Shar flexed his four calloused hands. Cloaked in shadow as he was, the brat who had entered the viewing room had no idea he was there. He watched with interest, running his tongue across the back of his pointed teeth. The human girl’s headscarf covered most of her hair, but left strands of brown hanging in front of a comely face. If she were to wear the finery that many of the rich in the adjacent ball room wore instead of her drab garb, he supposed that she might be considered beautiful. But that didn’t mean he would go easy on her.

Her eyes were affixed to one item in particular on the other side of the steel bars that split the luxurious room in two. They stopped observers from getting too close to the various expensive artefacts arrayed on fancy cushions and pedestals. The Aether-trap’s dreamcatcher-like filigree wires and faint glow certainly made it an attractive piece, but everything about her stance suggested that she knew it for what it was.

Power. Control. A ticket off the streets.

He took a long breath and dove deeper into the Aether, into the darkest of purple shades, those that bordered on pure blackness. Embracing all that he could, he released his concealment and willed the shadows around the girl to concentrate, to become corporeal. Too many darkweavers liked to maintain subtlety for as long as possible, but too much creeping got dull, and this was supposed to be a brazen airship heist after all.

Further infusing the shadows with that deep Aether, Ras Shar moulded them into long spikes, thrusting them at the girl – who disappeared, the sharp darkness spearing into the air where she had been standing. An instant later she returned to existence on the other side of the bars, right beside the Aether-trap, violet wisps of smoke diffusing from her.

“Phasewalker,” he hissed at her. She raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

“Darkweaver,” she said. “Who tipped you off?” Slowly, she inched her hands toward the prize. In response, Ras Shar materialised two long shadows that promptly wrapped around her wrists, anchoring her in place.

“That kind of information costs,” he said, stepping up to the bars. “Now, don’t even think about –” He grimaced as the phasewalker vanished, the shadows that had grasped her recoiling, and she reappeared on the opposite side of the Aether-trap as if the feat was nothing more than a normal step. She grabbed the trap and stepped again, this time right next to the door she had entered from. An annoying smirk was on her face. Ras Shar scowled, but quickly remembered how he had taken down phasewalkers in the past.

Those of them that stepped in the way that this girl was doing needed to be able to see where they were going. He allowed himself a retaliatory smirk as he thickened the darkness in the room. Rapidly, it became pitch-black, left him unable to see even his own upper hands right next to his face. Unfortunately, he was not so gifted with the Aether that he could bind the girl at the same time as he maintained the blackness.

A stifled cry came from her direction, probably caused by her trying to step away and finding she could not. He ran at her, the faint glow of the Aether-trap guiding him. A slicing sound split the darkness next to his right ear, and his heart skipped a beat. If her senses were a smidge better, he’d have found a dagger embedded in his head.

“I’m not leaving here without that trap!” he said, drawing a dagger with each of his lower hands. Though he couldn’t see her, he knew that that they had begun circling one another.

“Then you’ll be able to chat with all these wealthy airheads for ever and a day. I am not giving it up!”

Their blades clashed.

Phasewalker – II

Through the slight distortion of her spyglass lens, Kirris watched two well-dressed members of high society hand their ticket stubs over. An attractive galdar wearing a feminine demi delicately recieved them, and after comparing the numbers they bore to figures in a heavy ledger, smiled prettily and welcomed the guests. The two humans – no surprises there, they invented high society after all – grinned and advanced onto the railinged walkway beyond the galdar, stepping softly as it flexed in the fast wind.

The walkway, of course, was attached to the gondola of a luxury airship.

Wonders of this “Age of Steam”, as many were now calling it, the airships were powered by steam-driven propellers, their huge rubbery envelopes filled with a gas lighter than air, which Kirris supposed provided only slightly more buoyancy than the vacuous heads of the people she was watching. She snorted in amusement and lowered her spyglass. It was high time she found someone to listen to her shrewd observations, but she’d make do with infiltrating a well-to-do airborne gala instead.

Having seen no other socialites on their way, and with the galdar host nodding in a satisfied manner at the ledger, Kirris embraced the Aether. She reached for the purple resonance inside her… and the walkway, the galdar, and the airship all vanished. But only because she was now inside of it, a sharp violet smoke dissipating around her.

Her surroundings were replaced with lush carpet and soft walls, aluminium framing everything that could be framed. A disgusting show of wealth in her opinion, but let them try and figure out who was richer while she snuck around and took what she wanted. The sound of crisp, purposeful footsteps alerted her to the galdar stepping onto the walkway. Kirris darted along the corridor to her right, keeping low to avoid being seen through the windows. When she came to a mahogany door that led deeper into the beast, she jumped upwards, peering through its round glazing, using her ethereal ability to step inside without even trying the handle.

Its grimy metal shelving and close walls suggested that this was a room for the hosting staff. In the relative gloom, Kirris unfurled a piece of paper, and studied the badly drawn diagram. It detailed the layout of the airship, the Razorwind apparently, as well as showing a couple of suggested ways of reaching the viewing room, where her prize was located. Rubies and emeralds were nothing compared to some of the tech that was being invented of late.

She followed the dashed line on her map, crouching into the shadows of the maze-like employee area, keeping still when she heard voices or the clanking of some trolley laden with grossly opulent foodstuffs. The hum of the engines had only just started up by the time she reached the viewing room.

Thick blue curtains that could be drawn across its centre were currently tied to the sides, allowing an easy view of the thick steel bars that partitioned it. On this side were doors leading into the warren she had emerged from, and one that led into some kind of ball room, through which the sounds of hoity-toity laughter and a string quartet drifted. But she had not come skulking just to find a side way into the entertainment.

No, what she couldn’t tear her eyes from was resting on a central narrow pedestal on the other side of the bars. It resembled the dreamcatchers that had recently flooded the markets due to some expansion of imperial land across the ocean, but it was all thin metal wires, none with the same colour or gleam, and had a strange backlighting to it. Purple, the same exact shade that she experienced when phasewalking. This was an Aether-trap.

As she appraised it, the shadows around her seemed to… solidify.

Augur – II

Herrel wiped down the surface of the darkwood table, lifting off the grime of the previous day with a damp cloth. It was the one constant in his ever changing tent, the one thing that people expected when they came to visit the augur. Switching out the rest of the vaguely mystical decoration kept his regulars feeling that quiet sense of numinosity that did half of his job for him. Plus it meant he could run artefact smuggling deals on the side without anyone batting an eyelid.

A young etherling – of subterranean ancestry, with her large eyes and pale skin – lifted the entrance flap and walked in, though the wooden sign outside clearly stated Herrel’s hours. She glanced about nervously, her lower hands fidgeting with a timepiece while she wrung her upper pair together.

“I know you’re not open yet,” she said, her gaze skittering away from eye contact, “but I really need an augur.” She flashed a quick sharp-toothed smile, nervous and apologetic at the same time. “I have coin,” she added, her top-right hand now fumbling for a pouch.

“Relax,” Herrel said. “This is a safe place. Treat me as a trusted confidante, for your secrets won’t leave this tent unless you wish them to.” He tucked the cloth away and wiped his hands dry on his loose trousers, before gesturing to the high-backed chair at the round table.

The woman paused, confused, as most were, that he didn’t offer them the opposite stool and take the chair for himself. He gestured again, a slow, calm motion designed to put people at ease. Sentients spooked easy, and many still ascribed his abilities to the supernatural, rather than to the Aether. Not that he would ever disillusion them, this was his livelihood after all.

After a moment she sat, her four palms placed down on the half-cleaned darkwood. He joined her, perching on the stool. “When you feel peaceful, let me know, and I’ll begin.” She took a few deep breaths, becoming visibly less anxious, then bit her lip and nodded.

The sweet pulse of purple that met Herrel from the Aether felt different to him, grainier, but the time of day was known to affect its interactions, and he hadn’t read the Skeins this early for a while. He quickly found his own strand, and followed it to the now… But something was wrong.

He never looked at the violet thread of his own life beyond the paradox knots he caused by auguring; he wanted his future to be a mystery to him. But he must have missed the knot of the current moment somehow and gone too far, for he found an unravelling he usually associated with distant future, a place of many potentials, where numerous strands spread out and became indistinct no matter how hard he tried to focus. Herrel retraced his motion, again failing to find the knot, again finding the fraying earlier than expected.

“Is there a problem, augur?” The client’s voice pierced into his reverie.

“Nothing to worry about. I have yet to find your thread.”

“I once heard an augur say that sometimes they had to look at the bigger picture to find the smaller one.”

Herrel frowned, but took the advice, unfocusing on his own life to look at the thick strand woven by the society he lived in. His own thread was still visible though, winding tightly around its perimeter, spiralling and criss-crossing. Had that society-strand been a single life, he would have expected to see a knot right there…

What he had found in the sea of fuzzy purple was not multitude lives twisting together to form something greater. It was something singularly great. Which meant –

With a start, Herrel withdrew. A wizened human man sat before him in the same pose that the etherling had been adopting, looking back at him with pupilless eyes black in their entirety. The black of an endless fall. The black of annihilation.

“I said I had need of an augur.” The man’s voice was nightmare. “But I did not say I wanted my fortune told.”