Perhaps she sensed my frustration, because then she sighed. “I wanted to thank you.”
“Thank me,” I repeated, unsure of what the thanks was for.
“For setting her free.”
Laith.
“I didn’t set her free,” I said, my voice quaking with anger. I thought she was mocking me. “I gave her a life sentence of misery. There’s no freedom in what she has now.”
“That’s just her body, Zira.”
I was about to reply, but hesitated when I realized I’d never told her my name. Nor had she ever said it until now. I rerouted the reply to demand who she was, but a crackling sound caught my attention and I gazed back toward the gate. The mist had cleared.
A barren landscape lay beyond the threshold. Gray sky and dead, brown hardpan—not unlike the one Laith and I had recently faced. Violet and blue lightning snaked across the sky. No thunder.
Ominous.
My attention returned to the Evgan woman, but it was no longer her at the cauldron.
My eyes widened.
Laith smiled at me, dressed in the Evgan woman’s robes. I only stood there, gazing stupidly at her, my mind racing a mile a second trying to make any sense of this. A futile effort, as nothing here made any sense; not the kind of sense I was used to.
The silence persisted until she bowed her head and took a sip of her tea. “I told you I would come back here. I said that, didn’t I?”
“It… was you all along?” I struggled, wincing in confusion. “Why not just tell me in the first place? Why all the deception?”
Laith swept an arm outward, gesturing to our surroundings. “Look around us, Zira. This isn’t a logical place to you, is it? For most of our time together you believed it was a delusion. That I was a delusion. Had I said anything to you here, you would have retracted further from the truth. There was a purpose for you, with me; not the purpose you thought, and for that I’m sorry. I’m sorry you thought you failed me. You didn’t. This was all supposed to happen. But it couldn’t have happened without you.”
The shock was beginning to settle into conflict. I was irritated by the deception—more than irritated, as I’d been led around by the strings like a puppet—but my persistent need for the truth prevented me from expressing it. “Are there more here like you, then? All the gifted Evgans who were hollowed out and made subservient for the Elite OSC; did they make it here, too?”
Laith’s expression saddened. She lowered her gaze. “No. There may be a few, but I’ve never met any.”
“How long have you been here?” I was already well aware that time in the Quantum Divide did not run linearly with any universe.
“Time doesn’t exist here,” she said. “There’s no perception of time at all. Everything is happening all at once. Time is a constraint of your reality, merely a coordinate of a super-massive event happening simultaneously. I’ve been here always, and never.”
This was not the Laith I’d known. Her eyes were devoid of that naivety or ignorance previously occupying each and every gaze. Now she was a sage, and I was beneath her. Relief crept in like a silent tide, sweeping away my conflict. “I’m… happy to see you again.”
“Hold that thought,” she said, looking down at the cauldron.
I started to ask what she meant, but movement in my periphery diverted my attention toward the gate. There was someone—or something—standing several yards from the threshold, on the other side.
I took a step forward, tilting my head, straining to see more of the silhouetted form. Ripples ran across it, obscuring any detail beside its shape. A man.
“I thought you said no one was supposed to pass through the gate,” I said, cautiously taking another step forward.
“Remember, this isn’t about me,” she replied to my back, her tone brisk, dismissive. “It was never about me.”
I had no idea what that meant. The ripples in the silhouette began to fade, his details taking form. I took another step forward, and so did he.
Another, and another.
We faced each other at the threshold like two sentries guarding either side. I’d never seen him in person, but there’d been enough information in attica for me to understand very quickly who I was staring at.
“You’re alive,” I stated, trying to hide my surprise.
Cassima Shard offered me a weak smile, shrugging indifferently as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat. He didn’t wear the Framer suit, but dressed down in plain clothes. His hair was black like mine, eyes the color of a true noble. This apparition was his former Aphoric form, it seemed. “To an extent.”
“So you’re not really alive?”
“There is no life or death on this side of the gate. Or in the Quantum Divide, as you’ve seen with Laith.”
These fair-weather answers were starting to get under my skin. “Well you’ve meticulously orchestrated all of these events down to this moment. Obviously you want to tell me something, so get on with it.”
“She tried to stop it from getting out,” he began, seemingly in the middle of the story. “The Codemaker’s Law was instated to stop whatever’s in the shards from crossing into your reality. But it failed. There’s more popping up around your domain. Anomalies are becoming more and more prevalent. The wayfarers and keepers can’t hold the gates for much longer.”
“What is in the shards? We can’t help anyone if no one wants to answer my questions directly.”
“No one knows, but they either made this place or have a lot of influence on it. They’re older than us, and want to spread. The Quantum Divide existed before Insipia.”
That was a lot to chew on, and it left me momentarily speechless. What was he suggesting? That a collective consciousness existed before anything was capable of having a conscious? I would have posited these thoughts, but judging by Cassima’s expression and the way he kept looking over his shoulder, I figured we were on a time limit.
“What will happen if they cross the gates?” I asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “But nothing good for you.”
“So what would you have us do?”
He stared placidly at me for nearly half a minute. “Is she still with you? I can’t find her here.”
“Who?”
“Mia. Sarine.”
“Maybe. No one’s seen her.”
“Find her. She knows more about them than any of us.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but then Cassima said, “Time’s up. Hopefully we don’t see each other again.”
The mist swooped in and enveloped him with enough force that I felt the blast of air across my face. I stepped back instinctively, as the blue-chrome glow of his eyes was the last of him to fade in the fog. When I turned back to the cauldron, Laith was gone. Everything was gone; the cauldron, the bonfire, all of it.
This again.
A tingle of threat shot down my spine. I stared at the empty space just long enough to understand what would happen next; but knowing did nothing to stop the imminent terror.
My head whipped back to the gate, seeing it standing there, still as a statue. Wisps of black smoke wafted from its body, standing over twelve feet high in a distorted black cloud. Its eyes were icy blue, the only distinguishing feature on it. Holding its gaze alone made my legs tremble and my heart beat irregularly. There was a chill in the center of my chest. I struggled to catch my breath.
And then it suddenly separated, vaporizing like the fog. The view switched to that of a mirror, and I saw my reflection within the cistern, staring back at me.
But it wasn’t me. It was a darker, deader version of me.
My eyes were sunken in, leaving only black recesses where my sockets should have been. My skin was blotchy and bruised. Through the mirror I watched the Augur gyrate behind me. How similar we looked now.
The mirror cracked down the middle, and I felt it like a knife to the gut. I sank to my knees, holding my invisible wound, opening my mouth to scream silently against the cosmic white
noise that had crescendoed into a deafening roar. The mirror then exploded, thousands of tiny shards lacerating my face—;
*
Reality phased in.
The light faded to the cool darkness of my room.
I was shivering from perspiration.
The white noise had vanished, my silent scream had turned audible.
I was sitting up in bed, screaming, sweating and shaking—all the while Yahweh sat beside me, at a complete loss for what to do. When I realized what was happening I was able to control myself, clasping a hand over my mouth, breathing evenly through my nose. With the other trembling hand I reached for the package of malay cigarettes on my bed stand, retrieving one and lighting it between my lips. By now Yahweh had recovered from his shock and demanded to know what had happened; what was wrong. I didn’t speak at first, letting the malay dull my senses. I might have felt ashamed for presenting fear on such a visceral level to someone else, but it was Yahweh, and he was safe. The only safety I had.
“Zira,” he whispered, as if his quiet would somehow negate the scream I’d unleashed, “what is it? Why aren’t you—?”
“We need to find Sarine.”
ATCA_QRY_09b.G476
Search term: “_communications-hub9 “!”
Ophal System Confederacy Transmission Records
Ophal-III, 156th Cycle
Satellite transmission; language Ovam, dialect Nara-ko
Gevenh, O-1 HQ 3
This is Team Agvarsta-7, stationed at Jabron, awaiting evac.
The rebel forces have been pushed out of South-Eastern Svissan territory, but the place is a crater. The Svissan Isles appeared to have been bombed. No one’s gotten close to it, but the smoke coming from the island looks like a volcano. Airstrike, probably. Agvarsta-6 headed that way on boat several hours ago to check how badly it was hit, but they haven’t responded yet.
Some of the locals who’d escaped the island are raving about a death god, Enka or Enku or something, coming out of the Forest and torching the citadel. They think one of their gods are seeking retribution for heresy in their religious hierarchy, if you can believe it. Even the non-tribal locals stationed to work on the island said a big man with black wings and a horned mask came out of the woods and made people’s heads explode. I think everyone here is traumatized. We’ve got them recuperating at the refugee medical camp.
[20 seconds of silence]
We’ve just heard word from Agvarsta-6. They haven’t seen any death gods with horns but there are a lot of headless bodies around the citadel grounds. The citadel is on fire and threatening to collapse. This wasn’t an airstrike. We don’t know what this was. Either way, Svissa’s government is gone. Not sure how anyone wants to handle that.
Requesting an ETA on the evac, over.
TITLES IN THE HYMN OF THE MULTIVERSE:
This series is on-going. Can’t wait for the next Hymn of the Multiverse installment? Sign up to receive an email notification whenever a new book drops: http://eepurl.com/dDFIy5
(THE ANTITHESIS)
1 – INCEPTION
2 – HONOR
3 – FALLEN
4 – WAR
5 – VENGEANCE
(DYSPHORIA)
6 – RISE
7 – PERMANENCE
(COVENANTS)
8 – ELEGY (12/20/2019)
9 – ANODIZE (TBD 2020)
Covenants: Elegy (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 8) Page 20
