The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  Her self-control flickered for an instant, and Hadrian caught a glimpse of the great well of upset just waiting to spill over. “I feel the need to reassure you that I have no memory of any of this. I don't think I am or have ever been anyone else but me. Just me: Ellis. I grew up in Melbourne and went to school in Brisbane. I had a cat called Perestroika and a set of Saddle Club books in a box under my bed. I went to church on weekends until I was fifteen, and never once dreamed that it might all be true. I go on a holiday to celebrate finishing my master's, and look what happens: I meet you two, and my life gets pulled out from under me. And here I am trying to convince you that it's not my fault—as though I haven't been totally screwed over by myself as well. I'm an idiot.”

  “We're all idiots,” said Seth, reaching out to comfort her.

  She brushed him away. Hadrian truly saw her then, noticing for the first time how, with the veil removed, the cut of her black robes matched that of the Sisters’. She looked, from some angles, like Ana had: many faces, many eyes—but still her. A multitude of her.

  “We're not idiots,” he told both of them, reiterating what he had told himself after finding out that Kybele had betrayed him. “There were just things we didn't know.”

  “Is there anything else we don't know?” she asked him, eyes flashing. “Can you answer that?”

  He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  “Then excuse me for not feeling terribly reassured.” She deflated then. “Jesus, I'm sorry. I shouldn't be taking it out on you two. Of all people.”

  “It's okay,” said Seth. “I guess we're more likely to understand than anyone else here.”

  “Exactly. And it's not as if I can do anything about it. I mean, I can't deny what my life-tree tells me. It's all there. I can watch it as many times as I like, and it's not going to change.”

  “So—why?” asked Seth, faltering. “Why did you—did Nona…?” His gaze darted to the bed and back.

  “To be part of the moment,” she said. “To be close if the end came. I don't know exactly why because I have no memory of it, but that's what they tell me I said. The merging of the realms means the end of Sheol. The Sisters feel they should have a role to play in the destruction of the Flame. Maybe they're right.” She shrugged. “But that doesn't make it any easier.”

  “That's what Ana was trying to tell me,” Hadrian said, remembering: We do reserve the right to choose which particular path to follow to our ends.

  “There was some disagreement about me going,” she said. “The Sisters argued. It hadn't gone very well the last time, apparently.”

  Seth was nodding. “That's why Quetzalcoatl called you ‘Moyo.’ He and Xol knew you in that life. You were—involved.”

  “Again.” She looked down at her hands, which had curled into fists. “How could I have done all this and known nothing about it? How can it still be me?”

  “I don't know,” said Hadrian, marvelling at the triad of triads placed around them: third way, third realm, third sister. “There's no point fighting who you are. That's the one battle you will always lose.”

  Seth stared at him, recognising the quote from his own life-tree. “I never asked for this,” he said.

  “None of us did,” Hadrian responded, “but we're here now, and we have the opportunity of a lifetime. Of a million lifetimes.”

  “To make a silk purse out of a pair of pig's ears.” Seth snorted. “Yeah, right.”

  “Now, now, Mister Gloomy,” Ellis chided him. “There's already enough on my team.”

  “But it's true! Both realms are in trouble because of us.”

  “Because of Yod,” Hadrian reminded him. “We can either let Yod finish the job, or we can try to turn the tables on it. Me, I don't see much of a choice there. Not if we're going to be worthy of a choice.”

  “None of us can kill Yod,” said Ellis, weighing into the argument. “Not at the moment. Maybe it makes sense to give the world a chance to find someone who can.”

  “Is that what you would do, then?” Seth asked her.

  “It's not my decision,” she said.

  “But if it was?”

  Her gaze danced away. “I have some issues with my new siblings I'd like to resolve. There might be a way to kill two birds with one stone. If you'll pardon the expression.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Hadrian felt as though they had reached a subtle agreement, but what it was he wasn't completely certain. He still felt torn between the urge to embrace and punch his brother, and he had no doubt the impulse was equally strong and equally conflicted in Seth. Ellis was a different story, but not dissimilar: he couldn't look at her without thinking of the way the draci had betrayed him and very nearly drained him of life. And she wasn't Ellis any more. Not just Ellis. Like the twins, she was defined by her place in events rather than solely by who she thought she was.

  “Let's get out of here,” she said eventually, glancing at the bed then away. “We've spent long enough in this place for a lifetime.”

  “Or two,” said Seth.

  She held out her hands to take theirs. The triangle they made with their arms and bodies seemed to spin for a moment, like dice rolling.

  “I knew what you had in mind before I came to you,” she said as they tumbled, “and I'm glad you're not going to ask me to choose between you. That would be as bad as it was before—before all this.”

  “Don't say it,” Seth said to her, “until you have to.”

  “Just this, then. Do you remember when we first met, in that crappy bar in Vienna? You never knew which one of you I saw first. Well, I saw both of you at once. That's who I chose. Not Seth or Hadrian; both of you. And I had both of you, for a while. It's just a shame you couldn't let it stay that way. Not in a million years.”

  Hadrian could see disappointment in his brother's eyes. He felt it, too. She, like everyone else, had been unable to treat them like individuals; she had wanted them bound into one unit, inseparable and identical.

  Perhaps, he thought, the time had come to stop fighting it.

  They held hands until they were in Sheol with the cool, harsh light of the Flame licking over them once again.

  “Spare us the speeches,” said Seth. Sheol rocked around them, under sustained attack from the outside. The hands of the Holy Immortals were linked in a wide circle, facing outwards, their faces raised as though soaking up sunlight. Hadrian didn't think they were tanning themselves. “I know what I want to do.”

  “And that is?” Ana asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Fix the fucker who did this to me. To us.” He glanced at Ellis. “To Agatha.”

  “To everyone,” Hadrian added. The little he had seen of the distant, isolated future where he had found Seth haunted him, the closer he came to committing to it. He felt that he should have stayed longer, to look more closely at what awaited them there, but at least it was different. At least it had some promise. “If we have to have the Cataclysm—and I see no way around that—then this is the best way I've seen to avoid the worst of it.”

  Meg nodded. “We have followed the route you took. We have seen the effects it will have. It is a grave step to take, and one that certainly should not be taken lightly.”

  “There are a number of continuity issues,” Ana went on. “To ensure your new world-line remains stable, should it be granted to you, you will need to know the details.”

  “You,” said Meg, pointing at Hadrian, “should have been told about the third way by the raven, Kutkinnaku, and the oracle, Mimir. The imp Pukje would have shown you the rest, had the opportunity presented itself. In that timeline, you and your brother would have met before now, in the devachan between the realms.”

  “In that timeline,” concluded Ana, “this outcome would have been much more likely.”

  “So,” said Hadrian, “you're saying that this will be our new history.”

  “Yes.” The taller Sister nodded.

  “Will we remember the old one?”

  “T
here might be some blurring. Memory is fluid. Facts rarely speak for themselves when you're down among them.”

  That suited him. If there was any chance of erasing the attack of the draci from his mind, he was going to take it.

  The pounding of the invaders reached a new note.

  “I thought I said no speeches,” Seth said. “Let's just do it. Before Yod breaks free would be good.”

  Hadrian raised a hand. “I think we should hear them out.”

  “Realms come and go,” Ana said, “and so do the things that live in them.”

  “I know, sister, but the one place that has always existed is the devachan, the void. It surrounds the realms like air: although invisible and unfelt, its effects are very, very real. Your emergence from the void,” Meg said to the twins, “will spark a new round of uncertainty. It's difficult to know what might happen beyond that point.”

  “What about the rest of us?” asked Synett, moving from a position on the sideline to confront the Sisters. “Don't I get a say in what happens to me? I'm human, too.”

  “That's for us to know and the rest of you to find out,” said Ana.

  “My sister is responding to your first question, not your final statement.” Meg's eyes twinkled. “You will get a say, Ronald Synett, but not here and not now.”

  “But I don't understand,” he said. “Are we talking about letting the Cataclysm happen or not?”

  “Neither,” said Seth. “Why are we still talking?”

  “Because we have not made our decision yet,” said Ana. “Hadrian? Are you committed?”

  He considered only for a moment, although it felt like eternity in miniature. He had initially been looking for a way to minimise or contain the Cataclysm. Instead, he had stumbled across a means of transcending it. That didn't automatically make it right; there were indeed numerous effects he couldn't see, since his life-tree was no longer visible in all its grim complexity. If he was wrong, he could be condemning the world to something worse than any mere Cataclysm.

  The First Realm had laws, and so did the Second Realm. Perhaps it was time to try some new laws, for a change. For the Change.

  Do the right thing, boy, Pukje had said. That was all very well, Hadrian thought, if one knew what the right thing was. Was it what Seth would do, or what he would do? Or what they could do together?

  “I—I think this is the best course,” he said. “Of all the choices I have open to me, of all the different world-lines I saw, this isn't the easiest or the simplest, but it is the most—apt.”

  “Well put,” said Meg. “Very well. You have made your wishes known. It's our turn now.”

  “As it happens,” said Ana, “my sister and I are diametrically opposed on which way to cast our votes. I am inclined to let nature play its course, while Meg is curious to intervene. We need a tie breaker.”

  “Ellis,” said Meg, “it's your turn now. Your decision will break our deadlock.”

  “Come forwards, Nona,” added Ana with a devilish look.

  “I just knew this was going to happen,” said Ellis, standing up straighter between Ana and Meg. The three of them were the right height to form a straight diagonal along the top of their heads. Ellis was younger than any of them by decades—or appeared so—but her presence fitted perfectly between them.

  “While I have no memory of ever doing this before,” she said, “or of being someone other than who I am now, I can't deny that I'm well placed to make this choice. I was there when Seth died; I'm here now when the twins are reunited. I am a victim of Yod's plan as much as they are, and I stand to lose much should the Cataclysm proceed as Yod intends it to. I've already lost one world. Can I stand by and watch as another is destroyed?”

  She hesitated. Her poise didn't crack, but Hadrian thought he glimpsed the pressure she was under. Should she give her former lovers what they wanted, or should she let this branch of their tangled life-memories play itself out? The decision couldn't possibly be an easy one.

  “But I'm only human,” she said. “I didn't ask to be more than that. The woman I was in a previous life, the woman called Moyo—she thought she was only a woman, too, and she acted accordingly. She loved mirror twins and died in the near-Cataclysm triggered by their deaths.” The monsters, flat gold eyes blinking with complex emotions, hung on her every word. “Her memory was revered by the people she left behind—but that doesn't make up for the fact that she was used, just as I'm being used. That someone who thinks they're us is doing the using doesn't make it any easier to accept.

  “I'm not the sort of person who takes things lying down. Neither was Moyo. In fact, the longer I think about it, the more certain I am that she had definite reasons for wanting me back in the spotlight again. Eventually, the time comes to take action. So the decision I'm about to make will be as much for me as it is for Seth and Hadrian or for either of the realms.”

  She reached out to take Meg's hand; the older woman took it, but with hesitation, as if suddenly uncertain.

  “We are the Three Sisters,” Ellis said solemnly, taking Ana's hand in turn. “Once made, our decision stands forever. It cannot be appealed or undone.”

  Hadrian swallowed.

  “Will we see you again?” Seth asked.

  “That's what Hadrian asked me in Sweden,” she said instead of answering. “I'm as decided now as I was then.”

  The Flame flared behind them. The fabric of the realm flexed.

  In a soft voice, as though speaking to the two of them alone, she said: “Boys, I set you both free.”

  “People say many things. The truth is silent.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 332

  The first of the Lost Minds took the twins by surprise, so enmeshed were they in the song of the deep void. They had almost forgotten that there was or had been anything else. They could not have guessed how long it had been since they went out of the world.

  The first was a woman named Yugen. She said that she was a magician from the Greater Desert. They listened to her story with rapt fascination. She had been working with a team of engineers on the construction of a ravine designed to split the desert in two. Why this was necessary she never completely conveyed. The world she spoke of was very different from the one they had left, one of strange creatures, dangerous ruins, and terrible adversity. Humanity survived in isolated pockets, avoiding the depopulated, haunted cities wherever possible and only with great difficulty gathering new alliances against those who would harm them. The ravine was somehow intended to keep disaster at bay: a supernatural version of China's Great Wall perhaps.

  The twins’ first glimpse of the world they had made came in brief fragments as Yugen raged about her new prison, trying to find a way out. She howled at infinity and screamed at the endless drone. She wove charms and chanted arcane words. None of them made any difference. There she remained, with them.

  The twins tried to explain who they were and why they had done what they did. It wasn't easy. There were moments they did not want to revisit. Only time would tell whether it had all been for nothing.

  And She said: I know that you have sinned, and greatly, but the time has come for you to put that life behind you. I give you a new life, a new message. You must take it to the world in my name, and deliver the ones I love from oblivion.

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 13

  Seth remembered: the Flame imploding and the two Sisters being sucked into it; ekhi breaking into Sheol and Ellis escaping on a brilliant, hypnotic back; mountains closing in over a dark, hunched shape and three slender glassy towers entombing them all. Through the chaos, a green figure strode calmly towards him and whispered softly into his ear.

  “Peace, Seth. This is neither our first meeting nor our last. In your future, the Goddess awaits.”

  Then Horva was gone. Seth dreamed of Agatha placing one of her self-made silver rings on his finger. The bubble of the world burst, and a new topography swept over the land. A book opened, and a bandaged hand began to write.

 
“Remember us, Seth,” Horva insisted from very far away. “Please, remember us…”

  Seth remembered a sharp tugging sensation as though his soul had snagged on something and begun to unravel. A rush of sensations threw him off balance. Third Realm memories flooded through him, granting him sensory flashes of times long past and times yet to come. The feel of lips on his came and went, followed almost immediately by the smell of ancient dirt, dry and electric. His lungs tightened in thin, cold air.

  Everything went black.

  “Are we there yet?” Hadrian asked out of the darkness.

  Seth knew what his brother meant: were they in the new timeline? Had the old one fallen away like so much shed skin? Had the Cataclysm been subverted?

  “I don't think we're anywhere at all,” he said, as the void pressed in around them and only echoes of their lives remained.

  Whence did the Goddess come? There are those who say that glowing jade Angels carried Her gently from the Sky onto the Mountain, where the ruined air was thick with the smell of Blood. Though the Beast raged in its stone Cage beneath her, and the Earth shook to feel it, She was not afraid.

  There She met the Imp who was also a Dragon and found two Bodies. One She interred at the Summit of the World, where a Crater marks the place of Her return. The other She burned and scattered to the Four Winds. The Spirit of the Wolf bit and clawed at her, but it could do Her no harm.

  When that was done, the Angels bowed to Her and took their leave to continue on the Holy Path. The Imp fled as the Goddess and Her two beastly Companions travelled aloft in a fiery Balloon, rending the Sky and remaking it more to Her liking. The Earth She rearranged at Her whim, rending and mending as She saw fit. She remade the World, not in Her image, but so it might flourish and grow under the Light of a new Sun.