by Lee Bond
"A plane," Aäl put in, "similar to the extra-dimensional layer and the Dream both. A place where worlds and people and moments too strange to exist, even for the Unreal Dimension, wind up once the rules of causality catch up to them. Slices in time where paradox or implausibility or sheer chance flip the dice in one direction instead of another, but the momentum of that second is too great for basic entropy to swallow them up."
"An endless plane," Eddie answered hollowly, "worlds connected to worlds by impossible bridges, or being-made levels, or accumulations of broken planets merged together, all of them fighting against a hungry entropic force, an almost living, animal intellect surrounding these realms on all sides, eagerly waiting for the moment when whatever magic trick keeping them alive fades, so it can pounce. Things that could never exist here flourish there. It's as insane as it is glorious."
"Sounds like my kind of place." Garth quipped.
"It is indeed, Dreambreaker, it is indeed." Aäl smiled toothily. "And it is from this place that Bruush originate. Remnants of a much older Unreal Universe, possibly even the first to hide themselves away inside the Dominion. These fools…" The God pointed at Eddie and Drake, both of whom were plainly growing weary of the endless insults, "entered the Dominion violently, brutally, ripping and tearing their way through the so wonderfully described animalistic entropy, leaving behind in their wake hideous holes in the fabric of the Dream. Do you know what happened, Dreambreaker?"
"I can guess." A zing of cold worry worked it's way up Garth's spine. "That entropy. Flooded backwards through the holes made by their entry, no?" When Aäl nodded, the Kin'kithal continued, glad to see that both of the other mortal men in the room were showing symptoms of regret. "And because the Proto-Reality or Dream is fundamentally different again than the Unreal Universe, this hunger no doubt determined that the Dream was just another version of this totally awesome-sounding Shattered Dominion."
"And my brothers, now freed from hiding thanks to Samiel's expulsion, hurried to heal the damage, to save what remained of the Dream for the moment when our arrangement came to pass." Uncontained woe flowed from Aäl into the room, turning the chill colder still, filling it with the unimaginable loss and sorrow. Eddie and Drake shivered inside their skins while the Dreambreaker stood there, looking bored.
Because of course, the Dreambreaker's own remorse would become the stuff of legend when Reality 2.0 came to be born.
"But this entropy destroys things like us all the time, you see." Aäl continued when he was able. He loathed the fact that he had to treat these shambling ingrates with kid gloves; he would prefer it if Nickels voluntarily agreed for what was coming next because it would honestly make things go much smoother, so for the time being, that was how it was going to be.
For now. If the two men continued on in the way they were, Garth’s voluntary acquiescence wouldn’t matter.
"For many of the minds that hold sway inside the Dominion, keeping their levels or sheaf or whatever poignant term they use to define their tiny little patch of sand, are like us. Power incarnate, intelligence most sublime, ability unending. The entropy snuffed my brothers out like candles. Millions upon millions of years of life, experience, gone. Faster than the blinking eyes in your moronic heads. Nearly the only good thing to come from the tragedy is that the entropy was pushed back from whence it'd come. Either satiated by the meal or overblown by the same, it does not matter. They were gone, what remained of the Dream, safe."
“We couldn’t have known that.” Eddie shouted angrily. Suddenly feeling immensely claustrophobic, the deposed Emperor set off away from the deadly angry God. As soon as he got to the other side of the instrumentation panels that’d lowered him into the ‘virtual’ realms he much preferred, the pressure pushing down on him from all sides lessened. Not a lot, just enough for him to breathe and to clear his head. “How could we have known about something as esoteric as Gods?”
Aäl gestured to himself and then to the other one, then to the location where the incongruity had been stuffed away. “When confronted with a man like the Dreambreaker, when presented with a toy like the incongruity, failure to presume that there is nothing greater still out there is a failure on the part of yourself and no one else, Edward Marshall. Ignorance in a matter such as this … it beggars the imagination.”
“Leave him be.” Drake stepped between Eddie and Aäl, willing to do what it took to spare the other man any further castigation; it was unfair that the flame-topped Californian was being forced to take the brunt of the blame pushing outward from their local deity when in fact, he too had been involved. The loquacious displaced Englishman said as much, adding, “I was there too, asshat, right alongside. You want to blame, fine, go on ahead and blame all you want, just make sure you spread it all over the place, okay?”
Garth clapped triumphantly. “Way to go, Drake-meister, though I do think calling an all-powerful God ‘asshat’ isn’t necessarily the best way to win friends and influence people.”
“Tough shit.” Drake stuck his chin out. “What do you have to say to that, Aäl?”
“I say that again, as in all things since you two buffoons crawled through that Einstein-Rosen Bridge, you have proven yourself once more to be the better man, Drake Bishop.” Aäl absorbed the hostile emotion flooding from Eddie and smiled. “Your counterpart is a reckless, thoughtless, dangerous man. How he managed to keep from destroying this Unreal Universe long before this one ever got around to it is beyond me. His inner lust for more and more power might only be a thing freshly revealed to us all thanks to the Dreambreaker’s manipulations, but it’s not a new thing. Not at all.”
Eddie struggled not to rise to the bait, and it was perhaps one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. He only barely managed to keep from trying to defend himself by reminding himself that not only was Aäl a god, he was turning out to be a massive prick as well, and that by trying to explain his actions, all he’d be doing is giving that cockbiter more fuel.
“And that isn’t even the worst of their crimes, Dreambreaker, if you can imagine such a thing.” Aäl said conversationally to Garth, who had the air of someone still trying to figure out what was going on. The man would never unearth what was coming until it was dropped in his lap because even for someone as mythical as Garth N’Chalez, Dreambreaker, Engineer, Specter in the Stars and Changemaker, the idea was … ludicrous.
“What could be worse than killing your brothers?” Garth demanded. “From your point of view, that is. Remember, I’m not exactly a founding member of the Lords of the Proto-Reality Fan Club, or anything. I might download a few of your top hits and all, but I’m not out there in the streets shouting your guys’ names to the rooftops or anything.”
Aäl looked at Eddie, then at Drake, who was still quite spectacularly angry at how they were being treated. The man’s aura told the whole story, and it was quite amusing; Drake was plainly still at odds with how his friend had been behaving in the last little while –and quite rightly so, given the fact that the so-called Emperor-for-Life had been aiming to destroy the whole Universe for his own nefarious, greedy purposes- but at the same time, he was more than willing to do whatever it took to keep Eddie from receiving his just desserts.
Mortals. Their connections to one another was perhaps the most confusing thing he’d ever encountered in his entire, immortal life. They were sloppy and disorganized and the fact that a single human being could hold within them multiply conflicting emotions –all about the same person- struck Aäl as a fiendish waste of time, energy and effort.
“Shall you tell Dreambreaker what I’m talking about, or would you prefer it if I did?” Aäl asked, tone so saccharine sweet it was nauseating. Drake’s countenance went completely downcast and Eddie was still refusing to accept any reality save his own. “No? Very well. I’ll get the ball rolling, as they say. When you two found yourselves in the very implausible locale known to the inhabitants as the Shattered Dominion, how long was it before you found where the Bruush spend t
heir downtime? A day? A week? A month? Longer still? Surely with the indomitable powers offered to you by the incongruity, you blazed bright and furious across the mottled heavens, no?”
Garth bit back a curse. He recognized the looks on his friends’ faces now. He’d seen it before, when the three of them had been caught by one of the hellaciously effective security guards. They’d been at one of the side entrances, clumsily trying to sneak in several kegs, far too many bottles of hard liquor and roughly half the non-University population of San Francisco, and the two main knuckleheads had gone utterly stone-faced, as if pretending that they were not, in fact, surrounded by a veritable gang of already drunk and/or stoned goofs and enough alcohol to drown a small town, would somehow confuse the guard into walking away.
“Don’t say it.” Garth shook his head. “Don’t … just don’t.”
Drake looked to his long-missing friend, tears sparkling in the corners of his eyes. Their greatest failure, their deepest embarrassment, one of the only true reasons they’d ultimately fled their own home in search of Garth N’Chalez.
“We …” Emotion sealed his throat shut for a moment, but he pushed through it. “We … we didn’t. Get anywhere. The Dominion … is unlike anything you can imagine, Garth. You … you can’t believe what it’s like there. The … people who live there, who are in control of successful planes … they may not be Gods like our friend Aäl here, but they hold real, true power. The kind of power capable of holding sentient entropy at bay and we … we weren’t anywhere near where the Bruush hole up. We weren’t …”
“We were fucking idiots, is what we were.” Eddie snapped cynically as he came back around to where everyone else stood. “Me most of all. Flush with power, I thought it’d be a walk in the park. I was wrong. The overlord of the plane we arrived on was more than willing to allow us entry to the Dominion, but when he found out what we planned on doing, he assembled … well, I don’t know what the fuck he assembled because even the fucking tail end of what came after us was more than enough to convince us to take our leave. So we did. We fled back to the Dream, tails between our legs.”
“You see?” Aäl demanded, incredulity skyrocketing to never-before-imagined heights. “You see, Dreambreaker? It is one thing to risk everything, to take the lives of Gods in pursuit of ensuring the survival of your race. That crime is almost acceptable when you take into consideration just what it was they sought to do. But to flee! To run away? Without even trying? Without taking proper risk? A sin most sublime. And so, Dreambreaker, when I say to you that your friends are worse than you will ever be, I hope you comprehend the totality of just what I mean by that.”
***
"Fuck." That was the only thing that came to mind.
His friends had started off meaning well, but at the end of their efforts, they'd spectacularly shat the bed in just about every way possible. He wanted to argue the fact that their ignorance concerning the possible existence of higher beings should free them from Aäl's scorn … but he couldn't. Not really, not without lessening the importance of the beings they'd accidentally killed, and not without angering Aäl to the point of actual violence. For the time being, their alabaster jailor was content to loom, to pluck at their emotional strings until they were completely unsettled.
Besides all that…
Aäl wasn't wrong. It hurt, sickened him to the very depths of his soul, but Aäl was right. In possession of the incongruity, triumphant over the Bruush -and having beheld all that those dinosaur-like monstrosities were capable of- and somehow able to plumb the utter depths of the Unreal Universe to find this place called the Shattered Dominions … they should've known better than to assume they were at the pinnacle. Should've approached the entire affair cautiously instead of leaping.
"Fuck." Garth added a second time, completely unwound. There wasn't anything else to say. Aäl had them bang to rights, and at long last, everyone in the room was on the same page.
And it wasn't a good page, either; there was Aäl's as-yet unmentioned bargain they had to work through, and from the looks of things, whatever it was that the God wanted, Eddie and Drake were definitely not going to come out on top.
Aäl nodded and gestured for all three men to stand beside one another, saying, "And now, foolish mortals, we have, as the Dreambreaker has just realized, come to the moment wherein we discuss bargains and agreements, and how these things will affect all of your lives to come."
Eddie moved to stand beside Garth, exuding sullenness from every pore in his body, Drake, not much better off. "We're sorry for what we …"
Aäl was quick to hold up a long, gaunt-looking finger. "There is no need for apologies, little Godkiller. No need, and no point."
"Let's get down to brass tacks here, Aäl old buddy old pal." Garth subtly shifted his stance, just enough so that Aäl well and truly understood that while he'd been more than okay with giving the God time to unburden himself, any sort of violence happening wouldn't end well for anyone. "You're talking about bargains and agreements, and from personal experience, I can't help but feel that the 'little mortals' in the room are going to come out way, way short. What is it you think we can do for you? Your brothers are dead, the Dream transformed into quadro…"
"Ahhhh." Aäl breathed the word out, cool hoarfrost spilling from his lips. "That's where your awareness of things falls short of the mark, Dreambreaker. Yes, my brothers are dead and yes, the Dream is mostly gone, but it doesn't have to remain that way."
"The fuck are you talking about?" Out of all his dealings with absurdly overpowered entities the Universe over, Aäl was perhaps the most off-putting of all. Had to be something with his incredibly surreal nature and the fact that he legitimately possessed unheard of power. "You aren't making any sense. In fact, you're making the complete opposite of sense. The quadronium transformation was complete. Every iota of matter, pulled in and laid down inside me, as implants and augments."
"Are you certain?" Aäl asked craftily, pointedly eyeballing Eddie and Drake. "Beyond these two buffoons, there's also the incongruity itself. A portion of it remains on the other side of the entropic meniscus that surrounds the 'proper' Universe. And, of course, the bridge they used. All of that remains behind, miniscule in comparison to what once existed, but more than enough. More than enough to arrange for a little … manipulation."
"Oh hell no." It was Garth's turn to push away from the gurney, to walk away from the situation. There was just no way Aäl was even remotely suggesting what it sounded like he was suggesting.
"He gets there so quickly." Aäl commented wryly, watching the Dreambreaker as he huffed and puffed around the control room, anger and disbelief boiling off his broad shoulders in waves. "Not at all like you two monkeys."
Eddie spat. "I was the fucking Emperor-for-Life for thirty thousand years, you fucking fuck. I am sick and tired of you talking down to me this way. We had no goddamn idea about you or your brothers. Hell, we weren't even aware that we were causing any damage to the substrates. Do you think for one minute that we would've continued on blindly if we'd had even an inkling? Do you really?"
Aäl allowed the coarse insults to wash over him. It was easy enough; Eddie and Drake -Eddie in particular- were barely worth his notice. Allowing insults coming from either one to bother him would be to admit that a God found a worm's presence worrisome. "It matters not, Edward Marshall. What's done is done and the past is the past. With the Dreambreaker's assistance, perhaps some of that can be fixed."
"Now I'm completely lost." Drake admitted readily. "What in the hell is he talking about?"
"Time travel." Garth spat the words from the other side of the control systems. "Fucking time travel is what he's talking about and it is a goddamn fucking terrible idea. I literally cannot explain to any of the people in this room who only think in three dimensions how terrible an idea it is. There's no way it can work."
"But it can, Dreambreaker." Aäl flowed closer to the only man who could possibly make this new Dream a Reality. "As yo
u pointed out, I am the only being in this room who thinks in more than three dimensions. I've considered all the angles, Dreambreaker, and I assure you, we have the possibility here to do something that's never been done."
"You want to send Garth somewhere into the past history of the Proto-Reality, either to stop us from using the incongruity to travel to the Dominions or even to make sure we never lay hands on it." The concept was shocking. Novel, even. On the face of it, the notion seemed impossible, but all four of them had already witnessed time travel in more than one instance.
"Paradox." Drake shook his head firmly. "There's simply no way. All of the events that occurred in the Proto-Reality are what led to us coming here. Undo all of that, and the entirety of the Unreal Universe may very well unspool around our ears. We've influenced thirty thousand years of development, Aäl. You'd risk that to save the lives of your brethren? Who's more callous and insensitive now?"
“My realm may be mostly gone, fools, but I still exist. Augmented with the laughably termed ‘temporal incongruity’, I am now considerably more than I was.” Aäl watched Garth roam around the far side of the room, unsurprised to see that now the topic of proper time travel had been broached, the man was no longer simply denying it’s possibility, but actually trying to work through the particulars of just how they might accomplish the impossible. “Time travel was an established thing inside the Dream. Baron Samiel utilized heavily manipulated human/Bruushian DNA to gift his soldiers with the ability to deal with the considerable pain and even more deadly stresses put upon a body during each jaunt. The Dream allowed the temporal shifts to occur because they were taking place on a level within the Dream that, astonishingly enough, didn’t suffer from the abuse, else Samiel would have never been so successful. We have with us in this room the only being who’s already been through the incongruity’s particular method of temporal relocation, and without any harm. And given the state of his physical flesh now, I would say he’s more than able to survive a second attempt.”
