Sheria
Sheria lays her head on Michael Rider’s lifeless chest and weeps. The Bright Path stretches out before her, its singular correctness golden and heartless as it marks the perfection of what must be.
The snow begins to build up on her back as she grips the lifeless shoulders. A few hours behind her, she grips those same shoulders in passion and in love. But in all the many paths ahead, never again she does touch them.
Sheria will not leave the lifeless meat of his body to freeze in the snow. She clears a spot on the forest floor, then painstakingly scavenges for dry wood and leaves under heaps of brush beneath the snow. It is dawn before she has gathered enough for a bier. She lays the thing that is no longer Michael Rider on top.
In a nearby branch, a front of warmer air has swept in from the west. With it comes a rare winter lightning storm. Sheria closes her eyes for a moment, seeing the many branches where lightning is crashing down in the forest around her. She draws herself closer to the branches.
“” she says aloud.
A sudden flash erupts in front of her, and the dried wood bursts into flame.
She watches the flame consume the body that, in the relative-rearward branches, holds the man she loves. She loves him all along the paths, in all the branches. The fire, flickering under the trees, reaches through the branching pathways, drawing other fires to itself. It flares upward toward the branches of reality and the branches of the trees, singeing and burning them both. It is an inferno. She steps back.
Others join her, emerging from the dark of the wood to stand before the heat of her anger and loss. There are many; how many, exactly, is a paradox. But perhaps there are thirteen. The prime numbers persist more easily among the shadows and echoes of the branching pathways. They have durability. It is likely there are thirteen others, who are not Sheria.
“” she asks them.
One who stands nearby turns. S/he is male in some near branches, and female in others. It is not uncommon among Sheria’s kind.
“” s/he speaks. “
In unison, still circling the fire and Sheria, they bow, touching their faces to the melting snow.
She looks at the ground, and the snow melting around the fire. She sees the light of the flames coming from his body, and smells the charred flesh.
“” she says. Her voice comes from the black well between the branches, where lurks the dark and empty matter-energy of the great pattern. “”
She turns and walks away from the fire, and away from the others like her—of which there are, perhaps, thirteen.
“,” says the shifting male-female fey, rising to his/her feet.
They remain, watching silently until the fire has burned down. Then they turn and disappear into the forest.
Another Jonathan
Jonathan Steward and Ikongbe Rayth walked slowly down the gentle slope of the sphere, making their way toward its lowest point. Their faces were still wet with tears; for Amica Kimbwe, for Vicod Rayth, and for all the others that labored the long miles and months in the wasteland, only to perish in an inferno at the threshold of their destination. But their steps did not falter. Jonathan carried in one hand the little birdcage with its lonely dove, and in the other a single oil lantern.
Shapes littered the inner surface of the mighty sphere as they approached its lowest point. Statues with horrid, leering faces and distorted bodies; blood-stained altars; patterns of swirling concentric lines made of stones on the floor; they all churned up visions of dark fantasy in the mind. Both men recoiled momentarily in horror.
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“These monuments are more recent than the chamber itself,” remarked Jonathan, recovering his wits. The pale, wrinkled skin of his face hung in sagging folds, and his once-piercing blue eyes looked out from a face ravaged by age, care, and labor. A gray beard covered much of his face. “The locals must have taken it for a holy site. What this place was—what it is—is too much to bear, even for an ignorant and shallow mind. I think these little idols are meant to domesticate it.”
Iko looked up into the yawning blackness above and all around. His face was still young, and his skin a dark brown. He, too, wore a beard, though his was wiry and black.
“It is not domesticated,” he replied. Minutes earlier, his father’s body had collapsed into blackened ash at the mouth of the complex. Iko’s mind was not all in this moment.
They reached the bottom of the sphere. Though the stone floor was empty at first glance, the lantern’s dim light produced a glint that resolved itself into a circular plate in the floor. It was perhaps twenty feet wide, and sat flush with the stone around it. Jonathan bent down to inspect it, holding the feeble light of the lantern close to the surface. Iko looked down for a moment, uncaring, but then knelt as well.
There was a hole in the center of the plate.
A whisper reached their ears, coming from the path down which they had walked to reach the bottom of the sphere. It was the shuffling of many feet. Jonathan and Iko stood up abruptly, and Jonathan held the lantern high. From far off at the edge of the sphere, its light reflected back from scores of bobbing, shuffling patches of metal. They moved at head level; indeed, they were where faces used to be.
“Always more of them,” muttered Jonathan. “But no more of us… and nowhere left to go but up.”
He whirled back to the hole in the plate, probing at it with his finger.
“Up,” he repeated. “The wall etchings your father found in Kargen’s Palace showed a great circle and a man in the center, yes?”
“They’ll be on us in thirty seconds,” replied the younger man. He withdrew a large, cylindrical bomb from his tattered pack and held up the fuse to the lamp.
“Did they show a man at the center of a circle?” demanded Jonathan, his voice assuming an intent desperation. He jerked the lamp back, away from Iko’s bomb.
Iko blinked and nodded. He extended his arm forward and lit the fuse.
Jonathan reached into his pocket and withdrew the long, thin rod of black metal that had come down to him from Cyrus Stoat, those many years ago. It was absolutely void, reflecting no light even under the lamp. The shuffling grew louder, and the glinting lights of metal faces drew close.
“Goodbye, Jonathan,” said Iko. His eyes were already dead. “It wasn’t much of an end.”
“Wait, Iko!” cried Jonathan, grasping for his companion. But the younger man sprinted off into the darkness, toward the sound of the shuffling feet.
Several things happened all at once.
There was a terrific light and blast from the direction of the advancing Faceless. In the same moment, the old man that was Jonathan Steward bent swiftly to the floor and inserted the thin rod into the hole in the plate. Another rumble began—deeper, sustained—and bands of light emerged from hidden recesses in the floor, arcing up along the perimeter of the sphere in many lines to brightly illuminate its massive girth. The plate began to rise up into the interior of the sphere, propelled toward its center by some massive shaft of steely metal. Jonathan collapsed on its flat plane; the bird cage, and its occupant fluttering weakly, fell to the ground next to him.
With a jerk, the plate stopped, momentarily lifting Jonathan into the air above its surface. By the sphere’s now-blazing interior lights, he saw that he was in its very center, surrounded on all sides by empty space save for directly below, beneath the plate. The smoke of Iko’s bomb was visible toward the entrance, and the vivid, scattered painting of blood and the body parts of scores of Faceless. Somewhere among them was what used to be a young man with black skin and hopeless eyes.
The world began to shift. Jonathan rose to his feet, tears springing to his eyes. The reality around him split and refracted, becoming dozens, and then scores, then hundreds, and then too many to perceive or describe. Jonathan’s brain began to break down under the assault of fourth and fifth and sixth dimensions, trying and failing to conceptualize the awful immensity of reality. He closed his eyes, blocking out the sensory maelstrom, and reached down to the ground, groping for the little makeshift birdcage. Finding it, he drew it up to his chest and fumbled for the bit of twine that bound shut its door.
“Lead me home,” he said, opening both the door and his eyes. The bird fluttered again, and then seeing freedom before her, flew out. Her flight, so long denied, was desperate, joyful, exuberant.
The ability of certain birds to is one that appears, to certain men, a rather pedestrian sort of mystery. Amidst the triumph and power of technology, the ability of a bird to fly unerringly to her one true seems a rather shabby miracle. In this we err mightily. In truth, that instinctive connection to home ranks among the most profound attributes of any living thing. It is a vision beyond that of our impoverished brains, relying as we do on languages of determinism and certainty. The bird has no such handicap.
The dove burst forth from her cage, letting that strange extra spirit within her connect with her other selves. They called to her, and she followed them home.
“Merrily.” Tears flowed freely down Jonathan Steward’s face, blurring the refractions and insane variations of time and reality around him. “Merrily,” he repeated. “I’m coming home.”
He ran, pushing his old, spent legs for one last desperate effort. His eyes and feet followed the dove as she dove into the cataclysm of reality within the Kaples Wethan Mekoth. He ran off the edge of the great pillar; but it was no longer there. He went into time, into space, into the branching pathways of reality.
He went back.
