Grey Fate 9

I sat up straighter, feeling suddenly awkward in my silk night clothes in this strange bedroom. “I saw some of the Alacryan attacks from within the keystone. I—” An influx of tangled memories stole the words from my lips as they washed over me in waves. I remembered Varay, lying unmoving at the center of a blasted battlefield. I remembered the Alacryans collapsing in their jail cells. But there were other memories too, muddled with time, distance, and a kind of unreality. In them, I saw the aftermath of things that hadn’t happened yet, or might not happen at all.

Sylvie’s presence gripped me like two strong hands on either side of my face, forcing my attention forward. ‘Breathe, Arthur. We’re here to support you. You don’t have to carry the entire load by yourself.’

Leaning into her presence within my mind, I shifted some of the weight to her. Regis stood up on shaky legs, a frown on his puppy-ish face. Together, my two companions leaned into it, but the sudden smothering presence of the waves only intensified. Like a drowning man, I was dragging them down with me.

“Arthur?” Mother had taken a step forward, but her face was a blur, her expression nothing but a smudged shadow across her face.

Without conscious intention, aether released from my core and filled my limbs, attempting to buttress me against the mental weight of so many lifetimes of memory unfolding through my consciousness all at once. Regis stumbled forward, dematerialized, and drifted into my body, anchoring himself within me. More distantly, I felt Sylvie gasp against the force of so much raw memory.

Realizing that King’s Gambit had been helping me hold back the tide, I reactivated it fully. I saw myself reflected in my mother’s shining eyes, the crown of light glowing atop my wheat-blond hair. My consciousness split, then split again, fracturing so that every competing thought and memory was supported by its own branch of focused awareness.

...

Running in parallel with these thoughts were branches of focus that processed and compartmentalized all the memories of my many different lifetimes lived inside the keystone. But the lifetimes made up only a small percent of the memories, and my final efforts were to convince the conscious aspect of Fate that there was another way forward besides fully rupturing the aetheric realm and allowing the concentrated aether there to incorporate into the physical world in an explosion that would destroy Dicathen, Alacryan, and Epheotus.

The timelines and futures I had seen were nearly without count. The keystone’s ability to simulate alternative realities, when combined with King’s Gambit and the presence of Fate, had acted like a near-infinite kaleidoscope, with each fractal pattern an entire reality and sequence of events through which I had simultaneously searched for the solution both to my own problem and Fate’s. The latter, it had turned out, was the simpler of the two to figure out, while even my—at that moment—near-infinite resources had only revealed the start of the path I needed to take, not the resolution I had sought.

Entropy. In the background, I was still dissecting the idea. An unnatural pressure building behind the veil of our known dimension, like water behind a dam.

Fate, it had turned out, was neither the builder of the dam, wanting to obstruct its flow, nor the water itself, only flowing as its bounds demanded. No, it was closer to a conscious embodiment of the natural sciences and their expectations. An arbiter of the laws of magic and science. Where water can’t feel the desire to move beyond the dam and cares nothing for the banks of the river, Fate—and by extension, all of aether—felt the urge to flow. More accurately, aether was the dissipating fog, the particles of moisture forming the fog spreading out until you could no longer see them. It—

“Arthur?” Mom repeated.

I smiled, fully aware of the expression’s mechanical appearance. “I’m fine. I’m glad you’re both well. When I see Windsom, I’ll give him a piece of my mind.” Focusing on Ellie, I added, “And don’t worry about that old djinn seeing relic. I’m certain it can be repaired.”

The two exchanged that look again. I eased back on King’s Gambit until I felt the crown fade. With the influx of memories processed, I no longer needed the full effect of the godrune. I didn’t completely stem the flow of mana into it again, however, recognizing that it had been a mistake to do so the first time. Instead, I allowed a constant trickle of aether to keep the rune activated and support my sluggish mind with additional threads to process everything that was happening.

Mom stepped forward and lightly pressed one hand on my cheek. “I’m so proud of you, Arthur. You did it. You saved the world.”