Authors: CJ Rutherford,Colin Rutherford
10 – Switzerland – Alice through the looking glass
Two years earlier
Jason had thought tomorrow would be the greatest achievement of his life. The culmination of his life’s work in the lab, brought to fruition in the experiment planned for the following morning. But as he lay here in bed with his wife slumbering in his arms, he knew he’d just surpassed it. Well, technically it had been a two-person job, but this little detail didn’t prevent him from feeling the elation and pride within as he looked down at his beautiful and pregnant wife.
As she stirred, he remembered with regret the time lost with Katheryne, his daughter, and he made a vow then and there to make more time for this new life growing beside him. In fact as his wife woke up he made his first tentative step along this path.
“Hi, you two,” he murmured as he kissed her gently on the forehead.
Alice McNair laughed. “Don’t tempt fate, it might be twins, or triplets,” she said, mischievously. The completely unconcerned look on his face must have shocked her as she sat up abruptly. “That wouldn’t bother you at all would it?” she asked.
“Nope,” he chuckled, smiling widely, “in fact, I’ve made a decision. After tomorrow’s experiment I’m going to retire, well, semi-retire at least,” he added on as a look of disbelief appeared on his wife’s face.
“How can you say that Jason, I mean, what you do, it’s important, it’s—” but Jason interrupted her.
“What I do is almost finished. Once my theory is proven tomorrow, I can let Jules and the others continue the day to day work while I get to sit back on my laurels for a while,” he said, smiling.
Alice grinned back at him. “Hmm, I don’t think there will be much time for sitting on any laurels, seven and a half months from now.”
Jason chuckled and pulled her closer, putting his hand on her stomach. Their schedules lately had made her news all the more remarkable. They’d seen each other only twice in the last two months, so that meant...
“Paris,” he said. “We made this little one the weekend in Paris didn’t we?”
Alice put her hand on top of his and smiled. “Well, let’s face it, we had enough practice at the time, remember?”
Jason grinned at the memory and leaned in to kiss his wife.
“Why don’t you come with me in the morning?” he said, “I mean, it probably won’t be anything much to look at but it’d mean a lot for me to have you there to see my final triumph!”
Jason sat up straight and raised one pointed finger in the air in what he obviously thought was an impersonation of pure brilliance. Alice, however, took one look and hung her head in her hands, giggling furiously.
She looked up once she had recovered to see him smiling at her. “OK, my nutty professor, I’d love to come. I haven’t seen Jules in ages anyway.”
She smiled wickedly at him as she pulled him to her.
“But for now, let’s see what sort of final triumphs we can get up to, just the two of us.”
*
The next morning
Jason looked on as his teams carried out the final calibrations. All had been ready for hours now, but this was another way for Jason to keep them, and if he was honest, himself, focussed. This was the moment they had worked toward for the past three and a half years, ever since the first incontrovertible evidence had been gathered of the existence of extra dimensional space. This in itself had been a small step toward the final completion of a stable wormhole to another dimension, but the evidence that the space in between these dimensions existed, and was theoretically navigable, was a huge achievement.
And so it was with pride that Jason looked up at his wife, sitting in the viewing gallery with a number of the senior members of the facility. She winked at him cheekily and he smiled back mouthing ‘I love you’ to her. She looked around, embarrassed to see a few of the others had seen his open display of affection and they were smiling in her direction. But she didn’t mind. After all, she knew most of them, had known them for years in fact, and both she and Jason considered them friends.
The time had finally come, and Jason sat in his chair with his pulse racing and entered the coded sequence to start the process.
Jules reached across from her seat next to him and squeezed his hand. He turned and they simply smiled and nodded to each other. Neither of them believed in luck, just in science.
“Particle beams at full strength, beams are in alignment,” reported Jules as she watched the monitors. In the chamber which housed the phenomenon, known as the collider aperture, but affectionately christened the rabbit hole by the team, dozens of beams collided at the same point creating a microscopic reaction similar to a sun.
Jason punched another sequence and watched as the instrumentation confirmed the convergence of the beams. The monitors automatically dimmed the display so the guests could watch without the need for protective glasses.
“We have a collision event,” he said, sounding calmer than he could possibly feel. The handling of collision of particles traveling close to the speed of light was a delicate balancing act. One tiny mistake in their calculations could start a chain reaction which would kill them and everyone else in the underground facility instantly.
“Stand by for matter injection,” said Jason quietly.
The exotic matter in question had been collected during multiple beam collisions at variable lower intensities over the last few months, and stored in magnetic containment vessels. Of course there had been several smaller-scale experiments carried out to prove the theory behind what they were about to do, but this was the first full-strength procedure. The magnetic siphon moved slowly into position.
Jason gave a final look around to his team and to the people in the gallery, and to his wife and unborn child, and pushed the button which ended his world.
What happened next should have been impossible, as a barely-visible, instantaneous reaction ripped across the space between the collider aperture and lab. Something not quite there appeared in the air before the viewing gallery. Like a circle of silver shot through with diamonds, it was present for just an instant before seeming to lunge at the group before simply winking out of existence. Whatever it had been was gone. And so was Alice.
11 – The Never – Lost souls
How long the soul floated in the emptiness could not be guessed. There was no time in the void between dimensions, so there was no way for it to reference the passage of minutes, hours, or even years.
A whisper remained, of another soul, linked embryonically to its own being, but the memory was weak, clouded and dim as everything before here and now was. The other consciousness had passed on somewhere else, leaving the single soul wandering this void, lost and alone.
Alone, that was, until it felt the presence of another–an entity which wasn’t a soul, or if it ever had been, it was blackened and corrupt beyond redemption.
The wandering soul recoiled in fear from the malice and evil emanating from the other, trying to hide, but there was nowhere to hide in the void. The aberration which had found it chased the soul relentlessly, inevitably finding its prey. Toying with and torturing it, releasing it and letting the helpless soul think it had escaped, just to be drawn back into its maw.
After a time the being grew bored. Even though there was no way to measure the passage of time here, it knew it could not stay indefinitely. Its visits to the void were fleeting, and up until now had provided no escape from the utter loneliness of its corporeal prison.
So it imprisoned the soul within itself, intending to return with it to the physical plane, and use the life force pulsing inside to bolster its own ebbing existence, but in doing so it perceived new memories blossoming within its consciousness. There were visions of a blue world with an abundance of life. Life which existed for one purpose, to follow another’s will, it thought.
His will, Tenybris finally realised, as he returned to his physical body, with the memories of the first soul he had consumed in eons still fresh and boiling through his mind.
A greed, which had lain dormant for an age, awoke inside him, furiously sweeping aside his intransigence. He became fully aware of how close he’d come to fading into oblivion.
Looking around at his prison, he saw it consciously for the first time in thousands of years, and felt something completely alien to him.
Hope…hope that he would finally escape this dungeon of his own making. He saw the bloody marks on the stone walls that his fingers had etched, as he’d in his madness attempted to break free.
He knew now, as he grew increasingly insane, his consciousness had been released to wander the Never. He still couldn’t understand how he could have brought the soul back. It should not have lingered long enough to be found. It should have dispersed and been absorbed almost instantly after its passing, joining with the energies of the Never to be reborn again.
He put these irrelevancies aside however, as his mind regained clarity and the hunger drew him back to his escape. He had this soul, one purer than he could ever have thought possible. The energy within it would provide him with sustenance for another thousand years if he consumed it now.
But this would only prolong his imprisonment here, so he dismissed the notion immediately. No, he thought as he looked around at the carcases of the great dragons which littered the fortress, there is another way.
If this innocence could be turned, if it could be corrupted, he could use it to find a way to this blue world it was from. Not for him directly, until he could devise a way to break these walls around him, but if the memories brought to him were to be believed, this world possessed a magic perfectly suited to doing just that.
This... science, would provide at last a means to free himself, and once he was free, this same science, and the mighty weapons already possessed by these humans might...no, would, assist him in returning to his own birthright.
He would pierce the “Veil” which the accursed Olumé had used to rip his magic away. Pierce it and consume all the life and magic hidden there, and when he was done, all magic, all power would be held within his form to be used solely at his whim.
He laughed, but there was no merriment in the cruel sound. It was his first laugh in millennia that hadn’t been wholly insane. He had purpose again and set about his plans with just one thought and desire in his black heart.
Revenge!
12 – Sanctuary – Realities
Years before
“So how will I know?” asked Derren.
“What do you mean?” replied B’ran. This was the first time this had ever been asked and the old man seemed offended. The initiates were expected to study the history as they progressed in power. They travelled the Never, cataloguing the realities, the idiosyncrasies, as major decisions fractured the lines and created each shard of existence.
There were endless realities, the number constantly changing as major events created new shards, while minor changes could merge one or more realities with another. In the vastness of the Never there was chaos as the paths converged and diverged with seemingly random and lawless abandon.
When Derren had been brought to Sanctuary by his sister, he’d spent weeks adjusting to the fact that he, Krista and all the others here were unique. They were called the Liberi Nauntum, which means Children of the Never. They had the natural ability to not just travel in space, but also between these realities. And not only just travel between, but all of his peers shared a link and were capable of mapping the chaotic creation process.
This was instantaneously shared subconsciously among them, so they alone could make sense of the anarchic collisions of choice and happenstance.
Derren had been to hundreds of them so far, and he knew that to a common observer most would have seemed identical. But the perception granted to him and the other Liberi enabled him to instantly see the subtle differences, and the paths weaving endlessly between them.
The other incredible fact he struggled with was the Liberi were almost never from the same time frames. There could be a thousand years between the time that Derren and Krista had lived in and some of the others. The leaders of Sanctuary could reach through time, retrieving the new-born Liberi at the moment of their deaths.
Their number was always constantly maintained at 500. As they were lost, killed in combat or by accident, they were “replaced” by the leaders.
Their search was eternal, their battle endless. They existed for two reasons.
Foremost they were a constant force for vigilance. Derren had been amazed to discover his own battle had been one of the last. That Tenybris’s forces had been utterly defeated had left him reeling in exultation. But the news of his escape had left a cloud of uncertainty across Sanctuary.
Even though his armies had been destroyed, elements of his supporters still existed, causing dissent wherever they could, and so the Liberi battled far and wide across the realities, seeking to eradicate them and their twisted teachings.
The Tenybrists had garnered a following based on the fact that Tenybris’s body had never been found. And they preached he would return to complete his conquest.
This was the second burden the Liberi were tasked with.
Tenybris would return; this much was inevitable. He had hidden himself well, but the Liberi had wandered the Never for millennia in search of his bane. For there existed a prophecy here in Sanctuary which had been passed down from the days when Olumé had been alive. The prophecy of the Foundation.
In each reality there was one single being of great power, able to project their consciousness into other universes. They were not able to travel physically, but were capable of journeying with their minds between realities and interacting with the beings there.
Across the universes these interactions had many explanations. Ghosts or spirits, loved ones reaching out from beyond the grave, was a common belief. Some imagined they were angelic beings and whole religions had grown around them.
Each being was powerful in their own right, but what the Liberi ultimately searched for was the Foundation. The single being who would bring them together, unite and multiply their power, and provide the means to finally destroy the enemy. For if Tenybris escaped unopposed, all of these realities would be consumed and twisted beyond recognition.
B’ran dismissed the inquiry, but the youth continued to stare back. He looked around at his peers, but they sat staring ahead as if they were blind.
“B’ran,” Derren continued, “we all know what we can do. We all know the history, for what it’s worth. What I want to know is how I will know when I find the right one? How will I...we,” Derren indicated the others, “know when we have found the Foundation?”
As B’ran began to explain how all the realities meshed together, how it didn’t matter about the reactions across universes, Derren stood up so abruptly his chair flew backwards.
“Listen to me, you idiot!”
The others looked at him but instantly averted their eyes. Several of the initiates present here had had “run-ins” with B’ran before, so they lowered their gaze as he began to bluster, his face reddening as his temper broke at last.
“How dare you, boy,” he sneered pompously. “You are not here to ask questions which will become clear to you through time. The universe will not give up its secrets simply because a whelp like you demands it. Even if you do seem to think it owes you more than the rest of us lowly beings.”
Lately, all of the lessons which had put both Derren and B’ran in the same room had descended into this sort of conflict. Unfortunately for Derren, B’ran seemed to have powerful friends and he possessed a cruel willingness to abuse his position.
Unfortunately for B’ran however, Derren didn’t give a damn and continued to be a constant annoyance at every single opportunity.
“You don’t know, do you?” realised Derren at last. B’ran moved his mouth silently as if trying to decide if he should answer.
Derren wondered if now might be the time to reveal he already knew the answer to his own question. That he had already met the person in his drawing more than ten times already, but each time the meeting had resulted in bitter disappointment.
That although they had all been physically the same as the image, the feeling, the empathy, he’d got from them had always been wrong, diminished somehow.
He’d finally told Krista about the drawing, only to find out she’d suspected he’d had this gift for years. She’d urged him to tell Sanctuary’s leadership but he’d resisted. She’d been here for months more than he had, and he still hadn’t come to terms with what he thought of as their callous and unfeeling method of initiating a new Liberi to their ranks.
The Liberi were always born out of battle, their powers only ever manifesting at the final moment of their destruction. Krista had been lost, killed, Derren had thought, over 6 months before his final battle, in another attack far from their home world.
She had been prevented from any contact with him all that time and Derren still felt bitter about it. He knew it hadn’t been her decision; simply the leadership would not allow anything to jeopardize their great plan. So Derren had had to submit to six months of pain, thinking his twin dead or worse.
So as B’ran continued his attempt to browbeat him into submission, he knew that no, he would not make it easy for them. Not yet. Not until he’d found her himself.
And besides, thought Derren, annoying B’ran was proving to be increasingly entertaining.