Destiny: Child of the Sky

Epilogue

Meridion stopped the frame. The image on the Time Editor’s screen froze, hovering fuzzily in the air and dusty light projected onto the curved, clear wall of the observatory. He leaned forward over the instrument panel, resting his chin on his hands, gazing thoughtfully at the picture of his parents, captured eternally in a moment of true happiness, frozen in Time, laughing as they ran through the starry night. His timing, however inadvertent, was fortuitous.

Meridion rose from the Editor. His aurelay, which he had formed into a chairlike seat while he worked, dissolved and reabsorbed into his translucent body as he stepped away from the machine. He walked slowly over to the glass wall and came to a stop in front of the blurry image of his mother; the projection undulated as he moved, causing the lines and shadows to stretch and wave as if dancing on an unnoticed breeze.

How happy you look, he thought, crossing his arms in front of him as he stared at the projection from the lorestrand. I am glad. Even if this is the end for me now, even if the new tapestry of Time that has just been woven turns out no better than the first, at least there is this moment of happiness for you. Far better than what had gone before, for certain. I am glad.

His eyes wandered over the picture of his father, a man he had seen but never met, utterly unrecognizable in the vigor of youth and health. By this time in the old life you had sunk irretrievably into madness, broken in both body and mind, Meridion thought, watching the way the currents of air within his glass globe observatory made the image look as if Gwydion were running even now, caught forever in jubilant motion. Again, I am glad for you.

How strange it was, he mused as he returned to the machine, to feel such sentiment, such a connection, to people he had never met.

Time thudded heavy around his ears. Meridion finally worked up the courage to look out through the glass panes of the observatory at the world below. He inhaled slowly, letting his breath out in increments.

The fire had receded, disappeared in fact from the surface of the distant Earth; now clouds gathered over the blue-green seas, swirling on the wind, racing around the mountain ranges, obscuring his view. As it should be, he thought, fighting off the melancholy that was surging within his heart. No man should have so clear a view of the world if he is going to live in it.

He bent down on the floor next to the Time Editor and carefully gathered the scorched scraps of timefilm, shredded into burnt confetti and stripped ribbons at his feet. Meticulously he searched until he came upon a fragment that he had seen fall not long before, as the new history replaced the old, like a rerouted riverbed, or a tapestry rewoven from the same silken threads into different patterns. The brittle scraps were growing dim, dissolving on the floor, gone now from Time, from history. Soon they would disappear altogether, leaving nothing, not even memory, for in reality they were now only the remains of a Past that never was.

Meridion held the filmstrand up to the light. Satisfied, he draped it over a secondary lamp on the Editor’s instrument panel, and focused it on the wall next to the screen that held the picture of his parents.

In the dim light he could barely make out the image, a small, elderly figure in pale robes woven in the symbology of the ancient Namers, her long hair white as snow, braided and bound simply back in a black ribbon. Her face was lined and scarred, her body bent under the weight of age, though held steady in the grace of a strong will. In the crook of her arms she cradled a white birthing cloth, a garment used to catch a child as it emerged from the womb. Her hands reached aloft, as if in supplication. It was the moment of his birth in the old life.

He avoided looking at the next frames of film fragment that lay across the panel, coiled in a tattered spiral. Within those next few moments of time had been great agony, gruesome death. Though he had never known his mother, upon coming into existence he had still felt her love, even in those last moments of her life, and in the wake of her hideous demise. He had changed Time, and probably her fate, but he still could not bear to witness what had happened to her again.

The reel that held the film of the new history caught Meridion’s eye, resting patiently on its pinion. Idly he took the end and unspooled it, holding it up to the ambient light of the observatory. Unlike the shards of fading Past that were melting before his eyes, this new thread was clean and strong, vivid. He spun it out farther, looking for moments that had been particularly rewarding to witness: the meeting of Emily and Gwydion, the boy she had called Sam, in a green summer meadow; the Three emerging from the Root into the air of a new world they otherwise would never have seen; the moment Achmed took the throne, and the destiny, of the Bolg, as his own; the reunion of his parents; the victory over the demon; the rebuilding of the new world. Yes, he thought, running the smooth, thick film along the edge of his finger, it does worth it indeed.

But what of the Past as it had been? There needed to be a reverence for its loss. The outcome of events in that course of Time that had led ultimately to failure had been disastrous, for certain, but there had been moments of glory, too, heroism and brave acts of selflessness, choices, both wise and foolish, and love. He looked again at the frame of Achmed watching his parents’ wedding and smiled wryly. Certainly there had been love.

An overwhelming impulse seized him. Before he even had time to process the thought his hand darted out and swept the fragment of timefilm from the lamp, gathering it up from the floor with the last remaining scraps of the old life, the first history, the rewritten Past. He laid the disappearing snippets on a glass panel, the bottom half of a slide that rested on the Time Editor, and snatched a bottle of fixative from the whirling prismatic disk hovering in the air beside the machine. Feverishly he doused the shards with the. glimmering potion, preserving them. His eyes blinked rapidly as he pressed them carefully between the glass panel and a cover plate.

He opened a drawer in the Time Editor, lifted the slide he had just created, and slowly slid the panes of glass into the depth of the cabinet, then closed the door softly. He breathed shallowly, trying to regain his calm.

A sense of great dread coupled with relief washed over him. He had no idea what other moments of the rewritten Past he had just rescued; it might be as much a dire action as a good one, but it had been as strong an impulse as he had ever experienced. Since he did not know what lay ahead for him now, he decided he was right to trust the compulsion.

A shadow on the wall caught his eye. He looked up to where the last image had been projected to see shadows of it still there, as if burned into the glass. The outline of the elderly woman’s body was dimmer now, her hands reaching up into diffuse light and gray patches. Meridion put his hot forehead down on the cool surface of the Time Editor and tried to summon the courage to take the next step.

Even though his body was formed only of thought, lore, and pure will, his consciousness unhindered by the limitations of human flesh, Meridion was still capable of feeling the pain of imminent physical loss, the sting of tired hands, the delayed weariness after so much despair. He struggled not to be swept up in the choking fear of the unknown that faced him now.

The events that had brought him into being had been inexorably altered, shredded into scraps of amber film, gone now except for the few random fragments he had rescued along with the record of his birth. The steps he had taken in manipulating Time had produced the result he had prayed for, it seemed. The world beneath him was turning, sailing slowly through the ether, blue and whole and covered with swirling currents of air that danced across its surface, heedless that there had ever been any destruction looming. His meddling in the Past had worked. The disaster he had sought to avert had been averted.

At the same time he knew that the events his intervention had put into place had disrupted his own story, had negated the circumstances under which he had been conceived. He did not know if the new path Time was now taking would lead to his own rebirth somewhere in it.

Or not.

Contemplation, both now and before he undertook to alter the Past, had led him to believe against it. He had been brought to life, conceived as a concept, not really as a child, by two scarred individuals, one aged, one made old beyond his years by circumstance, who gave of their lives, their lore, to fulfill a prophecy different from any that now existed in the rewritten history. At least the first part was different; Meridion had been surprised to see Man-wyn utter some of the same prophecy in the new history, in Time as it was now. In the old history it had foretold his birth:

I see an unnatural child born of an unnatural act. Rhapsody, you should beware of childbirth: the mother shall die, but the child shall live.

Why did the Seer utter it again, in the rewritten history? he wondered, cradling his head in his hands. Would the magical sacrifice that Rhapsody, the elderly Liringlas Namer, and Gwydion of Manosse, a broken man dead in the eyes of the world, had undertaken to bring him into the world still be necessary in the Future? With the F’dor destroyed and the war averted, it hardly seemed so. And yet now that the Past had been erased and re-formed, the Future was unfathomable.

Instead of meeting as they had, in the new world, solely for the purpose of forming him to fulfill the warning of a prophecy, his parents had instead met in their mutual youth, had fallen in love and joined their souls of their own free will. Everything they had endured had brought them together again; it seemed little enough to hope for, that they might eventually bring him into existence by the mere happenstance that every other living soul comes out of. Meridion knew that this was merely wishful thinking, however. Just bringing lives together did not guarantee how they would be put to use. It was an observation he had made many times while watching the Past unspool itself as it was being altered. Time was fragile, and subject to change.

It’s your destiny.

Hogwash. We make our own destiny.

Yes, Meridion thought, bitterly amused. Yes, yes, we do.

For now his life hung, suspended in Time, within the glass globe of his observatory, powered by the ethereal fire of Seren, the star for which his mother’s homeland had been named. When the Time Editor shut down, the film of Time would begin to run again, endless and uninterrupted. And he would then come to his ending, winking out like a candleflame.

Have I made all the amends, begged all the forgiveness I need’? he wondered dully, running through a list of people in his mind, hoping that absolution would come in any case for whomever he had inadvertently harmed with his intervention. He thought mostly of Achmed, and what the changes in Time had cost him. Forgive me, he thought in silent prayer to a man he had also never met. In my place, I think you would have done the same. He remembered the words of contrition that the Bolg King had offered up to the Patriarch in the new history and smiled wanly. Given the choice, I think you would have wanted it that way, too.

His ultimate goal, of course, had been paramount; all sacrifices, all changes that had occurred between one history and the other had been worth the cost. Whatever detriments had come from the revision were to be added into the balance sheet and weighed off against the result, just as all more fortuitous outcomes were merely coincidence. Meridion looked up once more at the image of his mother in happy events of the new history and exhaled. Had he not sliced his father out of Time in his youth and grafted him back into the Past for the purpose of meeting her, she would never have followed him, never would have journeyed with Achmed and Grunthor, never would have had this moment, and any other happy ones that might follow. And the world would have been consumed in fire. I didn’t do it for you, he thought, staring at the projection. But I am still glad.

Before his eyes the darker image of his birth faded and disappeared into oblivion.

I am fading, too.

Slowly Meridion reached over and shut off the Time Editor’s switch, separating the machine from the light of Seren. The glowing instrumentality vanished into utter darkness. He closed his eyes as the remains of the timefilm he had known ignited on their reels, dissipating like the smoke from the last embers of a long-dead fire.

The circular glass walls of his observatory melted away in a heartbeat.

The last words he heard as the world fell down around him were spoken in the voice of the man who had guarded him from birth, who stood with him until the moment he entered the Time Editor’s enclosure, had comforted him in his own awkward way.

Will I die? Meridion had asked his guardian, knowing that the answer could not impact his undertaking. He heard the reply again now as the air from the circular glass room left, rushing into the dark vacuum of space. The words reverberated against the disappearing glass of the windowpanes in fading echoes.

Can one experience death if one is not really alive? You, like the rest of the world, have nothing to lose.

Amid the horrific noise and swirling vortex that consumed his life energy, Meridion felt the translucent form that had been his body expand, stretched infinitely out over the vastness of Time and space, then explode in a burst of agony. His diminished awareness ebbed, then grew, only to flash around the outer reaches of the sky, an incandescent beam of light, until it fell like a blazing stone through the windswept clouds, hurtling to the Earth below.

The last fragments of his conscious thought screamed with the anguish of death, howled with the pain of birth, tumbled, blind, through the flashing images of a Past he didn’t recognize, of a future he could barely see, until it stopped, became aware again, like awakening from a dream-filled sleep.

Meridion opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was the familiar, smoothly polished stone and thick glass windows of the high tower around him. He felt the coldness of the marble chair on which he sat, chilling the muscles of his body, a body that had pleasurable heft and weight to it. He was glad to note the reunion of his conscious mind with his physical form; he remembered that the first few times he had meditated, traveling back or forth in Time, he had been petrified there would be nowhere for him to return, but had eventually reconciled himself to the risk.

It was reassuring to step out of Time and back into himself, into his memories, the history he knew both from the old tales, and from seeing it himself.

Whatever he had been seeking on this journey had eluded him. He had always had a sense that there was something different about Time than the way it appeared, but could never find the link, the evidence, that any other reality had ever existed than the one he knew, and could see in his mind’s eye. It seemed to him for some reason that his memories, and the history he was able to view, were somehow new, fresher than one might think they should be.

Sometimes in his dreams there were flashes, fragments that seemed to belong to some other time, some other reality, filled with images of strange lights and darkness and spools of something that looked like thread, suspended as if hanging among the stars. Always in these dreams there was a sense of dread, an urgency that he could not escape, from which he would wake, panting, fearful, to the bright sun of morning that did little to warm the chill from his soul. He had tried to explain the strange misgivings he felt to his mother, who herself had been prescient, but she had never really been able to grasp what he was trying to convey.

The door in the tower room opened, and she came in; Meridion watched her out of the corner of his eye as she set the tray she was carrying down on the table next to him. He smiled at her, then turned in his seat and regarded her thoughtfully. Many years had passed since the day of her wedding, and she still looked exactly the same, although her face held a look of wisdom that had not been there in her youth. His father still had the appearance of youth about him also, though time had etched a few more lines around his eyes, visible when he smiled.

“All finished?” Rhapsody asked, handing Meridion a mug of dot mwl. He took the cup of steaming liquid gratefully and nodded, sipping the rosy amber drink they both liked. His father drank it on occasion, but had never really developed a taste for it. Meridion swallowed. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

She came behind him and slid her arms around his shoulders. “Where did you go today—forward or back?”

Meridion thought back to the only image he remembered, the hazy picture of his parents running through a starry night. “Back,” he said, taking another sip. “I think I attended your wedding, but I don’t remember much. Your gown was beautiful.”

“Miresylle would have been glad to hear that you thought so,” his mother said, picking up her own mug. “She worked for two months straight on it.” Her emerald eyes gleamed. “Did you see Oelendra, my mentor, at the wedding?”

He thought for a moment, searching his memory. “Yes, but not this time. This is only one of many times I’ve gone to watch the wedding, because the fireworks were spectacular. I don’t remember seeing her this time. Or the fireworks, for that matter.” He lifted the mug to his lips, unwilling to reveal that he remembered nothing but the one image from the journey. Everything else was blank.

Rhapsody blinked quickly and nodded. “I wish you could have known her, Meridion; she was very special.”

Meridion smiled. “I did know her, in a way,” he said. “You didn’t notice on the day you first came to Tyrian, but I was one of the children in her swordplay class.”

Rhapsody laughed and tousled his hair, leaving her hand resting on the wiry golden curls a moment afterward. “You really have been all over in Time, haven’t you? I remember you from the fountain in Easton; you used to ask me to play the same song over and over.”

Meridion nodded and took a sip of the dot mwl. “I came to witness the Cymrian Council, too, but I was an adult then.”

“It’s a great treasure you’ve been given, you know, this gift of Time, and the ability to step in and out of it at will.”

“It is.” Meridion set the mug back on the tray and picked up a pastry from the plate on it. “But it’s a little frustrating, being able to see events in the Past and the Future, but having no ability to affect them. I have the strange feeling that I should be able to make some sort of an impact, but alas, when I step into the Past I am only an observer, and on rare occasions a commentator—I had to work very hard just to make you hear me when I asked you to play that song.” He chuckled. “It’s most likely for the best that I’m just an image and not really there. If I could affect Time I’d probably make a botch of it.”

Rhapsody took a sip from the steaming mug, then looked at her son seriously. “I think anyone would. It seems to me that being able to see into the Past or the Future, which is a family trait in your case, causes nothing but trouble. The visions I have had gave me horrific nightmares, and as for your great-grandmother and her sisters—their lore certainly cost them their sanity, especially Manwyn; the power of seeing the Future must be the most dangerous.” Her eyes narrowed slightly as she saw something come over her son’s face. “Meridion, what are you thinking?”

He shrugged and lifted the mug to his lips again.

“Do you have any idea where Manwyn gets her information about the Future?”

Meridion laughed. “Well, she gets some of it from me. I stop by for tea and a good gossip with her every now and then. She is my great-great-aunt, after all, and no one else visits her without seeking something from her. I’m more than an image to her; I actually have some physical presence when I’m with Manwyn. Sometimes she lets me use Merithyn’s sextant to look into the Future. She’s a lot of fun, once you get to know her, in a crazy sort of way.”

“Really?” His mother untangled a nest of curls in his hair. “That’s odd. You’re a Namer, Meridion. If she gets her prophecies from you, then why is she so mysterious about them? And so seldom right when she relates them to the world?”

His smile faded, and he looked away to see a lark gliding past one of the tower windows, the sun on its wings. “Well, she is somewhat deaf, after all.”

“Is that the extent of it?”

Meridion exhaled slowly, still watching the bird until it banked away to even greater heights. “Who said she was wrong?”

“Isn’t she, on occasion?”

He shook his head, not looking at her. “No. She’s mad, and crafty, and hard of hearing, but never wrong.” Finally he turned and met her gaze. “Do you remember what Jo told you in the place of the Rowans about not being able to understand about the Afterlife until you are in it?”

Rhapsody put down her mug. “Yes.”

“It’s true of knowledge of the Future as well. Manwyn may see it, but that doesn’t mean she understands it.” Any more than you do, he thought with a touch of melancholy.

“But you do?”

He leaned toward the window, hoping to see the bird again. “Most of the time.”

“Hmmm.” Rhapsody followed his gaze out the window, the autumn sunlight spilling into the tower room. When she looked back again she was smiling.

“Have you ever determined where this ability of yours came from? I understand why the three Seers have their gifts; their father was born in the birthplace of Time’s beginning, their mother at its end, both of them of ancient races. Why you, then, Meridion?”

He took a bite of the pastry. “Good cookies,” he said. Her question hung heavy in the air, unanswered.

After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Meridion began to fidget. Finally he sighed. “Like the Seers, it certainly helps for me to have parents from opposite sides of the Prime Meridian, but who both spent time in each world.” And to have had one’s soul conceived in one, and carried throughout Time, ungestated, to be born in the other, he thought.

He averted his eyes, avoiding her clear green gaze. He had never really found a good way to explain to her that it was the presence of his unborn soul inside her, the bridge across Time, the bond between his mother and father conceived that night in the green meadow, that had given her visions into the Future throughout her life, visions that had ceased upon his birth, mostly because he was not entirely certain himself of how it had all come about. He had often looked in his journeys for the answer to his greatest question, how his father had been plucked for an instant from Time and sent back to the moment where his parents had joined their souls, making the beginnings of him in the process, but he had never found it.

Rhapsody looked fondly at him in return. “The Prime Meridian isn’t where your name comes from, just in case you’re wondering. You were named for your father and Merithyn.”

“I know; I heard the speeches at my naming ceremony when I was a newborn. You named me, after all. You do have a habit of inadvertently bestowing powers with the names you give.” Meridion slid off the marble chair. “Can I go and play now?”

“Of course.” Rhapsody regarded her son indulgently. “My, you’re getting so big. You’ll be as tall as me soon.”

“In three years, three months, and seventeen days,” answered Meridion, stuffing the remains of the cookie in his mouth. “Bye, Mama.” He kissed her cheek as she bent to embrace him, the strange vertical slits of his blue eyes sparkling warmly. Then he ran out the door, down the stairs, and into the clear autumn air.