Destroyer of Worlds

4

'Stay close together,' Church ordered as they moved through an area of bright, swirling colours.

'Wow, trippy,' Laura said. 'This reminds me of… okay, you had to be there.'

Aware of the fear in Rachel's eyes, Shavi took her arm reassuringly. 'Is this how you remember it?'

'I don't remember much at all, but it feels familiar.'

'Do not fight the sensations you are experiencing,' Shavi said. 'If you allow yourself to go with them, it is not unpleasant.'

'That's easy for you to say.'

'Tom, what are you thinking?' Ruth asked, seeing Tom's serious expression.

'I'm finding this both familiar and unfamiliar too,' he replied, anxiously twisting the ring Freyja had given him. 'I have moved through the medium of the Blue Fire many times, across our own world between nodes of power, and between the worlds, but this is different. Yet the same.'

'Yep, you lived through the sixties, old man,' Laura said.

For once, Tom ignored her. 'I've heard talk of this. Somewhere that bleeds around reality, around all the worlds and the connective tissue of the Blue Fire that joins them. Some occultists I encountered in San Francisco believed if you could find a way to this place you could access all places and all times.'

'You could run away for ever,' Ruth said, eyeing Church askance.

'Or you could fight a constant guerrilla war,' Church countered. 'No one would know when or where you'd pop up.'

'What's that?' Veitch pointed to a place where the colours appeared to have thinned so that it felt as if they were looking through a gauze onto the world. The sun was just disappearing below the horizon, casting its dying golden rays on a stone circle surrounded by trees. Beyond were well-tended fields. Figures moved in the circle, hazily coming into view.

'That's Caitlin!' Ruth exclaimed. 'But she looks younger. More… innocent?'

'And that teenage thug Mahalia,' Veitch noted. 'And Crowther.'

'The past,' Shavi said. 'Perhaps when she was just beginning as a Sister of Dragons?'

Tom and Rachel hung back, but he flinched and stepped forward when he glimpsed the young boy he had encountered on the Last Train who Mahalia had sworn was dead. Eerily, the boy appeared to be looking directly at him, and smiling knowingly, as if he was aware of all that was to transpire.

Caitlin looked directly at them too, but didn't recognise them, and then the colours swirled back in and the scene was lost.

'I have a feeling we could have gone right there if we'd carried on walking,' Church said.

'Caitlin wouldn't need us,' Ruth said confidently. 'Whatever happened back then, I bet she dealt with it, no problem.'

They moved on through an environment that felt both timeless and placeless, the hallucinogenic colours giving the sensation that they were floating. For the briefest moment, Church once again felt as if he was lying on a table, locked inside his own mind, with the odd belief that a group of people were observing him.

'Don't investigate that notion,' a voice deep in his head told him. 'What you have is better. It will always be better.'

Scenes came and went: Celts fighting a furious battle, a World War II pilot standing beside his downed Spitfire, a thick, semi-tropical jungle through which barely glimpsed beasts moved, a castle under siege, a Victorian funeral.

Several times Veitch witnessed himself committing some atrocity in service to the Void and turned away, unable to look. Once he had to be restrained by Church from leaping through the veil to right the wrongs he saw there.

When Laura glimpsed Hunter fighting a furious battle with the Lament-Brood in a past time, she broke down in long, juddering sobs. Nothing the others did could console her.

'I'm concerned we might get lost in here for ever,' Tom said.

The Rhymer's voice sounded oddly distant and when Church turned, Tom was fading into the swirling colours. It felt like only a step or two away, but when Church dashed back, Tom and the others were nowhere to be found.

There was little point searching in a place that appeared to have no dimension. Putting his trust in fortune, Church continued to walk in the direction he had been following; if they were meant to reunite in the world, he was sure it would happen. If this was a road he had to walk alone, that was fine too. Go with the flow, Tom would have said, followed by some rambling tale of the West Coast in the sixties, but Church felt it was an important lesson he had been taught many times during his long journey.

In the colours, any sense of time passing was lost. It could have been five minutes or an hour when he heard a voice saying, 'What is the point of the world?' It was the same voice Church had thought came from deep in his head when he had the impression of lying on a table, but now it appeared to be coming from all around him.

'Where is the meaning in life?' the voice continued.

'Who are you?' Church asked.

'What is real?'

'You don't sound like Tom, but you've mastered his degree of irritation, ' Church muttered.

'These are the only important questions,' the voice said. 'Once you consider them, all else flows from them. The answers may seem impossible to find, but it is the same as with any story: the author embeds keys in the text to help the careful reader decipher the true meaning. The rules that apply to the tiniest thing also apply to the greatest. The flower dies, but grows back the next season. Energy cannot be destroyed; it simply changes shape. What does this say for death? And is man a random collection of atoms, like a tree, or a rock, even though his nature is so very different from everything else in the world? In that nature, the key is writ large for all to see if they will only look. The nature of a being is the purpose of a being. If man has the capacity to find meaning, then there is meaning to find.'

'Is this for my benefit, or is everybody getting the travelogue?' Church recognised a quality to the voice; once again it appeared to be coming from within his head.

'Is reality a model of a town laid out on a table-top, with each house representing an adjoining world? Is each world a school for souls as John Hicks proposed, and as it was taught to the Knights Templar in the Fortress of Salisbury? How is a world created? By a powerful being? A god? Or in the head of a man, lying on a table, in the last seconds of his life?'

Church flinched. 'What are you saying? That all this is my dying dream? That it's all meaningless?'

'And so I return to the three questions: what is the point of the world? What is the meaning in life? What is real?'

Church fought his annoyance at the barrage of questions and considered them for a moment. 'A long time ago, I was told that I couldn't be given all the answers — I had to earn them, because only by doing that would I become the person able to utilise that information. Is this part of that? More teaching, but work out the damn answers for myself?'

He walked on a few paces in ringing silence, and then the voice said, 'Nothing is fixed in the Fixed Lands. Everything is fluid.'

'Yes, I changed reality. I brought Tom and Niamh back.' What is real? he thought. He made a new reality. And then: energy cannot be destroyed; it simply changes shape.

Other voices began to echo all around, some familiar, some unrecognised. 'We are all stars.' That sounded to him like Niamh. 'Love turns Fragile Creatures into gods.' Niamh again.

'So this is a puzzle?' he said, before adding, 'Everything I've been through is a puzzle, right? Like those complex traps that guarded the four great artefacts — the Sword, the Spear, the Cauldron, the Stone. We had to solve them before we got our reward.' The rules that apply to the tiniest thing apply to the greatest. 'So the keys are embedded in the text of life. Of my life. There's another story behind everything I've been experiencing.'

The colours shifted, and for the briefest moment he felt as if he was in a room with opposing mirrors so there were images of him reaching out to infinity; yet each was slightly different — in dress, or in whatever action they were engaged in. It was swallowed up by another flash of him, lying on the table.

'What is real?' he muttered again. 'What is real is what's on the inside, not what's around us. That's where the truth lies, where the meaning can be found. Is that what you're saying? We can create our own realities, which are as real as what we perceive to be real around us. We are all stars. We are all gods. So we don't look to the world for answers, because it's fake… and it's real at the same time. It's just… not important. We look inside.'

A transcendental sense of revelation overwhelmed him, and while he still couldn't grasp the immensity of what he was discovering, he was sure there was enough there for him to piece it together later.

He was rocked from his contemplation by the sound of running feet. Out of the colours emerged his time-looping double that he had first witnessed in Edinburgh and most recently in the Great Pyramid in Cairo.

As on their previous encounters, the future-Church wasn't shocked to come into contact with his old self. 'Is this it?' he said. 'Is this the right time? You have to listen to me. This is a warning.' Confused, he looked around. 'Is this the right place? Am I too late?'

Frustrated, Church said to his future-self, 'You're not giving me enough information,' even though he knew his double was locked in some constantly repeating cycle in the Warp Zone that made him appear at various points in Church's life.

'When you're in Otherworld and they call, heed it right away. They're going to bring him back. They're-' The future-Church became gripped with fear. In panic, he yelled, 'Too late!' and raced away into the colours.

For the first time, the double was close to his current appearance, suggesting that whatever point he originated at was in the near future. 'Okay,' he said to himself, 'when they call, I'll heed it. And then we'll sort out whatever's scaring you, all right?'

Church had a brief sense that someone else was nearby. He considered waiting to see what would turn up until some deep-seated instinct warned him to keep moving. Breaking into a jog, the colours streamed by him.

Am I dying? he thought. Is this just some reality I've created to soothe myself in my last moments?

'That question is not important. Remember the three questions. They are all.'

Church was surprised to hear the voice answering him directly for the first time. Before he could respond, the colours around him began to thin and he saw that he was, finally, running into the world.

The voice floated to him one final time, barely audible, and he realised it was his own voice. 'Good luck.' It faded away with the colours, and then he was jogging through a thin mist and out into a balmy summer night.

Grass lay beneath his feet, and there were trees nearby silhouetted against a sky alive with thousands of stars and a butterscotch moon, full and round, that lit up the field as if it were day. Church came to a halt and filled his lungs with the rich, cool countryside air, revelling in the aromas of hedge and field. As he looked up at the great chamber of the night, he felt an overwhelming sense of peace.

Home.

In a way he couldn't quite understand, every sensation that came to him in that beautiful evening setting reinforced what the voice had told him. His unconscious mind made connections that waited to reveal themselves. Fireflies glinted in the long grass, and as he looked out across the rolling countryside to where the lights of villages glittered, he heard the haunting call of an owl nearby. Here was everything he ever needed, every answer.

The scent of woodsmoke on the wind disrupted his reverie, and he turned to glimpse the flicker of a campfire in the middle of a dense copse. The soft buzz of amiable conversation drifted through the night, and by the time he pushed his way through the trees he knew what he would find.

Sitting around the campfire on which a spit-rabbit was slowly being turned were all the others. Ruth jumped up the minute he stepped into the circle of warm light and hugged him tightly.

'We were starting to worry you were gone for good,' she said.

Church caught the brief shadow crossing Veitch's face at Ruth's show of emotion, but he quickly flashed an honest grin.

'What are you talking about? It's only been a few minutes,' Church said.

'It's been a week!' Ruth said.

'Time moves differently in that place, just like in the Otherworld, you idiot,' Tom muttered as he stirred a bubbling pot of aromatic herbs and hedgerow plants.

'We have been waiting here patiently for your arrival.' Shavi clasped Church's hand warmly. 'Despite what Ruth said, we never doubted you would catch up with us. Experience tells.'

'Yeah, bad news just keeps on giving, Church-dude.' Laura grinned at him lazily, hands behind her head as she lay in the shadows just beyond the firelight. 'Besides, you're the man with the plan. We couldn't move on because no one knows what's rattling around in that tiny brain of yours. Unless it really is just running away and burying your head in the sand. Which I still think has a lot going for it.'

Realising how hungry he was, Church sat between Veitch and Rachel and stirred the pot. 'You stayed in one place? With the spiders everywhere? '

'Do you think we're fools?' Tom snapped. 'We're on a major ley here. And we've seen no sign of them, or we'd be far away and you'd be damned.'

Church laid one palm on the ground. Reaching deep down, he could just feel the faintest hint of buzz. 'Not much of a ley. The Blue Fire is pretty dormant. Just like it was before the Fomorii invaded.'

'That is the job of the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders,' Shavi said. 'We awaken the Blue Fire. They exert all their power to reassert the Mundane Spell and stifle the lifeblood of Existence so that it has little effect on the people who live here.'

'So that's us, right — pointless?' Laura snorted. 'We wake the Blue Fire. They shut it down. We wake it. They shut it down. We do all this suffering and get nowhere.' Underneath her irony there was a troubling bleak note.

'That's why we have to stop the Void once and for all,' Church said. 'That way we change things for ever.'

'Yeah, stop a god.' Laura laughed coldly, then rolled over so no one could see her face.

'You're all funny.' Rachel laughed. 'You talk about the strangest things!'

They all exchanged glances, but no one felt it necessary to illuminate Rachel on some of the harsh realities they had encountered.

'But you're good company, I'll give you that,' she continued. 'And you saved my life. I'm never going to forget that.' She wiped away a stray tear, the strain of her recent experiences still evident.

Her gratitude was touching, and only added to the warm mood that pervaded the campsite. With the soundtrack of the fire's crackling, the breeze in the trees and the calls of the owls, Church lay back and watched the stars amongst the branches. He would have been happy to stay there for ever, with his friends, and the woman he loved, in the beating heart of nature.

They'd all kept going for so long with the promise that such peace would finally await them at the end of their long, hard road, but perhaps this was the last moment they would ever have.

His lambent emotions must have played out on his face, for he caught Ruth watching him with concern. He gave her a reassuring smile. 'Let's make the most of this night,' he said to the group. 'What's out there isn't important. What's here is real, all that matters. Let's celebrate just being alive, being together. Because tomorrow everything starts in force.'