Four
The voice of grief. Demanding. Numbing. Silent. Hollowing the spirit and leaving the wisdom of all Epochs paralyzed and wanting.
“She’s getting worse,” Evanna whispered as Invictus, sorcerer and father, laid a book on the nightstand and crawled into bed. He pulled the covers close around himself. Pulled his wife close to him.
“Why did we have to be born now?” Invictus muttered. “If we’d been born a generation earlier, the plague wouldn’t have existed. If we’d been around a generation later, we would have vaccines.”
“Why do you always have to think like this?” Evanna rested a hand on his chest. “Can’t you just be happy with what we have now?”
“Not if it means losing Alayna. Or losing you.”
He buried them both within the week.
A local priest officiated at the funeral. Ten coffins, all encasing bodies that had lived in the same neighborhood days earlier, were arrayed in a neat line.
“I know all these people,” the priest was saying. “I’ve lived among them, and I have never met finer people anywhere. In many, if not all, of the world’s religions, every one of them is enjoying a better existence, perhaps soaring happily among the clouds, or else smiling down on us from the trees or the mountains. It may well be that they are the ones who are blessed, while it is us, living in the shadow of death and the dying, who are to be pitied.”
Everyone helped dig the graves. Invictus reveled in the sweat and the labor. He recognized the man digging beside him as another of the sorcerers from his convent, an older man whose breathing grew ragged with effort. The man’s presence was poor consolation. They exchanged no words.
They dug, buried the bodies, and then, slowly, one by one, the mourners trickled away. By the time the priest had left, the sun had already dipped down behind the mountains. Invictus stared out beyond the horizon until the bleeding sky turned an oppressive grey and the wind bit at his extremities. Movement behind him broke him from his stupor.
“You’ve seen hundreds of Eventualities,” Invictus said without looking.
“Yes.”
“Are they all like this one?”
“Yes.”
The older sorcerer left then, and Invictus was left alone to imagine the sounds of the city below, hearing only the hum of the occasional motorcar. He allowed himself to create a better world in his mind. Hear its voices. “This has been a horrid winter, hasn’t it, dear? I’m glad the plague missed our city. I read terrible stories in the news.”
He couldn’t face a silent house. He never wanted to see that house again. In a fit of rage or whatever else this grief was, he went to the convent’s library as he had always done when he needed escape. But his footfalls echoed on the polished granite as if it were a hollow tomb.
He perused the titles, looking for anything. Masterpieces of science, philosophy, religion, and magic from the most remote Eventualities stood proudly on intricate shelves. He’d read many of them—perhaps more than even the founders themselves, who’d searched the most distant Eventualities for these books and placed them here for their people to watch over. The collection had been priceless; those sorcerers’ grand quest had amassed far more knowledge than even the Immortal Scourge herself possessed. Today it was all worthless.
Everyone accepted death. Every single author in this meaningless library. Everyone rolled over and let it crush them and the ones they loved, like an unstoppable boulder rolling down a hill. Everyone except…
“Lucca.”
Finding Lucca in the bathhouse was easier than Invictus had expected; she’d left her fingerprints all over history. Historians described her as more fact than person. She was the table of dates for the succession of the monarchy and the footnotes in the back of the book. She wasn’t someone you could just talk to. But Invictus could count all the things he had left to lose on a single hand. Or less.
Lucca kept walking toward the exit as if she hadn’t heard him. Her eyes seemed…absent, somehow. Invictus took a deep breath and stepped in front of her, blocking the door. It must have been an odd sight: a haggard young man wrapped in only a towel standing in the way of this angry queen, or goddess.
“I have to talk to you.”
Lucca fixed him with a glare that was barely human in its piercing intensity. When she spoke, it was heavily accented, with a rasp as if she hadn’t spoken in days.
“I talk to people. People don’t talk to me.”
“I…” Invictus’ breath faltered. Lucca shoved him aside and continued walking.
Invictus took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and created fire. The stones at Lucca’s feet burst into a column of flame and heat with a noise like a gunshot. Invictus stumbled back, the process momentarily choking his senses. When he blinked his eyes open, Lucca was shaking him by the shoulders.
“What was that?” she demanded in a hiss. “Antimatter? Simple combustion? A nuclear reaction?”
Rattled, he forced out, “Most people just call it sorcery.”
They were interrupted by a small horde of shouting bathers who rushed towards them and the fire, carrying buckets full of water. Lucca’s clothes got soaked in the process. When they dispersed, she dragged Invictus over to a bench and sat, looking oddly transfixed. Invictus, bewildered, sat beside her and adjusted his towel.
“Sorcery,” Lucca said, tasting the word, but saying no more. Her eyes darted to the walls and the ceiling and the cracks in the stone, and yet remained sunk deep into their sockets. She was frighteningly uncanny. Invictus tried to recall the script he’d been rehearsing in his mind, but next to the woman herself, all coherent thought melted.
A crystal. Just get a crystal.
“It’s you,” he finally said, not knowing where else to start. “The Destroyer. The Shaper. The Architect. The one who rewrote everything.”
“This is my world,” Lucca said, grinning. Narrowing her eyes.
And suddenly, Invictus thought he understood. Who she was. Who she might have been, before she’d suffered the scars that were now so painfully easy to recognize. What she’d lost.
So Invictus quietly said, “I can fix it.”
Lucca remained silent.
“Listen,” he pressed, the backs of his hands turning white as he gripped the edge of the bench. “You can try to change the world. But it just keeps on turning and turning and taking. That’s all it does. It leaves beggars and obituaries and tombs and—”
He could bring his family back if he wanted—go back in time early enough to move them far away, before plague was even a poisonous whisper on the lips of merchants—but what then? Watch them die all over again in a few years? No. There was a solution.
“—I can go back and destroy it all. Recreate it from the beginning. And hold accountable whoever it is that created all this suffering.”
He held Lucca’s gaze. Her expression was unreadable. Around them, the air buzzed with tiny embers of ash like lifeless fireflies.
“All I need is a chance—one of the chances you’re carrying in your pocket right now.”
Was it…recognition that he saw in Lucca’s face? Or just…insanity?
“Ah, what the heck,” she said. She flicked the priceless crystal up into the air and caught it in her other hand, then slid it across the bench to Invictus. “Maybe you’ll be the one to free me from this hell.” She spat out the last words, then abruptly stood and strode toward the door.
Invictus stared at the crystal incredulously. Blue smoke swirled beneath its surface, warping into hazy silhouettes of possibility. A new world. A perfect world.
Had he really…?
“You’re no different from the rest of us,” Invictus whispered.
Lucca stopped in her tracks, turned, and stared him dead in the eye. “You don’t know anything about me.”
She turned and left, letting the heavy door slam shut behind her.