233. [INTERLUDE] From Atop the Hill

  Jasper aft’Hanafin slept.

  She slept for the briefest moment. She slept for the longest time.

  As she slept, she dreamed. She lived, she remembered. All the ephemera threaded into the skies, shared as one eternity by the Realm at large. The struggles of individual souls—against the universe, against themselves, against each other. The endless strife of an entire people and their progeny, propagated by callings both within and without.

  She was there as civilizations rose, fell, and rose again. She was there at the founding of the twice-lit city—its tumultuous beginnings and the controlled chaos that eventually became the order of the day. And she was there when the chaos tipped over to wanton destruction, at the behest of powerful souls whose only calling was to dance atop a burning world.

  She was there. Connected. With every soul small or big, weak or strong, anchored or free. Her wings fluttered against the threads of lost histories and impossible futures. Woven by choice and dyed by consequence. Washed and effaced by the tides of time and impermanence.

  She felt her Keeper’s pain when it too made a choice. The biggest, heaviest choice of them all. For only the Keeper could choose to cut the threads where they hung. Let them unravel, respool, and fall again. The Keeper kept the pain, strife, and struggle to itself. It left its people to build anew in a new reality, unburdened and unfettered.

  The latest such reality took the Realm’s intrinsic conceits to their logical extremes. Perhaps the only way for two halves of a world to truly coexist was for them to remain separate. The twice-lit city became two cities that never touched, never knew the union of light and darkness.

  The Keeper, unable and unwilling to divide itself, chose instead to hide behind the Gloaming veils, accompanied only by the ghosts and memories of civilizations past. It hid and waited. For chaos to settle into order. For order to once more beget chaos.

  What it didn’t know—what it must surely understand now—was just how desperately a people would seek and emulate a god who’d abandoned them. Day-siders learned to live outside of time. Night-siders harnessed the Gloam’s impermanence. Day lengthened while Night shortened, both racing toward chaos, apart yet together.

  Even in the muddled transience of her dream, Jasper recognized her own hand in the chaos. The discontent that had brewed in her heart, which then found release in the hours when the veils were at their thinnest. The ‘watch’ she shared with another as Dusk bled into Dawn. The letter written in darkness and cast into the light.

  If she should wake to find the Realm in disarray—changed beyond all recognition and repair—she must face the consequences of her choices. The Keeper might fold the VEILS as it would, but Jasper’s WINGS were still hers to spread.

  Jasper aft’Hanafin woke.

  She woke atop a hill that stood on nothing. She woke under a red sky bereft of dreams and nightmares.

  The Veilwatch Temple—for that was what it was, even when there were no more veils to watch—cast itself in the same red gloom as the rest of the Realm. And the rest of the Realm was a wasteland in every sense of the word.

  Dawnick had been leveled, roads and buildings pulverized into uniformly unidentifiable Dust. The surrounding hinterlands, once teeming with wildlife, had disappeared without a trace. Above it all, the red sun loomed. It’d lost its shine, its reason to be. All it could do was bear witness to the end of the world.

  How many Days, Nights, years, Kalpas had passed since Jasper last watched the skies from atop the hill? She’d slept and slept and slept, only to wake when nothing beside her was left. She, like the red sun above, could only bury her head and sit in solitude, as Tidereign saw out its final [Watch].

  No.

  Jasper’s heart skipped a beat. She heard a voice—hers yet also something more—echo from within her chest. She raised her head—heavy at the best of times, now leaden with despair. As she did, one of her butterflies trickled out to dance before her face.

  Robbed of VEILS against which to beat its WINGS, the butterfly nevertheless fluttered with outsized urgency. Imbued by pollen from THE PRESTIGE, its wings drew a halo of raw umber—a soft yet undeniable glimmer amidst the red gloom. They carried with them a voice that refused to fade—faint yet resonant against the overwhelming despair.

  “No,” the voice spoke again, stronger now it’d found its rightful origin. “As long as there’s time left to this cycle. As long as my heart continues to beat. I still have an [Oath] to affirm.”

  The Realm had withered, but her roses yet bloomed. The sky had fallen, but her butterflies yet flew. All hope had been lost, but her heart yet raced ahead—a Path for her to follow, here at the end of the world.

  Jasper stood. If this indeed was the end of all things, she’d meet it on her feet, eyes pointed ever forward. If she really was the last of her people, she’d die with dignity and surety of purpose, instead of wallowing in her solitude.

  Of course, she wasn’t entirely alone. Tidereigners rarely were alone, even here at the end of the world.

  She found Realgar aft’Enright inside the long-deserted Temple. The Viceroy of Dawnwick—though neither the rank nor title meant anything now—sat atop the dais with bare head buried in crooked hands. Both of his antlers had fallen off, now lying beside the man weathered and cracked. If Jasper had fought off her despair, here was a soul who’d succumbed to it totally and recklessly.

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  As Jasper approached, her attention wandered to a flicker of lotus-white light at Realgar’s feet. The Hubstation, she realized with a fresh pang, so withered and faded as to be but a mote amongst the dust. Her heart ached anew for the lotus flower’s last stand—holding on even as the souls around it dwindled to nothing.

  Jasper knelt beside them now—a man who’d given up and a flower that knew only to hang on. Realgar didn’t move a muscle, even as his fellow Templar wrapped him in a gentle embrace. Jasper held the embrace in silence. Commiserating. Understanding. Waiting.

  After what felt like cycles, Realgar spoke in a hoarse whisper.

  “Why does it hurt so?”

  Jasper didn’t answer. Her heart beat softly against the silence.

  “More than losing everything I ever held dear,” the man went on, pain giving voice to despair. “More than being cast aside by the Keeper. Even more than having fought for a cause that was lost from the beginning. Why… why does it hurt so to fail?”

  A sob shuddered out of the crumpled heap.

  “I failed you, Sister!” Realgar’s cry echoed across the empty Temple. “I failed [the Herd]. I failed my [Oath]. I failed the Keeper. But more than that… what hurts more than anything is that I’ve failed myself! Why? How can I, here at the end of all things, still be so selfish?”

  “Because souls are selfish,” Jasper finally gave word to her own anguish—to her undying hope. “Each and every one of us. We’re all but conduits of our most Primal desires, shaped and refined to blend with the rest of the world. The herd is but an endless gnashing and blurring of individual wills. I should know, Brother. For I’ve watched and felt it all from atop the hill, connected to each and every one of my selfish siblings.”

  Realgar unburied his head and stared with stricken, bloodshot eyes. Jasper held his gaze, unperturbed—indeed never surer of herself than in this Keeper-forsaken moment, as her heart beat with a thousand faded dreams.

  “But do not despair!” she urged, voice rising in step with anguish and hope. “Don’t you see? I speak only to the true nature of souls and the worlds we sculpt together. The self and the other. Two halves of a whole. You complete what I lack in myself, and together we forge solid Paths through the all-enfolding Gloam. That is how we [Oathbound] have always lived our lives. And that is how we carry all that we’ve built—that our brothers and sisters have built—ever into the enduring future.”

  At this, Realgar again averted his gaze.

  “What we’ve built? The enduring future? Look around you, Sister. There’s nothing for us to carry. Nowhere for us to go.”

  “Then let me remind you.” Jasper held Realgar at arm’s length and shook him bodily. Even in the pit of his despair, the Viceroy managed to be startled by the rough treatment. “Nothing is lost forever,” Jasper insisted, “so long as we remember where to look.”

  Cut off from the Gloam and cast aside by her Keeper, Jasper had no choice but to look within. And she, true to her words, proved to be more than a sum of her parts. All the cycles spent watching the SKIES from atop the hill. They returned to her now as her one and truest connection to the Realm, to its people, to their brethren across the VEILS.

  [THE PRESTIGE Spell: THE WATCHER’S LIGHT]

  Pure light. Untouched by dogmas, by higher powers, by the scourge of time and impermanence.

  Light of youth, boundless love, and surety of purpose. Emitted by Jasper’s roses, borne by her WINGS, and transmitted to the crumpled heap in her arms. A butterfly sifted its way across the red gloom, to then perch atop Realgar’s bare head, right between the stumps of his once proud antlers.

  The effect was subtle at first, then anything but. Unlike Bishop Hanafin, it took the older, wearier Viceroy some time to mend the fragments of his hope—to pick them up and study them piece by fragile piece, as he lived and remembered the manifold selves that had left them there in the first place.

  One such recollection felt utterly alien yet intimately, urgently familiar. It evoked cold metal against blood-hot skin. The darkness of a mind forcibly removed from reality. Senseless, formless particles yet shifted and churned amidst the darkness, jostled out of their hiding places. The particles gathered and brushed against the lids of a hidden compartment. Intimate, urgent. Urging him to open—

  The effect was subtle at first, then anything but. Realgar aft’Enright rose to his feet, so abruptly as to nearly throw Jasper to the ground.

  Cut off from the Gloam and cast aside by his Keeper, he had no choice but to look within. All the cycles spent chasing after the Keeper’s light, divining futures that had never been written in the VEILS—but fought for and won by souls who lived in the here and now. They spread before him now as his one and truest mastery over time and all that it nurtured.

  [HIEROPHANT Spell: THE THIRD EYE]

  [Oathborn Technique: THE ALL]

  Realgar’s person erupted with blinding iridescence. His antlers sprouted anew in an instant, encased in the gold of sunlight. He tilted his head—proud and haughty, as was only demanded of he who must lead his [Herd] to the promised Morrow.

  All three eyes wide-open, they sent forth myriad particles of iridescent light. Before [All] was said and done, the particles would cut through the red gloom and spread across the entire Realm. But first, they must shine upon the canvas shared by an entire people—memories, wills, and fates threaded into the VEILS for an eternity and more.

  The Temple’s ceiling shed itself of the gloom, to reveal the beginning of a fresco. The fresco was only half-finished, waiting for more brushstrokes to complete the picture—for souls to fight for and win their place in the here and now.

  What was there showed two distinct figures. One a Mriga woman, rigid in posture and solemn in salute. And the other… a ginger-furred man in dark, strange clothes—triangular ears, a whiskered smile, and an ever-nimble slouch.

  Realgar’s light continued to spread. Along the way, it rolled down as a gossamer curtain between the frescoed figures. The veil drooped onto the dusty floor below, then continued on as a golden canal.

  And Jasper [Watched] on. Calm and self-assured—perhaps in a way only possible for a soul who’d somehow been here and seen it all before. Roses bloomed. Butterflies flew. Hearts beat as one.

  Jasper, with her serene doe eyes, followed the spreading light. She saw shadows dance across the newly forged Paths. And she reached out as if she might touch them—as if to exchange an invitation.

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