That day the twelve bid farewell to the lives they had known and became Faerers, the first and only. They were halved to two sixes, two teams for two journeys. They went into training to prepare for what lay ahead, and who they were at the end was not who they had been. Things were… done to them. To their anima—the incorporeal selves that are the true totality for which bodies were only as icons fixed in space. The magi were always striving and delving, and of the Faerers they shaped something new. It was fitting, for their work was new, and it was great.
The Faerers were chosen to be explorers, the lightbearers of their people, to voyage through all the strata of the Continuum that was the great All. The Magus Regent of the College of Cosmology had explained it to them:
“The universes lie one upon the next as the pages of a book. But in the Continuum, every page is infinite, and the book has no end.” That was to say, each “page” extended infinitely along the plane of its existence. One could never hope to come to a universe’s edge. They had none. An explorer traveling along a plane would fly forever and find nothing to come up against. Planets and stars, yes, worlds and vacuum, on and on and no boundary at all. Nothing to cross.
It was necessary to push through. Not along the plane, but right into it. Like the nib of a pen jammed right through the page to write itself onto the next. The magi had learned how to do it, after thousands of years of study, and such was to be the work of the Faerers: to press through, and write themselves and their race onto each new world as they met it.
One Six in one direction, the other in the opposite. For the rest of their lives the distance between the teams would grow—to the greatest distance, no less, that had ever been achieved between members of their race or any other. This was the pinnacle of achievement of a very, very old world: no less than to map the totality of the great All and stitch the fullness of the Continuum together with their light. To open doors and go, and go, universe to universe to universe. To know them, and by knowing, in some fashion claim them.
Each Six would be everything to one another—companions and family, defenders and friends, and lovers, too. They were charged, in addition to their prime directive, to bear heirs to their knowledge. They were three and three, men and women, and that was how the magi had framed the directive: not to beget “children” but “heirs to their knowledge.”
They were to be the birth of a tribe, something more than their people had ever been before. Elazael and Razgut were of the same Six, with Iaoth and Dvira, Kleos and Arieth, and their direction was set. Another night of blazing light to draw the eyes of the godstars to them. For the glory of all seraphim, this great deed before them, a spreading of wings that would never be forgotten, a departure that would echo through time, and then one day unimaginable, so far was it in the future, they or their descendants would come back home. To Meliz.
Meliz, first and last, Meliz eternal. The home world of the seraphim.
They would be remembered forever. Venerated. Heroes of their people, the openers of doors, the lights in the darkness. All would be glory.
Oh, spite. Oh, misery. Laughter that gnaws like a bellyful of teeth. That wasn’t what happened. No, and no, and no, and no forever.
The Cataclysm happened.
It was the dream, simply and purely and terribly.
Watch the sky.
Will it happen?
It can’t. It mustn’t.
It did.
Not every stratum of the Continuum was fit to be opened, and not every world in the infinite layering was hospitable to light, as the Faerers learned, to their very great despair.
There was darkness unspeakable, and monsters vast as worlds swam in it.
They let them in. Razgut and Elazael, Iaoth and Dvira, Kleos and Arieth. They didn’t mean to. It wasn’t their fault.
Except that of course it was their fault. They cut the portal, one too far.
But how were they to have known?
The Stelians warned them.
But how were they to have known to listen to the Stelians? They were too busy being chosen, oh, glory.
Oh, misery.
And how many portals had they cut by then? How many worlds had they “stitched together with their light”? How many laid open to the Beasts and left unprotected as they wheeled and fled, again and again? They sealed the portals as they raced back toward Meliz in panic and despair. Each portal in turn they closed behind them and then watched the Beasts sunder it and keep coming. They couldn’t hold them out. They hadn’t been taught how to do that, and so, world by world, page by page in the book that was the great All: darkness. Devouring.
Nothing worse had ever been done, by accident or design, in all of time, in all of space, and the guilt was theirs.
And finally there were no worlds left between the Cataclysm and Meliz. Meliz first and last, Meliz eternal. The Faerers came home, and the Beasts came behind them.
And devoured it.
66
SO MUCH MORE THAN SAVED
Eliza woke from the dream to find herself still dreaming. She’d been very deep, she was aware, and supposed she must be emerging through layers of dreams, like climbing up out of the earth, out of one of those open-pit mines that are like hell made real, and each level bringing her nearer to waking.
It had to be a dream, though, if only because it defied reality.
She was sitting on a step. Real enough, so far. A girl was beside her: small but not a child. A teenager, doll-pretty and wide-eyed. Staring at her.
With an audible gulp, the girl swallowed, and said, in hesitant, accented English, “Um. I’m sorry? Or… you’re welcome? Whichever one seems… appropriate… to you?”
“I’m sorry?” said Eliza. She meant it in the vein of: What? What did the girl mean? But she seemed to take it as an answer to her question.
“Sorry, then,” she said, deflating. Her eyes were held wide and unblinking. Eliza shifted a glance to the young man by her side. Matching wonder in his eyes, she saw. “We didn’t mean to,” he said. “We didn’t know… that… was going to happen. They just… grew.”
The wings, he meant: dream wings growing from Eliza’s dream shoulders. Awakening—if you could call the passage from one dream to the next awakening, which she supposed you really couldn’t, much as it felt like it—she had been aware of the change in herself, without visual confirmation or even surprise, as is the way with dreams. She turned her head now to see what it was she already knew.
Wings of living fire. She shifted her shoulders, feeling the play of new muscles there as the wings responded, flexing and dropping a pretty rain of sparks. They were the most beautiful things Eliza had ever seen, and awe bloomed in her.