JULY 3, 2004
Dr. Kapoor and Dr. Andrew Ashford sit across from one another at a table in the LARC break room. Ashford is smoking, and his eyes are dark with shadows. Both he and Dr. Kapoor look more than just fourteen years younger than present day—their faces unlined, hair free of gray, a sharpness to their eyes that age and the burdens of their lives have dulled.
KAPOOR: You’ve seen everything now. Did you find what you wanted to?
ASHFORD: What I wanted to? No. But answers, nonetheless.
KAPOOR: And what about my answers? I think I deserve an explanation.
ASHFORD: Just one?
He laughs. The sound is hollow. He stubs out the cigarette.
KAPOOR: Let’s start with what the hell an Eidolon is.
ASHFORD: A king. Or a god. Or a demon. It depends on your point of view. There were seven. Seven kings of seven worlds. Long ago, long before the founding of Rome, the boundaries between their worlds and ours were thin. There were roads between them that you could simply walk down. The Eidolons demanded worship and tribute and sacrifice, and loosed horrors on humanity. Plagues. Monsters. Slaughter. And then they fell.
KAPOOR: How?
ASHFORD: There are many theories, but none of them is likelier than the next. Maybe some kind of disease. Or some kind of metaphysical change, like a natural—supernatural—disaster. Or else humanity fought back and won. Whatever it was, the seven worlds were broken. What remains of them now is to their original state what a rotting corpse is to a man. The Eidolons sealed away inside of them, behind what we call gates. Not literal gates, but metaphysical barriers, preventing them from entering our world.
KAPOOR: And if they open?
Ashford grimaces.
ASHFORD: Then surely these benevolent gods shall shower us with blessings. That’s what Landon thought.
KAPOOR: And this Ryder guy.
Ashford makes a noncommittal sound.
ASHFORD: Each world, each gate, is different. But in all cases, to open them requires people of our world who are in some way attuned to the one you are trying to reach. That attunement may be intrinsic, a matter of birth, or it may be manufactured by ritual or other unknown processes.
KAPOOR: It sounds almost scientific.
ASHFORD: We do our best to contain this madness with sterile words and rules, but the truth is, it’s a wilderness of ruin. As soon as you find a rule, you discover a situation where it doesn’t apply. Still. It gives us a framework. A way to comprehend the unknowable. But sometimes I wonder if that is more dangerous than accepting the wilderness.
KAPOOR: What do you mean?
ASHFORD: The men on the Krachka found something in the ocean. They should have cast it back, but they were curious. They kept it, and it wrecked them on the rocks and made these islands its home. The military thought to contain it in that bunker, guard and study it. Landon thought to worship it. All of them seeking a kind of understanding. But if they had only understood its one desire, they would have left it alone.
KAPOOR: Its desire. The Six-Wing wants to be free.
ASHFORD: Yes. But what you encountered wasn’t the Six-Wing.
KAPOOR: No? Because I counted. There were definitely six wings.
ASHFORD: Let me be more accurate: the Eidolon that Landon was trying to free is the Seraph. The Six-Wing is not the Seraph. Not an Eidolon. The worlds you wandered through were echoes, layered over each other, creating a bridge between the Seraph’s world and ours. And the creature that inhabited them was an echo too. The Six-Wing, as you call it, is the echo of the Eidolon called the Seraph.
KAPOOR: How can you be sure?
ASHFORD: If you had met the true Seraph, you would not have made it out.
KAPOOR: Not all of us did.
ASHFORD: Even the echo of a god is a dangerous thing.