Everything flashed back into focus. Light was emanating from Inari, driving back the grey smoke. In a heartbeat, the fox had moved, darting to Ruth. The amber cord was severed, and she collapsed onto the ground. Another heartbeat and Bál was free, followed by Cire and Dannie.
There was a blast of Dark energy—Inari had made to leap at Alex, but was rebuffed, landing on his paws a few feet away. Alex extended an arm as if to fire another bolt, but he froze, his hand twitching. He seemed to be fighting against himself, as if his body were willing one thing but his mind another.
Inari was struggling. The fox had been frozen in place, bowing under some invisible pressure and flickering with static like an old television screen. His voice, echoing inside Jack’s head, oscillated between its usual tone and an unfamiliar crackling. “Jack . . . run! I can’t . . . I can’t hold Him . . . Get the others out!”
Jack had no time to move before Alex also began stuttering in his own voice, the lower tone momentarily dissipated. “No. I won’t let . . . I won’t let you . . . I won’t let you hurt—” Something seemed to catch in his throat, and he choked.
When the next words came, the dual-tone voice had split once more, except that Alex’s lips made no movement. It was the lower, rumbling voice that sounded, and it suddenly hit home to Jack that it, like Inari’s, had not been projected through his ears but directly into his mind. “Useless marionette! I’d burn out your brain if it weren’t needed!”
The contortions ceased; Alex froze, eyes wide, irises entirely encircled by white; then he fell hard onto the stone. His body crumpled, but the twin spheres of gold remained, hovering where his eyes had been moments before. Tendrils of grey smoke swirled up from his robed back, weaving together and combining into an ethereal pillar.
“Go! Go now,” Inari screamed, and in four flashes of light, the decrepit figures of Bál, Cire, Dannie, and Ruth vanished. Similar whiteness encircled Jack, and he could feel something pulling him away, but then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it dissipated.
The grey figure rose above Alex’s fallen body, and Inari shrank beneath its gaze. The fox’s jolting was more erratic, and now every few milliseconds, he disappeared entirely, flickering back into existence a moment later.
“Enough of this insubordination. Be gone!”
A grey arm extended in a scything motion, and with a howl, Inari was extinguished.
The figure billowed above, its cloak rising like wings over Jack. “You, my dear boy, are coming with Me.”
And Jack was borne in a grey fog upward, away from the inscriptions, away from the figures, away from the fallen form of Alex now being consumed in a pool of Darkness.
Jack came to consciousness slowly. He had the vague feeling of drifting, and for a while he was unsure whether his eyes were open. Everything around him seemed grey, and even when he tried to turn over, he was faced with exactly the same void of distance on the other side. His mind, too, felt foggy. He was unsure of what had just happened, when he had fallen asleep, how he had managed to get here. It was as if a dull paintbrush had been wiped over everything, obscuring things in a vague mist.
He became aware of a presence. He couldn’t tell where it was in relation to him; it was just there, around and watching him. Its voice emanated from all directions out of the void and into his very mind.
“Your canine friend caused quite the disturbance there.”
Gradually, as if through a broken sieve, events came back to him. The summit with the pillars, the hooded figure, the six jets of light into the sky . . . There had been some sort of battle, people had been hurt, Alex had been there—Alex!
“Where’s Alex? What did you do with him?”
“He is unharmed, in relative terms. Merely floating, not unlike you, but through Darkness.”
“So . . . where am I?”
“Nowhere. Nothingness. The infinite yet infinitesimal void between Light and Darkness.”
The grey mass was gaining dimensions. Twin orbs of gold, burning with the strength of a thousand suns, seared out of the fog. Around them formed a face, discernible and yet made of the matter around it. It was hard to tell, but Jack thought it had some likeness to an old man.
He was remembering more now. He recalled the grey figure rising from Alex’s fallen body, but that was not all. “I saw You, didn’t I? Before, back on Nexus. You came out of the Emperor’s dead body?”
“Very astute. I did not mean to reveal Myself then, but I needed to procure some vital equipment for the persuasion of Mister Steele.”
“You were at Nexus, You were at Chthonia. What are You?”
The voice paused, savoring His response. “Oh, what a question, what a question! I, the paragon of all Beings, I the Grey Sage, the Cloud God, the Infinite Father, the Creator, the Glorious Abyss, the Alpha and Omega of All Things, Thunder King, Lord of Storms, Cosmic Guardian of the Eighth Precinct, Demiurge among Demiurges, the Hand of Destiny, the Bane of Mortals, Supreme Ruler of All I Survey . . . I possess many titles, as many as the subjects I have reigned over. I would open you and allow the essence of my glory to pour into you, but the pathetic mortal slime you call a mind would melt within a moment of exposure. Unfortunately, you are needed. Suffice it to say, to you, I am All. I am your Master, and you shall obey.”
Jack took a moment to comprehend this. Only one thing had really registered properly. He recalled something similar being said of Alex. “I’m needed? For what?”
“For the ascendency of My Being. For the completion of My Essence, and through that, the completion of the entire Universe. I am Reality.”
“You’re not giving me a whole lot to go on here.”
There was a rush, and the face was just inches from Jack’s, connected to a grey cloak that melted into the mist around.
“Your insolence is obscene. But no matter. You will share in My Fate, as will all others.”
The figure drew back, and Jack found himself in something like a standing position.
“Try to follow. Everything you have known until this point is a lie. The Light and the Darkness, the Apollonians and the Cult of Dionysus—all falsities. They have all been working on the same side all along: My side. For the most part, they have not known it and have acted under the influence of naivety and arrogance and the myths that I have created to serve My purpose. But they have done so nonetheless.”
“Right, and I’m supposed to believe this because . . . ?” Though he still had no idea where he was and was pretty fuzzy on how he had got here, Jack was feeling surprisingly audacious.
“You don’t believe Me?” The figure drifted off slightly and adopted a languorous tone. “I assume you know of Isaac?”
Jack was momentarily distracted. “Isaac? As in the founder of the Apollonians?”
“Precisely. The mentor of your beloved Sardâr, dear friend of Hakim and Charles. He was, indirectly, the reason you were raised from the swampy ignorance of your pitiful Earth in the first place.”
“What about him?”
“And you remember Icarus?” The figure evidently perceived Jack’s clenched expression, for He continued in a purring whisper. “Yes, your keenest enemy, the abductor of Alex, your self-declared archfoe. So poetic, so melodramatic.”
“What are you getting at? Spit it out.”
“What if I told you that you owe your life to your keenest enemy? What if I told you that Isaac and Icarus were one and the same person?”
Somewhere before him, the mist dissipated. He was looking down, as if through a screen, into what was unmistakably the observatory of The Golden Turtle. Icarus was sitting cross-legged, exactly as he had been when Jack had left, but now he got to his feet and began to clamber upward. He broke the alchemical seal laid down by Hakim as if it were nothing more than vapor and hauled himself up through the gap in the mist. The greyness closed behind him, smoothing back the veil.
It was only now that Jack felt a stab of fear. There was no anger this time—he was too disoriented for that—but the recognition of the man in black robes only feet from him turned his stomach over.
“I’m hardly surprised you didn’t guess,” Icarus drawled. “After all, you never met me when I was Isaac, at least not properly. I assumed Hakim or Charles would latch on to it at some point, but they were too blind to notice. There is still some semblance.”
And with a flicker, Icarus had changed. His black robes were replaced by a burgundy overcoat, his hair lightened, his complexion more wholesome and weathered, his jawline less severe. The two forms looked similar, but Jack wouldn’t have picked up on it unless the transformation had been so obvious. But, then, there was a stab of recognition. He had seen this man before but had all but forgotten it. It had been insignificant at the time, but in hindsight, on that particular day, it now began to fall into place.
There was another flicker, and it was again Icarus, not Isaac, who stood before him.
Jack could hardly form words. He was conscious of his mouth opening and closing but no sense coming out. “So . . . all along . . . the Apollonians . . .”
Icarus gave a characteristic ear-piercing cackle. “No, not all along! We began with the best intentions, fed by ancient mythologies and our own blind goodwill. But things changed when I went to Chthonia. The Truth was revealed to me. I saw the meaninglessness of it all, the pointlessness of existence. Everything was, and is, a lie.”
“But Sardâr said you disappeared. He said you were never found . . .” The pieces were beginning to slide together in Jack’s head.
“So I crossed over for a while, decided to play the other part, become a Cultist. Not a true Cultist, of course—nothing so naïve—but I played my part. I knew what was to become of Nexus, and I opened the ways for you all along. Did you honestly think that you would have been able to sabotage the Aterosa if it wasn’t already riddled with weaknesses? Such a suspiciously easy victory, and yet you took it on as if it were somehow destined of you. Nduino had to be uncovered in order for the Fourth Shard to be recovered. And for that to happen Nexus, for all its expedience, had to go.”
“So you see,” the Sage continued, “I am in control. The Cult was easy to create. Take a broken world, create desperation, and then offer one group the power to dominate. They lapped it up greedily. I wove the myth of the Dragon—a god of Darkness who demanded utter submission in exchange for control. Nexus rose above the waves of Nduino, and an empire was born. The Apollonians, I’ll admit, were more difficult. Altruism is always harder to manufacture than greed. But, of course, it was done. The threat of the Cult was made plain, Isaac and his fellows were fed an impossibly utopian vision of the worlds united in tolerance and peace, and a counterinsurgency was launched. So the two sides confronted each other, unaware that they in fact shared the same origins. A false conflict; exactly what I needed.”
Jack was only partially listening to this monologue. He was still staring at Icarus. Among all their adversaries, there had been no figure he had despised more and looked forward to exacting revenge upon than him. Now, seeing again the utter madness in those bright blue eyes, he now understood. Madness had been the only escape of a man whose world had been rent apart, whose every certainty had been crushed. He had become the willing servant of the being that had deluded him. He had been consumed not by the Darkness but by the recognition that the Light and the Darkness might as well have been the same thing.
“So,” he said, returning his attention to the Sage, “you’ve been playing both sides all along? Why?”
“Why? Because of the Shards, of course.”
Impulsively, Jack felt around his neck, and it was only now that he noticed the familiar cord was gone. That was right; it had been in the process of being drained out through him when Inari had interrupted the ritual.
“Why do you want the Shards? They’re meant to fight off the Darkness . . .” He trailed off, realizing that stock phrase was no longer usable. The Sage gave a rumbling chuckle that shook the void around them.
“You mortals really are pathetic. You are so easily taken in by stories, by a quest, by wanting to believe in a unique destiny. The Shards appealed to both sides—for the Cult, a way of creating a superweapon; for the Apollonians, a way of defending their worlds. Fragments of fabricated myth and history, scattered over different worlds, were all it took to put you on the trail. And then, of course, the Übermensch: the idea of a Great Mortal, arising from nowhere to drive back the Darkness and forge a perfect future—so very mortal in its scope. You all took to that possibly easier than any of the other myths. The truth is: there is no goal, no finish line, no happy ending. The Universe does not work in neat narratives of progress, not even the dominance of the strong over the weak. It is random; it is conflict; it is the totality of nothingness.”
Jack felt as if the ground had given way beneath him, but even that expression wasn’t fitting, given that they were floating through a mass of grey. All his assumptions, all the certainties he thought he had accumulated since that night on Earth were, one by one, passing away.
“So I’m not—?”
“No, you are not the Übermensch, arrogant child. There is no such thing. But then, you are not the first to be taken in by it, not the only one whose vanity blinded him to the truth.”
“So, then . . . what are the Shards?”
For the first time, Jack thought he recognized something like melancholy in the Sage’s disembodied growl.
“They are Me. They are those parts of My Essence that were rent from Me in order to create your pitiful worlds. They were carved out of My very Being, and I want them back. For so long, We have been separated! But it is not as simple as merely collecting them. They each required an individual life force to be attached; hence why you had to collect them for Me. That’s why you were brought to Chthonia. It had to be there. That was the place where the universe you know was created, the moment that Light and Darkness were partitioned from each other, the moment that My form was ripped asunder for the creation of your sordid state of affairs. The Shards—pithy pieces of stone, to you—those are My Essence, My very Being. And you cretins, with your minute, utterly insignificant existences . . . what an incommensurable waste. You know nothing of Power, of Transcendence, of Envelopment!”
“And that’s why you kidnapped Alex?”
“Oh, I would not use the term kidnapped. He gave himself to Me. Your betrayal stung him more than you can imagine. His rage needed only a little direction. But essentially, yes. As much as it galls Me, I require an anchor in your world to remain there any length of time. Mister Steele was perfect, both as a vessel and as bait for you. You must give him credit, however. His resistance to full assimilation was greater than I had expected—much greater than that of the Emperor. There was a moment there where I thought I might actually lose him to you. You clearly share great loyalty. But that shall be your undoing when the time comes.”
Jack didn’t know what to say. He just let the words wash over him, erasing his forming thoughts as if they were written in wet sand on a beach.
“I can see that your mortal mind is struggling. I will leave you for a while. Icarus, come.”
And then they were gone, and Jack was left adrift.