77. THE YELLOW SUN

Kihrin’s story

One of Ompher’s moons

Right after biting off more than he could chew

I was burning up. I knew in the back of my mind that I’d teleported back to the moon again—it seemed safer than staying planetside—but I had more immediate problems. Problems like what I could possibly do with all this energy without making the entire situation a thousand times worse.

Certainly, I couldn’t just keep it. The delicate balancing act of existence that had become my new reality was tipped all the way over. This was more than just the energy that had killed me half a dozen times over before I’d fought it off. This was that tenyé, and all of Xaltorath’s, and all of Galava’s, and all of Ompher’s, and all of every demon that Xaltorath had devoured …

The thing was, I wasn’t even sure it would kill me. I didn’t think it would, any more than Ompher’s cataclysm had. But if I couldn’t hold on to all this energy, it would go somewhere, and I had a terrible feeling that the explosion would be a thousand times worse than anything Ompher had accidentally done.

I really could break the world.

I found little humor in the idea that I might accidentally fulfill the worst of Xaltorath’s mnemonic prophecies after I’d not only discovered they’d never been genuine in the first place but had also finally managed to destroy their author. One might consider that irony.

I had a different problem too. While it may not have compared with my most pressing issue—what to do with all that power—I also needed to figure out what to do with all those souls.

Although Suless formed the kernel of Xaltorath’s identity, thousands of unique, individual souls were included in that mix. People I knew. People whom I had never known because they had lived their entire lives in a different version of history. I was forced to sort not only through lifetimes but through all the many instances that Xaltorath had simply started over again, twisting the ribbon of time in a loop again and again as the demon tried to find exactly the right set of circumstances. The path that she’d needed to take in order to have command over … everything.

I didn’t really want to think about just how close she’d come to winning.

Xaltorath hadn’t wanted to just overthrow the gods and rule everyone. Oh, her ambitions had been extraordinary, nothing less than merging both universes and using the energy therein to restart creation. With Xaltorath in charge. A demon turned into God. Ironically, several loops-worth of devoured Relos Vars had put their own distinctive spin on the plans, lending their own insight and knowledge, but hadn’t appreciably changed the goals. He was fine with becoming God too.

Those other lifetimes of Relos Var proved an odd tightrope to walk. They were identical to each other and to the Relos Var I knew—right up until the point where Xaltorath began manipulating the timeline, and then they splintered. There were Relos Vars who had never known Senera and Relos Vars who had become emperor, Relos Vars who had never fathered Sandus and Relos Vars who hadn’t made pacts with Grizzst. It meant that nothing I learned from these almost doubles was reliable, when the entire reason I had targeted Xaltorath was to finally learn some solid, consistent information about Relos Var’s plans.

I had grabbed the psychic equivalent of a double fistful of writhing, venomous snakes. Now I was forced to sort through the varieties without being bitten, searching for just the right species. Voices screamed in my ears as Xaltorath tried to threaten me, to cajole, tease, tempt. Worse, I couldn’t just disregard the demonic rat-king. Doing that allowed for the possibility that Xaltorath might find a way to regain her strength, to take over. Even if I stripped away every single extraneous soul and released them into the Afterlife (and I honestly didn’t know what the potential consequences of that would be when some of these souls were temporal duplicates of ones that already existed), the kernel soul, Suless, would still be a demon, and would still be capable of climbing her way back out of any pit I threw her in. So I had to keep Xaltorath trapped, adding the monster to an unfortunately growing collection of demons I was keeping imprisoned using my own body. Not ideal, but for the moment, I had no alternatives.

Anyway, back to the real problem: all the damn tenyé.

Xaltorath had been hoarding tenyé like she was preparing for a long winter. All that power had been necessary—required—if she would have had any hope of punching a hole back through time to restart the loop. That was the reason why Xaltorath hadn’t just started over when first Janel and then Jarith had escaped her control and mucked up her plans—she hadn’t accumulated enough power. At the moment I’d finally defeated her, she’d been brimming over with accumulated tenyé, the equivalent of dozens of god-kings, two Guardians (Galava and Ompher), and the total energy output of that comet strike. I could (and did) let Galava and Ompher escape back into the universe, but that didn’t do anything about the tenyé they’d carried.

I could feel that pulsing within me, demanding freedom. Explosive, destructive freedom.

I couldn’t contain it. And using it to turn back time in the same manner Xaltaroth plan allowed for far too many variables to be worth considering. I was equally sure that whatever physical object I tried to use as an energy sink would explode so violently that the devastation might well be total. I couldn’t predict how bad, but I assumed “beyond reckoning.” I couldn’t think of a single thing on the entire planet capable of holding this much energy. Possibly Skyfire? But I’d never reclaim the Cornerstone in time.

Nothing on this world … I looked up.

I had a fraction of a second to make a decision.

I did.

Teraeth’s story

Just outside the Korthaen Blight

Just after Kihrin’s disappearance

How Teraeth hated that he couldn’t do anything to sway the outcome of the fight. Although he did convince Khored to stop attacking Kihrin, which wasn’t anything to scoff at. Still, his job was making sure everyone else was in a position to do theirs.

Which meant Teraeth paid close attention when he saw Kihrin attacking Xaltorath. Kihrin had sworn up and down that he could do this, that it wouldn’t be a problem, that everything would be fine. Maybe that was even true. Unfortunately, even if that hadn’t been true, Kihrin would’ve made the same claim. So he watched for any sign of a problem.

The screaming was a big clue.

At first, he’d thought that it was just Xaltorath. Pulling the tenyé out of that demon had to be the spiritual equivalent of soaking in a midden. Teraeth would have screamed too.

But that wasn’t it. There was a strange distortion in the air—strange even for Vol Karoth. The faint blue-violet halo that outlined Vol Karoth’s utter blackness grew bright enough to easily see. Grew brighter still. That’s when Teraeth realized what the problem was: it was just too much power. Too much power even for Vol Karoth.

“You have to get rid of it,” Teraeth whispered. “Get it out of your body. Just … send it up into the sky or something.”

Kihrin turned to look at him. Teraeth couldn’t tell, of course. He couldn’t see more than that outline. But it was easy to imagine that Kihrin had done exactly that, that he’d given Teraeth a reassuring “don’t worry, I know what I’m doing” kind of nod just before he vanished.

Wishful thinking. Kihrin absolutely didn’t know what he was doing. That wasn’t even an insult: How could he? Who had ever done this before?

Laughter threatened to bubble up inside him. Xaltorath. He supposed Xaltorath might have done this before.

An odd silence fell in the wake of Xaltorath’s destruction and Kihrin’s retreat. Not true silence—the dragons remained on the scene, biting and sniping at each other. It gave the whole situation an unsettled feeling.

Teraeth crossed to Janel, still standing next to Tya. Janel seemed uninjured, but he remembered that she had been just a few moments before. “Are you all right? You’re healed, right? It’s not—”

Janel grabbed him around the waist and buried her head against his shoulder. He couldn’t blame her. What had just happened …

“To Hell with this,” Teraeth’s grandfather Khored said. “We’re damn well going to talk. And you’re going to tell us—”

A streak of white split the sky, pointed straight to the sun. The brilliant line dissected the heavens, traveling from somewhere beyond the horizon across the sky until it hit the sun. Six dragons stopped fighting and looked up.

Everyone looked up.

“What the fuck is that?” Xivan said rather succinctly, while also managing to convey a strong sense of “what is it this time?”

“Kihrin,” Janel whispered, still in Teraeth’s arms. “It’s Kihrin.” She gave him a stare that hovered between relief and panic.

Teraeth felt a rush of relief. Kihrin was doing what Teraeth had suggested. He was throwing the excess energy out into space.

Except he wasn’t, was he? He was throwing the excess energy at the sun. To what end? It didn’t seem like enough to do anything to it, good or bad. Sure, yes, the tenyé was more than enough to overwhelm Kihrin and supercharge Xaltorath, but that still didn’t seem …

Teraeth found himself wondering how much energy it had taken Vol Karoth to destabilize the sun in the first place. What the magical mechanics of the whole thing had been.

“We need to leave here,” Tya said. “Now.”

“Might I suggest the Manol?” Thurvishar offered. Teraeth could only envy his calm.

“What about the dragons?” Xivan looked north where the dragons were still arguing among themselves. At that very moment, Sharanakal reared back and started to breathe at Baelosh. Gorokai smacked Sharanakal’s neck, so he veered off course and ended up pointed straight at them. A great dark cloud of superheated gas and rock began to speed in their direction.

“Great suggestion,” Khored said. “Let’s do that.”

The entire group vanished and reappeared in the Manol throne room.

Teraeth exhaled. He was still holding Janel, and wasn’t honestly sure he ever wanted to let go. They’d been in so much danger back there that it had almost ceased to have any meaning. There were more than a few times where he knew for a fact that he would have been dead if someone hadn’t thrown a protective spell over him—usually Kihrin, but quite often Khored or Tya too. Even if he was grateful, he hated the helpless feeling.

Everyone started talking at once. The entire throne room drowned in panic, not least of which because no one was ever supposed to be able to just “appear in the Manol throne room.”

Teraeth glanced around. Khored was half a second from coming over to demand those explanations, no doubt eager to prove that he too shared the family temper.1 Tya looked not lost but numb. And various vané or Grizzst or one of the Quuros was trying to wrangle answers from Senera or Thurvishar. It was chaos.

Teraeth sighed to himself. He hated this. It was everything he hadn’t wanted. Everything he’d ever told himself he’d never, ever do in this lifetime. He’d have abdicated immediately if it hadn’t happened in the middle of all this nonsense. But not now, for so many reasons. For Kihrin’s sake, he stayed.

He’d do a lot of things for Kihrin. Even this.

Teraeth kissed Janel’s forehead and stepped away.

She frowned but didn’t try to stop him. He gave her one last look and a soft smile before he turned away from her. Teraeth climbed the dais up to the perfectly shaped chair of interwoven living branches that the Manol vané sovereigns had long considered their throne. Everyone was arguing or talking or having not-so-quiet fits when he turned around.

Teraeth sat down. “Silence.”

His command carried to every corner of the room, loudly, and cut through every competing voice. Teraeth couldn’t claim his blinding charisma was responsible—this was due to the spells set upon the throne.

“This—” he gestured toward the gathered crowd, ignoring the surreal knowledge he was about to shout down gods, “—is unproductive. Tya—” Teraeth paused as he realized the Goddess of Magic wasn’t paying attention to him. She had a faraway look in her eyes. Teraeth didn’t think she was daydreaming or being rude.

“Tya!” Teraeth repeated.

The goddess startled. “The sun—”

He gestured to her. “Yes, that. What happened to the sun? Can you show us?”

A dozen people started to ask questions, but Tya proved two things: first, that she had, in fact, been paying attention; and second, that she didn’t take objection to being given orders. She waved a hand through the air and conjured an illusion toward the ceiling, centered around a vision of the sun that hung like a glittering ornament.

“It looks normal,” Therin D’Mon said.

It did look normal. But that didn’t mean—

“Light doesn’t travel instantly,” Doc murmured in Teraeth’s ear. “Give it a few minutes.”

Teraeth didn’t react to his father’s voice, but he was happy to hear it.

Khored didn’t seem inclined to wait until the sun did something. He whirled on Teraeth.

“What happened?” The God of Destruction’s voice was not in any way suitable for public spaces. “Did you cure S’arric? Because that wasn’t Vol Karoth back there! What is going on?”

“Oh, I don’t think we have long enough for that conversation,” Xivan said as she stepped forward. She was scowling, but weren’t they all? “People are dying. We need to concentrate on saving lives, and afterward, we figure out motives and orders of events.”

“This is not an unimportant—” But Khored paused in whatever he’d been about to say to Xivan and stared at her. His eyes widened. In a much less concussive voice, he said, “You found Thaena’s Grail.” It wasn’t a question.

Xivan shrugged. “My friends did, but they gave it to me. That’s not important right now.”

“Not important!” Khored snapped.

“Not even slightly,” Teraeth corrected and then leaned past the God of Destruction to speak to the larger crowd in the room. “So let’s get this out of the way. Ompher’s—” He glanced over at Xivan.

“—dead,” she finished.

“Right. Ompher is dead. Xaltorath is dead. Vol Karoth—or at least the Vol Karoth we know as the insane God of Annihilation who wants to destroy the world—is dead.”

Khored scoffed. “Then who did Ompher throw a comet at? Because it looked to me like Vol Karoth survived that.”

“Vol Karoth is dead,” Teraeth repeated. “So’s S’arric, in a sense. Kihrin, on the other hand—”

“Look!” someone shouted and pointed up, at the illusion.

Because something was happening; the sun deformed, morphed, condensed. It was like someone had taken the red-orange forge of the sun and doubled the fuel—it began to glow hotter, a brilliant yellow-white color. Audible gasps were heard from all around the throne room. An unusually high percentage of the people at court were Founders, old enough to remember trivia that had passed out of common knowledge.

For example, Teraeth remembered being told by his … by Khaemezra that the sun used to be yellow.

“Is this bad?” Khaeriel murmured from nearby.

She was too young. Too young by far. She’d never seen the original sun.

Teraeth felt a strange pull at his face and realized he was grinning. Kihrin had done it. He’d fixed the sun …

“That idiot!” Senera cursed.

Teraeth gave her a flat look. “Excuse me?”

Senera crossed her arms over her chest. “He might as well have sent Relos Var a damn signed letter. This wasn’t part of the plan!”

Teraeth raised an eyebrow. He honestly wondered if she had any idea what the plan was. He didn’t, mostly because it certainly had seemed like the “plan” amounted to “let’s first find out what Relos Var is trying to do.” The plan had already shifted several times. “There’s never been a plan in the history of the universe that survived its implementation intact,” Teraeth spat and ignored the fond look Khored threw him. “He found a way to deal with the unexpected without destroying most of the continent. I’m not complaining.”

“Senera’s not wrong, though.” Janel’s smile fell into something less pleasant as she stared at the illusion. “Relos Var’s going to know exactly what’s happened to Vol Karoth the moment he bothers to look up.”