Despair weighed heavily upon him, as if his bones had turned to stone. When the dreaded moment, long-awaited and long-feared, had arrived, those on the side of life had been foiled by chance and an endemic weakness, by unwise choices and unforeseen treacheries. And now the calamity had blossomed forth, and an ancient viciousness had been set loose. The fighting had begun in earnest, and the destruction would be terrible beyond description.
Now cyborg knights of the Legion of Avatars flew through the skies over Umara, circling above the warpwell. Seated in the underground gloom of the roothouse, Cheluvahar, Uvovo Seer of Segrana, could sense their presence, and felt like weeping.
The root network that linked together the nineteen burrows he had extended to connect with the daughter-forests, all seven of them. The planetary energies of Umara now trickled steadily through the entire rootweb while he sat at its centre, holding it all in perfect balance. His Seer talents and senses were multiplied and focused now, allowing him to see the possible futures, to sift them for the likely ones, to see them in all their aspects of triumph and loss, to know what he could and could not do with the powers he controlled. The uncaging of the Legion had drastically diminished the range of future possibilities, and that was why he wept.
In one future, the Legion of Avatars to the last escaped from its hyperspace prison, its millions of cyborgs driven insane by the aeons spent entombed in a frozen pit at the very bottom of the Abyss. After utterly defeating the combined forces of Hegemony, Earthsphere and Imisil ships, it swept outwards, encountering the star systems of the Brolturan Compact. Entire worlds were laid waste and billions died in agony or were enslaved, a scenario that was repeated over and over across the Hegemony, tens of thousands of times for nearly a century until the rampage was finally stopped by a grand alliance of Earthsphere, the Indroma and the Milybi.
In another future the Legion swept in another direction, straight into the domains of the Milybi, whose cultural ethos of adaptation led them to take on aspects of their attackers. After fifty years the Milybi civilisation had turned into an exemplar of the Legion creed of convergence, such that the Legion of Avatars was eventually absorbed into the Milybi Exodomain. A decade of rebuilding later, the Milybi launched a campaign of conquest and in time the borders of the Exodomain swallowed the Indroma, Earthsphere and the Hegemony.
In yet another future the Legion of Avatars, having destroyed all opposition in or near the Darien system, then argued among themselves about forward strategy, resulting in a bitter and savage internecine struggle that tore the millions of cyborgs into several warring camps. The Hegemony were struggling to cope with the tragedy of hundreds of supernovae, but Earthsphere and the Erenate, backed by the Aranja Tesh and the Pothiwa alliances, led a new attack on the Legion cyborgs which forced many of them to flee into the Huvuun Deepzone. It also served to push several factions of the Legion into the arms of the Hegemony, with catastrophic consequences decades later…
Chel could see and feel those futures looming like unsteady mountains ready to topple and fall. It wasn’t entirely accurate to say that they all hung on the decisions of one person or several people since the inexplicable consequences of the unexpected had led certain individuals down paths of near-unbearable predicament. Chel could see the places where Theo and Rory, and Greg and Catriona had been, and the places they were soon to reach. Each had decisions to make and the ability to attempt resolutions, just like Chel.
He wept small tears into the fur on his face, but only from the eyes he was born with. His four Seer eyes stared unblinkingly into the futures arrayed before him, making starkly clear the consequences that had to happen and the preceding decisions that had to be taken. His decisions–about who should live and who should die.
Guilt assailed him, guilt for what he would soon do. It was a burning task that seared him down to the essence. He tried to shut it out, rise above it… and for one shimmering instant he was free of it and able to see further, clearer and more truthfully than ever before. One vibrant, vivid instant when the stonework of the roothouse and the ground above moved aside, when the sky parted, when a shining corridor opened for him and let his vision soar at first between the stars then into the underdomains, what Humans call hyperspace. Onward his vision flew, past incredible sights and spectacles before it approached what seemed to be a vast and monstrous island, hanging in midair, ragged at the edges and underneath. And he felt another mind looking straight at him, a mind of two minds, readying itself for battle. It spoke before he could:
‘Guilt cannot be outrun.’
A jolt of surprise and a sudden intake of breath… and he was back in the roothouse.
Sad, sombre and resolved, he bowed his head. He knew what had to be done.