The last time I’d seen Alexander—as a specter inside the Dauphine’s memories—he was a turbulent, threatening presence, godlike as befitting his persona during that encounter. In retrospect, maybe he was trying a little too hard.
The Alexander now approaching was gliding toward us in a shiny red 1960s convertible Ferrari. This was a youthful, casual version of Alexander, like some of the photos I’d seen of the earliest days of Jenning & Reece. I mean, you could still see the Zeus-like zeal behind his eyes, and his hair was still wilder than the clipped fashion of those long-gone days of yesteryear, but he was clearly attempting what he probably considered a relatable presentation layer here. He was wrong; now he was most certainly trying too hard.
He said, “Dauphine of the Shimmer Lands, I’m deeply impressed. You may consider your debt to me paid in full. You are free to seek your fortune as you see fit. I will escort Isobel from here.”
Before I could object, the Dauphine replied, “And what should I do, hmm? Return to the Shimmer Lands and waste what remains of this life? Transmute into a human and suffer the degradation of flesh on a planet that would never understand me? No, I prefer to remain exactly where I am now: at long last, integral to the narrative.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Well, go on, get in—I’ve got a few things to show you both.”
I clambered into the front passenger seat, and the Dauphine sat behind us.
“Would you like me to put on some music?” he said. “There’s an AM radio.”
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Or it plays eight-tracks.”
“I will cut you,” I said.
The Ferrari found and followed the beacons on autopilot, leaving Alexander free to focus his attention on us.
“Your reputation as a warrior in combat is well-deserved,” he told me. “I’ve never seen a herald fall in such a spectacular fashion.”
“I almost died,” I told him. “The Dauphine rescued me.”
“True, you’re also both extremely fortunate,” he said. “I almost intervened myself.”
“And why didn’t you?”
“I needed to see for myself how you operate, Isobel. I needed to know that my trust in you is not misplaced.”
“Well, as long as you’re trusting me to wind up covered in vile black horror slime, then we’re on the same page.”
“Why did you need to see how she operates?” the Dauphine asked pointedly.
“I have plans and schemes, my dear,” he said, giving me one of those obnoxious little Santa Claus winks that was supposed to put me at ease and make me reach for a Coca-Cola.
We began sailing past pocket universes that seemed familiar, or at least, aerial topography of pocket universes was a thing that seemed familiar, or comforting, or whatever. Then another long stretch of emptiness, as landmarks and smears of ideas receded once more into the distance. And then, I became clearly aware that things were growing dim somehow, and then the Ferrari slowed to a halt. Behind us, you could see a colorful miasma; ahead of us, all you could see was an oppressive, panoramic, black wall of emptiness.
He shut the car off.
From here, we heard a roar like an angry waterfall as you approached it from several miles away, knowing that it could only grow into something more fearsome with every passing minute. Then if you listened closely, you understood it wasn’t water at all, but instead a cacophony made of shrieks and howls and anguished wails. Inhuman sounds, on a continuum with the shrieking and hissing we’d heard from the herald we’d killed.
Then you settled in and the shrieks and such faded back into their original texture as a waterfall of extreme white noise. No matter how hard you looked, though, nothing visually corresponded to the sounds you were hearing. As far as you could see, you were staring into a vast absence.
This entire mise-en-scène is what Alexander called the thunderstorm.
This was its leading edge, where it only just barely maintained a foothold in this dimension. The sight was awe-inspiring and humbling.
“This wasn’t here when I first came to the logosphere,” Alexander said. “That’s how fast it’s moving across reality, obliterating everything in its path. Understand, the punctuation marks arrived on Earth perhaps two thousand years ago, and from their perspective, the situation was already urgent. Now as you can see—humanity’s turn approaches.
“When I first arrived here, I was lost for a time. I didn’t understand what had happened to me for a long while, and then when I did understand, I desperately tried to escape my fate. For I had cheated death only to find myself consigned to a strange and bizarre pseudo-life alone among the ghosts.
“Eventually, though, I came to accept that I would find no simple exit from the logosphere,” he said quietly.
“Why didn’t you just transmute back the other direction?” I asked. I’m always good for a sincere newb question.
“Back into my dying human body?” he scoffed. “That’s all the punctuation marks would allow me.”
Interesting. Actual participation from the alien referees. How quaint and out of character. Perhaps he just didn’t take the time to convince them.
“So I took to studying the thunderstorm as closely as I could manage,” Alexander continued. “The damn thing is ontologically promiscuous. Sometimes it’s this, sometimes it’s that. Sometimes it’s a tsunami that sweeps away any trace of a given slice of reality. Sometimes it’s a singularity or a gravity well that eats history and prevents the future. Sometimes it rips open a seam and drains away every particle of soul in an entire dimension. It’s prismatic in a way, in that it’s many simultaneous things, depending on the vantage point from which you face it; if you’re on some liminal border, you can be crushed between several of its aspects at once, ground into nothingness by overlapping obliterations.”
“How could you know these things?” the Dauphine asked.
“By studying the heralds that it spits out. They’re cosmic golems, infused with the compressed terror of the many realities that were swallowed or destroyed by the thunderstorm. Those realities aren’t stored as complete imprints inside the thunderstorm itself, mind you, or we’d be embarking upon a serious data recovery project. But shards of those lost realities sometimes emerge like lava plumes, capable of doing extreme damage to anything in their path before they’re absorbed back into the flow. And frequently they survive quite a long time on their own, to the point where they attain early stage sentience and question their strange role in this metaphysical ecosystem. They can’t be reasoned with, of course; they only ever seem to express rage at its most futile.
“The heralds started arriving well before the first sighting of the thunderstorm itself. I followed many of them on my travels through the logosphere. I catalogued their traits and attributes, their appetites and attacks. I know a dozen different ways to be afraid of them that haven’t occurred to anyone who wasn’t already murdered by them. By the time a civilization learns that the thunderstorm exists, it’s usually already in the process of being torn asunder by its heralds.
“I realized I wouldn’t be satisfied until I understood not just the heralds, but the thunderstorm that spawned them. I forged a Trojan horse—a perfect simulacrum of one of the heralds I’d studied—and I sent it into the thunderstorm, intending to observe remotely via psychic link as it passed the event horizon. The simulacrum lasted four entire seconds beyond the threshold before the link was severed. I cheated death a second time during that four seconds, but I survived. I learned proper respect for this unevenly distributed singularity. The shock waves from the event start in the future and ripple backward to meet the present.”
“How is any of this helpful to you?” I asked.
“My Trojan horse survived four seconds, and it was constructed out of arbitrary raw materials I found strewn about the logosphere,” he replied. “I believe I will survive much longer inside of it once I have finally become GOD.”
He said it with an impressively straight face, so I knew I shouldn’t laugh, but also, I didn’t really feel like laughing. If the most powerful linguist mage in existence, revered by an entire alien species, saw a path to becoming a god, who was going to stop him?
“Yeah, I’m going to need more information about that,” I said.
We peeled away from our vantage point in sight of the leading edge of the thunderstorm, and cruised away, continuing on our road trip.
“We are all mighty in our fashion,” he replied, and I imagined he was referring to the cabal at that point. “But none of us yet operate at the scale of gods who carve realities out of nothingness, or whose conscious minds fuel life in their domains.”
This was getting tenuous for me. I was perfectly willing to accept alien punctuation marks with vast control over humanity’s experience of reality; I was willing to accept a monstrous singularity that reached backward from the future to destroy the present; I was willing to accept that the logosphere and the material plane and the imaginary realm were all just pages in an infinite multiversal book filled with wonders and horrors I’d never know; but for some reason, start throwing the word “god” around and it was a slippery slope to accepting angels and afterlives and predestination and only one fucking set of footprints in the sand and I just couldn’t do that to myself.
But he was very serious.
“All the heralds that I studied, all the shards of blasted realities that gave up slivers of history to me, convinced me the thunderstorm has yet to face a truly godlike entity,” he said earnestly. “It’s time for a test of its limits. The punctuation marks have already signaled they would welcome me in this capacity. Of course they would—I am proposing to become their ultimate protector.”
“And everyone else’s?” I asked.
“More or less.”
“How are you going to do it?” I asked. “Protect everyone, I mean.”
“I will pierce the veil of that thunderstorm, and travel far beyond its event horizon, until I can travel no further. Then I will tear the thunderstorm apart from the inside.”
This plan was lacking on specifics, but I admired the gusto.
“Just so I’m clear,” I said, “what exactly do you need me for? Sounds like you got it covered—attain godlike powers, kill the bad thing, the aliens are happy, and there was much rejoicing in the logosphere. Why am I even here?”
“I need an avatar to carry out my will on Earth, Isobel. I need a prophet to face the cabal in my name and demand their loyalty. And if they will not bend to you, then I need a warrior Queen to destroy them. In return, when I am GOD, you can sit at my right hand as I reshape all of human civilization.”