“We prepared ourselves to race across the logosphere,” said the Dauphine.
“The thunderstorm’s movement is almost impossibly slow and imperceptible; its advance is felt deep in the soul rather than measured by some mundane unit of observable distance.
“But the heralds—oh, the heralds can be witnessed quite clearly, always ranging ahead of the thunderstorm, seeking out targets, hunting down life-forms, perhaps unnecessarily clearing the way for their dark creator’s arrival. Alexander had tangled with the heralds on many occasions. He had developed methods for distracting them, or taunting them. He knew their temperaments quite well, understood feints that tricked them, and he could easily reach speeds exceeding theirs when the time, eventually and frequently, came to flee.
“And he could fight them, too. In one-on-one combat, he was mighty and perilous to behold, but the heralds frequently travel in packs when they are not lurking in disguise somewhere, and even a pair of heralds could overwhelm Alexander’s arsenal. So carving a direct path through an entire onrushing brigade of heralds seemed like a suicidal task.
“But Alexander was not daunted.
“He said to me, ‘I’ve spared them the full extent of my skills, because they learn, and they adapt. If you fight a herald and it survives, it gossips back to its fellow nightmares, and they develop cunning strategies for defeating you should they encounter you again on the chessboard. And the chances of that are high, because once you survive them, they hunt you with increasing urgency, almost as though their humiliation at failing to murder you the first time is now their primary motivating reason to exist.’
“Then he said, ‘The logosphere has so far presented the heralds with very few challenges. And they’re familiar with me now. But you’ll be a complete surprise, and we must take advantage of this fact while we can. What can you do that they will never see coming?’
“We discussed tactics at length as we embarked through the rift in the map and set off across the logosphere. I intended to cast a portal to take us to the front of the herald formation, but Alexander warned against it, suggesting that the moment we used any magic in their vicinity, all of their attention would immediately come down hard upon us, and we should ensure we used that initial moment for a surprise attack.
“I struggled to comprehend the geometry of our approach, for when he had brought us within sight of the thunderstorm before, it was farther away from us at that point than the entire length of the Sparkle Realm itself, and farther still. He said, ‘When the heralds mass, they bend their local spacetime around them, twisting it to their will, fashioning slivers of reality into barbs and spikes. And when they congregate in such numbers as we will face, in the churning waves that regularly unfold from the thunderstorm itself, they own reality, but the thunderstorm has not yet consumed it.
“‘We will not travel in some straight line through the heralds, like a missile streaking toward a target. Instead, I will pull these heralds toward us, luring them away from their source of strength. I will detonate ideological gravity wells that will ensnare them and epistemological supernovae that will decimate them. When their first wave falls, in the briefest of moments when they retreat and regroup against these lightning strikes, then let’s hope you can see clearly to the thunderstorm itself, to commence your tunneling attack. I’ll be by your side, destroying them with the rage of my voice. Do you understand?’
“‘Where did you learn these incredible spells?’ I asked.
“‘I am self-taught in these ways of being GOD,’ he replied. ‘I have made much progress on my own. But someday soon I shall find myself fully exalted.’”
I caught Olivia’s tiny smile when the Dauphine said that. Really it was starting to bug me that after all the time I’d known Olivia, she was resolving down into a fangirl for Alexander; there absolutely had to be something I was missing.
“We crashed headlong into the heralds. Alexander’s voice seemed to be everywhere, all around us, many incarnations of it chanting simultaneous disparate attacks. His voice drowned out the sudden freakish bleating of the closest heralds to us as they realized the affrontery of our presence. He destroyed dozens at a time, shredding them into particles of hatred swirling all around us like black and poisonous snow. I carried up the rear, using my pistols instead of my portal because I did not yet want them to see my portal in action, lest they learn a defense against it before I arrived at the thunderstorm.
“And that is how we fought for what seemed to me an eternity: the two of us locked in combat against foes that seemed to endlessly replenish themselves, with only the stamina of Alexander’s voice truly keeping us both alive, until finally, miraculously—as befitting a god—he created at last a window of opportunity for me, a clear path straight to the face of the thunderstorm itself. And so I rocketed past him, leaving him to his fate. I dared not look back.
“A towering cliff face seemed to rise up in front of me, pulsing and veiny like flesh, yet misty and immaterial at the same time. I could feel a hyperintelligence probing me, a mind so computationally intensive that consuming all of reality would be the only way to feed it, and even then, only for the briefest of infinities.
“I launched my volley of portals at the surface of that cliff, creating the tunnel I had envisioned, and so I journeyed deep within the heart of the thunderstorm.”
“My magic was sorely tested as I pursued my course.
“The portals protected me, but they were porous in various ways. I found myself infused with memories that dripped from the tunnel walls onto me, memories of people frozen in the moments when they realized they were lost to the thunderstorm’s advance, ghosts forced to relive these moments over and over for eons, their lives and hopes eternally squandered, until finally their essences were fully extracted and pulverized into dissonance and wails.
“There seemed to be no way ‘out’ ahead of me, and the increasing pressure on the tunnel indicated to me that the organism was attempting to reject me as though I was a virus. Finally, I accepted that there was no grand plan beyond consumption that I could grasp from my limited point of view, no strategy to defeat it that I could somehow derive from superficial flaws or weaknesses, and no trail of littered remains lurking ‘beyond’—it was all thunderstorm this direction, in perpetuity.
“But I did come to one conclusion about its nature. The thunderstorm is intelligence so malevolent that reality gives way in its presence, and it comes from a purely antithetical impulse to life itself. It mimics life in ways, but in truth it is blind to the concerns of life, a vast gnawing ontological omnivore devoid of mortal concerns. Alexander aims to be GOD, a pursuit that I fully understand. The thunderstorm negates gods.
“I opened a portal back to the beginning of the tunnel, so that I could escape. Screeching tendrils of antipathy clawed after me, slapping at my heels, knocking me to and fro without managing to grasp me in my deliberately erratic flight path. At this point, I could have opened a portal to anywhere in the logosphere in a desperate effort to escape.
“But then I saw Alexander, at the height of his glory, riding the back of a herald as though he had tamed it, and perhaps a dozen heralds of all shapes and sizes, oozing masses and slithering insectoids, roaring hellbeasts and angular shadowdemons, had rallied to his call, and together they had formed a surprising assault on the unprepared heralds who had never faced their own.
“Suddenly my desire to escape seemed selfish, and cheap, and shallow; and I rocketed as close to his side as I could get, ensuring he could see me, and I began blasting my way through our foes. A tremendous and horrifying wrenching sound came from behind us, teeth and gears crunching and grinding, as the thunderstorm prepared to churn out yet another agonizing new wave of compressed fear fashioned into weapons.
“I took the opportunity to flee, trying to lead a chunk of heralds away from Alexander. A thundering cloud of them chased me. I did not dare lead them to the Sparkle Realm. And I knew no safe haven within the logoshere where I could hide.
“So I set my thoughts on you, Isobel. I hoped and prayed that you could save me, and I opened a portal, and so I found myself here.”