Adrift among the Columns
The Infinite Plane
One wrong decision, one snap judgment, and she’d damned herself for an eternity.
It had made sense. The brute—the giant, Paendurion—had been overconfident and stupid. Glass shards in his back secured her place at the Lord’s side. One of the treacherous Three, slain at her hand, breaking untold cycles of pain and suffering. Then in the moment of her victory, she’d touched the light, reasoning it would be the means to escape the House of the Veil. It was not.
Columns of blue energy stretched as far as she could see in every direction, and she floated between them, empty and weightless. No need to eat here, or to sleep. If time passed at all, she had no means to discern it; even counting the columns had fallen by the wayside when she’d passed twelve thousand. Changing her course was a thing done by the barest fractions of degrees, as though she were a ship the size of the world with a rudder the size of a stone. In the first days—if there were such a thing as days here—she’d strained to avoid the columns, with their crackling surges of blue sparks and light. After enough time had passed she welcomed her first collision, hoping it meant death, and release.
Another of the columns loomed in front of her now, and she hung limp as her body propelled itself toward it.
She could feel her limbs, her legs and torso, though they might as well have been as distant as the world itself. Had she been able to move she would have long since gouged her own eyes, choked herself, anything to feel something other than endless waste and boredom.
Blue energy crackled around her, and vision shifted.
A chamber. Empty. A table, set with fruit, beneath a silver fixture overhead. The warmth of a fire, burning in the hearth. Long wood tables, set and ready to receive their guests.
It faded, and she returned to floating.
She was long past caring where she’d been, or what manner of object these particular blue sparks had lived behind, this time. It was all the same. Countless thousands, countless millions, stretched forever, as though the entire world was painted from the terminal points of each of these columns of light, each one corresponding to some object, somewhere, in the physical world. The first one was supposed to have killed her; instead it showed her a child’s toy, a wooden soldier, left forgotten in a field of mud and snow.
She veered away from the columns ahead, pushing with what was left of her will to adjust her course. Some days she spent hours colliding with every column, tasting life again in fleeting moments of connection. Today she wanted nothing. Emptiness, bleakness, madness. Eventually she would lose her wits here, if she hadn’t already. But how could she tell? Her Lord had been meant to provide for her, his faithful servant, who had attached herself to his greatest enemy. She alone had recognized the girl, Sarine, for what she was. She alone had performed the great service, assaulting Paendurion with her shards of glass. Why had the Lord abandoned her to this unchanging hell? Why had she been forgotten?
Anger blinded her for a moment, blurring the columns ahead with simmering rage.
No. Wait. Not rage.
There was something there.
Suddenly all her despair melted at the prospect of something—anything—new. The columns stretching in front of her were blurred, that much she could see easily. A distortion, like a gray sphere, floating on its own path, bending the light behind it to make a traveling eclipse around its edge. Floating away from her, on a perpendicular course, tracing a line in front of her.
It was moving fast. Too fast. If she veered around to follow, she’d never catch it, only trail behind, watching and wondering what it meant. She had to hit it. Had to collide.
All her will bent her course, shifting each degree with agonizing slowness. The sphere hadn’t reacted to her, if it was a thing with a will of its own, continuing on at its same, steady pace. She was no mathematician, to calculate angles with precision, but she knew enough of ballistics from soldiering. She would miss. By a fraction of a hair, but she would miss.
She exerted herself, waking parts of her mind long since resigned to death. This was her chance. Anything new might kill her, or perhaps even offer an escape. Force of will. That was the way. She was magi of the Great and Noble House of the Ox. Strength was her gift, and she would not die like this, wasted and forgotten. She forced her course to change. One more degree. More speed.
Yes.
She would make it.
Relief washed over her. It had to be a way out, whether through death, madness, or passage from this place. Hope was poison, when it soured, but for a bare fraction she allowed herself to feel it, bright and golden, as she drifted toward the edges of the gray sphere.
They touched, and something dormant rekindled in her mind.
She was the Veil.
She’d been divested of a body, resigned to the failure that had cost her any hope of rebirth. The girl, Sarine, as improbable as it was, had gained control. The kaas had been her weakness, since Zi’s death forced a change in plans, and without a body, even her will could do nothing here, in the space behind realities. It should have meant a slow death, bleeding her mind and memories into the void. A crueler end than she’d suspected Sarine capable of delivering. The girl was weak. Too weak to take her place.
Yet now, something had changed.
A body.
She examined the creature who had come into contact with the gray sphere that had been her mind. Thoughts flared inside its shell; good. Not a dead thing, and not a beast. Human. A woman, even, though she would not have been above taking hold of a man, ill as the fit might have been.
She paused to examine herself. Was this a figment of madness? A dream, meant to cruelly wake the parts of her she’d already consigned to death?
No. A body. A thinking body. A woman, here among the columns of the Infinite Plane.
She forced herself inside the woman’s mind, purging it clean of thoughts that were not hers. She’d had enough of sharing a body with Sarine. This one she expunged, eradicating all traces of the original soul until nothing remained. Nothing save her will. Her consciousness found its way into new limbs, flexing fingers with instincts almost forgotten, feeling the strength of legs and muscles in her back, her chest, her arms and neck.
She was alive.
Laughter filled her ears; a strange voice, but hers now.
So much effort to be reborn. Her pact with the Regnant; her plans with Zi. And now it was done. No more prison. She was free.
She drew on the blue sparks of Life, boring a hole into a forest glade, where cold sunlight spilled over snow-covered boughs of needles and leaves. Faster, perhaps, if she took the time to traverse the spaces on the Plane, but she relished the thought of walking on her own, of learning the intricacies of this body, of remembering what it was to be the Veil.
She stepped through, and sealed the bore behind her.