The Empire: Book Six of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

  Chapter Three

  “Where are they all going, I wonder?”

  The woman known as Selerael watched another giant, silver-trimmed obsidian space transport land from the wide, arching observation window of Ariyalsynai's largest astroport.

  All around her, Federation citizens of all races and ages were coming and going; the most recent advances in centipede star-gate technology meant that a trip from Seynorynael to a planet such as Ephor or Kumshicha took only tendays. And among the alien potpourri of three hundred worlds emerging from the shuttles, few took much note of her, seemingly an ordinary Seynorynaelian woman standing by the window, wearing an unrecognizable black uniform with anachronistic swirling emblems emblazoned on the epaulettes and down the sides. Her uniform was thousands of years old.

  And Selerael was no ordinary Seynorynaelian woman. She was a time-traveler, a space-traveler, and a powerful immortal, grand-daughter of the race of beings known as Enorians. The Enorians had spread life across the universe billions of years before. Before they died out, they had been all-powerful.

  Selerael stared out on the land outside the dome; the snows had melted at last for another year.

  Another year, she thought. How many more would she live through?

  I cannot die... Have I no soul? she wondered, silently tormenting herself. Why was it getting harder and harder to care about ordinary beings while her own life continued unending, tediously unending? If they suffered, wouldn’t it be over soon? Yet she recoiled from this apathy; she had a mission to fulfill: to destroy Elder Marankeil, who was destined to become the Emperor of Seynornyael.

  “Oh, mother…” she thought with a tinge of sadness.

  Selerael stood absolutely still, still as a statue; countless citizens passed her by as she let the same thought possess her mind for an entire afternoon. Is there anything which can harm me if I fail to end the Seynorynaelian Empire? She asked herself again. She had asked herself this so many times. I could walk away and let the world continue as it is. But where would I go and would I make myself as he is, an Empress of Time??

  Selerael knew she could not forget her vow. Long ago, she had sworn a vow to her mother, a woman called Alessia, a vow to protect the planet Seynorynael and to destroy the evil Marankeil, who ruled the planet, and the Federation as well.

  This vow had been made when Selerael hadn’t known what she was in for. Yes it had been a vow made in ignorance, long ago. Since that time, Selerael had traveled many thousands of years back in time. And she had lived many thousands more, waiting for the birth of the man destined to become the Emperor.

  When Marankeil was born, she had begun to approach Marankeil many times… only to find that her arms were frozen against harming him by some higher power. Space and Time itself were preventing her from harming him. If only she had known that she, an immortal of great power, would be rendered powerless to harm him when she agreed to return in time and kill the man!

  Marankeil...

  Time, space, and it seemed the stars themselves were protecting him against her killing him, time and again. Selerael began to realize that she would have to be both patient and clever if she was to destroy him.

  In an attempt to get closer to Marankeil many thousands of years ago, Selerael had infiltrated his life under the guise of a young woman named Elera—only to change the course of his destiny.

  She had then created him, in a sense—made him the evil man he would become—on accident. For, by letting him see and come to know her, he had fallen in love with her. And her duty to destroy him had made her reject his love. That rejection had turned his heart bitter—and set him on an irretrievable course of action: his rise to power as the Elder Marankeil.

  Yes, facing this, that she was in fact responsible for the fate she had attempted to alter, Selerael had tried to escape. On one day long ago, she had left Marankeil standing by a fountain in a glade of sedwi trees, and she had fled her duty.

  For she had also fallen in love with him as a man, years before he used his scientific knowledge to turn himself into a mechanized robot. As a mechanized robot he had then become the Elder leader of the Council of Seynorynael, and one day leader of the Federation Council.

  A cold, hard anger had burned in Selerael’s heart that day, the last day she had seen him, when she stopped for but a moment to retrieve her things from the Lunei Center before leaving it forever. She had fallen in love with the man she had gone back in time to destroy—

  Marankeil.

  She hated the evil he would do, the evil man he would become, and yet now it was too late to know what he would have been without her interference.

  Instead of destroying the empire, and the emperor, Marankeil, Selerael had assured its very existence!

  Now she didn’t know what her true destiny was, and she was in great doubt of all she had ever known to be true.

  Selerael didn’t know when or how she would be able to confront Marankeil again. Could she risk meeting him, and would he know her at once as Elera, a woman who had rejected him and should have died many thousands of years before? Did she dare draw near to him again? Selerael the powerful immortal was afraid, so very afraid that she would fail if she tried to confront and destroy him—afraid of herself more than anyone else, that she would want to love him rather than kill him.

  Marankeil would understand her suffering, she thought abruptly. He had lived for more than three thousand years already...

  Selerael cast aside the thought in horror. Would she, too, turn evil and set herself up as his empress?

  No!

  Ah, she realized sadly, it would be so easy to give up her vow.

  In recent years, fighting this, she had found herself frequently thinking of the strength of her soul when she made the vow to her mother and to her own son, Adam.

  I’ll stop the eternal Emperor, you have my oath. No matter how, no matter what I have to do. The Seynorynaelian Empire will die with me...

  That vow was all that kept her going.

  Several tendays passed before Selerael suddenly decided to travel to Firien City, where the Enorian settlement had once been located. She had not been there in many thousand years. But in her moments of indecision, she found she needed to go where the Enorians had lived, where she had once lived, where the powers of good might refresh her to carry on.

  One afternoon, she turned north. Memories of the ancient community of Lake Firien called S'enor-inn-ayel had begun to play in her memory. She had lived there many hundred years.

  Oh, this beautiful place called Firien, she thought. It torments me with memories of things that can never be again.

  Selerael wanted to run from it, but she felt herself drawn back to the ancient dwelling that bordered the lyra forest and the north shore. She walked all morning from the nearest transport stop, but just when the land where her mortal son Adam had once lived appeared through the trees ahead, she turned back to the city.

  A few days later, she had gone to the provisions center in town when she glimpsed a man through the crowd, watching her carefully, his face obscured by a long hooded robe made of a rich blue material and emblazoned with an insignia she had never seen in all of her life in Ariyalsynai.

  Yet she knew that garment. And its emblem.

  With her telepathic power, she was acutely aware of the stranger's mind in all the milling crowds; his mind was as clear to her as a cloudless sky, but the frequency of his thoughts couldn’t be heard by any mortal ears.

  She took a step towards the stranger, but he drew back.

  Don’t leave! she thought in despair, but he was gone.

  She knew who he was. He was the last Enorian. The Zariqua Enassa—an Enorian colonizer of great power.

  Selerael remembered that she had a purpose, that she had a will, and he wasn’t going to escape her so easily.

  She followed the man back to the dwelling on the north
shore which she had approached days earlier, the dwelling where her mortal son Adam had once lived.

  "You!" she called out to the Enorian man, her grandfather, and stopped as she drew near.

  The strange man she had followed turned around far in the distance, in the shadowed path under the arching lyra canopy.

  It was indeed the same man that she had seen long ago in the Enorian Havens, when she had visited them. For the Havens were the buried remainder of the ship that had brought the Enorian people to the planet Seynorynael. She had gone there thousand of years ago and seen this man in a suspension capsule. Thinking that he was dead, she had left him alone and buried the Havens in a ton of rock.

  This man was the Zariqua Enassa.

  But, he was still alive!

  The Zariqua Enassa sat on the fallen log in a small clearing at the edge of the forest as she came though the overgrown path and caught sight of him. His expression was still, as if he were waiting for her. "Who are you?" she demanded, but he just looked at her with a calm, level-eyed gaze.

  "Do you need to ask?" He said.

  She flinched. The power of his melodious voice seemed to stun her for a moment.

  “I’ve been waiting to meet you, Selerael. Ever since that day in the Havens when you came looking for me."

  Selerael started to speak, but the words died in her throat.

  How had he known about her?

  “I had a feeling that you would come looking for me again." He explained. As she sat beside him, she was struck by a vague understanding that he was somehow connected to this forest, that a deeper bond existed between the lyra trees and this man of Enor than she had ever suspected might exist. It was as if they were composed of the same matter, but no, she told herself. That was ridiculous!

  “I’m glad you found me.” He said. “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t be able to meet you.”

  “Why?” She demanded.

  He laughed, a hollow little laugh. "I fear I’m dying."

  “How?”

  “We Enorians are long-lived, but not immortal. You are only immortal because of an immortality serum that your mother was given.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have my ways,” was all he would say.

  “Does Nerena know that you are dying?” Selerael wondered, looking towards the dwelling. She had read his mind and discovered that Nerena was the name of his wife.

  He looked hard at Selerael.

  “Yes, I told my wife long ago that I thought I wouldn’t live very long and that she shouldn’t stay with me.” He said. “But she said it didn’t matter, back then. I don’t know if she really believed me, or perhaps she was too young to know how she would feel about my death when the time came.”

  “That is sad,” said Selerael. “I hope that she will be all right when the time comes.”

  Selerael remembered the colonizers she had known years ago, who had told her that Enorians knew the moment of their deaths.

  “Can you tell me—how do you know me? You know about the time-loop, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Yes, I know you’re Alessia’s daughter. A time-traveler from the long-distant future.”

  “But am I? Am I really Alessia’s child?” She asked perversely. Or was she really just the creature of Space and Time, who had brought her into being just to suit their purposes?

  He didn’t answer. But he looked at her as though he had heard her internal thoughts.

  “Where is Enor?” She asked, turning to him. “Am I not only Alessia’s daughter, but also in a sense a creature from Enor? Will I ever have a chance to go back there, to leave this life behind?”

  He looked at her.

  “You know all of the secrets of Enor must die with me,” he said. “But one day, you’ll understand.”

  “What?”

  He seemed poised to divulge something he knew he shouldn’t say, but he was willing to pay whatever price to tell her.

  “You and I are both creatures of Space and Time.” He said. “Because we are Enorians, because we didn’t rightfully belong here, in this universe. Our spaceship arrived from our dead universe into this new universe, seventeen billion years ago, and by then it was too late, for we had interfered in the balance of life here. We had joined the circle in this universe, the circle of what is and what will be—”

  “I don’t understand,” she objected.

  He sighed. “I thought you might not.” He leaned back on the log.

  "You love this place, don’t you?” she said, as he listened to the branches in the wind.

  "Firien is the most beloved place on this world to me,” he replied, nodding. “Because it is here that the trees grow from the seeds I brought from the forests of Enor,” he added after a moment.

  "The Seynorynaelian forest—came from Enor?" Selerael said aloud, her breath catching in her throat.

  “You knew that already.”

  “Yes, I think I did.” She admitted, with a laugh.

  A noise sounded at the other side of the dwelling, the song of a young woman singing. In the memories she had stolen from her mother Alessia through a mindlink, Selerael recognized that voice, though it seemed she had never heard it convey such joy. The words Nerena was singing were not all Seynorynaelian, but Selerael's grandfather listened as though he understood them, laughing slightly at their unknown secret.

  "If Nerena knew what it was she was singing, I think perhaps she wouldn’t sing that song. I taught her the words.” He laughed. “I should go—" the Zariqua Enassa said, rising. “Alessia, my daughter, is sleeping, and I wish to go and kiss her on the forehead. I love her, and Nerena, and as I will die soon, I would like to spend all of my remaining hours with them.”

  “But...”

  He turned back to her.

  "Good-bye," Selerael whispered.

  "Good-bye,” he said. “And thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Through meeting you, my future granddaughter, I have glimpsed the daughter that I thought never to know. And so you have also given me one thing I never could obtain, something I thought one of my kind, inhuman as I am, would never find.”

  “What is that?”

  “Peace,” he replied, and then was gone.