Understanding was beginning to dawn on Grunthor. “And then she’s yours?”
Achmed glanced up at him. “What none of you understand is that, in a very important way, she is already. She’s the only other one who knows it.”
“She does?”
“Yes.” He drained the last of his brandy. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe it’s my turn to dance with the bride.”
Grunthor shook his head as Achmed made his way down the hill. He was standing beside Rhapsody just as the dance ended, and the Sergeant watched in amusement as she looked up at the Firbolg king and smiled broadly, nodding in delight and taking his hand. He wasn’t sure what was more amusing: the sight of Achmed dancing the mazurka, or the look on Gwydion’s face as Achmed nimbly swept his bride out from in front of him and danced her away.
As the first star appeared it was greeted by a chorus of Lirinsong, then by a tempest of fireworks lighting the heavens around it. Gwydion watched the display from the top of a hilly rise beneath a willow tree, his beautiful, finally official wife leaning on his shoulder and watching the sky with him. She sighed deeply and looked up at him, her eyes gleaming with the memory of another starry night, another willow tree.
“You know, I’ve decided something, m’lady,” he said as he leaned over and kissed her.
“Yes, m’lord?”
“The only way I intend to watch the stars from now on is by seeing their reflection in your eyes.” He kissed her again as a new shower of sparks went up, lighting her face and gleaming in her hair.
“As you wish.” The clamor from down the hill grew; the wedding guests were growing impatient, waiting for the next round of toasting and music. Rhapsody sighed again. “How much longer is this supposed to go on? We’ve been celebrating all day.”
Gwydion stood and pulled her up with him. “The nice thing about being in charge is that you get to say when you can leave,” he said, smiling down at her and remembering the rose-petal-strewn bed waiting for them in the room behind the waterfall. “Let’s go drink to our collective happiness, and then depart to start experiencing some of our own. Does that sound good to you?”
“Very good.”
Above them a golden shower of sparks ignited, brightening the darkness, to fall a moment later, slowly, drifting to earth on the warm wind. Rhapsody put out her hands with childlike delight and tried to catch some as they fell; tiny star-like embers coming to rest in her palms, gleaming between her fingers, like the dream she had had so long ago, on the other side of the world, and of Time. The light sparkled brilliantly on the diamonds of her wedding ring. The significance of the moment was lost on all but one, the one who had been with her there, under those stars, half a world away, who waited with her now, smiling, as the tiny lights gleamed brightly in her hands before burning out.
She turned to him and saw the last few floating sparks reflected in the deep chasms of the vertical pupils of his eyes, then reached up and kissed him, setting off a roar of applause from the bottom of the hill. “Ryle hira,” she whispered to him. Life is what it is.
“Nol hira viendrax,” he answered, smiling. And I am grateful for what it is.
They hurried down the hill, hand in hand in the starry darkness, running excitedly to begin the rest of their lives.
Epilogue
Meridion stopped the frame. The image on the Time Editor’s screen froze, hovering fuzzily in the air and dusty light projected onto the curved, clear wall of the observatory. He leaned forward over the instrument panel, resting his chin on his hands, gazing thoughtfully at the picture of his parents, captured eternally in a moment of true happiness, frozen in Time, laughing as they ran through the starry night. His timing, however inadvertent, was fortuitous.
Meridion rose from the Editor. His aurelay, which he had formed into a chairlike seat while he worked, dissolved and reabsorbed into his translucent body as he stepped away from the machine. He walked slowly over to the glass wall and came to a stop in front of the blurry image of his mother; the projection undulated as he moved, causing the lines and shadows to stretch and wave as if dancing on an unnoticed breeze.
How happy you look, he thought, crossing his arms in front of him as he stared at the projection from the lorestrand. I am glad. Even if this is the end for me now, even if the new tapestry of Time that has just been woven turns out no better than the first, at least there is this moment of happiness for you. Far better than what had gone before, for certain. I am glad.
His eyes wandered over the picture of his father, a man he had seen but never met, utterly unrecognizable in the vigor of youth and health. By this time in the old life you had sunk irretrievably into madness, broken in both body and mind, Meridion thought, watching the way the currents of air within his glass globe observatory made the image look as if Gwydion were running even now, caught forever in jubilant motion. Again, I am glad for you.
How strange it was, he mused as he returned to the machine, to feel such sentiment, such a connection, to people he had never met.
Time thudded heavy around his ears. Meridion finally worked up the courage to look out through the glass panes of the observatory at the world below. He inhaled slowly, letting his breath out in increments.
The fire had receded, disappeared in fact from the surface of the distant Earth; now clouds gathered over the blue-green seas, swirling on the wind, racing around the mountain ranges, obscuring his view. As it should be, he thought, fighting off the melancholy that was surging within his heart. No man should have so clear a view of the world if he is going to live in it.
He bent down on the floor next to the Time Editor and carefully gathered the scorched scraps of timefilm, shredded into burnt confetti and stripped ribbons at his feet. Meticulously he searched until he came upon a fragment that he had seen fall not long before, as the new history replaced the old, like a rerouted riverbed, or a tapestry rewoven from the same silken threads into different patterns. The brittle scraps were growing dim, dissolving on the floor, gone now from Time, from history. Soon they would disappear altogether, leaving nothing, not even memory, for in reality they were now only the remains of a Past that never was.
Meridion held the filmstrand up to the light. Satisfied, he draped it over a secondary lamp on the Editor’s instrument panel, and focused it on the wall next to the screen that held the picture of his parents.
In the dim light he could barely make out the image, a small, elderly figure in pale robes woven in the symbology of the ancient Namers, her long hair white as snow, braided and bound simply back in a black ribbon. Her face was lined and scarred, her body bent under the weight of age, though held steady in the grace of a strong will. In the crook of her arms she cradled a white birthing cloth, a garment used to catch a child as it emerged from the womb. Her hands reached aloft, as if in supplication.
It was the moment of his birth in the old life.
He avoided looking at the next frames of film fragment that lay across the panel, coiled in a tattered spiral. Within those next few moments of time had been great agony, gruesome death. Though he had never known his mother, upon coming into existence he had still felt her love, even in those last moments of her life, and in the wake of her hideous demise. He had changed Time, and probably her fate, but he still could not bear to witness what had happened to her again.
The reel that held the film of the new history caught Meridion’s eye, resting patiently on its pinion. Idly he took the end and unspooled it, holding it up to the ambient light of the observatory. Unlike the shards of fading Past that were melting before his eyes, this new thread was clean and strong, vivid.
He spun it out farther, looking for moments that had been particularly rewarding to witness: the meeting of Emily and Gwydion, the boy she had called Sam, in a green summer meadow; the Three emerging from the Root into the air of a new world they otherwise would never have seen; the moment Achmed took the throne, and the destiny, of the Bolg, as his own; the reunion of his parents; the victory over th
e demon; the rebuilding of the new world. Yes, he thought, running the smooth, thick film along the edge of his finger, it was worth it indeed.
But what of the Past as it had been? There needed to be a reverence for its loss. The outcome of events in that course of Time that had led ultimately to failure had been disastrous, for certain, but there had been moments of glory, too, heroism and brave acts of selflessness, choices, both wise and foolish, and love. He looked again at the frame of Achmed watching his parents’ wedding and smiled wryly. Certainly there had been love.
An overwhelming impulse seized him. Before he even had time to process the thought his hand darted out and swept the fragment of timefilm from the lamp, gathering it up from the floor with the last remaining scraps of the old life, the first history, the rewritten Past. He laid the disappearing snippets on a glass panel, the bottom half of a slide that rested on the Time Editor, and snatched a bottle of fixative from the whirling prismatic disk hovering in the air beside the machine. Feverishly he doused the shards with the glimmering potion, preserving them. His eyes blinked rapidly as he pressed them carefully between the glass panel and a cover plate.
He opened a drawer in the Time Editor, lifted the slide he had just created, and slowly slid the panes of glass into the depth of the cabinet, then closed the door softly. He breathed shallowly, trying to regain his calm.
A sense of great dread coupled with relief washed over him. He had no idea what other moments of the rewritten Past he had just rescued; it might be as much a dire action as a good one, but it had been as strong an impulse as he had ever experienced. Since he did not know what lay ahead for him now, he decided he was right to trust the compulsion.
A shadow on the wall caught his eye. He looked up to where the last image had been projected to see shadows of it still there, as if burned into the glass. The outline of the elderly woman’s body was dimmer now, her hands reaching up into diffuse light and gray patches. Meridion put his hot forehead down on the cool surface of the Time Editor and tried to summon the courage to take the next step.
Even though his body was formed only of thought, lore, and pure will, his consciousness unhindered by the limitations of human flesh, Meridion was still capable of feeling the pain of imminent physical loss, the sting of tired hands, the delayed weariness after so much despair. He struggled not to be swept up in the choking fear of the unknown that faced him now.
The events that had brought him into being had been inexorably altered, shredded into scraps of amber film, gone now except for the few random fragments he had rescued along with the record of his birth. The steps he had taken in manipulating Time had produced the result he had prayed for, it seemed. The world beneath him was turning, sailing slowly through the ether, blue and whole and covered with swirling currents of air that danced across its surface, heedless that there had ever been any destruction looming. His meddling in the Past had worked. The disaster he had sought to avert had been averted.
At the same time he knew that the events his intervention had put into place had disrupted his own story, had negated the circumstances under which he had been conceived. He did not know if the new path Time was now taking would lead to his own rebirth somewhere in it.
Or not.
Contemplation, both now and before he undertook to alter the Past, had led him to believe against it. He had been brought to life, conceived as a concept, not really as a child, by two scarred individuals, one aged, one made old beyond his years by circumstance, who gave of their lives, their lore, to fulfill a prophecy different from any that now existed in the rewritten history. At least the first part was different; Meridion had been surprised to see Manwyn utter some of the same prophecy in the new history, in Time as it was now. In the old history it had foretold his birth:
I see an unnatural child born of an unnatural act. Rhapsody, you should beware of childbirth: the mother shall die, but the child shall live.
Why did the Seer utter it again, in the rewritten history? he wondered, cradling his head in his hands. Would the magical sacrifice that Rhapsody, the elderly Liringlas Namer, and Gwydion of Manosse, a broken man dead in the eyes of the world, had undertaken to bring him into the world still be necessary in the Future? With the F’dor destroyed and the war averted, it hardly seemed so. And yet now that the Past had been erased and re-formed, the Future was unfathomable.
Instead of meeting as they had, in the new world, solely for the purpose of forming him to fulfill the warning of a prophecy, his parents had instead met in their mutual youth, had fallen in love and joined their souls of their own free will. Everything they had endured had brought them together again; it seemed little enough to hope for, that they might eventually bring him into existence by the mere happenstance that every other living soul comes out of. Meridion knew that this was merely wishful thinking, however. Just bringing lives together did not guarantee how they would be put to use. It was an observation he had made many times while watching the Past unspool itself as it was being altered. Time was fragile, and subject to change.
It’s your destiny.
Hogwash. We make our own destiny.
Yes, Meridion thought, bitterly amused. Yes, yes, we do.
For now his life hung, suspended in Time, within the glass globe of his observatory, powered by the ethereal fire of Seren, the star for which his mother’s homeland had been named. When the Time Editor shut down, the film of Time would begin to run again, endless and uninterrupted. And he would then come to his ending, winking out like a candleflame.
Have I made all the amends, begged all the forgiveness I need? he wondered dully, running through a list of people in his mind, hoping that absolution would come in any case for whomever he had inadvertently harmed with his intervention. He thought mostly of Achmed, and what the changes in Time had cost him. Forgive me, he thought in silent prayer to a man he had also never met. In my place, I think you would have done the same. He remembered the words of contrition that the Bolg King had offered up to the Patriarch in the new history and smiled wanly. Given the choice, I think you would have wanted it that way, too.
His ultimate goal, of course, had been paramount; all sacrifices, all changes that had occurred between one history and the other had been worth the cost. Whatever detriments had come from the revision were to be added into the balance sheet and weighed off against the result, just as all more fortuitous outcomes were merely coincidence. Meridion looked up once more at the image of his mother in happy events of the new history and exhaled. Had he not sliced his father out of Time in his youth and grafted him back into the Past for the purpose of meeting her, she would never have followed him, never would have journeyed with Achmed and Grunthor, never would have had this moment, and any other happy ones that might follow. And the world would have been consumed in fire. I didn’t do it for you, he thought, staring at the projection. But I am still glad.
Before his eyes the darker image of his birth faded and disappeared into oblivion.
I am fading, too.
Slowly Meridion reached over and shut off the Time Editor’s switch, separating the machine from the light of Seren. The glowing instrumentality vanished into utter darkness. He closed his eyes as the remains of the timefilm he had known ignited on their reels, dissipating like the smoke from the last embers of a long-dead fire.
The circular glass walls of his observatory melted away in a heartbeat.
The last words he heard as the world fell down around him were spoken in the voice of the man who had guarded him from birth, who stood with him until the moment he entered the Time Editor’s enclosure, had comforted him in his own awkward way.
Will I die? Meridion had asked his guardian, knowing that the answer could not impact his undertaking. He heard the reply again now as the air from the circular glass room left, rushing into the dark vacuum of space. The words reverberated against the disappearing glass of the windowpanes in fading echoes.
Can one experience death if one is not really alive? You, lik
e the rest of the world, have nothing to lose.
Amid the horrific noise and swirling vortex that consumed his life energy, Meridion felt the translucent form that had been his body expand, stretched infinitely out over the vastness of Time and space, then explode in a burst of agony. His diminished awareness ebbed, then grew, only to flash around the outer reaches of the sky, an incandescent beam of light, until it fell like a blazing stone through the windswept clouds, hurtling to the Earth below.
The last fragments of his conscious thought screamed with the anguish of death, howled with the pain of birth, tumbled, blind, through the flashing images of a Past he didn’t recognize, of a future he could barely see, until it stopped, became aware again, like awakening from a dream-filled sleep.
Meridion opened his eyes.
The first thing he saw was the familiar, smoothly polished stone and thick glass windows of the high tower around him. He felt the coldness of the marble chair on which he sat, chilling the muscles of his body, a body that had pleasurable heft and weight to it. He was glad to note the reunion of his conscious mind with his physical form; he remembered that the first few times he had meditated, traveling back or forth in Time, he had been petrified there would be nowhere for him to return, but had eventually reconciled himself to the risk.
It was reassuring to step out of Time and back into himself, into his memories, the history he knew both from the old tales, and from seeing it himself.
Whatever he had been seeking on this journey had eluded him. He had always had a sense that there was something different about Time than the way it appeared, but could never find the link, the evidence, that any other reality had ever existed than the one he knew, and could see in his mind’s eye. It seemed to him for some reason that his memories, and the history he was able to view, were somehow new, fresher than one might think they should be.