Chapter Nine: Oblivion
Part 1
“Things go wrong,” The Mage said, nodding his head slowly. “People die. Creatures die.”
“What does this have to do with the Event?” The Writer asked, peering at the man across from him. “Yes, this is tragic, but why tell me this?”
The Mage let out a long breath. “Because, despite my tremendous power, my stunning personality and not un-comely appearance, I am not infallible.”
“Why is that important to share? As far as the people know, you are like some sort of god-”
“No,” The Mage cut off The Writer sharply, gesturing with his hand. “Not like a god. A god is petty and cruel. A god is all of humanity’s faults and failures, all of its kindness and generosity magnified to unrealistic proportions. The same gods in mythology who brought fire to the people tormented them with forbidden knowledge. The same gods squabbled amongst themselves for power and influence, for love and recognition. The same gods brought forth floods because they simply…” he shook his head, “They were simply jealous. I am none of these things.”
“You seem rather prideful,” The writer pointed out.
The Mage smiled sadly. “I am prideful. I know this. But in my years alive I understand that many times pride does not matter when it comes to saving a life. What is important is understanding the importance of the life of a single child against the lives of an entire nation. What is important is that measure between an old man whose death might save millions and the guilt that man’s death might cause to you.”
“Have you had to make very many of these choices?”
The Mage fell silent, staring at the untouched plate of food before him. The Writer remained silent as well, allowing the man to work out his thoughts. There was a sense of profound fatigue, of endless responsibility in the man’s unwrinkled eyes. He did not appear a day over the age of thirty, but he seemed an old man. “Far too many to count.”
“So, did Henry Strathmore have to die?”
The Mage took a long, drawn-out breath. “I don’t know. Do I regret that he died? Of course I do. I also regret that that person in the park died. Could I have done something to help both of them? Possibl-”
“But through your actions and your actions alone you restored the stability of the planet. We have record of this. How is saving a man’s life any different than, say, fixing an entire planet. I imagine that people had to be saved as well during The Event.” The Writer leaned forward. “You say that you aren’t a god, that you are nothing like them, but, truly, a being with the ability to decide who lives and who dies… what else must it be called?”
The Mage shook his head slowly. “Is a doctor a god? In the middle of an emergency a doctor can act heroically to save a woman’s life, but in that time he spends with her, several other people pass away.”
“But that’s not an accurate analogy. A doctor only has limited tools.”
The Mage shrugged lightly. “I have better tools, yes, but they are also limited.”
“And,” The Writer said, gesturing. “Why save the world and not one man?”
“I was in a position to save the world. I was not so with Henry.” The Mage shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I’ve made these sorts of decisions before and each time…” He trailed off, his eyes lost in history, as if reliving each moment of decision. “The Event and my resolution of it is not as simple as the media makes it seem. There is always a price. As I explained to Miss Hawthorne regarding the African drought, equivalent exchange must be exacted to that the universe remains in balance. It is this rule and that of entropy that I cannot defeat. And it is because of these rules that I must make these decisions.”
Part 2
“You put them in a safehouse in Brooklyn?”
“What’s the status of the creature?” Williams replied. I stood in the apartment that the Strathmores had been assigned as part of their safehouse. An unconscious man with a US Marshal badge on his hip lay on the ground near the door. I stared at the phone, incredulous.
“The creature? The creature is dead.”
There was a pause. “Aiden?”
“Yes.”
Williams swore, which was generally surprising considering she always seemed so composed.
“And I believe you’re also missing the fact that Aiden’s father was also just killed.”
“You think that my assigning the family to Brooklyn contributed to that? I brought the Strathmores here to keep them nearby as I spoke with the UN, not to keep them handy in case a chromo-dynamic creature came hurtling out of a hotel.” She paused. “I am deeply sorry that we’ve lost Henry and I feel terrible that Aiden lost his father. But, Elijah. We have an invasion that needs to be stopped. If we don’t, a whole lot more people than just Aiden and Jenna will lose their loved ones.”
“Chrono-dynamic,” I corrected. And, of course, she was correct. There was nothing to be done just then about Henry. “Send someone up here to get Aiden and Jenna out of here.”
“I’m on my way.”
I set the phone down and looked around the small living room. Aiden sat on a chair nearby and Jenna was still on the roof with Henry. Aiden looked up at me, his eyes reddened with sorrow and pain. He still wore only his pajamas. “Why?”
I watched him for a moment before crossing the room and sitting down next to him on the couch. “Aiden, you know your father saved a civilian’s life today. Probably a number of them by shooting the creature.”
“Yeah, and then just ended up getting killed.”
“He risked and sacrificed his life to save others.”
“So, he was some kinda hero?” Aiden scoffed. “Would you have done the same thing?”
I considered. And the answer sickened me. Perhaps it was that I’d simply lived too long, but where there had once been surety that I would have sacrificed myself, now… Now I was hesitant. The treat of the complete annihilation of the entirety of the world loomed and I knew that had I died to the creature, billions more would have lost their lives. Still, that sort of logic was not what Aiden needed to hear.
“Your father was a soldier and a hero. He made the decision to give his life so that another person might live.”
“Why?”
Why? “It’s a choice he made, Aiden. He chose to make sure that no one else had to lose their father or mother.”
“So I had to lose mine.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. Was it destiny or fate that brought Henry to make that choice?
It didn’t take long for Williams to arrive. When she did she spoke softly to bother Aiden and Jenna in turn, then rode with them to the hospital with Henry’s body. I stayed behind. Despite Henry’s death, I still had work that needed to be done. I still had to get thousands of demons home before the invasion arrived. I still needed to arm this world’s inhabitants against the insane machinations of Rhianna. But, rushing off with speed seemed silly and somehow disrespectful of Henry’s memory.
I stepped out of the apartment building and made my way across the park. A hazmat team loaded the creature’s body into a truck and, a little farther on, another ambulance drove off, leaving a small group of people behind, weeping and holding each other. Two people had died because I did not stop the creature when I first had the chance. I didn’t want to kill it, I wanted to get it home but, as you said, its nature was undeniable. And deadly.
Could I afford to offer Rhianna the same choice if it came to it? Could I offer to send her home if only she would simply leave this world alone? Could I kill her, knowing that had things been different, had I made a single choice in my history, I could have wound up just like her? Insane. Mad.
I contemplated these things as I made my way back to Stonehenge. The sidewalk was covered with glass and other debris from my blazing run through New York to get to the scene, too late, of Henry’s death. But there was either that option, or ride the subway, which would take me through the location of the battle I’d had with the creature, which I didn’t want to do. Because, despite what the creature had done, I was still saddened to see it dead. Saddened that the thing did not have the opportunity to go home, to get away from the strange world.
But the words it had said haunted me. I fell.
I fell.
Part 3
Mr. Grim, Lily and the two men stood in the lobby when I returned. The men, thankfully, had clothed themselves, but Mr. Grim and Lily both looked dissheveled. Still, it was Lily who approached me as I strode toward the elevator.
“What happened?”
“The situation is handled.”
“What?” She walked with me, then put a hand on my arm, stopping me mid stride. “You killed it.”
“No, I didn’t kill it, but it is dead.”
Lily shook her head, saddened. It occurred to me just then that Lily hadn’t screamed when the creature returned, while Mr. Grim had. “Lily, how long have you worked here?”
“A little more than six years,” she said.
“Starting tomorrow you have Mr. Grim’s job.”
“Wh-what?” Lily said, altogether far more shocked about this revelation than any other of the night. And that’s exactly why she needed to be in Grim’s position.
“You have a level head, you know the hotel, you’re willful and you’re compassionate.” I smiled as I hit the button to call the elevator car. “Do you think you can do the job?”
“What about Mr. Grim?” she said, blinking away her surprise.
“As I said, you now have his job.” The lift arrived and I stepped into it. “But you didn’t answer my question: do you think you can do the job?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
I rode the lift alone up to the fourteenth floor and sighed when I arrived. The room wasn’t in as much of a shamble as I’d expected, but the door and it’s frame would need to be replaced.
The pawn-shaped device appeared, glowing with inner light as I approached and waved a hand. Work needed to be done. I placed a hand on the top of the pedestal and allowed the energies of the device to wash over me. Then, I focused.
Infinity spread before me into an infinite horizon of writhing white and blue. I found myself standing bare in this infinity, ankle deep in silvery liquid that reflected the descriptionless, yet lit sky.
Resonance, like the hum of a massive set of speakers, reverberated through my chest. I raised a hand and in the distance a column of silver liquid rose upward into a vertical infinity. The process, with the mage tower, is not unlike working with clay. I molded the fabric of the ether, the fabric of reality, warping it to fit my goal.
The demons of the world needed a way home.
Fell.
I reached through, manipulating matter and energy into the needed shape and dimension to affect a portal into a different reality. The process was delicate, like a complicated pattern of knitting or particularly intricate micro-electronics. While I could have created a sort of punch through reality, that would cause a tear or a rip in the fabric that separated two different realities.
Fell.
The word came back to me over and over again as I worked, threading, knitting, stitching the silver materials within the mage tower into a device that would enable a being to travel between…
Between…
Fell.
The creature had been strange to the point of ignoring the very nature of gravity and time. There were realities where that was the case, but the simplest explanation of the creature’s appearance was… that it had fallen from between realities. It was a creature that had dwelt in the space between this dimension and the next or any number. It lived in that strange, infinite darkness that we saw just beyond the door of the hotel.
And its claws. The gouges it made seemed familiar to me at the time and the realization hit with tremendous swiftness. I’d seen the same markings at the tomb at Truth or Consequences. It was the cause of the strange burrowing marks in the capstone to the tomb. There was another creature on the loose in this reality and I had no idea where it was or how long it had been free. Though, I assume it came forth around the same time that Rhianna began ripping holes between worlds.
Indeed, if that was the case, how many of the creatures had been set loose by ripping Tokyo free from this reality?
As I rode the elevator down to the ground floor with the portal device in my hand, a crystalline sphere that pulsed white, I considered these questions. Rhianna continued to make things immensely difficult and I was rapidly finding that the havoc she was causing was greater than I had ever expected.
Part 4
Williams stood speaking with Lily at the check-in desk in the lobby when I exited the elevator. They looked over as I approached eyebrows raised with question. Remarkable how they mirrored each other. Or, you know, now that I think about it, most every woman that I’ve met possessed that particular expression in their repertoire. It was equal parts question and skepticism. As if anything I were to say suffered from the fundamental flaw of being unverifiable and mostly false. “The evacuation device is finished.”
“What is that for?” Lily asked before Williams got the opportunity.
“There are demons on the world that wish to go home before conflict breaks out in earnest.” I handed Williams the glowing sphere. “Get this to Charles. He’ll know what to do with it.”
“You trust Charles?”
“I trust Charles as much as I trust a cat. He’ll do what’s in his best interests but he won’t go out of his way to hurt others. He’ll make sure the others know how to use the device and the evacuation can begin in earnest.”
“Hold on,” Lily raised her hand slightly. “Demons?”
“Inter-Dimensional beings.”
“Like that thing that tore up the hotel.”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“In the meantime, what do we do about Rhianna and her planned invasion?”
I sighed at that point. What else was to be done? I had people working on the weapons that would send invading forces back into their own dimensions, but Rhianna had moved an entire city in moments and manifested the entire moon in one night. Her machinations were so grand as to seem utterly comical, but the destruction she could cause in a true invasion.
The questions was: why was she teasing me? Of course, she’d taken Tokyo — why Tokyo, by the way? — and had a setback with my destroying her Death Star, but she had the technology to send groups of troops. “I don’t know,” I said, finally, “What’s going on with the UN?”
“I explained the situation and, though they were a bit skeptical at first, the evidence–”
“Tokyo.”
“Is really straight forward. That, and the moon.”
“They saw that, did they?”
“Evacuation centers are being established for the demons.”
“I’m sorry, what about evacuation for the humans?” Lily asked, reappearing from wherever it was shed’d gone off to.
“What?” I asked.
“There’s going to be an invasion, right? So why are only the demons leaving?”
We both fell silent at that. The small number of demons and their evacuation was a logistical nightmare, but to evacuate over six billion people. “That’s just unreasonable.”
“So the demons can get away safe and the rest of us poor suckers are left here to — what, work until the end comes?”
“She has a point.”
“Of course she has a point, but I don’t know if there is any place for everyone to go. Beyond that, we have quantum resonance weapons and training to implement, devices that need to be calibrated and dealt with. ENtire armies all over the world that need to be informed of the threat.”
“And that’s more important than potentially saving billions of lives?”
I shook my head, “It’s not impossible, it’s highly improbable. If I thought we had weeks, months, we could do it, but we’re looking at days.”
Lily shook her head slowly. “That’s crap and you know it.”
“What I know is that the logistics -”
“Some saved lives are better than none.”
She was right, of course. Why shouldn’t humanity be offered the same opportunity to survive as the demons. If I could not stop the invasion what other choice did humanity have?
Part 5
“Why hasn’t the world changed?”
The Mage set down his cup of tea slowly then reached to drop a cube of sugar into it. He took his time stirring the still steaming liquid, took a sip then looked up at the Writer. “I like to think that I have changed the world. Or rather, the world has changed around me.”
The Writer shook his head. “I mean, why aren’t there monuments to you?”
“What makes you think there aren’t? The Ancient world is filled with stories about heroes and villains. Most of them are made up, certainly, but there are some which are real and some of which may have been based upon me.”
“What I mean is… Why aren’t you king of the world or something similar? With what you’ve done and can do, many would have considered you a god in ancient times. Even now, with what you’ve done, why isn’t the world… I don’t know…”
The Mage nodded slowly, “You mean why isn’t the world in a perpetual state of awe and surprise?” At the Writer’s affirmation, The Mage took a long breath. “Have you ever broken an arm?”
“I broke my leg when I was seven.”
“What happened?”
“I fell off of the roof.”
The Mage shook his head, grinning. “How did that happen?”
“My father wanted to show me how he was going to take care of a roof leak himself. We were up there for a while and when he was done, I fell off the ladder as we tried to get down.” The Writer laughed, “He treated me like glass after that.”
The Mage smiled again, “Think of it like that. The world suffered a trauma but even still it went on. You parent were concerned for you, but went on with work after some time. Family members die, but people still go to work soon after. A building falls and we rebuild. Life goes on.
“When a football player makes a tremendous play or achieves MVP, he is remembered, but the fact of his victory does not change a life.”
“But you’ve saved the world, it’s a little more momentous and, frankly, important than that.”
“A point well taken. Some things have been added to human history as a direct result of my actions and I suppose now that people have an idea of the sort of unknown dangers they face every day, but that won’t change their routine. You know at any given moment there might be an invasion from beyond, what has that changed about your world?”
“I… Have a first aid kit in my car.”
The Mage smiled. “How many exits does this building have?”
“No idea.”
The Mage nodded. “There are six. The main entrance, the side entrance, one by the restrooms, one from the parking lot, the loading dock and the kitchen entrance.” He leaned forward. “You know, logically, that there is always danger, but you don’t act as if that is the case.”
“You’re saying that humanity is complacent.”
“I’m saying, that like any given system, low energy is preferable to high energy. Constant alert — the sort of world change I’m explaining — is high energy. Similarly, constant exaltation of me or any public figure is tiring. That is why the faithful only pray certain days or times of the day. Why sports fans only really rally for their sport and its players during the season. That’s why, unfortunately, new tragedies get more attention than long suffering ones.”
“What do you mean.”
“We open our hearts and wallets when there are world tragedies and sudden death, but consider the death rate in any given city or the number of people who starve to death every day. Even now, as we take tea.” The Mage met the Writer’s eyes. “All beings are… Lazy to a degree. This is why there aren’t parades every day for me and other heroes. That, and I don’t bother to stick around once the heroics are complete.”
Even with the best tech it is hard to save a life. And it can bring even a positive person down when unable to save someone.
It seems you accidentally posted chapter two twice, and you forgot to capitalize Aiden in “I am deeply sorry that we’ve lost Henry and I feel terrible that aiden lost his father.”
Other then that though, great story so far. I’ll keep checking back for updates, and can hardly wait to see where this goes.
Thanks for those catches!
Have you considered getting a beta reader to edit your updates for typos and errors before posting? Even with what the commentators mention, there are still quite a few. I would be willing to proofread for you if it was something that interested you. :)
As to the story itself, Elijah’s moral dilemma in this chapter is very compelling. I’m enjoying this, great work!
I hate those typos that spellchecker misses because they are spelled correctly just the wrong word. Both got replaced with bother in this line
It didn’t take long for Williams to arrive. When she did she spoke softly to bother Aiden and Jenna in turn,
Enjoying the story will keep checking back as you update.
Yes no time to feel loss just yet. To much needs doing to get ready for the coming attack. Still how did the creature fall into this world, maybe Rhianna had punched a bigger hole into existance by mistake. Or even to soften them up by hoping to catch quite a few of them.
Whew. I was wondering when this was going to update again, and I find that I’m not disappointed at all with it. Hope you enjoyed your holidays.
Very good work. It’s still as impressive now as when I first got started reading it. I commend you for tryint to keep to a schedule. Life has a way of throwing all sorts of things at you, so keep up the good work. We’re patient.
Oliver, Oloeopia,
Thank you so much for your comments. I try as best I can to make the schedule but recently I’ve hit a bit of a writing snag. I am trying to move the story forward but I feel as if I’m spending a lot of time having the characters talk, which I fear is boring to readers. So I sit and mull over the chapters and end up wasting time.
Thanks so much for sticking with it and I’m glad you’re enjoying the story!