“This is not the end,” Umber told Jason. “In fact, this is the beginning.”
Jason, Shade and Umber walked through the giant standing stones that anchored the dimensional bridge between Pallimustus and Earth. The size of a sports stadium, the stones had intricate sigils and diagrams carved all over them. Jason looked over the complex changes made from his and Clive’s original design, most of which were beyond his comprehension.
“I know this feels like a culmination for you,” Umber continued. “This business with the goddess and your homeworld all feels so important. But a few billion years from now, they’ll both be gone, at least in any meaningful way, while the three of us will still be playing my game.”
“You’re keeping me from my family and my friends. From the people I’m responsible for. It’s not a game to me, and while I think you know that, you do not understand it.”
“Oh? Are you going to educate me?”
“I have worse than pawns and henchmen to deal with. Our reckoning will have to wait.”
“Well, that’s the joy of immortality; we have all the time we need.”
Jason moved closer to one of the stones to examine it closely.
“I’m not sure I can even complete the bridge like this,” he said. “This was already pushing the limits of my astral magic expertise when Clive and I built it. The modifications you’ve made are beyond my understanding. Was it really necessary to weave a separate soul magic ritual into it?”
“We had to make sure that you would participate in both. You are known for being tricky.”
“But I’m not known for soul engineering. To call my grasp of it embryonic is being generous. I have some instinctive understanding, because of what I am, but the theory is beyond me, let alone the praxis.”
“I’ve been careful with my changes, to make sure you can invoke the magic. You just have to trust that I haven’t done anything that will affect you too negatively.”
“I know what it will do. I understand that much, at least. As I said, I have some instinctive knowledge of soul engineering.”
“This is not the kind of magic you want to be using by feel.”
“I don’t always get what I want.”
“You should get used to that. Now that you and my brother are a permanent set, you will be joining him in the little imprisonment game we play.”
“I told you that this isn’t a game for me. As you will eventually come to see for yourself.”
“I look forward to it, although it may be a greater task than you think. In the wake of Shade binding himself to you, father has seen fit to involve himself.”
“The Reaper has chosen to help you?” Shade asked.
“Are you truly surprised, brother? Did you think that father would tolerate your abandonment without reaction?”
“Why would the Reaper have helped my clan the way he did if he held a grudge?” Jason asked.
“There are many kinds of debt,” Umber said, “and great astral beings are never simple entities.”
“You know that I’m a great astral being, right?”
“I stand corrected,” Umber said.
“What has our progenitor done?” Shade asked.
Jason glowered at Umber, then left the brothers to talk as he resumed his examination of the standing stones. He crouched before one of the towering stones and used his fingers to trace the etchings upon it from the ground up.
“I will confess,” Umber told his brother, “that I may have been overly ambitious with this particular round of our game. Things were not coming together the way I had hoped before father’s intervention. And I did get rather lucky in several regards. Your new meat puppet was kind enough to solve some of my problems himself.”
“Meaning what?” Jason asked, looking up.
“I was having trouble finding a way to get you into my trap. The business with the sword in the Order of the Reaper’s astral space was one of many abandoned plans that I adapted for other purposes. Then you went and sat on the Cosmic Throne.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Jason asked, standing up. “I touched the throne for barely an instant, and I’m done with all that now.”
The two shadow brothers shared a glance.
“But is it done with you?” Umber asked. “Do you truly believe that you can put a hand on the Cosmic Throne and be done with it?”
“He is right, Mr Asano. However brief your connection to the throne, the experience changed you. You know that, even if you fear what confronting that will mean.”
Jason thought about a door in his astral kingdom he had put out of his mind the moment he’d last stepped through it. It was a door he had expected to never open again.
“I still don’t understand what that has to do with your plans,” he told Umber.
“There are places in the cosmos whose borders are beyond the ability of almost any to transgress, even with the authority of a great astral being. I am going to put you in such a place, but I was having trouble finding a way to get you in. But there are some whose authority knows no boundaries. Your connection to the Cosmic Throne lets you go places most cannot.”
“I’m not connected to the throne anymore.”
“Then I suppose my plan will fail miserably.”
“Even if I can go to this place you’re sending me, doesn’t that also mean I can walk right back out?”
“Presumably,” Umber said. “Good luck with that.”
Realising he would get no more out of Umber, Jason shook his head.
“I’ve seen enough,” he said. “Let’s get this thing done.”
***
Jason stood at the heart of the standing stone formation, Shade by his side. The ground beneath his feet was hard-packed dirt. The observers from the Church of Knowledge were outside the vast magical working, leaving Jason and his familiar relatively alone.
“Before we begin, Mr Asano, you should place items from your inventory into my dimension space,” Shade said. “Yours is connected to your astral kingdom, from which your prime avatar is about to be cut off.”
Jason scowled.
“This is going to feel bad, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Shade said. “This is outside of my experience.”
Jason moved a lot of items to Shade’s dimensional storage, from magic items and clothes to a fortune in spirit coins. He included his sword and the amulet and cloud flask on the chain around his neck, just in case.
“Not the cloud flask,” Umber said, emerging from the shadow of one of the standing stones. “That goes into your inventory.”
Jason glared at Umber but said nothing.
“You agreed to go quietly, Asano.”
Jason continued to stare daggers at Umber for a moment, then took back the cloud flask from Shade and placed it in his inventory.
“Thank you,” Umber said, then returned to the shadows.
The actual enaction of the ritual was relatively straightforward. The dimensional bridge had been decades in the making and even with Umber’s modifications, it was the magical equivalent of flicking a switch to activate a very complicated machine.
There was very little visual effect, relative to the scale of the magic involved. The carving on the standing stones lit up, not especially brightly. The impact on Jason was similarly unimpressive to look at, but within, he felt a fundamental shift. He tilted his head and blinked several times.
“Mr Asano?”
“I’d forgotten,” Jason said. “I didn’t realise how different it was. How much I’d changed.”
“Mr Asano?” Shade asked again.
“It’s just me,” Jason muttered. “No astral kingdom. No clan running around, living their lives. It’s just… me. I’d forgotten what it’s like to be the only one in my own head.”
“Mr Asano, are you alright?”
Jason shook his head to clear it, then looked at Shade.
“I was expecting pain. Powerlessness. I mean, I suppose that’s there. I can’t feel all the cosmic energy people keep telling me I shouldn’t call on. No astral gate, no soul forge. It feels light. Free. I haven’t felt like this in decades. Maybe not since my first trip back to Earth.”
As Jason was taking his sword and magic items back from Shade, Umber approached through the standing stones, flanked by diamond rankers from the Church of Knowledge. The priests were draped in robes that were more practical than ceremonial, much like the loose combat robes Jason preferred. Despite being ageless, they looked to be a well-preserved fifty or so, older than most essence users.
Both priests were stern, the man looking like the headmaster at an English all-boys school in the forties. The woman was Lucella Carnes, the priestess who had approached Jason on his arrival. Her appearance was somewhere between ‘head librarian’ and ‘nurse at a hospital you desperately wanted to avoid.’
“It’s time to go,” Lucella Carnes announced.
“It’s not finished,” Jason told them. “Give it a moment for the magic to permeate through the dimensional boundary.”
The clergyfolk waited, eyes locked on Jason. He looked around as if getting bored while standing in a queue at the sandwich shop. Finally, the lights on the standing stones dimmed and the stones themselves crumbled to dust, kicking up a cloud that covered them all. Jason used his aura to create a bubble of clean air around himself, while one of the diamond-rankers conjured up a sphere of wind to shield him and his companion.
There was no more visual effect, but to anyone able to sense dimensional fluctuations, a massive force had snapped into place. To Jason, it felt like standing at the shore of the Red Sea as it parted, opening up passage for the faithful.
“There you go,” Jason said. “So, what’s next?”
***
What was next turned out to be a dimension ship that carried Jason, Umber and a contingent of gold and diamond-ranked priests away from Pallimustus. The dimension ship had the shape of a giant bird forged of metal. The interior, at least the part Jason had been led into, was surprisingly akin to a private plane.
“This feels almost mundane, if I’m being honest,” Jason said as he sat in a plush chair. “When I think ‘imprisoned at the behest of a god,’ airports aren’t what comes to mind. Is there beverage service on this flight?”
“If you’re done whistling past the graveyard,” Umber told him, “I can tell you where it is that I am taking you.”
Umber’s indistinct shadow form was less seated in the opposite chair than piled onto it, dark orange eyes staring from a dark, swirling mass.
“Sure,” Jason said.
“As you know, many things were broken when the Cosmic Throne was sundered. The great astral beings worked to control the damage and maintain things on their own, but their failings were swiftly made plain. My father was one of the first to regret what they had done, and for good reason. There were instances of afterlife realms becoming corrupted and wrenched from his control.”
“Afterlife realms?” Jason asked.
“There are many realm types that exist within the cosmos,” Shade said, emerging from Jason’s shadow. “Normal universes are the most common, but there are others. Pocket universes, astral kingdoms. Many are hidden from and inaccessible to mortals. As you have joined the ranks of true immortals, it is no longer forbidden to grant you such knowledge. You know that reincarnation is one fate that can await souls after death, but there are many others. I believe that Umber is taking us to one such place.”
“Indeed,” Umber confirmed. “We are on the way to a place that bears some resemblance to an afterlife your world refers to as the Elysian Fields. Or it did, until the sundering. The place is corrupted, and no more souls are sent there. Our father’s authority no longer extends to that place. His power cannot reach it, nor can his agents enter.”
“But you can?”
“No, I cannot. I am, ultimately an agent of my father.”
“You keep calling the Reaper that. Father.”
“I do not care for the word ‘progenitor.’ It is impersonal. Distant. My father may not have a gender, but in places that do, the preponderance of references personify him as male. Including on your planet.”
“Fair enough. But, if you can’t enter this place, how are you going to take me there?”
“I told you there are those whose authority knows no boundaries. The All Devouring-Eye. That time fellow with all the names. The Cosmic Throne.”
“I’m not an agent of the Cosmic throne.”
“Perhaps, but you are something, and sometimes that is enough. I am not taking you into this place as much as I am taking you to it, then shoving you in. What I can do is watch, looking in from the outside.”
“Okay, so you push me in. What’s to stop me from walking right back out?”
“Just because you are not barred from dimensional travel does not mean that you are capable of it. Even if you found some way out, how would your avatar survive the deep astral? Your cloud flask could produce a dimension ship, but that’s locked away with your soul and the bulk of your power.”
“Doesn’t that work for me? My avatar stops existing, and your binding does too.”
“Actually, it doesn’t. Your avatar would die, but the binding would prevent its natural dissolution. You would be trapped in a state between existence and non-existence until one of your allies managed to scour the deep astral long enough to find what’s left. And within the corrupted afterlife, there is no death. You would be become the same as the current residents, which you will soon see is not a pleasant state in which to be. Your only option, Asano, is to play the game I’ve set out for you. Walk into the trap and try to find your way out. I’m sure that you’ll eventually find a way to unbind your avatar, unseal your astral kingdom and escape. Watching you do exactly that is what I’m here for, but you will not find it easy or swift.”
***
The dimension ship had stopped. Umber, Shade, Jason and Lucella Carnes stood on a square platform floating just outside of it, still shielded by the ship’s dimensional bubble. The astral space around that bubble was an absolute void, a blackness that held neither light nor time. Even the strange symbolic visions Jason had encountered on previous journeys through the astral were absent. The only light came from a glowing ritual circle, drawn onto the middle of the platform.
“Astral geography is a funny thing,” Umber mused. “It has neither space nor time, yet we experience both subjectively as we traverse it, safe in our little shell of reality. We are in a place where nothing can exist. Where only nothing can exist. This is where my father situates some of the more orthodox afterlives. You cannot see it, but there is one here, broken and corrupt. I’ll be establishing a little observation platform to peek in and see how you’re doing.”
Umber gestured to a ritual circle in the middle of the platform.
“If you would.”
Jason stepped into the middle of the circle and conjured his cloak of stars and darkness. His eyes shone within the hood, fixed on Umber.
“Anything you want to say before you go?” Umber asked. “A declaration of impending revenge, perhaps?”
“I’m out of things to say,” Jason told him. “Now, you need to watch what I do.”
“Very imposing. How about you, brother?”
Shade fixed his gaze on Umber.
“How certain are you of our progenitor’s motives in helping you after all this time? Does revenge over my abandonment sound like something that would drive the Reaper to action, or is it after something else? Something beyond your petty power plays. And if the Reaper gets what it wants, what will it be willing to do in return?”
Umber and Shade stared at each other until Shade vanished into the ephemeral void of Jason’s cloak.
“Get on with it,” Jason said.
Umber waved a shadowy hand and Jason vanished.