Alex

Jalholm hesitated as if having second thoughts. 'Get on with it,' I said, snappily but with a smile on my face.

Finally, I thought.

Jalholm took a deep breath and the said, ‘The last I remember telling you both before you were called away, was of how I had started to investigate the inner workings of my world using Dark as my source… you remember how I said that I had named the two very specific lights that I had found as Light and Dark.

Soon into my investigation, as I focused deeper into our world with Dark as a source, the view became clouded. As I went deeper still it became more and more obscure.

Any adjustments I made to the viewer only made it worse. Then abruptly came a point where nothing at all was visible.

The Eye was completely blank showing only a dull grey, shimmering mist. Nothing I did would penetrate this grey barrier. For that is how I quickly began to think of it. It was in my way, it hid something and I had to penetrate it and see beyond. It was a barrier.’

Jalholm hesitated then, his face suddenly pale and his eyes wide.

‘Are you okay? What is it?’ I asked, as I leaned toward him.

‘I am fine, Alex… I will be fine when I have told of this. He first touched me next, you see. And it is the first that I have spoken of it…You are the first, the only one who has heard my story.’

I took his hand and squeezed it tightly - my attempt to comfort him, as he had comforted me when I cried.

Jalholm smiled, a weak but honest smile.

‘Then came the voice,’ he said, his own voice hesitant and quivering. ‘It was indistinct at first, a noise, a rasping almost. I thought it static, some form of interference from my equipment.

'The Eye, you see, did not carry sound, only light energies. I had overcome the barriers that bound how light travelled, but had not concerned myself with that of sound. I had wanted to see other worlds and their life – sound would come later when I found that life.

'So to have noise projected through my Eye was something I did not immediately consider. I searched in vain through my rooms attempting to isolate this inconvenience.

Only when I had exhausted all possibilities did I turn back to the Eye. And even then, only after exhaustive tests did I conclude that the Eye itself was projecting the noise, and that it came from within the grey mist… the barrier, as I believed it to be.

How, I did not know. The Eye had no mechanism for producing sound, no speakers as you would call them. It was just an opening, a virtual screen in the air in front of me.

I experimented –varied settings, focus and energies as much as the tolerances of the Dark light would allow… but could neither enhance or remove the sound.

I reset the Eye to its original settings using standard light, but still the shimmering mist and sound remained.

'Finally, I concluded that the Eye itself must somehow be faulty. By then though, I was exhausted, and so replacing it would have to wait until morning. I tried to close the Eye down, but it did not respond. Nothing I did had any affect. The shimmering grey mist remained, as did the hissing noise.

'I left for my bed, resolving to remedy the problem in the morning.

‘Morning came quickly. I had not slept well, my whole night taken with strange dreams, as my mind pondered what the Dark light had shown me, and how my Eye had failed.

I did not breakfast, nor wash even. So great was my frustration with my progress that I went straight to my workrooms. The Eye remained blank, but almost immediately I entered the room, a voice spoke to me. It spoke words I did not know, in a language I could not understand. I was both excited and afraid.

'I do not know where the fear came from but it was there – a small voice within me telling me to be careful, to be wary, and to not act hastily.

'I ignored my fear and the anxious words of advice. After all, was I not Jalholm… the greatest scholar for a thousand years?

‘Though I did not understand what was said, I sat and listened to the voice. It stirred me, aroused a passion in me, it was addictive to me. The fear it had brought at first hearing was gone, replaced by wonder and awe. It was the beginning of his control over me, you see.

Even over the vast distance between our worlds he was bending me to his will.’

Jalholm began to quietly sob as he continued. ‘Had I been able to resist him, had I stopped then, so much would have been different. But, no, even without his control, he would have had me. My insatiable thirst for the unknown, for ever more knowledge, would have driven me to do as he asked.’

He stopped then, and long moments passed before he finally composed himself enough to speak again.

‘I spoke back to the voice. At first I just rambled, but gradually what I said became more structured – I explained who I was and I talked about our world and its people.

'The voice was not random noise. I was not imagining something that was not there – it talked back to me, pausing when I spoke only starting up again when I stopped. I did not understand what it said, but it was a voice, a voice of an intelligent being, I was sure of that. As I was also sure that somehow it understood what I said.

‘Slowly over a period of days, I sat and talked to this faceless being on the other side of my Looking Eye. I told it everything, all I knew, of me, of our world. I laid everything bare for it to learn.

'Then one day, a wondrous day I then thought, the voice answered me, spoke in my language, with a voice so very sweet that I thought this creature could only be a God. A God who would guide and help make our world a better place. And I, Jalholm, had discovered him.

‘He said all the things I wanted to hear, all those things that played to my vanity. He would give us knowledge beyond knowing, and our world would see benefits beyond belief, he said. And over time, he did… our conversations in this manner went on for almost a decade, you see.

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'He explained to me how to build the Travelling Circles, and guided me in their construction. I say he guided me, because I alone knew of him. He was my secret, and I could claim the knowledge he gave me as my own. ‘Take what is due to you,’ he said, to me. And I did, after all was it not I who had discovered him. Without my work and dedication none of his gifts would have been possible.

'The Travelling Circles were erected at all our cities, and within two years our world was completely transformed.

So wondrous was this new discovery that all our lives changed for the better.

'People could now live in one city and each day travel hundreds of miles in an instant to their place of work.

Foods harvested in the morning could be served for an evening meal thousands of miles away. I was once again the darling of our nation and, indeed, the whole world. My name was on everyone’s lips. Praise and riches followed me wherever I went.

'The circles were but one of his gifts, and following his teachings, discovery after discovery were proclaimed in my name. It was a wondrous time.

‘The next step in his plan, for he did have a plan I later came to understand, was to guide me in the creation of a Travelling Rod. It would be small, portable and far more powerful than the Travelling Circles, and it would allow travel to anywhere, from anywhere. He hinted that its power might even be extended to visit distant worlds.

'He said that he had held back the making of the Travel Rods because I had needed to learn the techniques and magics used in the making of Circles first - ‘Walk before you run,’ he said, ‘and besides the Rods are not for the masses, the common folk, only the worthy should possess such an honour.’

'So I built the first. It was a long tortuous process, the magics used were unlike anything I or anyone of our world knew, and there was many a failure before the first Rod was complete. You must remember my instructions were spoken, no plans, no one to show me, not even gestures, just a voice to follow. And what a voice it was, so patient. It was almost parental in its guidance.

‘Later, he told me of his world. It was much like our own, he said. More advanced in technologies and magics, but the lands and the people were much the same.

He said he could see an image of me through the portal opened on his world by my Eye. My image was not clear, but he could make out my form.

'The barrier, the grey, light eating mist I could see through my Looking Eye, was what dimmed the image he saw, and what blocked my view of his world. But it could be breached, he said.

'It would have to be done from our world, and he would have to again guide me through how it could be done. But that would have to come later, much later after I had learnt to understand the dangers in the knowledge he still had to give me. For there were dangers in the barrier, he said. Great dangers… creatures and evil lived there that must be avoided at all cost. Great care was needed when dealing with the barrier, he said, for the consequences of carelessness could be extremely grave.

'I understand now that he mocked me as he said those words. He was the evil. He was the creature that lived beyond the barrier. Even with this talk of the barrier and its dangers, he played me, slowly whetting my appetite, knowing that I would lust for this knowledge that would breach the barrier.

‘He was devious, so very devious. While he slowly fed me gifts of knowledge, I told him all he needed to conquer our world. I told him of our magics, our sciences, and our strengths and weaknesses… and I put in place his means to quickly transport his armies throughout our world to conquer our cities - his Travelling Circles.

'He had done this before, you see. His world, the one that he prevented me from seeing through my Looking Eye, was a desolate wasteland, devoid of all life save for his creatures of war, and his play things. All this came later of course, it would be years before his plans came to fruition and I would see these things.

‘You see, to free him from behind the barrier and allow him into our world, an enormous amount of energy was required. Such energy could only be obtained from an extremely rare crystalline substance, Dersium, hitherto used only in fine jewellery for the ultra wealthy. We did not know of the power locked within its structure; to us it was just a rare and pretty trinket. Huge quantities of the rare crystals were required as the refinement process produced only minute quantities of the final product, and so years would be required to mine and refine sufficient to power a rod to bring him to us.

'But, under his instruction, I had begun the process soon after the Travelling Circles proved themselves. He had said that it would be required for the greatest boon he could give us… once we were ready.

‘The Rods I had already built could not bring him to us. They would only allow us to freely travel our world unencumbered by the need for fixed Travelling Circles. They lacked the enormous power required, and the final adjustments that would make them capable of focusing that energy to create a rift between our two worlds.

At least that was what he he said.

'But even that power proved insufficient, and his coming was delayed further years as I toiled at his behest to find a way to bring him to us.

So his plan proceeded slowly, reined in by the extreme rarity of Dersium, and the strength of the barrier between our worlds.

'But patience he had in abundance when the prize was so great… He gloated of the patience he had shown, while I was abased at his feet on the day I first faced him.

‘The Rod, he said, was sufficiently powerful to travel between worlds. So efficient was it, that once charged, dozens of trips between worlds would be possible. Yet it could not penetrate the barrier. The attempts I made used almost all our stock of Dersium to no avail. I was both afraid and ashamed that I had failed him.

'I expected his anger, and yet it did not come. Instead, he praised me for my efforts, and then encouraged me to look for a solution to our problem. He said that he had much yet to do on his world… much that would occupy his mind, and much with which he could entertain himself.

The last I did not understand, but later, when I finally visited his world, I found out to my horror what he meant by those words.

‘I redoubled my efforts to find a way to breach the barrier, and made even more demands for Dersium to be mined. I devoted everything to my efforts, but still failure followed failure, and years passed.

'Yet even after such a delay, his patience held. Then one day as we spoke through the portal of my Looking Eye, it came to me. The Eye, the very portal in front of me had breached the barrier, broken through it with sound at least. Could I somehow combine what the Eye had achieved with the power within the fully charged Travelling Rod? Could the two together break through?

'He heaped me with praise for my remarkable insight and brilliance, and went on to say how timely my discovery was, for all his great works were now complete, and how, with nothing left to amuse himself, he grew bored.

'I was ecstatic, taking no notice of his comment other than to quickly push on with the testing of my theory so that I might save him from further boredom.

'In hindsight, that single comment and the tone it was spoken, the weight he placed on the word ‘amuse’ should have given me pause.

It should have made me question why one such as he, a god, should grow bored.’

‘Hold it right there, Jalholm!’ I said. ‘You keep referring to his world and how terrible it was when you finally got there. It’s about time you told me what happened, and what it was really like. Skip how you got there for now, and get to what it was like.’

The sudden flush on his face told that he was not used to people interrupting him, and I felt ever so slightly ashamed at my lack of patience.

‘Look, I’m sorry for being so blunt with you, Jalholm. But I’m not really a very patient person at the best of times, but what with everything that’s gone on in my life lately…’

Jalholm smiled as he held his hand up to stop me. ‘It’s fine, Alex, honestly. I know that I ramble on most of the time, and I admit that I do love to talk and be the centre of attention when I have an audience. So I do understand your frustration with me. I should be the one apologising to you. I will get straight to the point from now on, and be brief wherever I can. But sometimes, I will need to give more detail so please forgive me when I do.’

He trailed off looking quite embarrassed, as he realised that he was yet again rambling. He smiled again then, somewhat sheepishly.

‘Very well, as you asked, I will move on to how I finally broke through the barrier and go straight to him and his world.