Cassandra Pendragon

I was tired, my vision swam and I had trouble concentrating, hardly surprising after hours of taxing work. But it had been worth it. With a final push, I flooded the last sigil with energy and doused the glowing metal with a thought. A cube, about 10 centimetres along each edge, hovered before me, each side engraved with a different glyph. While I was watching, the symbols slowly receded into the cooling metal to leave nothing behind but a grey, porous surface. All except for two.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Splendid, marvellous, impressive… would you like to finally tell me what it is? I’ve watched you work and curse for nearly a day, but I still have no clue what you actually made there.”

“Oh, right. It’s a portal. Each of the glyphs you see, or rather don’t, represents an anchor. One is linked to me so that I can summon it and the other one that’s active, I’ve tethered… well, to this place. The other four are still unclaimed. It’s basically a teleport, one I can use to travel here as well as to four locations I’ll still be able to pick at will.”

“Honestly, that sounds rather underwhelming after the amount of work and energy you poured into the thing. Shouldn’t you have… I don’t know, made something a little more… useful?”

“More useful? Au contraire, this little thing will allow me to do much more. I already told you, four of the slots are still unclaimed, but that’s going to change. I’ll connect it to three other places, two of which I’ve already decided upon.”

“Why only three? If there are four more glyphs, shouldn’t you be able to access four locations?”

“How would I get back, then? No, the last glyph I’ll have to activate in the future so I’ve got a way to return to… wherever I’m stuck. Otherwise I’d only be able to jump between the locations already saved.”

“So, this little gizmo will basically allow you to access whatever you decide to leave behind in your secret layer? Don’t look at me like that, I’ve known for quite some time now that you’re a magpie on two legs. Did you really think I wouldn’t realise that all the interesting books and artefacts tend to vanish around you as though they could move on their own?”

“Only the dangerous stuff,” I admitted grudgingly. “But yeah, that’s basically the idea. Instead of moving a ton of magical auras around that could easily be traced, I’m going to allow myself to get there, smart, isn’t it?”

“If you say so. But isn’t the passage of an immortal just as easily traceable?”

“Nah, that’s why it took me so long and why the few remaining hairs on your head are still standing on edge from the residual energy. The passage will be nigh untraceable. Right now I have the knowledge and skill to make that work, I won’t in the future.”

“And how do you think you’ll get your invention when you need it?”

“I’ll hide it somewhere safe, and like I said, one of the glyphs is already linked to me. I’ll be able to summon it with but a word, a password, if you so will. Open sesame.”

“Great, does that mean the next time I’m going to see you, you’ll be just another snotty brat?”

“Yeah, but I’d suggest you refrain from using those exact words when you meet her… me, again.”

“Her?”

“Well, it seems like I’m going to undergo quite the change. Lose some parts, get some others… but from what I’ve seen it could be worse, even though I’m going to have tails…”

“Can’t wait… I’m basically going to stumble into one of your misadventures without the benefit of you actually knowing what you’re doing, right? Could you maybe change the connection to this place to somewhere… farther away? The moon, for instance? It’s not like I’m not looking forwards to meeting you again, but I’d much prefer it if you were older… especially since you’ll probably still be on the run from your family, won’t you?”

“Sorry, but that’s just not going to happen. I need a way to get back to earth and your remote monastery is just the safest place I can think of.”

“And why’s that? What’s this obsession of yours with this planet anyways? Don’t get me wrong, but aren’t there a million other places you could be? But still you somehow always end up back here.”

“That’s a terribly long story and one that doesn’t really matter. Still, if you’re interested you can help me clean up and I’ll tell you what’s drawing me to this place, aside from the friends I have here, that is.”

“Friends? Like, more than one? I always thought I was the only one who could tolerate you and that’s also mainly because I’m too old to run away. And because I fear what you might do to my home if I leave you alone for more than a few hours.”

“That’s hardly fair. Admittedly, chaos is drawn to me like moths to a lightbulb, but I’m still the only reason your planet continues to exist. Or do you imagine you could have dealt with all the shit we’ve encountered on your own?”

“No, but I’m not convinced that most of it would even have happened if you hadn’t been around. Alright, I’ll put away the materials, you clean the forge and start talking. What’s so special about earth? Why are you so determined to return, time and again?” He wasn’t going to be deterred so I began scrubbing away at the anvil, hammer and tongs I had used.

“Earth’s history is much older than you believe. True, you humans have only been crawling across her surface for the past few millennia, depending on what exactly you call a human. Even the famed dinosaurs didn’t really have the time to do more than blink, before they vanished again in a storm of fire and darkness. But the very fabric of this planet, the bits and pieces, chunks of metal and rock that came together to form a habitable oasis in the vast reaches of space, they are old… older than me, older than anything I’ve ever encountered. Maybe you have already heard that each one of you contains more than a thousand atoms from each point in earth’s history. Well, that’s not entirely true. It might be accurate for your documented, written past, but minuscule amounts of a time before time, when the universe was still struggling to create order for chaos, are still floating around here, diffusing life on this planet in all its beauty.” I paused to burn away a particularly stubborn spot on the anvil before I continued.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Every birth, every single one of you hairless monkeys contains a spark, sometimes even more than one, from a time when we, my family and I, were nothing more than an idea that would still need aeons to come to fruition. That on its own would make your home plenty interesting for anyone of my kind but I fear there’s more. Those sparks, they are powerful. Not in the blowing stuff up kind of way, even though they can be, but they… they can influence how life itself evolves… symmetry, chaos, micro and macro cosmos… it’s all bound together and in your own, downscaled manner, you relive the wars of old again, repeating the same circles, mistakes, triumphs and failures the universe has already suffered through in its infancy.” I sighed heavily while I removed the last molten clippings from the hammer.

“I’m an observer, trying to learn where we went wrong, what we could have done better… and I’m also trying to understand my own past, to lift the veil from memories I willingly sealed long ago… have I ever told you about our history? The wars and conflicts that made us, as a people, who we are? No? Well, to sum it up, otherwise I’d be talking to your corpse halfway through, there are… two, or maybe one. It is said that in the very beginning, when the cosmos was still nothing more than a salivating toddler, a far cry removed from the intricate and sophisticated system you’ve come to know in parts, the first cause that called the first beings to arms was the very essence of evolution: supremacy. Only the fittest should endure and since there weren’t that many living things around, it fell to us to satisfy the curiosity of an all powerful child. Angels against demons, two sides of the same coin locked together in an eternal struggle. But I digress, when we were done, the very fabric of creation changed, the lingering spells and cast off energy had infused all that is with a spark of what we are and creation changed. At least, that’s what I was told, I can’t remember a single thing from that time.” I paused to dust off my hands and fill the kettle with water again.

“Forgotten lessons and lost memories led us down the same path again, only this time, we didn’t fight ourselves. We manipulated and influenced life to create surrogates that would fend for what we believed in and would tear the skies asunder once again in their fight for the crown. I didn’t take part in that particular tragedy but watching from the sidelines was… difficult. I watched in silence while existence was snuffed out only to be reborn form its ashes, I listened to the cries of whole worlds sinking into darkness and yet I kept my distance. When they were all gone, annihilated by their very thirst to thrive, to excel, silence returned and we decided to stay out of the mechanisations of the worlds for good. That is, until my dear brother decided to break the balance… anyways, as you might imagine, I’ve spent my time on earth watching while you repeated the very same conflict, over and over again. Be it political, or as your legends so romantically put it, for the love of a beautiful woman, one way or another every era here has ended when two great peoples have gone to war, over and over again. The victor always succumbs to decadence soon after, allowing a myriad of small nations to stretch their fingers towards power and the cycle begins anew. Each epoch has ended the same, some of your scholars even noticed, and I want to know why. I want to find the lynchpin that holds everything and everyone prisoner in a repetitive cycle of unity and conflict.”

“Basically we are… toys to you? An experiment? And I always thought the white mice were the ones who used us that way…”

“Douglas Adams was a visionary, but even he got some things wrong,” I chuckled.

When the tea was done I handed him another steaming cup. “I’ve never thought of you as lab rats, but truth be told, it’s not completely wrong. But you’re more like patient zero, who might help me understand the underlying disease.”

“Gee, thanks. That makes it so much better. Did you at least find anything interesting?”

“Quite a few things, actually. Here, let me show you…”

I moved my wings to conjure a curtain of light that would show my memories as they fluttered through my mind but the spell didn’t work as I expected. Silvery light started to flood my vision and the sparsely lit chamber, the smell of herbal teas and hot metal, it all vanished into a maelstrom of colours. I heard the tides of the ocean crash against a rocky beach and I felt like I was falling, faster and faster but before I could scream, I opened my eyes again.

I was standing in the sky like a living star, my wings, 20 meters of pulsing, irresistible torrents of light danced around me like whips of molten silver, iridescent sparks of blue igniting across my vision. When I slowly breathed in, my mind still stuck in the past, I felt my lungs take in more than air, a part of the very substance of the world reacted to me and I nearly choked when the overwhelming taste of ozone suddenly filled my mouth. I felt… connected to everything around me, as if another layer had been added to my perception, somewhere between a sense of smell and taste. Pinpricks of energy raced over my skin and when I moved my wings, an afterimage of swirling light was left behind, hiding me in a cocoon of power.

I fanned out my wings and tails, their silvery glow warmer and less threatening than the light which erupted from my back, but my fur was shining brightly now as well, like fluffy pieces, torn from the surface of the moon. A smile spread across my face when I realised that I was me again, back where I belonged. Almost, at least.

I was high up in the sky, much higher than I had thought possible. The islands below me where just small, colourful pebbles separated by a unbroken, magnificent shade of blue. What I had only read of before, I could now see with my own eyes, the curvature of our planet, angling away from me towards the horizon. Bitter cold held me in its grasp, but it didn’t bother me and neither did the lack of oxygen, nor the glare form the sun when I turned in its direction.

Clouds travelled through the sky beneath me, white wisps pushed along by an invisible hand while their shadows changed the relief I saw below me, texture and colour melted away only to reform when the sun broke through again. Minuscule changes in the air pressure, the rays of light and cosmic energy that flowed around me, even the discordant song of entropy, intangible but for an underlying buzzing at the very cusp of my senses, it all flooded my mind while I became used to the new world I had been thrown into. Astral energy was everywhere and now, I could feel it, I could command it.

Power pulsed form my core but instead of working it into a specific pattern, a spell or a formation, I simply allowed it to travel freely along my meridians, to break through my skin and ignited the fabric of space around me. Silvery flames mixed with the ripples my wings cause with every beat and I felt a rising pressure in the thin atmosphere. It grew by the second, a constant strain against my mind and when it finally threatened to turn into pain, I let go with a shattering command that sprang instinctively to my lips: “Lux!”

And there was light. I didn’t know how it must have appeared from down below, but to me, the expanse of nothingness all around me and the distant surface of Gaya vanished behind a flash of liquid silver, as if the molten metal had suddenly poured like a flood through the tiny star shaped holes in the black void above me. There was nothing but glaring brightness for a moment and while my wings didn’t expand, it felt like my perception raced along with the wave of light.

Ideas and concepts sprang forth from a simple touch, when my energies freely traveled farther and farther away, bringing back the names and structure of everything they touched. Atoms, even the collapsing probabilities that ultimately formed the underlying structure of the universe, pulled into reality through interaction, it spoke to me and I listened. Memories rose form the depth to mingle with the impressions that reached me, a cacophony of knowledge and sensation that made me realise just how blind I had actually been. No wonder mages always considered themselves superior. It was hard not to, when you lived in a brighter world.

For the first time I could truly understand what the fey had done to Morgan and Auguros. They hadn’t simply crippled them, they had destroyed the way they saw the world, themselves, they had taken away a crucial part of who they had been. For someone who had been born with this, it must have felt like they had been blinded, their ears had been destroyed and their tongues had been ripped out, all at the same time. If it was at all possible, I would return their sight to them, or help them find a way to do it themselves.

Yet another thing to worry about… But first things first. I had to find out where I was and how I could get back to Ahri and my family.