Chapter Sixty-three
Thought Forms
He woke up.
He felt a pain difficult to describe.
It was a simple, single-celled mind while it was still multiplying, dividing and unfolding.
Life. It was alive.
But there was something wrong.
He didn't know why, but something wasn't right. Did life feel that way? It felt like something had been ripped away from him. Something very important. Something physical and something else.
Why was he there?
He couldn't scream. He didn't know how to do it, although on the other hand he didn't have a throat for it either.
Even though the pain he felt was inconceivable, he could not scream. But that pain was not physical.
He touched where he was, but he could not feel. He had no sense of touch.
Although the temperatures of the explosion had been enough to destroy everything around him for miles, he could not feel pain from it. Just as he could not scream, since he had no mouth, he could not feel what he touched, so the inferno of fire that the forest had become did not affect him. The pain he felt came from somewhere else beyond his comprehension.
He could not breathe. He had no lungs yet.
The smell of smoke and heat had been enough to annihilate plant and animal life for miles. The animals that had escaped more than thirty kilometers away died a few days later, due to internal injuries from breathing those hot gases and a chemical foreign to the earth. Others died days later, due to wounds that had appeared on their skin and had been taking their lives more slowly, but surely just the same.
He could not see. He didn't know how to. And he still had no eyes.
In the same way he could not hear, nor could he feel any taste.
It took hours, days, weeks and months before he finally could do it, and the initial pain also passed.
The shape. The form. The form.
That thought, in a language foreign to the planet where he was, was the only thing that filled his primitive mind, while the most primitive forms of thought and ego were being formed.
The shape. The form. Form came first. The most important thing.
It had to be observed.
That was all he could think about.
He slipped first through the mud, the snow, the sky and the clouds. Then he crawled days later in that kaleidoscopic space, which repeated patterns on a larger and smaller scale of the space where he was and that still contained him as a uterus of multidimensional nature.
With the passing of a couple of weeks that layer had finally become weaker but the space around was still the same.
It was there, and at the same time it was not.
The shape. The form.
That instruction was the only thing on his mind. He didn't feel hungry or thirsty yet. But later he did as it changed.
He could not see it, but he was unfolding into a lower dimension, as his body and internal chemistry changed and an accelerated evolution of his organism took place. Black particles were opening like the seeds of a tesseract and from them sprouted blocks of information in a higher dimension that was to fold into a lower one.
That did not matter to him since he could not see it, but he had been traveling through a repeating space and they were like layer upon layer of information with self-similarities. From the smallest block to the tallest, the information was the same and repeated in a pattern of coordinated geometry. Snow, trees, roots, frost, atmosphere, sky. Everything was within reach where he was, even though he could not see it.
Reality manifested itself with a degree of detail that bordered on the insane. From the smallest grain of earth, or from the smallest snowflake, to the sky, everything unfolded and he could have traveled anywhere he wanted. But he could not. He did not have the means, nor the knowledge to move in those layers of information of a reality beyond the three dimensions.
No, he had to do it his own way and get out of that final four-dimensional chrysalis that unfolded space and down into the three-dimensional spheres.
Regardless he was unaware that he was moving in a landscape that repeated and repeated as his body was adjusting to the dimension.
The folding into a lower dimension had occurred oblivious to his senses.
Until the process had ended a week later.
Sound. He screamed the only way he knew how. Almost like an animal and his voice echoed throughout the place even though no one could hear him. Although his cry did not sound like the voice of the animals that had inhabited that region.
It echoed among roots, disturbed earth and trunks uprooted from the ground. Silence was the only thing that reigned in that place. Life had withered months ago when the disaster had occurred and neither the animals, nor the insects, had decided to return to that place.
For the first time he felt something like hunger and thirst. He assimilated frozen roots and drank water from the snow.
He could not do it properly for days. When he ate he felt so much pain that it was almost impossible to swallow. That composition was not what he was used to.
The form. Remember, form is the most important thing. The command, or instruction, struck like a hammer on the anvil in the primitive neural connections that were forming.
He crawled through snow and frozen grass and more destroyed trees. How far had he gone? No matter it seemed like miles and miles of the same landscape.
The form. The shape.
Sound. He could hear, although he still had no ears. The only thing he could hear was the occasional rustling of a tree branch in the surrounding area.
Taste. He could feel the coldness of what he ate, although it didn't bother him. Yet he had no mouth, not even a digestive tract.
Touch. Yes, touch was important. Because when he wanted to eat he only had to find the roots and with only desire they dissolved and gave strength to his body.
Breathing. That scared him. Finally feeling something swell inside him as the air penetrated his body gave him a strange, but not unpleasant, sensation.
Vision. It scared him even more. Seeing the colors and shapes around him finally gave him the final landscape of where he was.
Trees and trees. Elongated shapes in the landscape for miles, some on the ground, others straight up with their branches seeming to reach the sky. And snow. A pale yellow light provided warmth and light. While then it disappeared so that everything was covered with darkness.
When he observed the phenomenon of day and night it confused him. When night came he thought he had lost his vision again but, after a few hours, the sunlight came out again bringing warmth.
He felt stronger and moved faster. He didn't know at what point it happened but, gradually, as he moved away from where he had come from the trees were tall and no longer down.
One night he was surprised when he saw a green color in the sky filtering through the trees. He had never seen such a phenomenon and it was a new color for him. An aurora. Although there had been several upon his arrival he had never seen one. His vision had been gradually acquiring colors so the notion of texture and hue had just appeared a few days ago.
The form. Don't forget the shape.
A new day came and he was surprised. He was elevated a little more than a meter off the ground. But it had no legs, not even arms.
He was floating. In his angle of vision floated some small black particles. Had they been there before? Maybe from the beginning, but he hadn't noticed them.
He didn't know when it had happened but, almost at the same time, he felt new ideas bursting in his mind. New connections were forming even though he had no brain as such. It was an undefined form of thought and particles.
He slipped at incredible speed into the frozen world that surrounded him. It circled for days, sometimes even retracing its steps. He did not know where he was going. The only orientation he had was the sunlight. Unbeknownst to him he was marching in a westerly direction, chasing the light of a dying winter sun that was setting at dusk.
In those days his consciousness burst into a frenzy of new connections, as he felt he could form more concrete thoughts. He was able to orient himself at night by looking at the stars.
He saw the first animals he could hunt. He was able to melt water and drink it more easily. His body chemistry had adapted sufficiently.
How far had he traveled? He wondered one night, though he could not find an answer. The landscape seemed to be the same.
Two days later, though, he was surprised. That primal command he had in his mind was no longer a command. It was something instinctive that he felt now. He knew that form was important. And what was more important, that order seemed to have been given by himself. He didn't know when, or where, but he knew it was so.
That thing called consciousness went through all the evolutionary stages and finally he searched. It had to search.
It had to find the form.
The form was the most important thing. If he wanted to live, if he wanted to survive.
He had to find... who would see him.
Why, he didn't know. He only knew it had to be this way.
Two days after those thoughts came the first change in that world. He found the plains and open spaces of that forest.
And then he saw them.
He had seen many life forms in the last month. But they all reacted the same way when they saw him and some of them attacked, while others fled. Almost all of the ones that had attacked him had turned into food.
But that was different.
Those animals had something familiar about them, although he couldn't tell exactly what they were.
He studied them for two days.
Those animals were standing on their hind legs, they were not like the other animals in the forest.
These animals were covered with the skins of other animals and communicated with each other. They went in and out of structures on the ground. They were of various sizes and all seemed to coexist in that place.
They had other animals that he had never seen before, which they managed and kept in a kind of encirclement. At night they lit lights with pieces of the trees, so he thought maybe they could handle the light that gave him warmth in the daytime.
They behaved strangely. They had behaviors that he had observed in forest animals, such as running, hunting, drinking, among others. But there were a series of actions that seemed to have no concrete meaning even though they seemed to be important to them.
One night he approached to study them.
Too much.
So much so that someone detected it.
He had been observed.
***
The memories seemed to flow from another time and were coming like a torrent in his mind. The images were intermingling and the scenes were happening as if they were taking place in a turbulent and stormy sea. The waves of that sea would show a memory for a second of surreal richness, only to be swept away by the swell the next second and replaced by a new image of equal richness of detail. Memories were swept away by the waves, melting into liquid dreams at times, sometimes being covered with sea foam and sometimes simply drowned and replaced.
He was disoriented but, in that Moskstraumen of memories, he soon found images to which he could make sense and on which his mind cast an anchor. And beyond that, voices and more sensations.
The memory acquired solidity and was not swept away. Yes, he remembered.
It was an Evenk camp. That night, like so many others, about seven people were gathered around a large campfire.
He could not forget that. That might as well have been called his final birth.
Yes, he remembered.
He had been watching that camp for the last few days and that night he had approached it with the intention of looking into one of the tents. He tried to do so carefully but, when he realized, someone was moving in his direction cautiously.
It was a young girl, she couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. She was quite warm and wearing a hat that covered her ears. Her long, flowing blonde hair seemed to blend in with the color of the campfire behind her. The girl's movement had alerted the others near the fire.
One of the women had turned around and let out a cry of surprise.
"What is that?" a man asked in Russian.
Another man had turned over his shoulder, but at the sight of the girl had stood up as if struck by lightning.
"Svetlana! Come over here!" the man shouted in desperation, and the voice reached him like a distant echo. The man was tall, about six feet tall, with bushy eyebrows and a coal-black beard, wearing a bearskin coat and wielding a rifle in his hand trying to aim it at him.
Another man had stood up and was looking in his direction.
"Feodor! No! That's a spirit!" The one who had spoken was an old man with long hair and blind. The passage of time had taken the color from his eyes, but not the impetus with which he had moved. Blind though he was, he moved around the campfire and reached the man with the rifle, who by this time was approaching the girl, urging her to back away slowly.
"The hell you are! Svetlana, get away from that thing!" said the man named Feodor.
"Dad, no! Look! It's him! I can't believe it! It's him!"
The girl's gaze was fixed on him.
He felt something crackle and as if something was unfolding once again inside him. He had spent the last few days floating around, but the moment the girl spoke it was as if something had crushed him against the snow. No, it was more like he just fell.
Not only that. In the last while he had become accustomed to his vision. He could observe everything around him when he moved. But as soon as that girl had turned to him his field of vision changed. It was narrowing and he could no longer see in that omniscient way. At that moment he only had his point of view focused on that girl who was trying to approach him.
The girl approached with a hesitant step. "Can you hear me? Are you really the one-eyed raven?"
She was speaking to him, but he could not articulate a word due to the pain he was feeling.
"What is that black thing? A bear?" someone asked from the campfire.
"A raven." The blind man approached Feodor who was still aiming and with his hand made him lower the barrel of the gun. The man called Feodor looked at him. The blind man simply shook his head. "It is not evil."
Feodor reached over and grabbed Svetlana by the arm and pulled her away as the blind man was walking toward him and crouched down.
Those around the campfire had risen and some had moved closer while others had moved back. What did they see?
"It's like mother's story," said Svetlana, as she smiled and looked at her father.
"What are you talking about?" asked Feodor.
"The raven man, shaped like a cloud."
The blind man seemed to keep looking at him through those eyes almost as white as snow. He had stooped down and brought one of his hands toward him. He almost instantly felt that hand touching him near the place that had become his point of vision. "Oh my, you lack the sight of one eye. A one-eyed raven indeed," he said and laughed.
The laughter rang out and shook the image. The whole scene lost its consistency again. But it wasn't for long. Instantly it had changed and the scene was not of one night. The sea had become agitated again and with it had brought a different place and time.
He could see a place with abundant vegetation. He was in a forest. The evening sunlight was filtering through the trees, painting everything in a golden color and the yellowish leaves of some trees contributed to give a certain air of melancholy to the afternoon.
He was walking with someone.
There was a young looking girl beside him. Her clothes were a dress with a long skirt, over this she wore a rather warm sweater and was wearing a pair of muddy boots.
The girl had light brown eyes and blonde hair tied in two braids.
She oozed youthfulness in her smile, as he could see her moving through the trees.
Svetlana.
He could place the memory. Two years had passed since that night and that young girl had transformed into a woman.
"Let's go back, or Dad will come looking for us if we delay any longer."
Svetlana held out a hand and he gave her his. There was a big difference in size. He had huge rough hands and she, despite looking young, had strong and somewhat rough hands too, but smaller.
They were working hands. Although the girl's hands seemed delicate, it wasn't until that touch that one could feel that those were hands used to working with the earth.
The sensation was so real that he could swear he could smell the fragrances of those trees and the scent of fresh hay emanating from both of them. For they had been working until a few hours ago. They had finished their chores for the afternoon and had gone to the nearby forest for her to teach him. He had a small notebook in his scarred hand where he put the notes that both Feodor and Svetlana had taught him in the last two years. It was already the second notebook and he had only a few pages left that would surely be filled in less than a week. His handwriting had improved in just a few months since he had started living with them and Feodor had no more books left that he hadn't read.
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She was talking to him, but the sound was lost, as if it were a radio that could not be tuned properly. She walked over to a thick-rooted tree and picked up a dandelion that grew solitary among those gnarled roots.
They were talking, but he couldn't quite catch the dialogue. Until suddenly that changed and the sounds became intelligible along with the sound of the wind in the trees.
"Wherever we go, sometimes it's best not to think about where the journey will lead or end. Often the important thing is not the end, but the journey itself." Svetlana said, speaking in a northern-accented Russian. Her voice was somewhat deep, but melodious at the same time.
"What does that mean?" he asked, also in Russian, although with a somewhat rougher tone.
The young woman turned and looked at him smiling. "It's just something my mother used to say. That knowing the final destination never ruins the experience of the journey," the young woman smiled, and blew a dandelion, which the breeze scattered the seeds and carried them on their own journey. "You know something?"
"What?"
"It reminds me of you."
"What?"
Svetlana pointed to the seeds she had just blown. "The first time I saw you I was a little scared, for some reason it reminded me of dandelion. Although I had never seen a dandelion colored black and shaped like a cloud."
He didn't know what face he was making, but he looked at those seeds that were drifting away and that the afternoon sun was painting as light snowflakes.
"I just remembered something," he said. "That night you had said it was like your mother's story. You said something about a cloud."
Svetlana nodded and smiled and sat down on a nearby stump. "Yes, it's true. She always told me the story of a raven, a thunderbird that came sent from the gods."
"It's not that Odgi guy, is it?"
"The blind gods usually sends emissaries. But my mother's story was a little different, that's why it caught my attention when I found you."
"Why?"
"Because she once showed me a drawing of the fey raven emerging from a cloud."
"A drawing?"
Svetlana nodded again. "Weird as it sounds, she said that was the raven's face. And it's the same face I saw that night, though I mistook you for something else at first."
"Wait a minute... you're saying it was my face?"
"Yes, or at least it's pretty close."
"A cloud? I came out of a cloud shaped like a dandelion?"
Svetlana was about to say something but held back for a few seconds somewhat reluctantly. "The truth... even I don't know what I saw the night we found you. I think it was some kind of black cloud... but I don't know how to describe it to you. In fact, when we asked the others, that night it was as if everyone had their own impression and they were different."
"It's not possible that you saw this black stuff under my skin?"
"It wasn't that armor. It was something else."
"But if you were afraid, why did you come closer?"
"Because mom always told me. If I ever saw a black cloud in the future not to be afraid. The raven would bring me luck."
"Your mother must have been something else."
Svetlana rose from the tree and smiled. "Maybe, but nothing compared to you."
He nodded and cocked his head.
"Come on, if we delay any longer we'll run out of dinner," Svetlana urged.
He followed her and watched her braids move in the air. "I would have liked to meet her."
"Mom?"
"Yes."
"She told me she met you."
"What?"
"Or maybe it's some other thunderbird."
He heard a rustling behind him and turned. They couldn't be so unprepared. It was bear season and it was not impossible that some might be nearby. But there he saw nothing.
He did not know at what moment it happened but when he turned to look at the girl she had disappeared. Not only she, the forest had disappeared, also the sun and the murmur of the wind together with that warmth.
The sea had stirred again, taking with it the warm memory and replacing it with something that was the opposite.
Everything became dark and cold.
He stirred in the ocean. He had the sensation of being immersed in something icy. The cold penetrated his skin like lancets and he felt as if parts of his skin were being torn off. Was it skin? He couldn't be sure.
Then in the midst of that abyss of darkness he felt a warm sensation that had taken him over.
It was the only source of warmth in that gelid darkness. A tiny, weak flame stirring in the emptiness, but at the same time, it seemed to him that this warmth could contain an entire world. And then, out of the warm feeling that was sweeping over him, a breathy voice that pleaded between sobs.
"Please come back to me."
***
Thursday, March 22. 6:10AM. 125 S.A.
Shin woke up and straightened up on the drizzling wet grass. That voice pleading for him to come back had finally woken him up. Come back? Where to? No, more importantly. Didn't he know that voice?
Almost instantly he realized that he was completely naked. But that was not the important thing. He winced and put a hand to his head as he began to feel pain as if someone was putting a drill into his skull.
Memories.
More memories of decades began to flow into his mind. He convulsed on the floor as the clonic storm of memories filled his head.
That knowing the destination, never ruin the experience of the journey.
The happy days spent with Svetlana and Feodor, whom he grew to love like a father. That giant of the Tundra who was even his own height. The days he spent with the Evenks in the nearby camps. He remembered how he would talk to the blind old man and how he would tell him stories of his people.
The days of study with Svetlana, with classes that Feodor gave. Also the work in the fields for food and grazing animals and the days of playing in the forest.
Happy days before the fire of the revolution reached that far away place. The Evenks in that vicinity moved further west and Feodor and Svetlana, together with Shin, had to flee. Feodor had been someone linked to royalty and had retired to live a life away from those intrigues. They were together until they reached France and after five years their paths diverged, although they would meet again.
Memories of the First World War, the horror of the trenches. Years of peaceful study and years of adventures around the world as a traveler. Egypt, Libya, Spain, Turkey, India, China. Friends and enemies. The United States Empire where he met Howard, whom he would help solve several crimes of a preternatural nature. Feys, more friends, and the occasional enmity. Miskatonic University, where he studied for a couple of years as a guest of a secret circle that studied occult phenomena.
The Dark Events were also becoming evident at that time. Perhaps they were the reason for that legend of the Great Exile that said the feys had been disappearing in the 19th century. He had studied it too, but had not come to a definite conclusion.
The sounds of war. The horrible war was brewing in Europe again. The Ley tunnels.
Lizbeth. That fey girl he rescued from the Ahnenerbe's laboratories and would love with all his soul, even if later they had to part.
The Dark Events seemed to follow him sometimes.
Gehirn, that child transformed into a semi-immortal by the Nazi experiments in the concentration camps.
The final operation. And then a new war.
The atomic race and the Cold War.
An undeclared war, but no less brutal. Betrayals and those who had once been friends became enemies. The feys that once helped in the past conflicts became guinea pigs in the psychotronic and hidden war between powers. Not to mention the space race.
Shin remembered that stupid mission where he had agreed to help and what was supposed to be a rescue mission had turned into a mission to steal a Soviet probe for one night to study technology.
Years of peace and study, a few days of love affairs and also years of conflicts and conspiracies.
Svetlana lived a long life and he was present the day she passed away. That girl who had been an older sister to him died peacefully and surrounded by a large family. Feodor had died several decades before, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Other memories.
After his body regenerated from being pulverized by a turbine, he was attacked by a certain fey girl in a wild state who could not control her ability. Mii, who would be a companion for some time and with whom he had a rather short relationship, but with whom he would continue to be friends in successive years.
The memory of the Tempus Fugit project.
A group of feys and humans united to study the Dark Events. Many countries were forming research circles, but they would be of a freer nature thanks in part to a small financial support from Gehirn.
The memories of Onigashima Island, place they would call Tokoyo, an evanescent island in the Japanese archipelago that was the base of operations for Tempus Fugit. Although they would later abandon it when tragedy struck and many of its members died.
1986. Shin recalled his solo trip to Argentina and how he would end up saving the one who in the following years he would consider a little sister, but for her Shin would be more like a father. Rein. The dragon fey.
Years of peace and then in 1994 Noki would arrive and be rescued in Spain.
Noki's treatment, due to her ability, made Shin dive deep into the medical study until he found the most successful method for her to control her ability. It took some time, but he succeeded. No, Noki had succeeded.
Someone else called him dad.
The two girls separated from him to study and travel to see the world after they became independent enough. Leon would accompany them on the trip. There was already a secret network of feys to move around the world in relative safety, even though technology and surveillance was advancing by leaps and bounds.
He continued his travels for a few months.
More problems and sporadic missions. Quiet days with Lizbeth before separating again. Passionate nights and days that he wished had lasted longer. But no, he had to part.
His mind was feverish in those days. His mind had been invaded by something else and he got some memories of a tragedy outside of time.
He had to go to Japan to stop what his mind remembered from happening again.
He had gone away from her to protect her, but it would happen again.
It would happen again. He couldn't stop it. He would have to do it even if he didn't want to.
1999. Tokyo.
An alley, a gun and a sobbing girl who didn't want to die. Not again.
No, that wouldn't happen.
One shot and two hundred and twenty-four years of separation.
Forbidden memories of the Other Side. Erased time. But he had finally understood. It took time but he had achieved his goal. He had understood.
Mai and Lizbeth. He had found them.
A chasm had separated them by two centuries.
Year 124 of the Singularity Era.
It should have been 2224, but civilization had changed a lot while he was gone.
May knowing the end not deprive you of the joy of the journey.
In Shin's mind paraded the memories of the past months. The missions with Mai. Countless hours of driving through routes facing all kinds of dangers and investigations. The days they had spent wrapped up in bed while trying to make up for lost time. The days they had spent wrapped up in bed making while trying to make up for lost time. Sometimes he with Mai, sometimes with Lizbeth with whom they met in secret.
They had understood, even though they couldn't say it. It had always been that way, always had been, and always would be from that moment on. They had finally got the pieces of the half-deconstructed puzzle that had been their lives.
But there was someone they didn't think would have anything to do with them. Yet on one Christmas night and the next, all four had succumbed to their carnal desires. Kotori was a part of them now too.
Shin gritted his teeth and crawled to the half-destroyed pavement, as he felt the memories finally coming to an end. It had all been a matter of a few seconds, but it had felt like an eternity. His long life up to that point had flashed before his eyes, almost as if his brain was reading all the memories.
Shin crawled and took a deep breath.
The fine rain drenched everything around him, but to him it almost felt like a cleansing bath. He felt different. He didn't know why but he knew it was right. What had been taken from him had come back to him. He could not know what it was, but he knew that a part of his body that had been taken from him, the moment he had come to earth, had returned.
They were not memories of his pre-Earth past. It was still shrouded in mist as it had always been. But there was something else.
Slowly his memories became more current and he understood it all. He closed his eyes and finally his feet and hands were able to support his weight as he squatted on the half-destroyed pavement, where the fine drizzle had formed small puddles of mud.
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Kolsay Lake, last week.
He had died there and his head had been crushed. He had woken up under the lake, but what had woken him up were voices just as his head had finished regenerating. Now he knew whose voices they were.
At the exact moment he had been resurrected under the lake in Kazakhstan, his other self had also just woken up in some lake in Switzerland. No, not just any lake, it would have to have happened close to when that wall of the sphere had pulverized him, so it would have to have been at the site of the plane.
The voices he had heard in Kazakhstan were the same ones he was hearing at that moment in Switzerland. They were the voices of four boys who had pulled him out of the lake. His body was old for some reason at that time. Their hearing had connected even though they were separated.
He had always been told that the chemistry of his body was the same as human, with the exception of the arrangement and shape of some of his bones and organs and, of course, the black particles that formed the armor. Many experts in chemistry and biology, and even he himself, had come to the conclusion that if as all the oracles and legends said he was from another universe. Then there was a possibility that his chemistry was completely alien to that of the earth. However, it was not.
That was one of the reasons he did not like to talk about what he remembered from when he had arrived in 1908. He knew that those black particles had done something so that his biology could live on earth. But in return he could not age, and he could not die. His time was stopped. There was a possibility that, if he really came from another universe, the arrow of time in his place of origin was not even equal to that of the universe he now inhabited.
However, his body that had been taken from the lake was old. That sphere had aged him. But now he understood the reason for many situations.
First the sudden tiredness he had felt since that night when he had risen from the dead and confronted what lived in the lake together with Mai. In the following days he had been feeling more and more tiredness, but it came and went and had not prevented him from working.
Then the particle armor had been disappearing little by little, until in the plane he had barely been able to contain the attack of those filaments. The layer of the sphere killed him while he had tried to break through it to save that child.
At the time of the airplane incident, different years had been connected. 2012, the year of the disappearance of the plane, the year in which those fishermen had found those seats and the present.
Only a very small part of that particles had survived and that was enough.
Then it had awakened several years later at the bottom of the lake, until it had been rescued, which had been a week ago. Everything had been happening at the same time. His death in Lake Kolsay had caused his other self to awaken, on the muddy ground of another lake several thousand miles away. Although his other self was at this moment the same.
All that time there had been two Shins. Probably for years he had been regenerating. That backpack and the airplane seats had not arrived alone, he had arrived with them.
The tiredness of last week was because his old version had awakened and was reclaiming the particles. That was the reason why the armor had been gradually disappearing as well.
Collapse. Observation.
He had stayed alive probably by a miracle in the last few days at Mai's side, thanks to her, who acted as an observer, as well as Lizbeth and the others around him. But his body was weakening, as the particles traveled to the old version that was slowly regaining its youth.
The particles and the armor were intrinsic and could not be divided in two. One of the two parts had to die. He had died, but he had only complied with the established order to come back to life.
He had been awakened at the very moment he had to do so. He was blind when he awoke and fell unconscious, but he could hear some of the conversations. He had been transported to a Pyrene facility and put in a place for observation.
No one had paid much attention to him. But it was as it should be. His self that was with Mai at the time was stronger, while his other old version was weaker.
Two consciousnesses seeking to collapse. Observation was vital for that.
Slowly but inexorably the old version was the one that was going to regain its youth when it had been saved.
Shin slowly stood up and reminded himself once again.
"I'll let you sleep alone now. Remember: that knowing the destination, never ruin the experience of the journey.
"We will never see each other again, but thank you for taking care of both of them."
The words he had been told by that girl who had rescued him from dying again due to lack of oxygen. That girl had taken him out of Pyrene, where apparently something had happened. Shin had not seen the girl. No, he had seen her. Just out of the corner of his eye and with blurred vision as she walked away and left him on the side of the road.
A blonde hair.
"She told me she met you."
Svetlana's words echoed once more.
Shin had never met Svetlana's mother, but he had seen her in photographs. A woman with blonde hair.
The woman had traveled to Russia where she had met Feodor. Prior to that Svetlana had told him that her mother had lived for several years in Japan with her father. At the time it had told him nothing, but now it made sense.
Shin frowned, but not in anger. He had finally understood.
"Alice… you were Sveltana's mother?" he whispered and tried to smiled. "So you finally found your daughter, you nosy journalist. You went all the way to Japan to find your daughter."
Memories of an estranged time that no longer existed.
He shook his head. He had no more time for anything else.
If what he thought was correct, the moment he had died on the plane the remaining particles must have scattered and he had just woken up. If what he thought was correct, then he had just died on the plane a few minutes ago.
The boy. That strange child he had tried to save.
The boy had watched the old man and the old man had collapsed and then exploded. The explosion was what had taken them out of the plane.
Leteo Waters. The boy named Benu Bender.
He remembered him from the passenger list with his mother. The boy had crossed the sphere while he had died. Had they both ended up at the same time? What had happened to him?
Leteo Waters.
"Sorry for the question. But do I know you from somewhere?"
The face of Lee Reubens appeared in Shin's mind when he had met him. Then the boy's face. The backpack with the book of myths. Leteo, the name of the river of oblivion in Spanish.
The face more elongated, with a beard, slightly longer hair. Same color eyes and hair.
"Oh no!" Shin said and remembered the old man's words.
"Never mind, just go! The p-people you and your t-team are looking for are in M-Meyrin!"
The old scientist was also the one who had told him where to rescue that boy and another man. The old man had avoided looking at the boy, but it was when the boy had looked at him that the explosion had occurred.
Two consciousnesses in the same space and time… and a third.
That child had survived. He had survived to become a teacher. A professor who along with Oxy had just disappeared and that old man had told him where to find them.
"Professor I-Ishijima Kanade, or Oxy, as you call her! She is in M-Meyrin! You can find her there. Don't worry about the s-ship, it'll be fine!"
Lizbeth, Carissia and those he had rescued, where were they? Had they escaped safely?
Whatever it took, he had to go to where they were.
But how? Where the hell am I to begin with?
Shin looked around and then noticed a sign: Abandoned village of Saint Laurent du Pont. 2 kilometers.
"I'm in France," he muttered, then closed his eyes.
He had never been lost thanks to his armor. Those black metal particles in his body could react to magnetic north. Although since he had arrived he had discovered that sometimes the orientation varied due to the Orbital Belt.
But he detected it. There was something odd, though.
Magnetic north. What is this?
It happened all at once. The ground disappeared under his feet. The first thing he thought was that he had gotten dizzy.
When he opened his eyes he realized. He hadn't fallen. He was floating.
No. He wasn't floating. His legs were gone, but he wasn't touching the ground either. Not just that. He looked down at his hands.
He could feel his limbs, but they had been replaced by the particle cloud and seemed to have no concrete physical form and moved around what was left of his body.
"What is this?"
That which had disappeared when he had arrived had returned to him. But what was it? Some other function he couldn't remember anything about.
It was as if his body was falling apart, but he could feel his normal body even though he knew he was floating.
It began to creep up his torso and arms. Whatever it was, he didn't know what it was. He had never experienced anything like it. His whole body was consumed in that cloud and began to rise towards the sky without separating, almost as if it were a cloud of iron sand.
A cloud. A black cloud, Svetlana had said.
The drizzle seemed to have no effect on it.
A dandelion carried by the wind. A crow coming out of a cloud.
Many shapes. A black chaos.
Shin let himself be carried by the wind and tried to remember. He had forgotten. How had it been displaced when he had arrived? It had happened so long ago that he had forgotten.
He had been moving through that forest in 1908, just wishing he was going where he wanted to go.
I'm really a cloud of black particles, is that the way I came here? At that moment, even though I had no shape, I could see everything around me.
Two hundred meters above the ground, three hundred, four hundred. When he reached what he estimated to be a thousand meters he thought.
"Stop!"
The shape, the form.
From that cloud of particles emerged a hand, albeit a ghostly one. Shin looked at his hands and gradually saw how certain parts of his body became more solid. He clenched a fist.
Get a grip!
The fist took on more corporeality and appeared covered by the armor. Then the arm. His body gradually regained solidity, but he was floating. He had already experienced sustained flight with jetpacks and the special turtle backpack system, but that was different.
Thought. Vector control. Gravity dipping faster in a higher dimension than motion would explain why I'm floating. Shape is controlled by observation and then by thought. No, thought came first. I could move just by wishing. I did not acquire form until Svetlana observed me later.
He thought about the test he had been given on Tuesday and Camila's question. "Hmm. Let me ask you something then. Would you rather be able to fly or breathe underwater?"
"Fly," Shin said, looking in a northerly direction.
An explosion occurred.
Even though he had taken corporeal form Shin could feel a pressure throughout his body.
The speed at which he was moving through the air should have crushed his organs, he felt some nausea and heat throughout his body. Parts of his limbs dissolved into particles at times only to come together again the next.
He did not yet understand how it worked, but he could imagine what was happening. Basically the particles were what mattered. Surely every black particle in his symbiont armor encapsulated his body when it took on a non-solid form. The process occurred in infinitesimal units of time. Was that what he had lost? The ability to fly? No, that was not flying, simply displacement. However those particles had to be a generator to reach that speed without forgetting to change the weight of the mass and send gravity in a higher dimension.
Could he control it at will? It seemed from his thinking that it had worked.
It must be over two kilometers above the ground, he calculated and looked to the north. How long had it been? Seconds? A minute?
He looked in a northerly direction, but could see no body of water corresponding to the Lemac. How far away was it?
He had many questions, but at that moment he had too many problems to worry about his own. First, he had to make sure the ship had landed safely. Second to corroborate what the old scientist had told him.
Meyrin? What's in there?
The old man had told him only that the two he was looking for were there, but nothing else.
If what he thought was correct then that child he had rescued was Lee Reubens. But what was his relationship to Leteo Waters? Was it as he thought? Could it be possible? How could it be?
How much time had passed? Three minutes?
Three kilometers above the ground he began to worry about how to decelerate. He was almost certain that from the heat and pressure he felt he was traveling at a thousand kilometers per hour.
Five minutes. He had tried to think first about descending a little and it had worked, as well as slowing down.
Over the black horizon he could see a dark mass. The lake.
What would happen if I slammed on the brakes? No, don't think about that.
The mass of water grew and after seven minutes he decided on the best option. It must have been almost eight minutes.
He had moved through time at just over 1000 kilometers and was slowly decelerating. If the calculation did not fail him, he could estimate that the place where he had been must be more or less one hundred and fifty kilometers away, more or less. He had distinguished several French peaks on his journey.
The lake began to rise before his eyes but it was still too fast.
Here we go!
The lake would be what would slow him down.