Esar

17 Years Ago

Esar was a man adrift in time and place. Futures came unbidden to him now, asleep and awake. But the future wasn’t written in stone. The future could be changed.

His feet carried him forward as he made his way across the campus alone. The few people he passed seemed to speed by him or to stop in their tracks, frozen in one moment forever. Esar ignored them, his mind focused on his destination and what he had to do. A little girl’s high voice echoed in his ears.

“Let me go!” she shrieked. “I want my mama!”

He could change her destiny. He could keep that vision from coming true.

He could save her.

Mechanically he opened the door and walked into the building that housed the university’s archaeology department. The lights flicked on above him in turn as he traversed the hallway, passing dark classrooms. The door at the end of the hall led down into the basement. What he was looking for was down there, in one of the storerooms that held artifacts of the distant past.

The door was unlocked. Esar paused in the entryway for a moment to catch his breath, trying to reorient himself. Everything around him was perfectly still, even the dust drifting in the beam of light from the high, tiny windows of the basement room. Then the room lights came on automatically, and the dust resumed moving on the air currents.

Everything was just as it had been in the dream: the footprints in the dust, where multiple pairs of shoes had stepped in and out. The paperboard boxes stacked against the walls, one of them open, the contents disturbed, as if someone had been rifling through it, looking for something. And dominating the room was the tall rectangle in the center, covered by a dingy gray cloth.

Esar pulled the cloth away, revealing a stone monolith carved with myriad winding channels. It was dark and still, slightly taller than he was and as wide as his outstretched arms, about a foot thick. In his dreams he’d seen it alive with light, and he’d seen its purpose. This was a door, a gateway built ages ago to connect his world with another.

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He lost his place in time. Esar was in the same room on another day, a dream of the near future. Streams of colored light traced paths across the stone and a woman with dark hair and fair skin, dressed in strange clothing, appeared before it. In her arms a little girl cried and struggled to escape her grasp.

“It’s time for you to meet your father,” the woman said.

“I don’t have a father. I want to go home!” the child whimpered, too tired or too scared to fight back any longer.

The man with the red eyes was there, waiting. He reached out to take his child from the woman. His eyes terrified Esar—they were pitiless, merciless. He could see that the little girl’s eyes were the same deep red color, though hers were filled with fear.

“No!” Esar cried, striking out with a fist.

The vision dissipated and his knuckles struck cold, dark stone. He was back in the present, alone in the room where dust danced in the air, his hand smarting from the impact. He winced and let his vitricity flow down his arm to soothe his aching hand.

If he destroyed the door, the girl would be safe. She’d never become what her father wanted her to become. Esar had foreseen what would happen if the currents of fate continued on their present paths. He knew what came next, if the father claimed the daughter, if he raised her to use her terrible power alongside his.

The nightmare struck Esar with its full enormity now, the most terrible of all his dreams. The girl with the red eyes had grown into a young woman, and she looked down at him from her perch in the sky, as cold and merciless as her father. A towering whirlwind of darkness threaded with colored light touched down on the street before him. It churned through the city, devouring everything that it touched, stripping trees and buildings of their form and leaving only twisted wreckage in its wake.

Esar tried to pull himself back to the present, but all he could see was that vision of destruction. Still, he drew on every last reserve he possessed and threw himself forward, his body’s meager strength augmented by vitricity. He collided with the stone and pain seared through his shoulder, bringing him back to his body, back to his true place and time.

Dust flew all around him. The monolith rocked on its base. Maybe it would topple forward and crush him when it fell. He found that he didn’t care whether or not it did.

But it fell away from him, landing on the floor with a resounding crack as the stone split in two. There was no explosion, nothing more than an angry cloud of dust that rose on the currents of disturbed air, as if it had been no more than an inert rock, and his dreams no more than the delusions of his sleeping mind.

Surely someone must have heard the stone fall. They would come and find him here, alongside the pieces of an ancient, irreplaceable artifact. Let them come. There was nothing they could do to him that they hadn’t already done.

Esar sank to the floor, exhausted. But when he closed his eyes, the dreams didn’t return, only blessed darkness. For now, at least, there was silence.

For the first time in years, there was silence.