Teller of Fate
Intermezzo: The Portals
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The Multiverse has an infinite number of identical copies of everything. Travelling is thus a perilous venture.
Most life imagines it is part of a singular universe, with unique places that can be visited and returned to. This is a dangerous misperception.
For each location in a particular universe, an infinite number of layers exist, each one in a different universe. These copies are identical or nearly so.
Getting back to a starting point means finding the iteration that one left. The odds are infinitely against that happening by chance.
Life avoids getting lost in the Multiverse only by the power of Mind. It is Mind that takes the memory of a place and steers the body toward that one iteration that matches it.
Were this not the case, one would hop between universes without even realizing it.
When deliberately travelling between universes, even in the same Aion, this Mind power fails. Two people returning to a familiar place in another universe will not get to the same one if they travel apart. The tragedy of this is that neither will notice at first.
Some things will be different than they remember, though. It might be trivial things, such as the placement of objects. It might be important things like the contents of memory, or the facts of history. The people they know are different. The cause is unsuspected.
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The Templars, taking their cue from the Færie Doors, resolved the problem of travel between universes and Aions through the medium of the Portals. People think that the Portals move people from place to place.
They do not. The power of Mind does that. The technology—or magick, if you will—of the Portals allows the bodies that the minds inhabit to follow them to their destinations.
The Portals pin singular copies of places to each other in pairs, so that people can be assured of arriving in the same place every time.
The worlds of the Thirty Aions are so many that no one has counted them, but they are each only one copy in an infinite series. There have been no new worlds discovered since the end of the Templar War because no new Portals have been made. The science has not been lost, but its present keepers are cautious.
Any world without a Portal cannot be found reliably more than once.
The City Glyph is an exception. It is the City of Portals. There is no other like it.
Continued here.
— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, July 2026
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