Chapter 50 – Teller of Fate

Teller of Fate

Sixth Movement: The Fate of Stars

Chapter Fifty

* * *

Abram had been restless since the Templar had left Azhure’en for Glyph. The plan they’d laid out should work, though only a fool would count on that. The Archivist’s part in the drama required that he set aside a lifetime’s belief and training.

Abram took his concern to the Albedo and the Kokkinos, two of the three governors of the Order.

They agreed that the plan was a sound one, though expressing the same reservations. They too had trouble with the notion of abandoning a charge the Order of Hermes had faithfully kept for a hundred thousand years.

A contingent of the best mages in the order was ordered to prepare for a move to the Nonspace City. All three Chiefs of the Order and its Inner Head would accompany them.

Now, Abram need only wait for the moment he could engineer the ‘escape’ of the White God.

The moment came while he was napping.

Hermetists were expected to live Spartan lives and they did, owning nothing except personal items and clothing. The living quarters of most, whether residents of the Mother Lodge or of any of the many chapterhouses scattered throughout the Thirty Aions, were cells with a bed, a desk and two chairs, shelves for books, and hooks for clothing.

Abram was one of six Hermetists whose position merited something more. Hanging in space outside the Mother Lodge proper in the angle between two two of the ground-level naves, near the crossing, were five domiciles that resembled large beehives with spires atop made of coloured crystal glass. They were supported from beneath by buttresses extending out from the walls of the adjacent naves.

The interiors were elaborately carved, the windows oddly shaped and set in peculiar places. From the interior, these windows always appeared brightly lit by white light.

The dwellings had several mezzanine levels ascending in a series of wide rings. Each level contained many small rooms, most empty and unused.

The bottom level was the only one that covered the whole area of the structure. It sloped downward in a gentle curve like a wide, shallow bowl. Occupying its center was a fire pit. The levels that rose around it could be reached by a few shallow steps.

On this main floor were a table and chairs, a desk, and sundry low furniture that could serve as couches. At the circumference of the main floor were five chambers that served as kitchen, library, temple, meditation room, and bedchamber.

Above the fire pit, visible through open floors, was the spire of coloured glass, that let crystalline light flood the air.

Abram was dozing at his desk when the shaking roused him. It wasn’t much, just a mild trembling. He felt it through the wooden surface he had his head down on. It jarred his cheekbone and made his teeth itch. Blinking, he sat up.

Hands gripping the edge of the desk, he could still feel it, a small rapid vibration. There was also a noise, exceptionally low in tone. It was almost a solid thing, vibrating his chest.

Azhure’en never moved; not in the slightest. Owing to its peculiar nature, it couldn’t; at least not from any external cause. That meant only one thing.

The Archivist grabbed his hat. Moving briskly for a man of his years, he left his apartments.

The external walls of Azhure’en were several yards thick and riddled with passages; some open, many secret. Abram exited the windowed hall that sloped down inside one of the buttresses supporting his home and emerged into another.

This one ran along the wall of a nave at a height of over three miles. It had the look of a gothic aisle: fan vaulted ceiling, and an arcade of pillars opening out into the titanic space.

The path itself was five yards broad and eight high. It went to the vanishing point to the right of him. Abram turned left, heading for the five-way crossing at the center of the Lodge.

The vibration continued as he went. The low moan became louder, though no higher. The vibration seemed to stay the same.

Abram kept his gaze on the air of the nave hoping to see the other Templar’s light silhouette in her perpetual fight with the White God. By the time he reached a corner pillar at the crossing, he still hadn’t. That didn’t mean much, but still he worried.

The interior of the pillar was another wide spiral staircase. Stepping on the nearest riser, he gripped the handrail. The stairs began to move, spiraling quickly down.

Far past ground level, past the level of the library, and even past the level of the great docks where the fleets of the Hermetists lay in port, to the Nadir, a part of the Lodge few ever saw, went the Archivist.

Much of the above ground structure of Azhure’en was immense enclosed spaces. Except for the cells, most of its habitable space was below ground level.

The Lodge itself was protected by an egg-shaped shield that surrounded the whole. The Taphros, a moat that one needed to pass to enter or leave the Lodge, ran just inside its perimeter and completely under the lodge itself, following the shape of the shield. Azhure’en thus floated in the liquid that was death to touch—a further protection.

Abram was headed for a room that was almost at the bottom of that floating island.

The stairs halted after almost half an hour. The Chief Archivist stepped off the last riser, wobbled a bit, and walked through the arch and into a large pentagonal room.

The arch was at one corner of the room, as were the other four that he could see: two over a mile distant. The space had the same area as the crossing above, though it was only forty yards high.

The massive chamber was plain; the many-hued blue stone of its construction gave it its only interest. A circular hole in the ceiling covered roughly half its area. The floor had a similar, even larger hole.

What made the latter unsettling was that it had no clear edge. The floor itself began to slope downwards just a dozen yards from the wall. The angle increased until it was vertical. There was no railing or any marker to indicate where the horizontal ended.

Finally, descending from the hole in the ceiling and through the one in the floor was the line of blue-white light that was the edge of the Portal that stitched the many copies of Azhure’en together. A glowing red line, opposite the entrance Abram had used, followed the contours of ceiling, wall, and floor, completing the outline of the Portal itself.

Here the moaning sound was louder, the vibrations increasing in frequency. Against all his training and experience, Abram began to wonder how sound the stone was.

The room appeared empty, but the Archivist could hear the distorted echo of voices. He turned left and began walking. Almost immediately, several figures appeared as the vertical glowing line parallaxed in the opposite direction. They’d heard his footsteps and were glancing in his direction. Knowing they had a ten-minute wait until he could get to them, they continued their discussion.

When he got up to the group, they turned and waited for him to speak. There were four Hermetists there, two men and two women. None were as senior as he. The trembling was constant, the moan still rising in volume.

Abram had to raise his voice to speak. “The White God is trying to break out!”

“What can we do? IT’s never been able to affect the Lodge before!”

“IT’s been feeding! Don’t ask how! There’s no time! We only have one course of action: we must let IT go, else IT will destroy the Lodge!”

The horror on the faces of the other four was exactly what Abram expected. He was prepared for it. “The Governors have known for some time that this moment would come! I was authorized to make this decision when the time came! It has now come! Fear not, this has been planned for!”

It was a lot to absorb, but the others did finally accept that this decision was the correct one. That all of it was true didn’t make Abram feel any less a deceiver. The five of them were about to abandon a charge the Order of Hermes had faithfully kept since the end of the Templar War. That they’d been forced to it by the machinations of the Wanderer in the Wastes didn’t make the pill any less bitter.

His hope in this plan was considerable, his faith shaky.

Azhure’en was an infinitely long chain of individual copies of the same structure forming the chain which bound the White God. Each iteration of it was a ring. The Portals linked each one to its neighbors. Freeing the White God was a matter of braking those links.

It couldn’t be done piecemeal. Each link needed to be isolated from its neighbors at once. This requirement was part of the mechanism designed to make a jail break difficult. The Templars had thought there might be attempts.

The line defining the outer edge of the portal was a short walk away. Close to it was a red circle on the floor. Abram went to stand on it. Following his instructions, the others travelled around the circle and stood on the analogs of the circles in the nearest iterations of the Lodge. As the hole in the floor of the room was unbridgeable, this meant going around the long way. Two of them went clockwise, the other two counterclockwise.

It took almost an hour for everyone to get in place.

Abram was alerted to this by the sudden glowing of the red circle and the fact that he could hear the others quite clearly.

The actual breaking was a matter of speaking five eleven syllable phrases. Each person had to speak one of them and they had to be spoken perfectly in unison. This would uncouple the iterations of Azhure’en, forcing anyone who might currently be transiting from one to the other through whatever gate they were using.

The uncoupling lasted only so long as all five stood on their glowing red circles. As soon as at least one person left her or his circle, the Lodge would link itself up again.

It took three tries before the spell was uttered properly. The result was startling in its lack of anything to be startled by.

Nothing seemed to happen at all, except Abram could no longer hear his comrades. They were now all extremely far away from him and from each other.

They were under orders not to move until they saw their red circles stop glowing. Abram would be the one to step off and break the spell. This is he would do only once the White God was gone.

For several moments, everything remained perfectly still. The vibrations and the moan continued as before. Abram began to wonder if they had somehow failed.

Then the Portal lines began to flicker. They stuttered and flashed for a few seconds and then winked out. The glowing white vertical line linking the abysses above and below faded to nothing somewhat later.

The noise and vibration ceased with such suddenness that Abrams’s ears ached in the silence for a few seconds.

The room went utterly dark. Something passed through the Archivists body; or rather, was pulled out of him. Every part of him felt as though it was being gently abraded. Rough, sticky things were being dragged off his soul. It went on for a subjective eternity.

Gone! He breathed a shaky sigh, relieved.

Everything remained dark for a moment. A tumbling, rolling, grinding, grating sound came from the air around him, rising in pitch.

Sight returned abruptly. Abram squinted as a painfully bright light from the depths of the hole faded quickly. When it was completely gone the normal light of Azhure’en returned.

The Hermetist stood for a moment, marvelling. The die was cast. For good or ill, they were committed now.

He remembered himself after a time and stepped off the red circle. The white and red lines snapped back into place with an audible clap.

As he waited for the others to return, the same horrifying thought kept repeating in his mind: ‘The White God is free!’

* * *

Azhure’en felt different now. Everyone sensed it.

It was not lesser or greater.

Lighter perhaps, cleaner.

And empty.

Everyone felt emotional about it, but none had a label to offer.

Abram had gone from the Nadir up to the docks.

Five great harbours underlay the Temple City of Azhure’en, all filled with the stuff of the Silvergrey Sea. They were massive caverns, seemingly natural, but mirroring the general shape of the nodes of the library above. The innermost corner of each harbour was the transition point to the Silvergrey proper.

Three galleons were tied up along the quay where Abram and a troop of Hermetists stood waiting the order to board. They were headed to Glyph to help enact the end of this drama.

While he waited, Abram checked up on the reports by those tracking the White God. It was depressing. Worlds were dying again, many worlds. It would take a frustratingly long time to set and bait the trap for IT. The Archivist calculated the number of worlds that would die in the hours leading up to IT hopefully taking the bait. He sighed.

Finally, the Governors arrived bringing with them the Mercurius, the Head of the Order. Resplendent in Hermetist garb of a deep blue, the Outer Head of the Order was the tallest person Abram had ever seen.

The fourth of the tetrad was, in many ways, the most enigmatic member of the order of Hermes. A short woman entirely in black—even neophytes began with one white button—the Nigredo was never seen, except when great magick was required.

Abram had never seen all four in one place before, had never seen the Nigredo at all and had only ever met the Mercurius once. He bowed form the waist along with all the others, until the four had gone below decks on the lead ship.

A bosun’s whistle shrilled the air. Abram joined the throng boarding the vessels.

Once the ships had passed from the harbour and into the Silvergrey Sea itself, its true strangeness became manifest.

The Silvergrey was a sea without a shore or a measurable depth. It had currents, tides, and winds that were precise and rigidly predictable. Its sky was a pale featureless grey with silver twinkles, flashing on and off. No sun or stars, no indication of the source of the light that was everywhere. That light, reflecting off the water from its unknown source, was initially blinding.

Five days they sailed in this quiet and unchanging strangeness. They were headed for a little-known backwater that led to no world and so was not travelled much.

Until the fifth day nothing visibly changed. There were breezes that shifted and modified in strength, but the view remained constant. Toward the end of that last day of travel, radical change began.

What had been a relatively calm and above all level sea began to bend. The sky disappeared as the stuff of the Silvergrey, over the period of a few hours bent into a tube.

Light was now hitting the ships from every angle off the invisible wave crests. Both wind and current increased astern and the ships gained speed. They began to move up a noticeable incline. The resemblance to a traditional body of water was very tenuous now, as the upward flowing tunnel of sea curved to the right and then levelled off.

The ships finally hit a foggy patch indicating that the journey to the ‘Real’ Multiverse was imminent.

The Hermetist galleons passed, single file, through the fog and onto the River Styx under the City Glyph.

* * *

As the Templar absorbed the news that Glyph was now cut off from the Thirty Aions, conversation ceased. Not only were the gates closed, which had only happened once since Glyph was first built, but none of the Portals into or out of the city worked.

After a time, discussion between Trevorsayn and the Templar determined that the city had been thus closed off around the time the Wanderer had been performing his Magicks in the Under.

The Mages Guild had tried and failed to reopen the gates. The Templar’s news that the Incunabulum had been involved in the sealing of Glyph explained the formers’ failure.

The isolation of Glyph from the former Pleroma was total. The river levels were dropping; they would soon run completely dry. That meant no water for the city. The water that remained was being diverted into cisterns built for the purpose of preservation. Various private reservoirs also existed. A water rationing scheme was being implemented.

Another more serious problem was the air. A complex system kept the composition of the atmosphere in Glyph at constant levels. Maintaining this balance required access to the worlds on the other side of the four perpetually open gates. The mages assured the Templar that they could keep the air breathable indefinitely, but it would require considerable effort.

The final problem was the invisible shield that kept the air in. Having been put in place before any part of Glyph had been built, there was no reason to believe that it would be affected by the city’s sudden isolation. No one felt comforted in the least by this line of reasoning, however. If it failed, they would all die a chilling death.

Dævara’s father took Trevorsayn aside and the two had a whispered conversation. When it was over, the Mages Guild leader gathered his underlings and headed back to their citadel. The other Guild leaders went alone to theirs. The subordinate members the other three guilds went into the crowd issuing instructions.

Soon citizens, refugees, and visitors began to move out of the Plaza. Father explained to Dæv that the excess people were being distributed about the various squares and along side streets as evenly as possible.

When asked what they were to do, the Templar replied, “We wait. A beast of sorts is coming at the Wanderer’s bidding and there are other visitors expected. Some will be allies, I hope.”

“But if the city’s sealed, how will anyone get here?” Dæv asked. The others in the group paused to listen.

“There are ways into Glyph that may be still accessible,” was all he would say.

After a brief discussion, Dævara and her father decided that if they were going to have to wait, a little rest and refreshment was in order.

To the Griffin the troupe walked.

Just as the elf and her companions entered, a Hermetist stopped her father with a hand on his arm, whispering something in his ear. The Templar asked the others to carry on and said he would be with them later. Together, the two departed the inn.

— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, August 2026

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