Teller of Fate
Second Movement: The Last Templar
Chapter Eleven
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‘Death teaches many things,’ went the saying. For the Dark Man, it had taught him that he was not what he thought he was.
The fog of terror and brief, intense pain gave way to darkness and…
…
…bright orange light.
The perpetual storm of Scorn’s waste had abated long enough to show some sun. A reddish orange ball shone in the sky to the West. The sky itself was grey as a shroud.
By the look of it, the miles-wide mound of sand smothered rubble to his right could have been there for generations.
The corpse of the Dark Man was recognizable as a body at all only because the one who had been the Dark Man was seeing it.
Had this been him?
Who was it?
Who was he now?
Old patterns of thought long suppressed, began to re-emerge. He remembered the oldest things first.
The islands with their Temples. Then there was the sky and space, stars and worlds, galaxies and the dark things between.
Finally, there had been other Aions and subject peoples by the supercluster full.
There had been the dream of an empire that would truly be paradise, requiring a magick riskier but more powerful than anything they had ever tried before. The few who knew and had the courage to follow the Dream began their work. It had been the most glorious of times.
Then there had been war over trifles, interfering with and ultimately requiring a halt to the Dream. Division and error had crept in. Arrogance had replaced benevolence.
Whose side had he been on?
Finally White God had come, and all fighting had ceased as an empire united to stop the end of everything. Or so they had thought.
They had not been far wrong.
The Shining Empire had been lost, but IT—the White God—had lost as well. Not dead but bound for eternity in a prison Templar-manifested, the blue mountain city of Azhure’en.
He remembered the bitterness of that solution. It had cost so much, and it had not even lasted.
Now, barriers were weakening. That should have been impossible. ITs gaoler and eternal foe was dying. That should have been especially impossible.
He, now once again a nameless Templar, checked the bond to his sister, the only other Templar remaining, the warrior who kept IT occupied and ITs violence in check.
She was still there, still fighting. Nameless could sense her fatigue but could not sense weakness, though he knew it had to be there.
He had a mission, the one who had been the Dark Man. As the Nameless, he had thought to create a ruthless man as an avatar to help him find the means of rescuing a sibling and recorking the bottle that held a nasty genie.
Somewhere, he had lost that goal and even himself. He recalled it now and knew that precious time was lost.
A few more minutes and he remembered everything. The cage holding IT rotting, his sister slowly dying, he himself attacked and trapped.
IT had an ally.
Not only did Nameless have to find a way to fix everything, but he also had to find and thwart an unknown foe.
Nameless felt despair but did not let it linger. He had allies to call on as well. The Order of Hermes had been all but neutral during the last conflict. Now that the White God threatened their home, mayhap they would enter the lists.
He used the sand and made a form; his form as he had been in his youth. The old, familiar form. As he inhabited it and made it Live, he smiled.
The great city to the south was much less impressive in daylight. The storm would not return for hours, yet. He began to walk.
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Getting into the city proved harder than leaving it. Granted, he looked nothing like the man who had left.
Still, nothing came out of the waste that hadn’t come from the city in the first place. The guard was shocked to find a living thing without the equipment necessary to survive strolling toward the gate. Nevertheless, Nameless managed to convince him that he had a right to enter.
It took a day to fully reintegrate himself as parts of his being were hidden in distant and hard to reach places.
By the time he was complete again, he was also quite worried. The White God’s ally was influencing events more than he expected. IT was feeding again. If this couldn’t be stopped, IT would become strong enough to slip ITs bonds altogether and to then sterilize the Thirty Aions. The sacrifice of the Shining Empire would have been for naught.
There could be no rescue this time. All the warriors were dead. Well, almost all.
He needed to see for himself how secure those bonds still were. To Azhure’en he needed go.
As much as anyone still living, the Hermetists knew the true nature of the beast that edifice imprisoned. His quest for the tools needed to reforge the chains binding IT would have to begin there.
A shock to Nameless had been the current date. He had been prepared to discover that he had been out of commission for millennia. Well, he had been.
The Templar had also been pushed back in time almost ninety-four thousand years. How this had been concealed from him was almost as great a puzzle as how it had been done in the first place.
This narrowed the list of suspects aiding IT to three—the surviving Elder Gods. None of them were going to be easy to grapple with.
First things first. Nameless tracked the future history of this place. In a millennium’s time, this whole constellation would be destroyed violently.
So, merely travelling forward from here was out of the question.
He could use the Portal network to move through time as well as space. Doing so would leave a tell-tale signature, but it had to be risked. Time, ironically, was short.
Nameless wouldn’t consider why he had been moved backward through time until later.
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Azhure’en existed in an infinite number of places. The Multiverse was more infinite in many dimensions, so finding an iteration of the Mother Lodge of the Hermetists would be a chore.
There had never been a proper census done of the worlds. Too many people, too many kinds of people, no consensus definition of what constituted ‘people’. The same was true for ‘world,’ ‘settlement,’ ‘intelligent,’ and on and on. Nameless wasn’t sure there was even an agreement that the peoples had ever formed a single civilization. There was even argument over what ‘civilization’ was.
There were enormous differences in technology from world to world, sometimes even within the same system. It made for a fascinating life but finding what you were looking for Sisypheanly difficult.
In truth, it was worse than that, for there was only one iteration that he could enter: the one on Mercurius.
When the Templars had built Azhure’en, they had made its primary iteration on their avatar of Oerth. That iteration vanished soon after they had imprisoned the White God; an event not only unanticipated but whose means, motive, and instigator had never been discovered.
Though the existence of the planetoid Mercurius was well known, the home world of the Hermetists was hidden. Not only was it not a natural world, it was a nomad, roaming unsunned in the dark voids between strings of galactic superclusters. In what Aion it dwelt, no one knew. Thirty multi-infinites were a lot of space to search for a world that was magickly hidden. Mercurius might not even be in the former Pleroma, or in normal space.
No Portals outside of the Mother Lodge itself touched it. To find Mercurius, he’d have to find a port on the Silvergrey Sea.
That meant getting perilously close to the god that dwelt within it. Poseidon was the father of everything the Templars became. He created the first Ten Kings, founded the Ten Temples. Nameless had been sworn to his service when still a child.
He and the others of the last Timpeall had foresworn that allegiance, breaking their magickal link to the deity. They had done so as a matter of principle. ‘No More Gods’ had been their war cry.
The Sea God would know when Nameless was near. How would he react to an apostate on His sea?
Nothing to be done about it. Nameless could fend off Poseidon if need be.
Adding another layer of difficulty was the nature of that Sea. Though one could find any number of people who knew of the Silvergrey, finding someone who’d sailed it was next to impossible.
The ports had a way of staying hidden in plain sight. People would know where one was when they were near it and forget when they’d travelled a certain distance from it.
Finding a port would mean finding indirect evidence that one was near. Nameless spent most of a day scouring records for clues to the existence of such ports on various worlds. Finally, he found one—at least, he was reasonably sure it was one. The easiest way to get to it was by passing through a place that was—to his great surprise—new to him. The Hermetists, again. He wouldn’t know for sure if he could get to the Silvergrey until he got to this ‘Glyph.’
— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, July 2026
© Gideon Jagged
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