Teller of Fate
Second Movement: The Last Templar
Chapter Fourteen
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It turned out to be a pleasant three-day voyage to the planet of the Hermetists. The Silvergrey was a calm sea; the winds and the currents changing with mathematical predictability.
Not trusting to luck, Nameless sent out mental signals into the Sea several times during his voyage. On the second day, he got a response from his former god.
The nature of the being who answered was so different than his previous experience that, at first, he thought he must have reached the wrong one.
Then Poseidon told him of events that had happened thirty years previous. Nameless was left stunned as, with a heartfelt wish for his good fortune, the Sea God ended their colloquy.
Knowing the answer, he asked the Mate one day, while squinting at the wave crests, if there’d ever been a storm on the Silvergrey Sea. Only one, he was told. Thirty years ago.
No more would he be drawn into the subject beyond saying that its cause was not natural and not likely to ever happen again. Nameless decided not to press.
The Mercurius dock resembled the one on Noir to such a degree that, along with a passage that left little trace of motion, Nameless could almost believe there’d been no trip at all. This amused him, though he could not say why.
The trip back to real space was the reverse of the trip in. He travelled from the dock up a narrow, paved path and into the silvery fog.
It thinned as he walked, the world of Mercurius manifesting as charcoal sketches of land and air into which colour slowly poured.
The sky was a boiling hell of dark indigo cloud. Inverted thunderheads wrestled and fought with each other, occasionally birthing jagged, twisting cracks of pale orange in the cover that flowed along, growing, shrinking, writhing, until the pressure closed them up again.
The ground beneath was boring by comparison. Brown earth giving way to dry scrub and eventually to grass that would probably look green in normal light.
The land sloped up to a low ridge along which the village of Mercurius lay, housing the few non-Hermetists allowed to live on this world.
Nameless followed half a dozen Hermetists up a winding, hard-packed dirt road that intersected the main road through the town.
The buildings themselves were two or three storeys of white stucco and dark wood beams, clustered along the top of the rise for three or four miles in both directions.
He had been contemplating spending the night in town but dismissed the idea once he’d crested the rise. Ahead, through a break in the buildings was a wide valley dominated by the Mother Lodge.
He knew it to its smallest dimension, did the Nameless One. He hadn’t been near it since its beginning and had forgotten how beautiful it was.
Made entirely of a unique stone in a million shades of blue, Azhure’en was larger than most mountains any world could boast. It rose in an ever-steeper pitch, from a base seventeen miles across to peak in the central spire that reached a needle-sharp point fifteen miles above the valley floor. The five-sided lantern tower was almost entirely stained glass.
No less than eighteen naves at three different heights radiated out from it, five on ground level topping out at over seven miles tall. Each of the latter had massive square towers flanking their entrances.
Crossings of many sizes there were. Some crawled along the ground, others leaped enthusiastically through the air, and still others seemed only occasionally to exist at all. The whole made dizzying the attempt to take it all in.
Nameless descended the wide, flagstone path at a discrete distance from the others.
As Azhure’en rose to meet him, more of the excesses he’d lovingly helped to create so long ago became discernible.
It was carved and fluted and knurled with geometric and artistic excess.
Not a single plain surface had the Templars allowed. For the most part, the decoration was intended to increase the apparent size of its already titanic proportions.
The path led to the left, where the main entrance was. As he came closer, Nameless saw a fence of blue stone, elaborately carved, that circled the grounds, protecting the unwary from the Taphros, a moat of what appeared to be water, but most definitely was not.
Ahead and to the left of the fence was a colossus that had looked like an ordinary sized statue from the hill. Over a cube of stone, the figure of a robed woman slumped in grief. She had three pairs of wings, arching up and curling over her and the space in front of the statue itself, creating a large area of deep violet shade. One set of wings was of feathers, another of skin stretched over bone, and the last like the wings of an insect, the latest even managing to be translucent.
It, like the Lodge, was blue.
Before turning to the Mother Lodge, each Hermetist turned first to the statue and disappeared under the shadow of its wings.
They did so one at a time. Nameless knew what to expect. Though he’d never faced the ordeal himself, he knew he’d survive it.
As each Hermetist returned from the dark, they would stride briskly up to a break in the fence hedging the moat and walk, seemingly on nothing at all, in an arc over the ‘water’ and down onto a path that led to one of the open doors to the Lodge.
He waited behind the others, none of whom presumed to look at him, for his turn.
When it came, Nameless walked confidently under the shadow of the seraph’s wings.
Once inside, there was light and all without was dark. Before him was the visible side of the cube, six hundred by six hundred feet. Deeply carved into it were words in the first language he had ever learned. It was a short, simple sentence.
He read what the words said.
He read them again.
His heart hammered twice in his chest and then seemed to stop. A roaring filled his ears. Chills and tremors shook him. Sweat covered him and his knees seemed not to want to hold him up.
He tasted the bitter truth of what he read and knew despair.
It passed slowly and was gone. He’d come through with his determination to continue intact.
Nameless emerged from the shadow and into the forgiving dimness of Mercurius’s native light, much lighter of heart than he’d felt since waking to himself on Scorn.
As he crossed the now visible black crystal bridge over the moat of Mercurial Water, Nameless remembered that the message was different for everyone, each time.
Those with the right strength crossed. Others most often threw themselves into the moat and became one with the Source again.
As he crossed the center point of the crystal bridge, Nameless first saw, then felt the barrier. He just caught a reflection of it in a burst of orange light from the sky.
Passing through it felt like walking into a wall of icy water.
Azhure’en knew him and welcomed him.
Nameless stepped off the bridge and onto a well-trimmed lawn. The gates closest to him were to his right. From this vantage the Mother Lodge of the Hermetists filled half the sky.
He was, in fact, too close to see the central spire; the square towers flanking the gates obscured it.
Sharply angled pillars embedded in the faces of those towers insistently drew the eye upward. Nameless fought the urge almost successfully, to avoid craning his neck to see the tops. It would after all be undignified to fall over backwards head cranked back and mouth hanging open.
The scale of the building made its true size less noticeable from where he walked. Like the sky or mountains, the mind simply assigned it to the landscape as another feature.
The gates themselves were small enough to escape this phenomenon. Double doors fitting into the parabolic-arched entrance, they towered hundreds of yards tall. One hundred and eleven wide, shallow steps, like ripples in a lake, spread out from the threshold.
Nameless climbed in silence.
About halfway, rising like the keel of a ship, a plinth split the stairway in two. A wide, flat space held text in a language dead for a thousand centuries.
It was a quote from an ancient Hermetist lamenting that evolution had created intelligence.
The great stone doors were shut. The wicket gate, however, was open; a mere three yards in height, it was.
Nameless passed within unremarked.
The narthex was a railed path the width of the gates. Beyond it, where one would expect more floor, there were only the echoes of the path at lower levels. The vaulted ceiling was just visible in the pale blue light. The air seemed suffused with a fine mist; cool and slightly damp.
Nameless still had the place to himself. He headed for the doors opposite; just as big, just as closed.
Another door-in-a-door and he was standing at the end of one of the five ground level naves. Here, at last, was someone to greet him.
The Hermetist was young and all in black, except for one white button on her double-breasted coat. She removed her wide-brimmed hat when she spotted him. She was bald, as most female Hermetists were.
Her smile was slightly nervous; she knew to whom she was speaking.
“I am Breen Hermit. On behalf of the Kokkinos and the Albedo, welcome back to Azhure’en.” She made no movement other than the removal of her headgear, neither extended hand, nor bowed head.
She treated him as a peer. She didn’t bother asking for a name, either. They schooled their own well, did the Hermetists, even the novices.
“Thank you, Breen. I need to speak to the Archivist with all speed.”
“Certainly.” Breen replaced her hat. “This way.”
The instruction was unnecessary, but the courtesy was welcome. Nameless hadn’t been in the company of those who truly knew him in an exceptionally long time.
Walking miles down this nave would have been a chore, but when they’d built this place, Nameless and his peers devised an easier way.
He stood beside Breen as she held her open hand out in front of her, fingers down. A column of blue stone smoothly extruded from the floor until it touched her palm. She gripped it and pushed forward lightly.
The floor under them began to move. A circular patch two yards across remained still while the rest of the floor seemed to ooze around it.
At a fair clip they went towards the center of Azhure’en.
Each of the naves radiated out from the center at equal angles. Each was over a mile in width. Each roof sloped up from just under four miles to just under seven miles high. Each had its own climate including clouds and rain. The floor was featureless and had a slight bit of give under Nameless’s heels.
Enormous windows formed the top half of the nave. It was flanked on either side by seven aisles, the closest half its height, the next one half that, and so on. The upper halves of each were also filled with windows, all looking like stained glass. They were dim now, the pale light within turning them into dark-tinted mirrors.
Every few minutes, though, they would be vividly lit up by the opening of one of the bright orange cracks in the clouds. Like a wave, the amber light would move along seven rows of lit windows—the seven clerestories—each one higher up and taller than the last, each closer to its mate on the opposite side of the nave.
There were a few other Hermetists with them, going from place to place. All greeted him when they recognized who he was.
If any were surprised by his appearance, they hid it well. The voices that should have been an incoherent babble, echoing and reechoing were muffled by the air of this place. No one whispered yet voices simply didn’t carry.
A flickering bright white light appeared from the corner of Nameless’s eye. He turned to it only to have it dart out of sight again. He spun the other way, hoping for a clearer sight of it and was rewarded.
Like a spiky ball of slow-moving lightning, the phenomenon jittered and zigged down the nave at ceiling height and then dropped in stuttering stages and back-and-forthed its way toward him. It left afterimages in the air as it moved, like the fading trail of a synthetic comet.
Very quickly, it darted just before his face and away.
Nameless didn’t follow its course for he was staring at the fading image of another of his kind in white light. This other Templar, his sister, had a look of extreme anger and was raising a distinctive sword over her head.
Her image was gone in seconds. So was the sparkling mote that tracked her position.
He turned to the Hermetist. “How often is she seen now?” There was no sign of concern in his voice.
“Less often in the last few years. The Kokkinos is concerned. Is she why you’re here?”
Nameless nodded.
A few minutes later, as Breen and Nameless approached the pentagonal crossing, a brilliant blue-white shaft of light running from the ground straight up became increasingly prominent.
When they finally entered the open space, Breen made to turn aside to head down to the archives. Nameless stopped her with a hand on her arm. “A moment, if you please. Could you steer us to the center of the crossing?” he asked.
“Of course.”
It revealed its true dimension as Nameless approached it. The mist gave it a penumbra which deceived about its width, for it had none.
It was a one-dimensional line of light. The only straight line in the multiverse, a friend had once said of it. It did not touch the floor. There was a circular hole where it would have about four inches across. The line continued down.
Even with perfectly clear air, it would not have been possible to see the ultimate end of the line. The clerestories of the naves were joined together by windows square to the center of the crossing. Beneath those, half the height and farther away from the center, were five more square to the aisles flanking the naves. Beneath those again were smaller more distant windows, as so on to the last and smallest aisles. Above them were the six radial naves of the second level and above that the seven of the uppermost level. Capping all was the stained-glass lantern tower.
Nameless could just make out the beginnings of the of that central spire in the light of another orange crack in the sky outside.
Looking back to ground level, Nameless indulged in a bit of silliness he’d never been able to resist when here.
Stepping away from the moving platform, he walked as close to the Line as he could. Focusing on the window joining the fourth clerestories in the two naves before him (one eye to either side of the Line), he could see that it opened out onto the dim skies of Mercurius.
When he leaned his upper body to the left, the right half of the window was suddenly ablaze with the bright butter yellow sun of Cormoryn, a world in another Aion, while the left half still showed the gloom of Mercurius’s sky. Leaning the other way, and that same window’s left side showed the dimmer green suns of Ashlory, resident in yet a third Aion, while the right side was the dark blue of Mercurius.
The fact that the same window showed daylight from three different worlds never ceased to be a delight to him.
Nameless stepped around the Line and looked down at the glowing red line along the floor that helped define the largest open Portal in the multiverse. Really, there were infinitely many of these Portals, all stacked in the same space.
Walking round and round the Line in either direction would take one form world to world forever.
He turned back to Breen to find a smile on her pleasant oval face. He smiled back and was rewarded with a grin.
Nameless decided he liked her. Stepping back to her side, he said, “Let’s get going.”
Breen piloted the platform away from Line and headed for the juncture of two of the series of ever diminishing aisles. The seven aisles were open on the sides facing the naves and were topped by fan vaulted ceilings. They diminished in height and width the farther they went from the crossing.
Each aisle was braced on its naveward side by a row of baroquely carved and fluted pillars. The illusion that the clerestories were floating walls of glass and that the pillars were much farther away than they were added to the feeling that the space was even bigger than its true gigantic scale.
The aisle adjacent to the nave was four miles high and a half mile wide. The farthest was barely three yards wide and only a dozen high, its windows occupying the top third.
Beneath each window of this furthest aisle was a single pointed archway with a plain door. These opened into the cells where most resident Hermetists lived.
Where the two smallest aisles met under the smallest center-facing window, there was a set of double doors, dense with fantastic bas-relief.
Dismissing the extrusion she had used to make their moving bit of ground, the Hermetist pulled the left door open. Together, she and Nameless stepped through.
It closed quietly behind them.
It was a drop of three miles to the Archives. More practical engineers would have put some sort of elevator in to do the job, but poetry figured prominently in the souls of the Templar designers.
The pair stood in a foyer leading through a modest hall to a set of curved stairs that could have accommodated a parade twelve abreast. The descent would have exhausted anyone. Fortunately, they didn’t have to walk.
Once both were standing on risers and gripping the railing, the stairs began to move. Slowly at first, and increasing to a fair clip, the stairs corkscrewed their way into the ground. There was no tug to the outside as they descended, which was a good thing as they quickly accelerated to a speed that would get them to the Archive in only a few minutes.
Continued here.
— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, August 2026
© Gideon Jagged
All Rights Reserved
