Stories of Stardust (pt2)

239. Fire and Gold (3)

Before me, a silver mirror rose from the darkness. I moved closer. With each step, the crisp edges of the mirror softened, eventually disappearing entirely into a mist that hung over the area. At first contact with my magic, it retracted and began to solidify, bright purple eyes taking form before the rest of Tezcatlipoca's figure pried itself from the darkness. He lifted a hand in greeting, a faint feeling of surprise echoing across the dark landscape. The feeling was quickly and expertly muffled, replaced with a warmth that didn't feel fake.

"I didn't expect our paths to cross here." Tezcatlipoca's magic poked back, the mist surprisingly warm.

I was equally surprised and felt my curiosity echoed.

"I wouldn't have been quite so surprised if your friend had been the one to find me." A flash of memory accompanied the words, the moment Tezcatlipoca realized Cove's magic's magnitude. Jealousy gave the memory a slight green hue, a mixture of Tezcatlipoca and mine.

In the face of such power, I couldn't find it in me to be offended by his lack of faith in my abilities.

Tiny, twinkling lights fluttered deep below us, rising like the moon to greet us. One felt familiar, and I reached out to touch it.

Tezcatlipoca's now-solid hand wrapped around my wrist, and the darks began to sink back to where they came.

"Be careful not to fall too far away from the present. Even for someone like him, it would be difficult to return." The words were unexpectedly warm, and honest concern underlined them. I realized suddenly that Tezcatlipoca's condescending tone hadn't come from a place of disinterest–instead, it had the same underlying concern that unsolicited advice and scorn from elderly relatives carried. Good intentions; wrong tone. He thought of humans as children, capable of surprising ideas and things, but even our oldest elders were young compared to the millennia he had seen.

I found myself deferring to his expertise, though no such warning had been left in any book I'd read.

Human mages don't usually end up this deep. Tezcatlipoca thought.

He studied me, many thoughts passing quicker than I could keep up with. "Perhaps..." he trailed off, his thoughts stilling enough for me to catch the tail end.

Perhaps I was connected.

Connected to what?

My thoughts reached him.

"I am the greatest seer El Dorado has ever known." His words lacked the ego I expected from him and were founded simply on a truth. "Yet my vision has been clouded."

A hungry darkness rose behind him, a mere echo of his vision. It swept over him like a tidal wave, throwing him away from the thread of reality he'd been investigating and barring him from peering any further into the future.

The vision vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Even here, where my body and emotions felt numb, I could feel the hair prickle on the back of my neck.

On the heels of his vision, a forgotten memory of devouring darkness crossed my mind, pulling alongside it the paintings of the ocean and the flame the Agarthians had created based on their visions, suspecting Cove and me to be related.

Tezcatlipoca's excitement shot through me like lightning, his eyes glistening like the stars that had risen back up beside us. Suddenly, I felt far too exposed, and the stars sank a little further. My discomfort vanished like lightning, fading away in the face of an idea that sparked across both our minds. Was it Tezcatlipoca's idea or mine? The higher the stars rose, the thinner the barrier between our thoughts seemed.

If we fall much further, you might find it difficult to wake up.

But if we went just a little bit deeper, perhaps two could accomplish what one couldn't alone. Tezcatlipoca had the experience, knowledge, and a vast, smoky power that ran deeper than it appeared. If our suspicions were true, I had something even more valuable–a connection to the vents that would soon shape the future.

And having that connection would make it easier to find the correct thread of time to pull on, Tezcatlipoca knew.

Propelled by a shared curiosity, we reached further away from the present, golden threads shimmering against the dark. The stars shot past us as we plucked on the most likely one, chased by the darkness hunting them. It ate, and ate, and ate. At first, it was only large enough to feast on tiny fragments of stardust. With each bite, it grew more powerful, and the number of things it could eat increased. Soon, it was large enough to devour the stars, and it tore into them with a vengeance, carefully picking and plucking out the ones that would grant it the most power. As it grew, so did its hunger. Soon, it set its sights on the supermassive stars in the sky. This time, its approach was different. Rather than devour the stars all at once, it took massive chunks that were insignificant to the stars, letting them recover between bites and growing faster than they had before. Nearly unlimited wellsprings of power were ripe for the taking, and take the darkness did.

We pulled the strings of time closer still.

The threads snapped, and our vision burned before scattering like ashes on the wind.

We briefly shared a moment of disappointment–in the end, had the vision shown us more than we already knew?

The force–whatever it was that had yanked the future from our fingertips–shot us pack, propelling us up away from the things that could be and closer to the present with the things that were. This close to the present, much less was shared.

Even so, the surface of Tezcatlipoca's thoughts remained an open book. He'd spent millennia as El Dorado's foremost expert on spaciotemporal magic, outpacing all his peers and gathering the experience of hundreds of lifetimes and thousands of timelines.

In all that time and not time, weaving through the strands of time had never been so easy.

"Your magic is odd," his words echoed something the Agarthians had said about an odd feeling to my magic.

"Maybe it's because you've left impressions on many timelines," he continued, as we both recalled some of my interdimensional travels.

His theory didn't quite ring true.

-

Oranges and yellows beat against my heavy eyelids, heralding the early morning. Artificial sunlight drifted in through the solitary window, deepening the golds of the room and staining everything yellow. Fur brushed up against my cheek as Ani nuzzled me, kneading his claws against the golden threads of the bedsheets.

Bits and pieces from last night's dream and lingering knowledge gained from Tezcatlipoca flashed through me. I reached out toward the sunlight, watching it spill over my hand as my thoughts settled to Ani's purr. With what I gleaned from Tezcatlipoca, I was reasonably sure that what happened with the Merchant and the Djinn while I was playing Zenith Online had something to do with the overlapping timelines. Still, the particulars were just out of reach.