“HOW LONG WAS I there?”
“Only a few moments. The time in Jinsaih’s world is brief,” Naliv said.
“It felt longer.”
“You integrate easily into it. Do you know who you remind us of?”
“I heard you the last time. Hernot. The troublemaker.”
“We need to begin our work before he is born.”
Nathan sighed. “What makes you so sure of that? How can one man affect so much, create the path that has led to where we are now?”
“Is that not what you have done? One person can do anything. For Hernot, however, his purpose is to sow discontent. Words can kill as easily as a weapon—this is what we have become aware of now. Yes, we believe he is the source of the problem.”
“So you get rid of him.”
“Oh, Nathaniel, no,” Naliv said, her voice filled with compassion. Did she feel that for him, or for Jinsaih’s world, or for herself and Elaimat? Nathan wondered. In his heart, he knew it was for all of them.
“We re-create the beginning of Elaimat to a time before he exists,” she said. “He will still live. Do you see? We are choosing a different probability for our Elaimat, that is all. It is something the shaman understands. Probabilities are vibrations. The slightest effect alters them. Yet there is no end to their number. She already knows she has to choose a different one. She feels that where she is, because of Hernot.”
“Your Elaimat won’t be the same.”
“To an extent, but the differences will not be great, and we can adjust. Unless we do this, Calum’s fear and anger will wipe us out. We have nothing to lose, you see.”
“What if you’re wrong? What happens to me? Do I end up in Calum’s world, then? Or maybe none at all!”
“Except, have you not been telling us this is a dream, and you will wake from it?” Naliv asked, her voice soft. “Is it possible that now you believe in us?”
“I don’t know.”
“We know now that we need to join Jinsaih in her rituals, be within the power she enters there. That is how we will know what to do. We can receive that power she shows to us through you and give that knowledge to the source, to the Harec. We will know how to make the transformations we need. Then Calum will not send the source into your world. Then our Soran will not die.”
“So if I take you there again, and you figure out how to do that, I’ll disappear when you succeed.”
“And wake up forever in your own world. Whether you help us or not, you will have that outcome, Nathaniel,” Naliv said.
“You know, you could forget about the shaman and just stop Calum yourselves,” Nathan said.
Kilan gestured beyond the entrance to the cave. “You have seen what it is out there. We told you we cannot get near him. He cannot control what he has set in motion. He is not even aware of us anymore. He is consumed by grief and fear and thus he has split us and all of Elaimat apart!”
“I told you Nathaniel, we can only create in harmony,” Naliv said. “The Harec needs the power of the shaman to restore that balance to us.”
Nathan looked at the faces of those around him. They were so familiar now. A sudden thought surprised him. If they did succeed in what they wanted to do, he would never see them again. He had wanted things to be as they were, for the dreams to end. Was that still true? The idea was one he found confusing and unwelcome.
“I’m still here. I haven’t woken up or been pulled back to the shaman. So just think about it. Maybe I’m still here because there’s another way. That’s all I’m saying. Show me where Calum is.”
Kilan and Naliv exchanged glances and turned to the others. No one spoke, but Nathan knew they were deciding what to do. In the silence the room seemed suspended in that moment, an eternity of its own.
“All right,” Naliv said. “I will take you as close as we can safely go. We’ll find Marn there, too.” She touched his arm, sending her energy through him. Again he felt no motion, but in the next moment he was standing on the edge of a chasm she had shown him before, Naliv and Kilan beside him. He turned around and looked back, but there was nothing to see. Elaimat was shrouded in the storm.
“I need to be on the other side,” he said.
“If you go over there, his fear could consume you,” Naliv called out above the fury of the wind, and beckoned him to the shelter of a ledge.
“I’m not from your world, remember?” he said, his voice echoing against the rock. “Where I come from, what Calum feels is normal. You said that to me in the churchyard and a dozen times since, that it was why you brought me into Elaimat—to find out what I was, my emotions, and to stop the influence of my existence on you and end the chaos. You were right. Calum is in my world now, my vibration.”
Naliv looked over the chasm to the clouds that filled the sky and the red flare from the explosions that erupted as they watched.
“Yes. For the same reason I cannot cross the abyss, nor can any of us in Elaimat,” she said. “You already understand him in ways we cannot. Yet I am so sorry, Nathaniel. What we have done to you, to bring you into this.”
“How could you avoid it, if we both come from the same origins, are both what you say we are—probabilities that grew out of the shaman’s world.”
Naliv smiled, though her eyes showed sadness still. “Then you finally believe us,” she said.
“I already said, I don’t know.”
“It is not death we are afraid of, do you understand that? It is the violence he has invited with his acceptance of his fear. It is the violence that has arisen out of the fear that will bring the end of Elaimat if we cannot change this.”
“Like I said, the idea is familiar to me.”
“We will wait here. I must find Marn. I cannot sense where he is because of the storm. When you return I will bring you back across the abyss.”
“Good.”
“Nathaniel, your own life is not intended to end here.”
“Not to mention, you need me to reach the shaman again if I can’t get to Calum. Isn’t that what this is about? Don’t worry. That’s my plan, to get back here. Trust me.”
Naliv nodded and lifted her hands and with a quick motion touched his shoulder.
The shift was instant, as it always was. In the next moment he was standing on the other side. He saw Naliv across from him on the ledge in the wind-lashed rain. He turned around and faced a wide plain that he could only half perceive in the dim light left under the darkened sky. Lightning appeared in the east but there was no rain. What he sensed most of all was that the place felt familiar, but he didn’t know why. The air itself seemed to embrace him.
Calum had shaped all of this, brought it into being, created his own despair. It occurred to Nathan that he and Calum had each created a reality in response to unspeakable loss. Even his own illness, Nathan thought, the anomaly lodged in his brain, was of his own construction. Where he was now wasn’t a dream anymore, not the way he had felt it. Both were the same, the dream and waking, both were aspects of him, equal and the same. That was the truth.
What would he do when he found Calum? Talk to him, as he had promised Naliv? Bring him back? Dirt and sand swirled around his feet. Would Calum sense he was there, like a creature in the wild knows when something or someone has entered its territory? Or like a criminal anticipates his captors and eludes them? Calum was unaware of his own power, acting out because he didn’t know any other way. What he felt was no longer a part of the Elaimat into which he had been born.
The landscape altered. Stone croppings obscured his view. Arroyos appeared without warning, threatening to swallow him. A narrow river flowed parallel to his path as he walked, its water a thick black. Without it he would have lost his sense of direction, for a thick fog had crept in.
All of it was a maze of projections from Calum’s mind. Yet this was real, as far as Calum wanted it to be.
Nathan stopped. The fog was gone. Hills lay to his right in a sharp, ragged outline. Dark clouds raced overhead. In the center of the plain two massive stones rose up, united by a capstone, its length half that of the two. The ground led down a gradual slope and he followed it. Mounds rose in the distance and a massive stone circle lay beyond them. On the boulders nearby he saw the imprints of spirals that matched the ones in the cave where Naliv had taken him three times. There were rings and depressions scored into the stone. He reached out and touched one of them.
He understood then why it had all seemed familiar. This was the shaman’s world. He remembered his first vision there, the first time in the cave. Only now there was no endless sea of green grass, no ground she would have called home. The desolation he saw was a dead place. Her world lay in the past. Had Calum conceived it this way, or was it what had happened to Jinsaih and her people?
The route continued through the great circle. The stones had once held their energy for the shaman in her rituals, the vibration and light. Not now. Not anymore. Yet, she had said, nothing was ever lost. Naliv had said that too. For Jinsaih the light and sound she experienced in the circle had become patterns imprinted on the stones, shapes of other worlds. Had she seen Calum’s outcome, then?
If she had, she would have seen it as a probability, only that. That was her life’s work, what she was there for. It was unthinkable to fail at it.
Yet it was changing for you, Jinsaih, thought Nathan, just as much as it has for Naliv. And for me.
Could the shaman have stopped Calum? Or had it been too late even in her time? Was that what Naliv meant about needing to get to a time before?
If it was all probability, each of these paths and patterns existed. He only had to bring Calum back to the beginning by bringing him peace of mind. That would change all the rest, for all the worlds in-between. The chaos would cease for Elaimat. He, Nathan, would wake up for good. Yet, what would that mean?
He walked in what seemed to be slow motion for a long time. Behind him was only the dim light and barren plain. Before him he could see now the straight line of the horizon, a thin white line at the edge of the clouds, a curious reflection that cut across the dark. He saw a round, squat building made of stones that rose almost ten feet into the air, its edges uneven and open to the sky, the whole of it unfinished. He knew at the same moment that Calum was inside.
“Calum,” he called out. His voice sounded brittle and thin in the dead air. There was no answer.
Nathan took a few steps closer.
“Calum,” he said again.
Still there was no answer. He walked forward until he stood a few feet from the building, and he could see the markings on its stones, crude imitations of the patterns from Jinsaih’s landscape. A man stepped out of it.
Nathan held in his shock. In the muted light Calum’s hair was white and reached his shoulders. His clothing was of one piece, a shapeless garment that hung down to his feet.
“I saw you with Naliv. You should thank me. I made certain nothing would keep you away. Did you notice? No fires. No detonations. Nothing to bar your path.” He spoke in a flat, unemotional tone.
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to see you, of course. We are the same, as you told Naliv. Or is that what she told you? Yes, it is.”
“What you’re doing has no point. Elaimat has the Harec now. Naliv and Marn and everyone else can help you make it all the way it was before.”
“I go back there, and there is everything to remind me of what I did. You are still here. They send me the very person who brought the destruction to my city in the first place, because I lost the Harec and gave it to you. Naliv retrieved the source, but we cannot get rid of you.”
“They need me to go into the shaman’s world.”
“Unless you persuade me to return, yes, I know. In that, you will fail, because it does not matter what we do, we cannot change anything. So long as you are here, there is no hope for us. Go back to Naliv. You will fail with the shaman, too. I know you will.” He gestured out into the land that surrounded them. “Here is proof of that.”
Nathan took a step forward. He could see Calum’s face more clearly. Lines ran in deep channels across it. “Listen to me! It isn’t so futile. It doesn’t have to be this way. Come back with me. I understand what it means to feel helpless, to know there’s nothing you can do to change things, to make them what they were before. Listen to me, that isn’t the truth of it.”
“What is the truth, then? That nothing is lost, you want to say to me. You are wrong. It is.”
“Naliv would do anything to help you. They all would.”
“I let you come here because of her, to honor her. That is all. Go away. I will not hold back the storm much longer, I can promise you.” Calum stepped close to Nathan again.
“Look at me.” His face blurred and shifted, the planes of it altered, and Nathan watched as other features consumed it. One of them was the face of Hernot, and then in dismay Nathan saw a mirror of his own features replace that.
“We are the same. Do you see now? You come here out of what, a desire to console me? To make it better? Naliv thinks I have lost touch with Elaimat. Does she not understand I am trying to save it?”
The air changed, darkened again, the white light on the horizon vanished.
“Calum!” Nathan shouted. “Not this way!”
A sudden detonation blew the ruins apart. Nathan was thrown to the ground and felt blood flowing down his face.
“No! This is crazy!” he shouted. He got up and moved closer to the blackened arc of debris left by the explosion.
“I told you to go,” Calum said, his voice coming out of the darkness.
“You’re not saving Elaimat, you’re destroying it!”
In answer, another detonation. Nathan felt the ground tremble. He reached out into emptiness. “I’m not afraid of you, Calum.”
“I do not want you to be, but if you do not leave now, you will lose your chance to return home.”
“You have no control over that!”
“Because this is your dream? You forget, Nathaniel, it is also mine.”
The sound filled his head as one explosion after another struck the ground.
“Too late, Nathaniel. Too late for you.”
He grabbed at the rocks and dirt for balance. The matter crumbled in his fingers and he pitched forward as the ground split apart and he fell into its depths.