“You couldn’t have known what would happen.”
“I did, though. It’s why I tried to tell him what Veridius and I were doing.” He plucks at his sleeve. A frustrated motion that’s eerily reminiscent of his brother. “He always was gods-damned scary once he got his mind set on something. But you should know—that’s not him. Not really. I’m sure he’s been through a nightmare, but he would never, ever do that to someone.”
I just nod. A hint of desperation in his insistence that I’m not going to argue, despite my doubts. I can tell he wants to keep questioning me, to find out more about Ulciscor and the world he left behind seven years ago. But that can wait. “When I got here, you said there was a war? Is that what happened here?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” His brow is furrowed. Deciding where to begin, I think. “I should warn you—some things I know from what Veridius and I translated from the ruins, and some from what I’ve been told since arriving. But a lot of it … a lot of it comes from guessing at the spaces in between, too.”
“Alright.”
“Alright.” He lets out a long breath. Loose stone crunching underfoot in the vast hush of the crater. The cheerless slope is getting steeper. “I suppose the war is the easiest place to begin. It started thousands of years ago, against an enemy called the Concurrence. They were bent on enslaving everyone, and from what Veridius and I could tell, at one point they were winning.” His mouth twists. “So our side split the world into three near-identical copies. Res—where we’re from; Obiteum, which is here; and Luceum. Don’t ask me how,” he adds with a wry smile.
I nod a reluctant acceptance. Unfathomable though it still seems, it fits with everything I already know. Everything I’ve seen. “How would doing that help, though?” Then I pause. “Near-identical?” It’s not what he said before, when I first arrived.
“Physically the same, down to the last detail. But the nature ofWillwas what they were trying to limit. The three worlds were created because they wanted to diminish it, restrict how it could be used. Split its capabilities.” He presses on before I can ask any of my myriad new questions. “People called it the Rending. Afterward, the war continued, but the resistances on the three worlds began to have their own levels of success in the fight. Different capabilities with Will. Different choices. Everything diverged.”
My mind reels as I try to put the pieces together. “Obiteum is lost. Do not open the gate,” I murmur. The eerie chant of the eyeless bodies in the ruins. Iremember the Rending being mentioned by Artemius and the others guarding the Labyrinth, too. “So the Concurrence won here, and were defeated on Res?” The logical conclusion, given how we’re striving to stay out of sight. Clearly in some sort of danger.
The looming sphere behind is a cold, dead sun, too large in my peripheral vision every time I turn my head. There’s silence, for long enough that I wonder if Caeror has heard my half question, and then, “What do you know about the Cataclysm?”
I pause. “As much as anyone, I suppose?” Momentarily thrown by the apparent veer in topic. “Something happened three hundred years ago that killed almost everyone. The survivors were mostly children, and the records from before that time were lost. Civilisation collapsed. There are theories about how, and why, but no one really knows much more than that.”
“That’s not quite true.” Caeror hesitates. The gentle reluctance of a man about to deliver terrible news. “Those ruins you said you visited, near the Academy? That place was built to stop a Cataclysm. One the architects knew was coming.” He rubs his face, then smiles at me in sincere, rueful apology. “They’re culls, Vis. The Cataclysms are culls by an enemy that everyone on our world has forgotten. That one those architects were trying to prevent? It was theeleventh. The eleventh in three thousand years. And even with all their knowledge, they failed.”
The terrain is more cliff than slope now, and we start to pick our way upward over boulders and exposed rock. Less than five hundred feet to the ridge. I clamber along behind Caeror, trying to grasp it. The enormity of it. No desire to believe, but it’s impossible not to, given where we are. The utter desolation around us. “So the Concurrence somehow just … killed everyone?”
“From everything I understand, yes. And they will do it again. Andagain.” He says it softly. Pauses to lend me a hand up, then glances over my shoulder. “They didn’t just win the war here, Vis. I think they won it everywhere.”
I stop too, twisting to join him in his inspection. We’re high enough, have come far enough that this is a new perspective. The red glass ball above the centre of the crater hangs implacably, glinting in the morning light.
Slow, uneasy recognition penetrates the shock of what Caeror just told me.
I’ve seen this. The ruins near the Academy—one of those dioramas made of white light. One of the three versions of Solivagus, illuminating eyeless corpses pinned against the wall.
There’s more detail in real life, though. I’d already noticed the jagged lines carved into the surface of the sphere, but they’re easier to comprehend from this distance. Not writing, but not random either. They form familiar shapes in familiar arrangements.
My lingering gaze finds the coastline of Suus before Caeror touches my shoulder. Nods to the crater’s apex ahead.
“I’m sorry. It’s a hard thing to hear, but we need to keep moving.”
I’m reeling, but there’s an anchoring in his calm, sympathetic authority. I take a breath. Nod.
We march on.
OVER THE RIDGE, THE CRATER BEHIND US HIDDEN FROMview, I can see the waves again. Impossible, monstrous from this angle, miles away though they still are. The roar of their shattering thunders across desolate hills.
I gather my scattered thoughts. I do believe Caeror when he says this is another world; the proof could not be clearer. But everything else …
“You said I’d been copied.” I leave it at that. Make it a question. There may be more pressing concerns, but none that have lodged themselves so disconcertingly in my mind.
“Yes. That device you were in—the Gate—it takes what’s inside it on Res, and creates new versions on Luceum and Obiteum. Perfect replicas.”
“So there’s another version of me—the original one—still on Res?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s another in some other world, too? In Luceum?”
“Yes.”
