“It was you. You were the light in my dreams and the voice I heard.” It’s not a question. I know it was him. “You kept me safe.”
“I did. I was,” he tells me, “but it was not enough. I wanted to do more. I should have been able to do more.” I start to ask him what else he could have done when he starts speaking again. “That cult, those fools. I should have killed them all. That filthy half god and his human minions.”
I know who he means when he says half god. “Lethos?” I ask. He was frightening, a mix of shadow and starlight that was nothing and everything all at once. He looked beautiful, perfect but there was an evil in him that hollowed you out. Or at leastthere was until Wrath took him apart after Charlie made him a god.
“The one and the same. If I had not been cursed by powers far greater than he, I would have ended him centuries ago for meddling in the human world. There’s no need for it. Chaos already reigns here. There are far more interesting places to bring to heel than here.”
The mage’s words come back to haunt me so maybe I was paying attention more than I realized.Lord of War, Bringer of Chaos. Jaakobah the Destroyer.
“Oh, right, you like chaos. That’s your thing, right?”
“It’s my purpose, so yes, it is very much my thing. I was made for it.”
I bite my lip and think on that. “You were made for chaos but you think there’s enough chaos here? Are we that much of a mess?”
“Oh, certainly. Humanity’s ever present and growing hunger for power ensures there is always strife and chaos. Peace will never endure in this world with the greed of men at large. My presence is not needed to tip the balance.”
I suck in a breath. The words Jaakobah just said feel so right. Like a puzzle piece snapping into place. Somewhere deep down inside of me, I’ve thought what he says. No matter how hard I’ve tried to be optimistic about the world, there’s no denying Jaakobah understands humans to their core.
“You’re right,” I say. “It is pretty chaotic here.”
“Low hanging fruit for the likes of a bottom feeder like Lethos,” Jaakobah growls. If he thinks the god that nearly killed everyone I know is a bottom feeder thenwhat is he?
“You’re-you tried to save me. Why would you do that?”
“Because I was cursed by the cosmos. The fates themselves bound me to the Hell Maw, they wrote my story into thedarkness between worlds and jailed me thusly, and for a millennia I was alone.”
A millennia? The fates?
My mouth goes dry at his words and the only thing I can think to do is pat him awkwardly. “I’m sorry. That sounds horrible.”
“Horrible? Not hardly. It was torture. Penance for a wrong I did not commit, but I bided my time. I knew I would be free to walk the worlds again in chaos.” He sounds chipper. Like he’s talking about who won the big game last night and not the fact that he was bound by the fates in a certifiable rock jail. “Year after year slipped by and the world changed, the universe and all the worlds shifted and grew older and there I remained until I lost my sanity.”
“Seems like a lot of that’s going around these days,” I offer helpfully because it is. I make a mental note to ask about how we’re going to help Charlie when we arrive wherever it is that he’s taking me. “What happened after that?” I ask.
“You,” he says softly.
“Me?”
“Yes,” he shifts me in his arms slightly until I’m nestled closer, my head right under his chin. “When the world vanished and everything faded from my mind it was you that brought me back from the brink. Day after day, night after night, I saw you. Your mind called to mine. In your torment, I brought you peace. Once I found you, I could not leave you to the darkness.”
“That’s how you saw my dreams?”
“Yes, at first I didn’t know where I was when I walked into the first nightmare. It seemed like the worlds I’ve visited before, the ones destroyed and long gone but here they were in a girl’s mind. A human’s mind.” He pauses and brushes the hair away from my forehead, it's just the brush of his fingers but it sets a spark off down my spine. Like the feeling of sinking into a warmbath after being in the cold all day. Jaakobah sets me down on my feet and it’s only then I realize we’ve stopped walking.
The gold thread between us flares brightly with light when Jaakobah takes a step closer and then sinks to his knees in front of me.
“The horrors you’ve seen alone are real. They’re memories.”
“Memories? Whose memories? I-I,” I shake my head and move to take a step back but he reaches forward and catches my hand.
“Meadow, please.”
“Whose memories?” I ask again.
“It’s hard to say,” he says and squeezes my hand, “for a time I wondered if they were mine. That somehow I’d shared them with you but that wasn’t it. The places I saw in your mind I’d only heard of, some of the worlds were older than even me. Long gone from memory. Just like the being that released the memory into the cosmos and then to you. Everything has to go somewhere at the end of its life, nothing is ever destroyed. Those memories are proof of it.”
“So you’re saying my night terrors are memories of dead aliens or whatever that just mailed their brains off to whoever’s brain was dumb enough to answer?”
