Rain was something that Ramses both loved and despised. When traversing the Space Between Spaces, weather was as abstract as time. Storms were composed of radiation or the dust from outer Realms such as Errata and Nex. Light came from the burning corpses of forgotten gods as often as it came from the combustion of elements in the core of a sun. Anything similar to rain came in the form of stray plasma, frozen liquids or gases vented from exploding planets or passing comets, interdimensional parasite swarms, or blood-like fluids escaping from wounded creatures in the void. The weather of a mortal world was something less abstract, something familiar that made Ramses feel a little bit less abstract himself.
At the same time, since he was a feline, Ramses did not like getting wet.
Shaking off the water that had accumulated on his cloak, Ramses glared through the gloom at the sign dangling from the front of the mossy stoop of the inn. There was indeed a prancing raven carved into the sign above the words “Dancing Raven” and that was what he had been instructed to look for.
Waving his hand as he approached caused the door to swing open before he reached it. An equally dismissive flick of the wrist caused the door to shut behind him. Only one or two patrons took note of his entrance. The Dancing Raven was posted on the first few miles of a highway that led from the southwestern coast of the Pretannai Empire out into the rest of the kingdom. Once you passed the Dancing Raven, it would be almost 40 miles before you saw civilization once more. As such, this cozy structure was accustomed to seeing wayward travelers come through her doors. The regulars from the docks in the nearby city, from the fisheries, and from the local farms that benefited from the damp weather of the coastal region barely noticed when someone they had never seen before entered.
That being said, even though he was a Yorn, Ramses was still able to draw some curious stares as he flipped his hood down and pulled his cloak off. The world he had come from had a wider variety of species among the Yorn. He had found that here in Aegis, his hairless feline species was even more rare than it had been where he hailed from. Ramses could feel the stares as he picked a peg on the long rack by the door to hang his cloak on. He had to smile just a little while he picked a peg that was at least five pegs separated from all other cloaks. Seeing a feline Yorn who had no fur, large ears, and big round eyes made almost anyone pause to gawk.
Had the patrons known who, and less what, they were looking at, their confusion would have redoubled and become infected with fear. Unlike the patrons Ramses now walked past, his soul was not in his body. The driving force of his body was tucked safely away in an inconspicuous location of his interdimensionally mobile keep. Because of this, Ramses had not only been alive much longer, but he had also accumulated an absurd amount of power and knowledge, enough that there were few beings he had encountered in his travels that were his rival.
Once he had collected a mug of wine, a concept he detested but understood given the lack of widely available glassware in a pre-industrialized world, he turned his attention back to the patrons at large. By now, those who had gotten their fill of curiosity had turned back to their own business. A few wary eyes were still on Ramses, their owners attempting to make sense of the strange creature leaning against the bar with a mug clutched in both hands, but even those glances were already becoming furtive instead of earnest. Perhaps, before he departed, some peasant would work up the courage to ask what kind of Yorn he was, but that seemed like a distant possibility in this establishment.
The only individual that had yet to even glance at Ramses was a Yorn fox tucked into a distant booth of the Dancing Raven. To the rest of the patrons in the inn, this fox didn’t look all that different from the thousands of Yorn foxes that populated the Pretannai Empire or who labored as slaves in the Holy Jahlnarth Empire. Ramses, who could see through the majority of illusions without having to cast any specific spells, could see the metal hand guiding a pen across the pages of an open book, the intricate metallic structures that had replaced the entire right side of the fox’s head from snout to ear. This creature was like Ramses; an anomaly that passed through worlds without most mortals ever catching sight of them.
Still under the watchful gaze of the few genuinely curious souls in the Dancing Raven, Ramses approached the booth where the fox sat writing, a crumb-covered plate by his elbow and a nearly empty mug lurking just above the top of the book. Surreptitiously, Ramses slipped onto the bench opposite the fox. Disturbing the recordkeeping process was a nearly religious offense as far as Ramses was concerned and he was in no hurry to commit any heresy today.
“The vintage red is surprisingly delicious here,” the fox noted, glancing up from his work to smile at Ramses.
“I will likely send a thrall to collect a cask or two,” Ramses confessed as he returned the smile. “You’re being surprisingly subtle. None of my devices took note of you until last dawn.”
“This world is in a state of turmoil right now,” the fox noted, setting his pen down and picking up his mug. “I didn’t want to cause any more disturbances than necessary. There’s a lot of interference too, what with some of the ongoing damages. With how many things leaked through from other Realms it’s hard to spot travelers. I barely caught wind of the Keep when you parked it off the coast.”
Ramses chuckled. “I’m almost embarrassed that we stopped so close to where you’ve been working and almost didn’t take note of you.”
“I’m glad you stopped by,” said the fox after taking a swig from his mug. “There’s a few things I wanted to give you that I think will pique your curiosity.”
Ramses raised an eyebrow over the rim of his mug. Inscribers like this fox were deployed by gods to collect data for divine records. Some of them were extremely stealthy, slipping into worlds and disappearing without anyone ever knowing they were afoot. Others, like this fox, were visible to mortals, but rarely were they identified as alien creatures. Trading information with an Inscriber was a valuable pastime that Ramses had cultivated throughout his travels. This particular Inscriber, however, was one that often collected more than just data.
In another life, this Inscriber had been a tinker. His records often took great pains to detail the mechanical achievements of a world he was sent to observe. His own lair, hidden beneath a guild hall on the fox’s home world, was a well-catalogued collection of relics from across the cosmos. Ramses had toured these vaults and found said collection was rivaled by only a handful of collections, his included.
In keeping with this Inscriber’s penchant for collecting actual samples from worlds he was sent to observe, the fox placed items on the table between them. Ramses watched carefully. The first item was a small device that functioned like a sextant for naval navigation. The second item was a bulky but intricate pocket watch on a gold chain. The third and fourth were some sort of industrial tools, each consisting of two rods joined at a conical head as if something were meant to be flushed through the rods to be mixed at the head before being forced out. The last item was a complete unknown; a cube made of strange, amber-like material that refracted light that touched it from any source.
With utmost care, Ramses picked up the sextant, turning it over a few times in his hands. The device was well crafted, solid in hand, clearly and cleanly marked. The lenses were made of expertly ground crystal and provided marvelous clarity when peered through. Examining the markings revealed that the device was meant for this world, but not this region. With it, one could mark the movement of the heavens above the seas far to the southeast, where the Jahlnarth had established colonies on a recently discovered continent. Outside this one fact, the sextant seemed rather mundane.
Setting the sextant aside, Ramses picked up the pocket watch, and instantly he frowned at it. Exquisite was an apt word for the timepiece, which was solid but not heavy in hand; its delicate hands marking the passage of the 14 hours that made the days and nights of Aegis. Gold plating adorned the body of the watch to match the hefty gold chain that would attach the piece to the wearer’s clothing.
Ramses turned the watch over in his hands. The timepiece was certainly native to Aegis, but there was something ever so slightly off about it. For several minutes, Ramses scrutinized the device, glaring at the metalwork, peering as deep into the inner workings as he could by opening the back plate, and watching the device run with both his eyes and his magic. As he pondered the numerals on the watch’s face, the problem with the watch revealed itself.
“Those are Trilinian numerals,” Ramses muttered.
“They are,” the fox confirmed. “I bought that Karath.”
“What happened there?” Ramses asked, looking up from the watch. “Thralls I’ve sent have been unable to get near the village. I know that humans speaking Trilinese and with access to advanced technology have infiltrated the area, but more than that we’ve been unable to uncover.”
The fox nodded. “That makes sense. I had to pretend I was a resident of the town to get in there and make my observations. The short version is that an entire rifle brigade of the Trilinese United Forces was displaced from a roadway in occupied Yorio to a cattle pasture just outside of the border town of Karath. They’ve done a rather impressive job fortifying the town and improving local infrastructure. They’re mining coal and iron out of nearby hills, along with sulfur and niter to replace powder for their guns. They’re quarrying stone, processing timber, and they’re in the process of building a blast furnace. They’re working the fields too, put in a bunch of pump-driven irrigation. They even built a road that connects to the Green Way to their east. Karath is on track to become an absurdly wealthy region that I’m sure the Jahlnarth want to recapture and which Pretannai is glad to have within their current borders. One of the soldiers sold me this watch, which was produced at a workshop they built in Karath.”
Ramses nodded, reaching out to hand the watch back, but then he froze.
“The brigade…is it the 43rd?”
“It is,” the fox replied.
Ramses sat back, considering the watch once more. “They disappeared while on the road to Cirvah during the last year of the Queen’s War. The fighting body of the brigade, along with experimental weapons squads and a unit of steam tank cavalry, all vanished without a trace. If we account for differences in timelines, then these soldiers traveled forwards in time…what? Some 400 years?”
“412 years and about three days,” the fox said evenly.
The watch felt much heavier with the new knowledge. When he had first caught wind of what the people of Aegis called the Schism, Ramses had been in the midst of crossing the Space Between Spaces. Whispers of creatures, objects, and even entire geological features transferring from other Realms into Aegis reached him from all corners of the void. His own investigations had confirmed these movements. Traversal of time, however, was not something that had been noted yet.
Ramses could now understand why the Inscriber wanted to share this information with him. Both gods and wanderers like Ramses were interested in the Schism. No one could pinpoint what had caused it. All anyone could agree on was the fact that magic outside the capacity of any known entity or flares of activity in the flows of cosmic energy had been the driving force. Displacing objects across space already required a huge amount of power. Displacing objects through time as well was something that even the most disciplined practitioners of magic, such as Ramses, could only do in very small bursts, if at all.
Setting the watch down, Ramses turned his attention to the two tools. There were nominal differences between them, the kind usually brought on by changes in industrial standards, materials, and increasingly efficient practices. They were not, however metal as he had first thought. Each was composed of dense crystal, from the rods to the conical heads.
“Welding torches,” Ramses said suddenly, his face brightening with understanding. “I haven’t seen this type of equipment in some time. Though…where does one hook up the gas?”
“You don’t,” the Inscriber grinned across the table. “These are Vakari torches, powered by the very materials they’re made from. That one in your left hand is from the Ark, those Vakari that have been impeding colonization of the new continent the Jahlnarth have been sending people to. Your right hand has a torch that hasn’t been seen since the Sky Island Vakari dominated the air beyond the Volkrusian Mountains, far to the north.”
Ramses nodded slowly, setting the two torches down. Vakari, with the strange connection to the minerals of whatever world they infested, had a knack for growing synthetic crystal that they used in place of metallic compounds. These two tools fit that motif, and the cruder of the two certainly mirrored tools Ramses’ thralls had brought back from their investigations of the Ark conclave of Vakari. The ancient torch, however, deepened the problems Ramses was confronted with. This meant that separate pieces of a single people’s history were pulled into one location, not only moving across time and space, but doing so in conjunction with a species that already existed quite firmly in the timeline.
Setting the time traveling tools down, Ramses moved on to the strange amber cube. Goosebumps rose all across Ramses’ skin. Nothing about this object seemed native to Aegis. When probed, the materials reflected nothing that Ramses could easily recognize. Despite a silicon composition, there was immense energy contained in the device, as though it served as a type of battery. The energy had structure to it, the kind of structure that suggested information storage, but no magic that Ramses poked the object with could extract the data.
Changing his focus a little, Ramses attempted to unravel the origin of the object. This thing was both from the far distant future, at least four millennia from when they were sitting in the Dancing Raven, as well as being from a Mortal Realm that Ramses was unfamiliar with that was some 10,000 years in the past.
“This thing disturbs me,” Ramses grumbled, still prodding the object.
“If it makes you feel better, it can be cut with mundane stone working tools,” the Inscriber noted after a sip of his drink. “That cube used to be a shard about the size of my hand. I was able to cut it down to that. For better or worse, it lost nothing in the process. Any fragments I removed from it crumbled to dust. This stuff is coming up everywhere. Farmers are finding it in fields, foresters in trees; I even heard tell of a noble finding that several gems in his collection had morphed into this amber.”
“Where is it coming from?” Ramses demanded, still pondering the cube.
“Everywhere,” the fox replied and continued when Ramses shot him a glare. “That’s not a figure of speech. The world itself is bleeding this stuff. Most are ignoring it, but there are some that see its supernatural nature and want to make some use of it. That cube almost cost me my other hand, since the Collector and I got to the shard at the same time.”
Ramses snorted disgustedly as he rolled the cube across his palm. The Collector was becoming a strange thorn in his side; a chimeric creature that crawled out of the Void at some point and had been assembling a body for itself from bits and pieces of other creatures, all the while collecting things that Ramses would like to have obtained for himself.
“Have you found no one that can identify this thing?” Ramses queried around a swig of wine.
“No one. You’re better equipped to conduct a very direct examination of this thing than I am.”
“I will do that,” Ramses said, taking the time amber and slipping it into a pocket on his silk tunic. “What other terrible disturbances have you uncovered, Inscriber Saurex?”
“Nothing more troubling than time traveling objects and monsters from other Realms,” Saurex replied evenly. “For all we know, all of these things were in the same place but at different times, hence their presence here. Still, moving so many objects to the same place in space and time would require power that goes well beyond what either of us have ever encountered.”
“And between the two of us we have encountered nearly everything,” Ramses grinned.
“Speaking of encounters, how goes the hunt for the Furtive Beetle?” Saurex asked.
“Poorly,” Ramses grumbled. “The pest has chewed holes in several of my documents and no device of mine nor Steven’s can catch the little bugger.”
“They still have a reward posted for him in the Halls of Record in Arcanis,” said Saurex as he relaxed in his seat. “Any interesting news you’ve unearthed since you arrived here?”
“Nothing immensely fascinating,” Ramses replied idly, sipping at his wine. “Your time-displaced objects are the strangest thing I have seen thus far. The people of this world are charming though. I have my thralls engaged in tracking down as much information as they can.” The feline Yorn smirked over his mug at Saurex. “Accumulation of the tales of individuals would be much quicker if you’d allow me a copy of your omnibus.”
Both of them smiled, each knowing that access to the omnibus was not Saurex’s to decide.
“You’ll have to take that up with the gods, I’m afraid,” the fox chuckled. “I can share copies of individual records on request, if that’d help.”
“I’ll have Steven contact you with a list of tales I would like to ensure end up in my archive,” Ramses said with a grateful tilt of his head.
The two wandering immortals talked idly for a while, each sipping away at their drink of choice until the bottoms of their mugs came into view. With parting pleasantries, and a care not to make direct physical contact, Ramses took his leave.
Fog collected in swirling masses as Ramses stepped out of the Dancing Raven. In the distance he could make out the ghostly calls of a Neble Metza and the not-too-distant thunder of the ocean dashing against the rocky shore. Unwilling to spend the energy to fight off the Neble Metza stalking the night fog, Ramses pulled his cloak close about him before making his way down the road towards the sea. Neble Metza appeared as large felines with shaggy gray coats that melded with the unnatural fog they brought with them. Consummate hunters, these pony-sized cats would slink through the mist, snatching up unaware travelers, occasionally reaching through unlatched windows to pull children and infants from their beds. Ramses had encountered several Neble Metza, and even had one trapped in a glass crate in the Keep, but tonight he was in no mood to battle a supernatural entity.
The steady thump of the strange amber cube against his chest as he walked forced Ramses to direct some attention to the strange object. Of the things that Saurex had found that were out of their timelines, this one was certainly the strangest. Unlike most things that floated away from their native chronological location, this cube seemed perfectly stable. It also seemed to be a symptom of the Schism, not a direct creation of said event, as though the amber itself was not actually a physical item adrift in time, but rather a sign that something had broken time itself on the face of Aegis.
As he wound his way down the switchbacks that led to the beach, Ramses realized that there was another, more sinister, possibility to the existence of this material. Currently, no one knew who or what had caused the Schism. Ramses had called upon some of the most knowledgeable creatures he knew across the cosmos, including a god or two. None of them, from the Grand Bureaucrat who oversaw the literal function of every contract throughout the cosmos, to the Goddess of Records and Timekeeping, Yagg, had been able to pinpoint the source of the Schism.
Yagg, however, had given Ramses something terrifying to ponder.
“I think there is something you should see,” she had said as the two sat sipping tea in the midst of Yagg’s lair in the Realm of Arcanis.
She had led him through great tunnels lined with silken webs, all attended to by her numerous children. Even in her “downsized” form, Yagg was still a spider of considerable size. Her appearance had never bothered Ramses. On the contrary, he thought that he would have taken her less seriously in any other shape. It was Yagg, after all, that wove the great Web of If, where all possible futures of a given universe were splayed out to infinity. Who better to hang a web than a spider?
The great machine known as the Eye of Now served as the spinning wheel that constantly sucked up the strands of If, twirling them into the thread of history that was used to weave the Tapestry of Then, which showed the history of the universe. Twice before, Yagg had allowed Ramses to browse Then. The experience had been illuminating each time, as the threads of Then held the truth of all that had happened.
That day, Ramses had felt fear for the first time in a great many years as he beheld the tattered holes that now existed in the Tapestry of Then.
“The threads are not gone,” Yagg had explained while her children crawled over the face of Then with delicate threads to mend the gaps. “They are now in the wrong places. Whatever shook Aegis did not merely displace space, but it has rearranged marked points in the history of Aegis…and surrounding Realms. We are in the process of replacing these damaged threads, as what they have become is no longer suitable for use in the making of Then.”
Standing on the beach, the rolling surf a few feet away, Ramses pulled the cube of amber from his pocket to examine it once more. Mist swirled around him as the cube shed a soft golden glow, tinting the fog and Ramses fingers. Should the cube prove to have some meaning in the manipulations of time, was it possible that it was part of whatever spell or device had been used to create the Schism? Was it a physical manifestation of the shifts that had transpired with such force that they had quite literally torn the fabric of history? Or, more worryingly, was it a piece of the tangled threads of Then that was leaking into this world in the face of the damage done to it?
Reserving further musing for later, Ramses stowed the cube once more, reached out, and grasped the latch of a door that only he could perceive. The sudden hole in the fog that he opened led to a warmly lit stone antechamber into which Ramses stepped. Once the door closed carefully behind him there was no sign on the beach that the door nor Ramses had ever been there.
“Master has brought a follower!” a stooped thrall—one of a few hundred “compressed” gnolls Ramses kept—cried excitedly as he shuffled forward to take Ramses cloak.
Looking down, Ramses noted that a small, dark-shelled crab had followed him through the portal. Sighing, Ramses bent, collected the small creature, reopened the portal, tossed the crab back onto the beach, then quickly shut the portal once more.
Once he had retreated to his study, Ramses pulled the cube from his pocket once more, eyeing it ever more suspiciously. Subsequent hours poring over tomes and scrolls, comparing the object to any known specimen that remotely resembled the crystalline structure, and even placing it in the furnaces used to smelt unbreakable metals for some of Ramses’ creations did nothing to the cube. The stone continued to simply exist, glittering under the lights of Ramses’ study.
In the midst of subjecting the cube to the third item from his personal collection of enchanted tools—a frustrating venture, as the first two tools had shattered when used on the amber cube—something important dawned on Ramses.
When Saurex had drawn the cube from his bag, he had done so with is left hand. Any time the Inscriber had touched it, he had done so with his left hand. Had a mortal done this, Ramses would have assumed the individual was left-hand-dominant. Inscriber Saurex was right-hand-dominant. This led Ramses to conclude that Saurex had not wanted to touch the cube with the metallic prosthetic that served as his right hand.
That particular hand had its own unique properties. Ramses was quite disappointed that he would not be able to add the appendage to his collection one day, as the metal hand would show Inscriber Saurex the complete history of any person or item he touched. This tool was what made the fox a valued recordkeeper for the gods. He could lay his hand on a world and see its entire story, giving him the ability to record history in a way similar to Yagg while also making note of details that often got lost in the fabric of Then. Such details were often cosmetic, nothing that weighed on the fates of anyone or anything, but they were the kind of details that Ramses relished.
If Inscriber Saurex had avoided touching the cube with his enchanted hand, that could mean one of two things. Either he had already touched the cube and had no desire to see its history once more or, more likely, touching it had done something painful to him. The Inscriber was no stranger to pain, having had his right hand, shoulder, and most of his head blown apart by magic and rebuilt against his will using cursed metals. For something to compel him to not touch it, the item in question would have to deliver a jolt that would be fatal to a mortal.
On this principle, Ramses began to approach the cube once more. Time was forbidden in the Keep, so it mattered not how long he toiled with this frustrating object. What mattered was that he at least learn the origin of this enigmatic material.
Over the course of what would have been weeks, Ramses sent out dozens of thralls into Aegis, each one with a list of materials to acquire, each returning having succeeded in their missions. Ramses was always surprised when no one tried to detain his thralls. They had once been gnolls in the services of Yeenoghu, until Ramses got a hold of them. Via a slightly less grisly version of the same dark magic that twisted the blood of hyenas to become gnolls, Ramses would shrink them down, stripping away the bloodlust that Yeenoghu prized and making them a little more independent. When the process was over, Ramses “compressed gnolls” were dutiful, three-foot-tall, fluffy hyena humanoids that were good enough at completing most tasks that Ramses always kept a few hundred of them about the Keep. Still, he could never understand why people did not panic more when they saw them out in the wild.
Deep in the bowels of the Keep dwelt The Seer. Built eons prior using the forward half of an undead sphynx, the Seer glimmered with gold runes, wires made of pure copper, silver charms, and the dull sheen of steel supports and scaffolds that suspended it from the ceiling of the cavern. The chest of the beast had been carefully emptied of the useless organs, filled instead with spells and runes and sigils and slots made of pure platinum into which items native to Aegis were placed to give the Seer context. Eyes rolled in the skeletal sockets of the head; prizes stolen from the Seer of the Mirk deep in the Space Between Spaces. When all was prepared, Ramses placed the cube of amber in the cupped hands of the Seer, retreating quickly to a safe distance, behind a thick, lead lined door.
Far below the Seer’s chamber, a thrall shoved a rod of pure copper into conduit. The thrall screamed, their body disintegrating as energy that was a blend of hellish and angelic was sucked from batteries scattered throughout the Keep, flushed through the new circuit, and blazed down the cables leading to the Seer. Ramses stood patiently in the room from which he could watch as the Seer writhed, eyes rolling in all directions, bones creaking as the creature wailed. Ramses stood, hands clasped neatly behind his back, dark-lensed goggles protecting his eyes from the flashes of plasma flying from the Seer’s mouth.
Amid the catastrophe unfolding in the Seer’s chamber, there was some order. Two rooms away, safe from the ravages of the analyzing machine, a mechanical arm was furiously scribbling words onto paper. Borrowed from a tinker who worked for some rather eccentric people several Realms away, the Auto-Arm Scribe was connected by dense cables and even denser magic to the Seer’s moldy brain. As the Seer mercilessly pried information from the amber, the Auto-Arm Scribe feverishly recorded what the Seer saw and heard and felt and, brilliantly enough, thought, all overseen by Steven, the only human Ramses had ever managed to trust for more than a few hours at a time.
When the final roar from the Seer faded, Steven waited for the arm to stop writing. As it folded itself out of the way, Steven cut the continuous paper feed, pried the newly rolled scroll of data from the machine’s lower chassis, and unrolled it on a heavy workbench. Only after he confirmed that the writing was clear and clean throughout the document was the scroll re-rolled and carried to Ramses.
The amber cube rested on Ramses’ desk in his study, its interactions with the Seer having changed absolutely nothing about it. Floating before him, suspended in a field of magic that slowly pulled the document along at a pace Ramses could read at, the scroll progressed from one spindle to the other.
Most of what the Seer had managed to pull from the cube had been rendered out as gibberish. Ramses was confident that with time, and further information, even the gibberish could be made sense of, but for now it would have to be ignored. What information did come through cleanly was useful, if not concerning.
The majority of material in the cube came from a point in time 4,198 years further down the current timeline from where the Schism took place. Only a fraction of it came from the distant past, with most data chained to that history badly scrambled. This object, the Seer had determined, had been pressed into existence by some undefinable force that could crush atoms into organized material. Fragments of data stood out here and there, all of them cluttered, each telling portions of stories that were entirely disconnected from one another. Some of the writing reminded Ramses of the ramblings of mortals that attempted to interact with the Space Between Spaces and were driven mad as a result. Still, there were moments of clarity in the otherwise unintelligible nonsense; names of stars Ramses felt sure he had seen in his own charts, vague references to things that could have been familiar with a little more information.
In the end, Ramses was left with almost as little as he had started with. The amber itself possessed no archive of any kind. Information was trapped in the weblike complex of a matrix that combined numerous smaller arcane structures in order to create what amounted to the power of an entire sun in a cube that barely measured a full two inches on any side. Under forced comparison, the structure of the cube was indeed similar to the threads of Then, if perhaps made of very different material.
Gently pushing the cube away from himself, Ramses stared at it, part of him now hesitant continue dissecting the Seer’s report. With the ability to bend both time and space, Ramses had traversed many Realms. He had been to many places at many times and seen wonders that would have made gods jealous and would have driven mortals to insanity. In all those travels, nowhere had Ramses met anyone, mortal or not, who could cause the past, present, and future to congeal as they had in this strange material.
Continuing to read what he could from the report of the Seer, Ramses was confronted by a mounting suspicion. He repeatedly read the same passages, made notes, cross-referenced the bizarre commentary of this cube to existing documents he had. With new materials loaded into the Seer, the cube of amber was examined once more. The results were carefully transcribed from the midst of the gibberish they were mired in, bound into a small book that fit easily into a pocket, and then handed off to Ramses as he put on his preferred robes.
Departing the Keep from the portal once more, the cube and the results of his research tucked neatly in a small satchel, Ramses blinked in the bright sunlight. The air was thick with the warm briny odor of the ocean. Further down the beach, a despondent looking Yorn coyote was digging for clams. Fishing vessels dotted the horizon as other beachcombers worked their way along the line between land and sea. Clothing seemed optional, and that made some sense to Ramses, given the brutal temperatures the sun was pressing down upon the sand.
That phenomenon, however, made little sense to Ramses. Winter had been on the cusp of settling in when he had received the cube from Inscriber Saurex. This weather, and the harvesting operations he could see on the water and on the shore, was indicative of midsummer.
Time was a relative creature, this Ramses knew. Not only had Ramses made a brutally extensive study of time as a concept, but in the Space Between Spaces, he had found and conferred with creatures made of time. A few were gods; some were just creatures composed of the past, present, and future in one strange entity who aided the flow of time throughout the cosmos. This grasp of time often led Ramses to forget that outside of the Keep, time flowed. The fact that several months had passed in Aegis while Ramses had pondered the cube from the hidden world should not have startled him, yet it left him feeling adrift.
While hiking up the switchbacks, Ramses caught a glimpse of metallic sheen ahead of him, skittering away up the trail. He glared, trying to determine if the small creature was a regular beetle or the illusive Furtive Beetle, but by the time he caught up to the color the cause was gone.
Cursing the machinations of Fate as he climbed up the switchbacks did little to make Ramses feel better. The Furtive Beetle was exactly what it sounded like: a very stealthy insect, despite being the size of a small dog. Rather than tangible matter, the Furtive Beetle fed on information, pulling it directly from whatever source it could find. Entire libraries had been left blank by the Furtive Beetle as it sucked the knowledge out of the tomes on the shelves. Ramses’ own collection had a fistful of documents that had been rendered useless by the creature.
Yet, the Furtive Beetle was not itself useless. While many wished to capture it in order to put a stop to its feeding, Ramses was interested in the secrets it had already consumed. Rumor postulated that the Furtive Beetle would render useful information when captured. If it could be held indefinitely, then it could serve as a living archive. That was the purpose for which Ramses wished to catch the Furtive Beetle, knowing full well that there would be many ancient and forgotten secrets tucked away inside the clever creature.
Putting the Furtive Beetle out of his mind for the time being, Ramses trod down the lane, between fields of cabbage and onions, marching doggedly towards the Dancing Raven. Steven had assured Ramses multiple times that his invitation had been sent and that a reply had been received. Inscriber Saurex would be waiting at the inn, just as he had on the dreary evening seven months ago.
Up on the roof of the tavern, Ramses noted something that gave him pause. Pelicans were not uncommon on this particular shore. This one, however, looked wrong. Parts of it were rotting while other pieces had been replaced with harder materials, like shell and bone. Its wild eyes were fixed on Ramses, as if it knew things it should not.
“Collect your own relics,” Ramses snarled, whispering a spell under his breath, watching with satisfaction as the grotesque amalgamation of a bird exploded. The Collector had been sending increasing numbers of these hideous creatures out to pick up whatever it was the monstrous creature wanted.
With summer in full swing, there were few patrons at the bar so close to midday. Even those whose fields were not in immediate need to tending were busy repairing equipment, chasing pests from their fields, or plying their hands to their secondary trades in preparation for market days and upcoming festivals. The lack of distraction made Ramses nervous as he hung up his cloak and approached the bar. Subterfuge was easier when you weren’t one of five people in an entire room.
With a mug of wine in hand, Ramses shuffled quickly to where the metal-faced fox Yorn sat, pen scratching away at the thick paper of a book splayed open on the table before him. Setting both mug and satchel on the table as he sat made Ramses aware of just how still the inn was with so few people in it.
“Your messenger sounded a bit frantic,” the Inscriber noted as he closed his book to look up at Ramses. “I was starting to think maybe you’d moved on from this world.”
“My thralls are still busy collecting artifacts and information,” Ramses said dismissively as he fished the cube from his bag. “Aegis will yet yield a wealth of both. Nothing, however, will compare to this. Since you brought it to my attention, my thralls have collected it whenever they encounter it. Do you know what it is?”
Saurex snorted. “I gave it to you because every time I tried to touch that stuff, I’d black out and wake up somewhere else. I went through several pairs of gloves refining it into that cube you’ve got. Judging by the fact that you seem to have written a book on the subject already, I’d wager I was correct in guessing you’d be the only one that could unravel that thing.”
Ramses simply sipped his wine as Saurex picked up the book that had been set on the table between them. Like the first time they had met in the Dancing Raven, the Inscriber was careful to avoid the cube, specifically with his right hand.
A fly buzzed against the wavy glass of one of the nearby windows. Towards the back of the establishment occasional snippets of song would drift in from the kitchens. One of the only other patrons began to snore lightly in her seat, face down on the table, her body slowly sliding towards the floor. Sighing as if this were a common occurrence, the bartender abandoned his post, collected the snoring human, and laid her on one of the benches of a booth near the door.
By the time the bartender had returned to his position behind the bar, Saurex was sliding the book back to Ramses.
“I hate how fast you read,” Ramses noted, his jest stained with only the slightest hint of true jealousy.
“I’m sure you do,” Saurex said, his attention on the cube. “Time…solid time…like a chunk of volcanic glass leeching up through the soil of Aegis. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“Something similar, yes,” Ramses replied calmly. “When I have been permitted by Yagg to observe Then. I have found that this amber is somewhat similar to the threads of Then, only, it came into being as a byproduct of another force, not the intentional weavings of a goddess.”
Both immortals sat, staring at what could best be described as a fragment of the compressed past, present, and future of Aegis as it sat mundanely on the table. Even though neither of them said anything, both were consumed by questions, mostly surrounding what the implications were of a solid block of time sitting on a table anchored firmly in time.
“Does the future still exist?” Inscriber Saurex asked.
“As far as I can tell, the future this cube was formed from is still intact,” Ramses replied. “What significance that holds is relative. From where we sit now in time the future will always appear possible. Only arriving at the future itself will reveal if it survived. For now, however, what is true is that the Schism was strong enough to crystalize the past, present, and future into this strange material.”
Silence settled in once more, cozying up to the space between the two beings pondering the evidence of an event that should not have been possible. The bartender had overheard parts of the conversation, but chose to ignore it, thinking that either the two were insane or they were talking about something that was well outside the scope of serving drinks. Other patrons that could have heard the conversation were too drunk or unconscious to grasp what was being discussed a few feet from them.
Once again, Saurex picked up the book, leafing through it to near the end where he began pouring over the same three pages. Ramses watched curiously. Ages of analyzing history from numerous individual perspectives had given the Inscriber the ability to see patterns where others could only see chaos. The Seer could only do so much with the cube. Steven could only compile data. Ramses found that having a separate perspective often helped him unravel things that were vexing him.
“These parts here are memories,” Saurex noted softly, pulling Ramses from his wine-sipping reveries. “They are part of the forefront of the timeline segment that the cube is tied to. The breadth of the time the amber is tied to is also surprisingly short, maybe a handful of seconds, but nothing indicates that this material itself can create memory. I think…is it possible there is a creature trapped in here as well?”
“Have you touched it?”
The question was met with a tense silence. Ramses waited, swirling his wine, watching Saurex closely. It was never lost on Ramses that both he and the Inscriber were from the same world. Both of them had left that world behind. Both of them now faced time and the concepts of mortality very differently than they may have long ago. But some things could not be abandoned. Both had been raised with the same sensibilities and fables. Both were products of an era that demanded civility come packaged in a very specific shape. Because of this, Ramses could read Saurex better than almost anyone else he regularly ran into.
The Inscriber’s ears flicked, eyes darting to anything other than the cube, then settling on the cube as if to challenge its existence. If it were possible for Yorn to sweat, Ramses felt sure Saurex would have been doing so.
“Well?” Ramses prompted.
“I did.” Inscriber Saurex recoiled from the cube. “It made no sense.”
“Then try again.”
Saurex glared across the table. “You have no idea, do you? This isn’t one of your machines, some husk nailed to my arm. The metal is alive, like the rest of me, and it feels, just like the rest of me. What kind of machine did you have to use on this stuff? Did it scream when it was compelled to touch this? I did.”
“Pain is temporary,” Ramses said dismissively.
Ramses barely had time to realize that Saurex was reaching for him. When the metal hand came into contact with Ramses, seizing on the side of his face like a vice, it was not cold as he had thought it would be. Instead, it was warm, soft even, as if it were skin. The breath that this revelation gave Ramses to hesitate was enough that when his eyes registered what Inscriber Saurex was doing it was too late to stop him.
With the speed of a practiced street hustler, the Inscriber snatched up the cube and crammed it into his mouth where he bit into it with his metal teeth.
Information was a brutal thing to process within time. In the Keep, without the burden of time, one could spend comparative hours pondering things that would have taken months to riddle out. This diminished pace was, Ramses had learned, a failsafe built into mortal brains. Should the mind be exposed to too much all at once it was likely to shut down. He had spent many years sharpening his mind to handle the massive intake of information, but he was still ill-prepared for the torrent that was came crashing through Saurex’s hand.
It was easy to see why so much of the Seer’s findings had come out as gibberish. Garbled sound clashed against colors that screamed as if they were dying while shapes that had yet to be named collided with the organized structures of the mind, tearing them down, then reshaping them until they were unrecognizable. Flying through this storm of insanity were solid points of data. These jewels of clarity were observable only for an instant before they were swept away in a wind of fragmented dreams and the cries of a soul that could no longer bear the weight of its existence.
Something took hold of Ramses shoulder. He could hear coughing, taste bile, but could not pinpoint the source of these strange sensations. Raising his head revealed that he was surrounded by everything he had just witnessed, all still swirling uncontrollably, but now expanded, as if he stood in the eye of a storm. There was nothing gripping his shoulder when he looked, but Ramses could feel a very real tension there, like a hand. Taking comfort in the anchor of sensation, Ramses stood, wiping tears from his eyes as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing all around him.
A flash that could have been mistaken for lightning forced Ramses to shield his eyes. The clear points of information were coalescing to a single blinding point of truth…no…Ramses’ felt his eyes grow wide. It was not truth. This was not raw data raging on all sides of him. He was standing in the midst of what remained of a soul that was entangled with threads of the past blended into the potential of the future. The beacon forming before him was the last vestiges of what this soul had witnessed; echoes of the fear and pain and confusion it had endured as the body that had once played host to it was shredded by forces outside the scope of anything Ramses knew.
Blinking, skin crawling as if covered in angry mites, Ramses forced himself to take a breath. Respiration was not a requirement for his survival, but the act of manually taking a breath still had a calming effect when his body attempted to replicate the hormonal processes of fear it had once possessed.
“This was a person,” Saurex’s voice said hollowly, his hand setting the cube on the table between them once more. “Now all that’s left of them is what I found as a spike of material that should not exist.”
“Echoes,” Ramses whispered, turning his eyes up to the Inscriber. “Is that what you see every time you touch something?”
“Why do you think I usually have a glove on this hand?”
Ramses simply nodded, gazing once more upon the cube, comprehension of what his fellow immortal endured to complete his work now settling on him. Saurex’s hesitation to touch the amber made sense now. As much as he could see the life the creature now trapped in this artifact had lived, it was difficult to ignore the terror of its final moments and the agony of its current state.
“Is all the amber like this?” Ramses asked.
“I’ve found a dozen or so pieces with souls laced in them, but it isn’t every piece,” Saurex replied. “Whatever ripped apart the Space Between Spaces destroyed a lot. These vulcanized scraps of time, echoes as you said, contain remains of some of the creatures caught up in the Schism.”
“The dragons of the Dynasty should count themselves lucky that no such thing happened to them.” Ramses noted with a faint smile. “The majority of their land and people were all transported as part of the Schism. So many other things managed to leak through to Aegis…what must have happened to create the conditions for this…echo…to form like this?”
“That I leave in your capable claws,” Saurex said, causing Ramses to focus on him. “My work is history, and my work here will be wrapping up soon. You understand the Space Between Spaces; you know more about the anomalies of the universe than anyone. You’re the only one I can trust to puzzle this out.”
Saurex reached down and retrieved his satchel, fishing around in it for a moment before pulling out a silken drawstring bag. Ramses skin erupted in goosebumps as the strange angles of the bag betrayed its sharply edged contents. As he set the bag on the table, Inscriber Saurex scooped up his book, slipped it into his satchel, and stood.
“Good luck, old friend,” he said, patting Ramses on the shoulder as he departed. “Something tells me this will only become stranger the deeper you delve.”
Ramses pulled the bag to himself, gently tugging the mouth open and peeking inside. He was greeted by the soft gold glow of a numerous shards of amber.
Over what would consist of months in Aegis, Ramses would shut himself away in the Keep. Most of his thralls were given the peculiar assignment of seeking out and acquiring more of the amber echoes. Batches of echoes were run through the Seer. Flakes of the past were found. Strings of the future, as if torn straight from If, were suspended in the glassy mineral. Souls, or at least pieces of them, were scattered throughout, though they did not appear in every shard. The past, present, and future, along with fragments of Aegis and its inhabitants, were all present in this strange amber no matter where it was recovered from.
Sitting on the beach, the fog tight around him, Ramses listened to the rumble of the surf against the shore. By his side sat a chest with the most recent collection of echoes to be brought to him. Before him, invisible to any but those who could see outside of the flow of time, the Keep loomed far off the coast.
A scurry of movement caused Ramses’ arm to lash out. He had left the lid of the chest slightly ajar, hoping against hope that the appeal of such unique forms of information would draw in a creature that would have some sort of answers about this strange phenomenon. His fingers closed around a cold, if not disquietingly large, exoskeleton. He grinned, a thrill rushing through him as he withdrew his hand from the chest, a glittering beetle the side of a cat clenched tightly in his hand.
“The Furtive Beetle,” Ramses leered. “You’re not so clever now, are you?”
The large insect flailed, legs wriggling in all directions, head oscillating as it attempted to make sense of what had just happened. As soon as it spotted Ramses properly, the creature stopped moving entirely, as if suddenly trapped in ice.
Ramses blinked. This creature had managed to evade the capture of gods. Resources from the Realms of both light and darkness had been pooled to catch this exact insect. Even Chaos itself, the freakish entity that ruled the Realm of Errata, had made it known to those who wandered the cosmos that if they could bring it the Furtive Beetle, it would reward them beyond their wildest dreams.
And yet, somehow, Ramses had just caught that exact creature with his bare hands and a trap a child would have thought stupid. Glancing into the chest, Ramses noted that several shards had nibble marks in them now. Eyes wide, he noted the crumbs of amber wreathing the Furtive Beetle’s face. The trap, dumb as it seemed, had worked perfectly.
These thoughts had barely gotten past Ramses when the Furtive Beetle shimmered, flickering as if its body were an unstable painting. For the space of a notion, it ceased to exist. It came back into being atop Ramses knee, staring at him with beady eyes, its segmented antennas wiggling at him as if to scold him for thinking it would be so easy to capture a creature that not even gods could properly threaten.
“Then why let me see you, let alone catch you?” Ramses queried, unsure of how exactly this strange creature would attempt to communicate with him.
“Those are they who were caught in the middle,” the Furtive Beetle said simply, though no part of its body seemed to be engaged in creating its voice. “Those are they who are echoes made by the voice that broke reality. Follow their trail. Find their home. Find the voice that can speak the End of All. Also, it is illegal to wipe your nose with your left hand in the Court of the Emperor in the Holy Jahlnarth Empire.”
Without any further explanation, the Furtive Beetle scurried down Ramses’ leg, burrowing rapidly into the sand. Cursing, Ramses dug after the creature with his hands, spitting furiously as sand spayed up at him. For several minutes, Ramses continued to fling sand in all directions. Some part of him knew this was futile, but he didn’t care. Soon he was sitting stomach deep in a hole of his own making with no sign of the Furtive Beetle ever having even existed. Sighing like a defeated child, Ramses scooped up the chest full of now slightly-gnawed echoes and opened the door to the Keep.
Documents hung in the air like ghosts as Ramses entered the archive. Setting the chest on a table, he turned his attention to the litany of paper surrounding him, trying to quickly observe what Steven had managed to do while he was away.
Steven’s voice rolled out from among the papers. “I thought you might like to know that we’ve already noted something unusual. Despite coming from various points in time, all of the echoes share a point of origin. I took the liberty of examining the coordinate. There is a pocket of time that once existed in the Space Between Spaces. From what I gather, it ceased to exist when the Schism occurred.”
“Did its past and future vanish as well?” Ramses asked, taking note of the markings on the papers that chronicled the similarity Steven had mentioned.
“All points of time that stabilized the pocket are gone,” Steven confirmed as he appeared from amid the papers. “The only reference to the coordinates we can derive come from the echoes. There was also a lot of chatter regarding something one of the thralls noted lurking around the Scratching Post.”
“Chatter?” Ramses asked, ignoring the strange name that his staff all used to refer to the Keep.
“An entity,” Steven clarified. “We can’t identify it. It’s floating in the void just outside the fringes of the Scratching Post. Its movement is what caught my attention. It’s like a cosmic ribbon flickering through space. Several souls in the amber have a faint memory of something similar.”
“We’ll be wary of evil space ribbons then,” Ramses quipped. “Prepare the Keep to travel. We will begin our search for the truth in the place where this time pocket used to be.”
Steven bowed to his master. “I’ll have the thralls prepare to boodle.”
“I hate that word,” Ramses muttered to himself as Steven departed the archive.
Alone once more, Ramses looked over the documents Steven had prepared for him. All of them demonstrated little consistency. Each echo was made up of so many fractured particles that it was difficult to tell what bound them together. Two things remained consistent enough among them to be observed.
Firstly, every echo had components of a spell in it the likes of which Ramses still had trouble fathoming. The arcane web he had first observed in the echoes was more than just a twisted system of power and matrixes. While far from complete, these strange tangles of magic made up pieces of a much larger spell. Ramses felt sure that with enough echoes he could reconstruct whatever spell was haunting them, but as of yet there were simply not enough pieces to attempt that kind of project.
Secondly, every single echo had some reference to celestial navigational points. Consisting mostly of the names of stars, and occasionally the positioning of solar and lunar bodies, the tangle of memories resolved into a single point of view when taken together in consideration. To many, the location would have been impossible to determine, for it existed in no Realm, but rather in the great void, the Space Between Spaces.
Deep below his feet, Ramses could feel the vibrations of the great engines that moved the Keep through time and space. His thralls called the process of moving the tower and accompanying structures “boodling.” While he was certain they did this to annoy him, the word had grown on him with each use. After all, to “boodle” meant to employ bribery in a distant language. The Keep and its attached structures moved by metaphorically bribing the powers of the cosmos to allow it passage.
As the keep began to pick its way through space, eventually slipping past those that guarded time, oozing along the cracks of the cosmos until it dripped free into the void, Ramses rested a hand on the chest full of echoes.
Save for the Schism, Aegis would have been a rather unremarkable world. Yet, it was now the site of one of the most terrifying incidents anywhere in time. Nothing could compare to the Schism, but it was also not alone. More and more, Ramses was hearing whispers of breakdowns in the fabric of reality across the known cosmos. Monsters were appearing where they had never been seen before, seeping into worlds like Aegis, where no such things had never transpired before. Places and people were appearing in the wrong places, and now at the wrong times as well. Something had fractured the very fabric of reality, catching Aegis and its people directly in the crossfire.
“When I find out what made you, I will know what caused the Schism,” said Ramses, addressing the echoes as if they were still capable of comprehending him. “Then, perhaps, I can quiet the voice in my head that tells me your appearance is a sign of much more terrible things yet to come.”
