Shadow of the Otherverse (The Last Whisper of the Gods Saga Book 3) (53 page)

“First order of business,” said Alicia once they were gathered around the top. “Dorthik, are you ready? This isn’t something to be undertaken lightly.” She had no doubt about his commitment; unlike her, he wouldn’t have to be pushed through the opening. To this day, she wondered if she would have gone if Rexall hadn’t removed the element of choice.

“I can hear the call,” he said, his tone abstracted. There was a faraway cast to his eyes. After all he had gone through in the past hour - had it only been that long ago since they had entered the portal chamber in Havenham? - his dazed appearance didn’t surprise her. She remembered how insistent the portal could be in close proximity. Denying the call wasn’t easy.

She wondered if she should mention the risk associated with the ambiguity of Sorial’s fate but decided not to. No need to plant the seed of doubt. The process of progressing through a portal had never been a sure thing. It was a leap of faith - a gamble that the position was waiting to be filled. The fact wasn’t lost on Alicia that if Dorthik died, her plan would perish with him. She couldn’t enter the Otherverse with only three of the four elements represented.

“There’s no real preparation, as you saw with Lavella and Excela.” She might have added
and Basil
, but she didn’t. “Just steel yourself and step in.”

After a moment’s hesitation, he did just that. Alicia held her breath, not exhaling until several seconds had passed. There was no indication of the portal rejecting Dorthik. Crushed body parts didn’t fill the air. Instead, there was an eerie silence until, with a groan, the new Lord of Earth dragged his naked form out of the opening and deposited it onto the apron. The price he had paid for his transformation was evident: each of his hands and feet had lost the smallest digit. Alicia wondered about the apparent arbitrariness of what the portal demanded as compensation. The transaction always made sense in the moment but, afterward, there didn’t seem to be a reason for it. Alicia would have rather have sacrificed fingers and toes than her ability to give Sorial a child.

“Are you all right?” asked Excela, kneeling next to the prone man.

“Give me a minute. I can tell it worked but I’m weak. Takes a lot out of a person, going through that portal. Can’t hear it anymore, though.”

Alicia remained calm and still, watching Dorthik recover. She was anxious to move forward but didn’t want her impatience to show. A concern was whether Dorthik would be able to channel his power properly. What she needed from him was among the most basic uses of magic - taking control of it and directing it toward the portal without attempting to manage or manipulate it - but it was a large demand to make of someone who had just undergone the transformation. She would have to be patient. It would be foolish for her to force him to attempt something he wasn’t ready for. After all, she would be the one to pay the price if he failed.

Dorthik’s ascension to the position of The Lord of Earth provided confirmation of Sorial’s departure from the world of matter. Either he had passed completely into the Otherverse or death had claimed him. For Alicia, there was still reason to hope. She intended to follow in her husband’s footsteps; her fate would be the same as his unless something went wrong during the transition.

With Excela’s help, Dorthik rose. When he spoke, his voice exuded more confidence than it had moments before. “I can feel it under me. Sorial was right; it’s like an extension of who I am - so vast and so comforting. Not at all cold and hard like we imagine the earth to be.”

“Can you use your powers?” asked Alicia, keeping her voice from projecting the sense of urgency she felt.

“Let’s see,” said Dorthik, his voice continuing to regain strength and timbre. Moments later, Alicia felt the ground shift slightly beneath her feet. The tremor wasn’t forceful enough to knock her off-balance but it evidenced sufficient magnitude to be noticed. “That should answer the question.” A smirk degraded his comely features.

Since her conversation with Lavella in Havenham, Alicia had debated the benefits of issuing a warning. The cavalier manner in which Dorthik flaunted his powers convinced her it was necessary. It might offend the others, but that didn’t matter - she wouldn’t be around long enough to experience any long-term consequences of their ire. If there was a conspiracy afoot to kill her when she tried to enter the portal, putting them on notice that she was aware of it might cause them to reconsider.

“You all know what this entails - you saw it with Sorial. The process won’t be any different with me. I need your full concentration and
loyalty
throughout. If any of you harbors your own agendas, put them aside for the time being. Now isn’t the time to attempt a power play. There’s too much at stake. Your elevation as a wizard will mean little if the Otherverse isn’t stable.

“If you value your future, you’ll do what’s needed and open the gateway. Once I’m gone, you can engage in whatever gamesmanship you please, although the continent would be best served by cooperation. Another war is in no one’s interests.”

When she finished, Alicia looked around her to gauge the others’ reactions. Lavella’s features were placid. Dorthik was openly amused, as if someone had told a funny joke and he was trying not to laugh aloud. Excela stared daggers at Alicia. She had taken The Lady of Water’s words as an insult.

“Let’s take our places and begin.”

The wizards arranged themselves as they had in Havenham with one at each point of the compass. Then, at Alicia’s mark, they began pouring their concentrated power into the portal, flooding the mouth with elemental magic. It reacted as its twin to the south had - at first seeming to absorb the power with no effect then beginning to emit a teeth-grinding buzz. Next came the hostile, angry
Comecomecome
that was Alicia’s cue to follow her husband to wherever he had gone.

Thus far, there had been no signs of malfeasance from either Excela or Dorthik and if either was experiencing a challenge maintaining or controlling their magic, those difficulties were camouflaged. However, just as Alicia committed to entering the portal and stepped off the apron, they acted, cutting off their input in concert. The act was so precisely timed that it couldn’t have been accidental. In the fraction of a second it took Alicia to pierce the black veil, she recognized her peril but lacked the opportunity to avoid the trap.

The portal didn’t reject her, at least not immediately. It didn’t spit her out as a mass of shattered blood and bone. She didn’t fall through it as if it wasn’t there and plunge down the shaft to her death. Instead, she
transitioned
and glimpsed the gateway to the Otherverse through melting eyes. However, even as she approached it, she felt herself being torn asunder. Instinctively, she recognized that she was the victim of an imbalance in the magical energy transporting her here. She had made the journey but might not survive it, at least not whole. Then the wracking agony began.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: CONTENTION

He existed. Then again, perhaps not. After all, he had no body, at least not in the sense that he was accustomed to having one. He couldn’t feel, but was there anything to touch? He had vision but not sight. Sight, after all, required eyes, and those, like the rest of his corporeal form, were relics of his past. Here, he was surrounded by activity. Yet perhaps “surrounded” wasn’t the right word. He was part of it; it was part of him. Small particles of energy, some grouped together and frozen in neat patterns, others buzzing around without rhyme or reason, knocking into the organized ones, sending them scattering. Order and Chaos: the building blocks of reality. This
reality. His
new
reality. The Otherverse.

Sorial. It was a name. His name, or at least the name of his former self. In the Otherverse, names had little meaning. The only reason he had retained independent thought and reason was because the particles representing “Sorial” had arrived as a unit and remained bound together, attracted to each other by the glue of individuality. What had survived the transition through the portal? Consciousness? His ability to ask the question defined the answer. Thought? To be sure. Memories? It took an effort but he could stir up recollections. His entire past, ordered and catalogued. Everything remained - feelings, faces, names - from childhood to his “death.” His soul? Perhaps that was the best way to delineate what represented “Sorial.” A person deprived of a body. But here, the concept of a body had no meaning.

He was surrounded by the two competing dynamics of this place. They were evident all around him. They formed the sum and substance of the Otherverse. The purpose of Order was to tame Chaos and force it into an organized pattern. The purpose of Chaos was to disrupt that pattern. The transformed Sorial maintained a strong pattern at his core but, toward the edges, he was beginning to fray. Both forces called to him. Order urged him to bind more tightly together. Chaos offered the freedom of letting go.

But he wasn’t here to bow to the whims of Order and Chaos, regardless of how strong the compulsion might be. He had entered as Kara and Braddock had, bereft of power and subject to the forces within. He had wrenched open the gateway and arrived with his potency intact. That made him a shaper of things not a disorganized collection of flotsam. He could stand against the entities that claimed dominion over the Otherverse. For the longest time, as the material Sorial, he had wondered what he would find “on the other side.” Now he knew.

He reached for his magic - a faltering action made uncertain by his unfamiliarity with the rules governing this reality - and found, almost to his surprise, that
something
was there, ready for him to command. The potential remained intact. It wasn’t the same, of course. There was no “earth” here to master but he could access the pure, undiluted energy - the byproduct of the endless friction between Chaos and Order. The Otherverse teemed with it. There was so much power…

He concentrated on the building blocks that formed his core: innumerable cascades of energy particles that gave Sorial structure within the Otherverse. By tightening the bonds among the ordered molecules and capturing random packets of chaos, he was able to fashion a representation of
himself
: an energy avatar, a bastion of Order. It came automatically; his magic made it a natural action, like breathing in the material world. Involuntarily and perhaps accidentally, he had chosen sides, allying himself with Order and making Chaos an adversary. But he was too attached to form and structure to release it - Chaos might allow him to retain his individuality but it would be amorphous.

His alignment with Order didn’t go unnoticed. How could it in a place where every action, no matter how small, rippled across the whole of the cosmos?
They
knew he had come. Perhaps they had been awaiting him. Perhaps not. Regardless, there was no hiding from them. It might have been an option for Kara and Braddock, inconsequential aggregates of particles, but it wouldn’t work for Sorial. He was a figure of power, a threat to the prior establishment, a shift in the Otherverse’s balance.

The random pinging of out-of-control energy particles increased, rising the tsunami of Chaos to a fever pitch. Sorial was buffeted on all sides and, despite concentrating to tighten the Order of his being, he could feel the erosion beginning. Entropy increased by orders of magnitude. Order required an effort to be maintained since the natural state of things was to decay. Here, he could see it at work as, one by one, particles from his well-organized outer shell broke away and spun off to lose themselves in the flood of randomness. It was dizzying to comprehend. There were billions of particles in his sphere of influence. True mastery seemed an impossible task.

I knew you would come
. The voice was without sound yet familiar to Sorial’s memories. He had heard it twice before: once at the Ibitsal portal and once in a dream that might have been something more.
That’s the way with your kind, ever meddling in things better left alone. In this case, you have strengthened me. By way of thanks, I will absorb you. The gestalt will crumble. The Order you jealously guard will be turned to Chaos. The sooner you embrace that, the less difficult the process will be. Open yourself to me and I will expose you to the bliss that comes with unfettered freedom. You need not completely abandon your identity - merely those elements of individuality that come from structure.

During his previous exposures to The Lord of Chaos, Sorial had found the voice, with its deep, resonant timber and dire words, to be daunting. Now, however, there was nothing frightening or ominous about it. The advice was reasonable. In the Otherverse, there were only two options: Order and Chaos. Adopting one meant rejecting the other. For better or worse, however, his choice had been made. His decision to cling tenaciously to Sorial, not only in soul but in form, made him Chaos’ adversary.

The Lord of Chaos intensified his efforts. Sorial, new to the Otherverse and its ways, recognized that he couldn’t stand long against such an onslaught. The more he lost of his individuality and the rigidly arranged matrix of particles comprising it, the greater the risk that what endured would break apart. He didn’t know whether his current consciousness could survive that. Most likely, he would be assimilated by The Lord of Chaos. How much of Sorial would remain at that stage?

If you wish to retain your selfness, come to me. I will safeguard you.
This was a different voice, softer but no less pragmatic. The Lord of Order. The opposite pole in the Otherverse. Sorial’s second option.

“Travel” as a concept didn’t apply in the Otherverse, yet to reach The Lord of Order, a spatial transition was required. In this, Sorial’s abilities provided the solution. He reached out to the source of the voice and, once a connection was made, he formed a tunnel of structure to provide passage through the ocean of pandemonium. In the Otherverse, for those with power, thought controlled reality. He could join The Lord of Order merely by
deciding
to do so. Nothing more was required for millions of particles to fall into line.

Unlike The Lord of Chaos, whose mercurial form shifted on a whim, The Lord of Order embodied a stable, recognizable figure. Although he could appear however he desired - there were no limits to how he organized the vast energy defining his being - he had chosen to replicate his appearance as it had been before entering the Otherverse.

You have chosen Order. Welcome, then. I am The Lord of Order. You might know me better by another name. In the world from which you have come, I was Malbranche. My former self discovered the means by which you entered the gateway.

Sorial, still struggling with his sense of identity, asked his first question.
Do you still consider yourself to be Malbranche?

Perhaps. My memories of my time in the world of matter are intact although my personality has been reshaped by my role in this realm. I am Malbranche reborn with a different purpose. Above all else, I am The Lord of Order. Structure obeys me. I wield it in the Otherverse the way I wielded magic as Once-Malbranche.

That made sense to Sorial. It echoed what he was feeling. He was Sorial, yet not Sorial. He almost felt like the man he had been was an imposter. Remembering history, he continued:
Then The Lord of Chaos is Altemiak?

He who was once my brother is now my partner in controlling the Otherverse. We master Order and Chaos and revel in their embrace but we are not Order and Chaos. The difference is subtle yet important. We work in concert with each other to maintain balance, contending when necessary, cooperating when required. We are one and the same, yet separate. We are closer than we ever were in the world of matter but entirely different. Our efforts ensure that neither Order nor Chaos gains preeminence. If Order was to overwhelm Chaos, it would be a boon for me but not for the Otherverse or the realm of Matter. I do not desire that even if it was to happen through Order. Balance must be attained. The Lord of Chaos and I agree about little else but we agree about this.

This struggle between the two forces has endured since the dawn of eternity. When the gods abdicated, they believed the Otherverse to be stable - a closed system where Order and Chaos naturally canceled each other out. In their arrogance, they did not see the breach and departed without recognizing the fatal flaw in their vision. Now you, through actions rash and ill-considered, have become the third external to exploit this flaw. Your entrance has destabilized the whole of the Otherverse. Because of your incursion, Chaos has multiplied at an exponential rate and is beyond Order’s capacity to balance. Flush with power, The Lord of Chaos will become warped and will no longer seek an accommodation. It is only a matter of time before all Order within the Otherverse will erode. After that, Chaos will spread through the portals into the universe of matter.

How did my coming create this instability?
Sorial asked, although he knew the answer. It all went back to
The Balance of All Things
and what Justin had been attempting. In penetrating the gateway, Sorial had injected more than himself into the Otherverse. He had admitted a reflection of the current state of the world he had left behind - a world that was tilted toward Chaos in the wake of the war.

The universe of matter is awash in chaos, so perhaps it was inevitable. When the gate opened, the rush of entropy was so swift and overpowering that I have not been able to counter it. I will be overrun. All will devolve into fire and death. It is inevitable.

To Sorial, whose existence as wizard in the universe of matter had been forged through war, the consideration of not battling was unimaginable even if The Lord of Order was willing to concede based on a mathematical disadvantage.
Chaos doesn’t win until Order surrenders.

The Lord of Order had built a massive construct of form and structure that was under assault by a stronger, emboldened Chaos. Without a full understanding of what he was attempting, Sorial threw himself into the struggle, committing every particle available to him, including those that comprised his essence. Millions upon millions upon millions - an army the likes of which he could never have imagined, and he controlled them all. He recaptured lost packets, strengthened areas of weakness, and struggled not only to regain defections but to blunt the wedge of Chaos and, ultimately, put it in retreat. His capacity for Order surged. The part of him that was Sorial ceded the foreground; he was now Order and for Order to be maintained, Chaos had to be contained. Then, after this show of strength, a new accommodation could be reached with The Lord of Chaos to retain balance.

When it happened, he wasn’t fully aware of it, but there was a point during the struggle when his investment in Order superseded that of Once-Malbranche. As Sorial’s control crested, the old Lord of Order became submissive - so much so that Sorial began thinking of himself as not just an adjunct to The Lord of Order but as The New Lord of Order. He and Once-Malbranche had merged. They weren’t simply working in tandem; they were working as one - no longer two distinct and distinguishable entities. Sorial, however, new to the Otherverse and jealous of his individuality, dominated. Not daunted by Once-Malbranche’s defeatist attitude, he rallied the forces of Order to blunt Chaos’ assault.

Now all things are possible
. The words, meant for The Lord of Chaos, were unnecessary. No change so radical could happen unnoticed. The reverberations spread throughout the Otherverse. Sorial’s almost instantaneous mastery of Order undermined The Lord of Chaos’ mathematical certainty of a win. The parameters of the equation had changed. Balance loomed.

Then the constants shifted again. As The Lord of Order was gaining an upper hand, the maelstrom received an injection of strength. Once again, the gateway opened. Chaos flooded in from the world of matter, but there was something else… Once-Sorial couldn’t see the cause but he could feel the effects. Buffers created to hold back pockets of disorder were shattered. The frequency of bombardments by random particles swelled - sporadic showers became raging storms. It could mean only one thing and The Lord of Order knew what it was.

He reached out to the maelstrom, seeking to be heard and understood, groping for her, craving her, even though he knew she could be lost to him forever. Lost in Chaos. But perhaps not lost to herself.
I am Sorial. I am The Lord of Order. I have survived. What you do threatens balance.