For the Record

While tormenting my adventurer ‘friends’ for a few dungeon dives – without a break between them, it’s so wonderful seeing them struggle – I had an idea.

A wonderful idea.

Why do the gods all have these boring, repetitive architectural designs for their audience halls?

I can do better.

I can do so much better.

And so I’m going to.

Without a word to Vivi, Omorth, or any of my household servants, I dismiss the dais upon which the three thrones stand, reducing them to the ash from which they were made. And with an idle flash of feelers…

I open a rift.

A small one, just large enough for two people to enter side by side.

Ignoring the sudden sucking pressure trying to pull me through, I send forth a flood of ash, compressing it as it moves to form a glasslike barrier.

Yes, this will do. This immaculate, shimmering hallway surrounded by the void of the space between space.

And at the end, I place an audience hall.

A new one, a new design, one I’d thought of while using a similar wall of glass to defend that idiot paladin’s blind spot from the end-of-dungeon boss’ poisoned dart.

Imagine Izahne’s surprise when I showed up in her own personal boss chamber alongside a group of adventurers! Oh, it was priceless… granted I didn’t allow her to actually kill me, but I did teleport myself back to the entrance after she handily dispatched Callian and the others.

I’m still not quite sure how to take the sad smile she showed me. I couldn’t help but mirror it.

Should I continue to wait for her? Should I take a less passive approach?

…

Should I simply let her go?

I don’t want to.

I don’t want to give up on what we’ve had. We’ve been through so much.

…

I’ve been through so much. With her.

She’s a piece of what little normalcy I’ve found in this small piece of my life… if it can even be called normalcy.

I’ve spent more of it asleep than anything else.

…

But I digress. I have other tasks at hand… Other diversions.

The new audience chamber… While it does in fact host three thrones as before, instead they float in the center, made of dense iron in a motif of sharp edges contrasting smooth surfaces – forged by my own greatest craftsmen and expertly aged to perfection by none other than myself.

I want this place to look as otherworldly as possible.

And so I continue. To the walls, I add geometric shapes to refract the little light – or lack thereof – entering this place. All light found here is emitted by an ethereal bubble of energy in the center, focused around the seat of power, engulfing the places for myself and my wives and leaving them in a stark silhouette to stay in the eyes of mortal observers for a not insignificant length of time as an afterimage.

They’re going to remember having seen me. Their bodies are going to remember, and not just the terror of my auras.

“Where am I supposed to sit?”

I sigh, but don’t pause my efforts. The pink seductress drifting in behind me doesn’t warrant it.

“At my feet, as usual,” I drawl in response

Eros’ gleeful giggle shows far too much acceptance of my demand… that was supposed to be an insult!

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I was on your lap like the old days?” the demon goddess coos back. “They were rather fun, you know. You could scratch under my chin and laugh that sinister laugh like the villain you’ve always been! Wouldn’t that be grand?”

Another sigh escapes me, larger than the last. “Can you turn back into an imp? You were much easier to ignore then. Quieter too.”

A split second later she’s less than a foot from my face. “Is that what you’re into, darling?”

But I stand my ground, offering her nothing but a deadpan glare.

…And she takes my lack of response as her cue to wrap herself bodily around me, pressing her teeth to my neck. AGAIN.

“{freeze}, you insufferable fool.”

Disengaging from the supple yet motionless and wide-eyed annoying thing is far easier… as natural a motion as breathing for me. I simply disperse and promptly reform my body three feet back.

And before she’s even had a chance to process what is happening, I open a hole in the glass and give her a gentle push through into the space between space, reclosing it behind her.

…

…

Well, she’s just drifting there…

Although I can feel her panic through our bond. The bond I didn’t particularly want, or at least don’t now.

…

And her pain. A pain she can’t escape.

Left frozen in time to all but her own perception, she can’t even teleport to safety.

…

This is killing her. And not just her Vessel, either.

…

…

She’s gotten three sighs from me now. Three in one irritating visit. And as much as I know I’d like it sometimes…

I don’t really want her dead. Not really.

So I reopen the hole in the would-be floor, latch on a feeler, and drag her back into habitable space.

“Think about what it means, that that deadly place is my natural environment.”

…And then promptly throw her through the weightless air toward the entrance. Without unfreezing her.

She can think about all of this wherever she lands in the old audience chamber.

***

“Mashie Mashie Mashie is that you Mashie? Is that you Mashie? I know it is, I know it is! It’s you! I saw you coming, I did I did! I saw you coming, I did!”

Reactionless, I step into the large circular chamber adorned with large spherical cushions as my companion’s sightless eyes alight on me, dropping their many-stringed instrument to the floor to flap their featherless wings fruitlessly in excitement.

Wings that will never grow feathers again.

“Yes. Hello Fate. How are you, dear?”

They reply with a purring trill that sends rapid ripples through the white plumage down their neck and chest. “Good good! I am good! Music, I write music! Music they write, or will write, or have written? Have written? Have they written it? Mashie Mashie, have they written it? I don’t know. Will they? Will they?”

I resist a sigh. They don’t need to see it. “I don’t know, dearie. I don’t know. Are you hungry? It’s been some time since you’ve fed, yes?”

The snow harpy twists its head around to an awkward angle in thought. “Time? Some time? Some time? Long time? Short time? How time? How long of time?”

Yes.

Of course. I always manage to forget…

That Mantle. The Domain of Fate. They can never seem to keep track of time, or rather what is happening now, in the moment. Or the passage of it.

They nearly exist outside of time, at least as far as their perception is concerned.

In my many years, they’ve always been the only creature I’ve met with this kind of affliction. The other Mantles may affect personalities, or even more overtly like racial changes… but nothing like this.

Never like this. Maybe that’s why I’ve always found them so fascinating.

“Close to five years, Fate. Every time I visit I ask, and every time you say you’re far too busy with your composition.”

Even though it’s not their composition. They’re playing the music of the past and future that they can’t choose not to see or hear.

I used to wonder why, long ago… and then I finally came to the conclusion that their grasp on sanity, however tenuous it may be, is because they cling to this.

“Are you busy now as well?”

Fate twists their head back and forth in thought for a few minutes… a few long minutes… before finally locking their unseeing eyes on me again.

“Time, I have time. Some. Some time. Not long, time. Time? Some.”

“Good.”

And it is.

As monstrous as I may be, I know it’s beyond what even the pantheons think.

Why?

Because I did this.

I did this to my companion, the same companion I’ve spent numerous of their lifetimes with. And I’m not sure how they don’t know.

Maybe they do.

And yet they stay here, with me. Not that I’d let them leave…

Maybe they know that too.

I sigh internally.

There was good reason.

Every time they’re reborn, they remember everything.

Every time they’re reborn, the pantheons seek and inevitably find them. Why? Strategic advantage, profit, or any number of petty and useless excuses…

And of course, the rivals come. Should they fail to steal away the misfortunate creature… they simply kill it.

Again.

And again.

And again.

They’ve died so, so many times; murdered in cold blood, each and every time.

And so I permanently scarred my only… friend, I suppose. So that their eternal wanderlust wouldn’t lead them to leave this realm, the pocket dimension hidden away within my own dimensional storage in which I choose to dwell.

I’ll never let those fools kill them again.

NEVER.

I owe them that much.…

Even if only for telling me that my granddaughter wasn’t truly gone, not entirely, and would miraculously return… even if only as a shadow of herself.