Lightning lit the planet from horizon to horizon in a blaze of blinding light.
Silus understood then that Kerberos had just blinked.
Tendrils of cloud rose up around him, caressing him as they drew him down towards the surface.
Silus closed his eyes and sank into Kerberos.
Silus wasn't sure how much time he had spent in Kerberos's presence before he found himself rising back up, but he felt as though he might have been conversing for hours. However, he found he could remember very little of what had been said. All his questions and doubts had been replaced with new questions and doubts. He was no more aware than he had been of who was right about the nature of the azure giant; the Final Faith, the followers of the Many Paths, or the priests of the Allfather. In a sense he knew that there was a grain of truth in all of their beliefs but, at the same time, he realised that they all had a long way to go before they could claim to truly know Kerberos.
Silus rose into the void and looked towards Twilight. To his left the sun blazed away, great geysers of fire shooting out into the eternal night. Twilight caught the light and reflected it back and, feeling the pull on his body, Silus moved towards home.
However, something was rising over Kerberos's horizon. Something that Silus only began to see as a deeper darkness moving against the sea of stars. Then, as it rolled towards him, he could see that it was a pitch-black sphere. It was about an eighth the size of Kerberos and utterly featureless, its smooth surface reflecting the light of the sun like polished onyx.
This was the blight that marred the face of Kerberos.
There was a sudden sense of disorientation and Silus found himself looking down on the black terrain of this strange new world, with Kerberos now looming above him. He tried to will himself towards home and his body, but the dark moon dragged him down until he came to rest on its surface.
He sensed movement behind him then. Silus turned to see an arm reaching up through the ground. No, that wasn't quite right, he decided. The arm was in fact forming itself from the ground, the very terrain shaping itself into the semblance of a limb. Another arm rose beside it and then the ground between them bulged as a head, and then a torso, pulled themselves free.
The thing looked up at him as it coalesced, and its face was as smooth and featureless as the dark moon itself. As it rose to stand over him, the only thing to define it against the night-black background was the reflection of the stars on its obsidian flesh.
Silus prepared to defend himself before realising that there was nothing for the creature to attack. He had no body.
'What are you?'
The thing's blank face began to form itself into his own.
'Please, don't do that. You don't know me.'
There was the sound of the ground breaking behind him and he turned to see another figure pulling itself together from the surface of the moon. This one coalesced into Katya's form. Something crawled out of the ground beside her and when she picked it up, he saw that it was a mockery of his son. As Zac looked at him with its eyes of pitch, fear overtook Silus and he desperately tried to find the link to his body, but when he reached out, there was nothing.
'What do you want with me? What are you?'
We are the Great Ocean. The three figures said with one voice. We are the endless sea. We are the father of the creatures you call the Chadassa. The creatures whose blood run in your veins.
'But I don't understand what you want with me.'
Silus, your birth was the start. You are the herald for a new age of the Chadassa. The time of the endless ocean.
'How? Look, you have driven me from my home. You have caused the deaths of people I care about deeply. You owe me an explanation.'
We agree. Too much has been hidden from you. It is only right that you are made to understand. Maybe then you will submit to us with gladness when you realise just how important you are.
'How can I be so important?'
Look, said the Katya facsimile, holding out the thing that looked like Zac.
Silus didn't want to look at the thing. It wasn't his son. But when it smiled and said his name, he found himself falling into the bottomless pits of its eyes.
As Silus was dragged far into the past he tried to scream, but he had no mouth.
It felt as though he fell forever, but he didn't fall far.
As he came out of his tumble, he saw that Kerberos still turned slowly above him and Twilight still sat against its blanket of stars.
Something was different though and it wasn't just that the dark moon was no longer there to cast its shadow on the face of Kerberos. Something made Silus feel that he was further away from home than he had ever been.
Then he had it. He had fallen not through space, but time.
As Silus wondered why the creature that called itself the Great Ocean had dragged him into the past, there was movement at the edge of his vision and the dark moon drifted towards him. This time, however, it paid him no heed. Instead, it came to rest before Kerberos, hanging in the void.
As Silus began to wonder what great revelation it was that he had been sent here to witness ripples passed through the surface of the moon. The black orb convulsed and a great rock erupted from its surface to go spinning towards Twilight.
Silus was dragged into its wake, following it as it sped towards his world.
After the endless silence of space the booming concussion that the rock made as it entered Twilight's atmosphere was deafening. Fire erupted from fissures in the stone and gas vented from cracks to surround Silus in billowing steam.
The clouds broke and Silus saw that they were hurtling towards the sea, the water coming up to meet them at a sickening speed.
He braced for impact but the scene changed suddenly, and he found himself beneath the waves rather than falling towards them.
Silus was standing before a beautiful citadel, much like the one he had explored with the crew of the Llothriall. But whereas that city had been broken by war and time, this one shone in its perfection. Great towers reached from the seabed — linked by arches that looked like they had been formed from polished quartz — while domes of glass nestled amongst forests of seaweed, the green fronds alive with the play of brilliantly coloured fish. Shafts of sunlight filtered down through the surface, moving slowly over the scene, picking out the smooth green stone of the buildings one moment and shining from the glass domes in dazzling coruscations the next.
As Silus looked more closely he could see tiny lights darting through the city like fireflies and when a shaft of light moved to rest on one of them for a moment he saw that they were attached to strange creatures.
They were humanoid in appearance, though thin silvery tails propelled them quickly through the water and small globes of light hung from either side of their jaws, looking much like the lures of anglerfish. Their heads were larger than an average human's, with great dark eyes staring from above a circular mouth lined with hundreds of needle-like teeth. At the ends of their hands were not fingers but fronds, not unlike those of a sea anemone.
These are the Calma, the voice of the Great Ocean said. A simplistic and mongrel race.
The creatures moved through the city with a balletic grace that was a joy to watch. As Silus saw two of their young race each other to the surface, he realised where he had seen such incredible beings before. His vision in the broken citadel. He had seen himself killing the Calma. He had revelled in their deaths while standing knee-deep in their fallen.
There was a commotion above the city then and Silus saw a host of Calma rushing away from the surface, as though fleeing from something there.
Panic overtook the city as a great shadow fell upon it.
Silus wasn't sure what had happened but he was suddenly surrounded by a thick cloud of debris. Dark shapes moved past him in the murk, and he could just make out chunks of broken rock and the tangled masses of shredded corpses tumbling through the clouds.
Then as rapidly as the cloud had rolled over him it was gone, and Silus now found himself looking at the ruins
