I had to find my mother. She’d built this thing. She’d made me a cripple. If anyone knew how to restore me, it was her.
The despair and excitement that accompanied thoughts of my mother nearly drove me back to the waking world. I couldn’t allow that, not when I was so close to finding my way to the next advancement. I clamped down on my errant emotions and focused all my attention on the cracks in the dark side of the core. The largest of them held me mesmerized as it expanded and contracted with the rhythm of my breath. At its widest point, I willed myself forward.
Nothing happened at first. My mind battered at the crack, but couldn’t force its way through the darkness to the light. Brushing my thoughts against the cold iron shell summoned the taste of old pennies.
You’re thinking too much, I thought. The visions in my head had distracted me from my journey. I forced myself to feel the pain that had led me this far. It was still there, sharp and clean as a scalpel’s edge. The ache guided me where thoughts couldn’t. A moment of pain obliterated my awareness.
I clung to my meditation as I passed through it. Losing myself when I was so close to advancement would be the worst kind of defeat. The pain receded, bit by bit, and my attention pierced the shell. I’d broken through the resistance...
And plunged into a rat’s nest of writhing black cords that immediately tried to strangle me. Loop after loop snared me, holding my thoughts motionless, paralyzing me with fear. The more I struggled against them, the tighter the bonds became. Darkness surrounded me in a crushing weight. My strength was nothing compared to the ebony coils, my powers were useless inside my shell.
And that was the key. This was my core, my mind.
“Enough,” I growled, and willed the cords to leave me be.
The black lines unspooled from around my thoughts with reluctance and stuck to the walls of my core. When the last loop had wrapped itself around the bottom of the shell, I noticed the thread’s end pierced the core’s floor, exactly centered on the seam that stitched together the golden and iron halves.
Hahen had told me to advance I had to go deeper. And what was deeper than what lay beneath my core?
“Here goes nothing,” I said, excitement growing within me.
Advancement was so close.
I willed my mind to follow the cord. The grisly seam parted with the lightest of resistance. For the blink of an eye, sensations overwhelmed my consciousness. Amber light blinded me, the sweet smell of honeysuckle filled my nostrils, and a burst of cinnamon coated my taste buds. Childhood memories blossomed like fireworks in my thoughts. My mother sprinkling brown sugar over a bowl of algae meal to help me choke it down. Hiding under my neighbor Billy Chan’s bed to split a candy bar we’d stolen from a drugstore near the overcity lift. Mama Weaver’s crackling, grinding words as she cast me out of her domain. The reek of polluted jinsei forced down my throat by Hahen’s devilish contraption....
I emerged from the stormy tides of my past to a tranquil sea of pure white embroidered with silver threads. Those thin lines formed a design so intricate it was impossible to take it all in. The sound of a million perfectly aligned gears humming with perfect synchronicity thrummed from beneath the great circular pattern, and tiny dots moved along those gleaming paths.
The Grand Design, I thought, my mind reeling at its complexity and size.
An imperfect copy of this had appeared to me during the Empyrean Gauntlet. In that vision, the Design had seemed impossibly huge and complex. Even scaled down so my mortal senses could envision it, the copy had been almost too much for me to bear.
The real thing was impossible to grasp. The smallest section was still overwhelming, and I had to tear my thoughts off the pattern before its sheer magnitude flattened me like a bug on a windshield.
I looked away from the center of the Grand Design to save my sanity. My vision sought refuge in dark patches on the pattern’s edges, and the blotches pulled me down with an irresistible gravity. As the totality of the Design narrowed, I understood the significance of the lines and the dots that moved along them.
Each of those twisting silver lines stitched into the fabric of reality represented a single thread of destiny. And the black dot that moved along it was a person. The one nearest me was halfway along its length. Another had almost reached its end. Before I could discern any more details, my point of view zoomed closer to the darkness at the Design’s perimeter.
What I’d thought were black blotches were collections of hundreds of smaller forms. Their amorphous bodies sloshed along the silver threads and left behind stains of shadow that sizzled like hot grease and reeked of ammonia. The creatures moaned a series of nonsense syllables as they devoured the lines of destiny. Oo-lorth-shog, oo-lorth-shog, oo-lorth-shog. The pattern repeated itself again and again, a chaotic maelstrom of slurred, sloppy not-quite words that grew louder and more insistent with each new cycle.
The hypnotic chant pulled me down to the darkness before I could resist. I was near enough to a creature to make out every repulsive detail of its body. Most of it was undulating sacs filled with purple, gelatinous masses. Stick-like legs emerged from the top sac in a haphazard arrangement alongside flailing tentacles that slapped against the silver threads like greedy tongues. Its head reminded me of a flattened squid, and rasp-like teeth lined its writhing legs. Those teeth drooled a constant stream of black saliva that corroded the silver lines. I watched
