An old man shuffled into the building, his shoulders stooped by the weight of years, lines of grief carved into his dark face. He passed through me with a shiver, then shook his head.
“Begone, spirits,” he said in a deep, powerful baritone. “My son has earned his peace. Leave him be.”
The force of those words drove me to the ceiling and pinned me there. I watched, helpless, as the man rested his hands on the long table and bent low until his forehead touched the cloth-wrapped figure’s chest.
“We thought you’d be safe there, Abi,” he said through choking tears. “You have to believe us. We believed it was a chance for you to see the world, an opportunity your mother and I never had. Your brothers didn’t want you to go. We should have listened to them.”
Silent sobs shook the old man’s shoulders and his falling tears darkened the pale cloth that covered his son’s corpse. I wanted to go to him, to tell him I’d never meant to hurt his son. Despite my intentions, though, the Design had marked my friend for death.
I fell again.
“Hello, again, brother.” Maps’ familiar voice was soft in my ear. She appeared just behind it, her arms around my neck in a gentle embrace that halted my fall. “This is my final gift to you for some time, a vision of the future you’ve always sought to avoid.”
“I don’t need to see this,” I said. “I’m not bound by a thread of fate. I make my own decisions.”
“You always have,” Maps said with a slight giggle. “And it has not always worked as you would hope, now has it? Accept my gift, brother, so you will know the price of choices yet to be made.”
Maps released me, and I plunged through the darkness to land, hard.
In a throne.
It closed around me, less like a comfortable chair than an iron fist. The back curved against my spine, forcing me to lean forward and peer down at the people who kneeled before the black iron monstrosity. The armrests curled around my forearms to hold them in place, and the heavy balls at their ends held my fingers like iron filings to a magnet. A weighty crown pressed down on my brow.
“My lord.” Hagar rose and raised her head, though her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. “Our plans are moving ahead. The Church’s forces have been pushed back to Atlantis by the Eclipse Warrior detachments. Our purge of the spirits in the Far Horizon continues with the Chaosbound at the vanguard.”
Hagar looked proud of her accomplishments. Sticky bands of scar tissue covered the left side of her face, tugging the corner of her eye down and stretching her mouth back toward her ear in a rictus grin. Her eyes were clouded with jinsei’s silver sheen, and coils of dark light surrounded her core. Those threads of black radiance rose through her aura to reach my core. More of those black threads rose from the cores of the other kneeling figures, and they were all connected to me. Their weight was clear in my thoughts, like the pull of leashes in the master’s grip.
A second figure rose and took a position next to Hagar. He pushed back his cloak’s hood to reveal an ancient face warped and twisted by injuries that had left him with a limp and bowed back. Sanrin didn’t hesitate to meet my eyes, though it was hard to see his through the cataracts of sacred energy that hid them. He looked simultaneously withered and bloated, his bones jutting through the sallow folds of his drooping skin.
“The new Design nears the final stages of its completion,” he said. “We estimate the majority of the populace will align with their new fates inside a week. There has been no resistance to your work from the common folk.”
Bits of memory floated through my thoughts like balloons filled with poisonous gases. I’d redrawn the Grand Design to my own specifications. I’d leashed my allies to me with threads of fate, enslaved most to ensure they’d never rise up and threaten me again.
No, that wasn’t right. Not me. Threaten the world.
Because there was a real danger out there. The decisions I’d made were driven by the certain knowledge that if I didn’t do something the warped monstrosities who gnawed at the foundations of the Grand Design would destroy humanity. I’d collared people not to enslave them, but to save them.
I wasn’t sure that made a difference. Freedom in exchange for survival was a risky trade. There had to be another way.
And it was up to me to find it.
The Champion
MEDITATION ALLOWED me to visit my friends, though only in chaotic snatches. I had no control over whose vision I’d enter, and no warning when the Design would hurl me into another person’s dream. And that was all these were: illusions of a future that would vanish when we activated the Umbral Forge and rewrote the Grand Design.
But if the destinies I’d seen were tied to my friends, then there was a way to control whose destiny I entered, and how long I stayed there.
I hoped.
The first step was to dive deeper into my meditative trance, below the golden glow of my shell, to the sprawling vista of the Grand Design. As I descended through the layers of consciousness, I braced myself for the sight of the warped and their monstrous god, Oolorthshog. Grimaldi’s men had fought so many of the deformed beasts in the ruins, I was sure there’d be a swarm of them gnawing at this part of the pattern.
To my surprise, though, that was not the case. The pattern below me was strong and vibrant. The warped
