Existence for abandoning him.
Veitch captured me and took me to Rome where I was to be sacrificed to the god Janus, one of the great architects behind the mysterious unfolding struggle. But I was rescued by the remaining Roman Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, who accompanied me back to the Far Lands where I recovered from my ordeal. Though Lugh still hadn’t been found, my relationship with Niamh had started to change. I didn’t recognise it at the time, but she was beginning to fall in love with me.
Meanwhile, the Void had been establishing a fortress for its growing army on the edge of the Far Lands. The remnants of the spider-controlled Ninth Legion marched there along with an array of foul creatures — Redcaps, the Lament-Brood, the vampiric Baobhan Sith and more. The Void wanted to keep control of the universe, and the army and the spiders would ensure that any hope and resistance generated by Existence would be crushed.
Meanwhile, there was a new arrival at the Court of the Soaring Spirit: a human, Thomas Learmont, who had been transformed into the mythic hero Thomas the Rhymer by the prophetic powers given to him at the Court of the Final Word. Tom had become a great friend to me, but that was far in the future, when I had first become a Brother of Dragons. Here, in the distant past, Tom didn’t know me at all, but his prophetic abilities knew I was vital in the coming war with the Void.
Using his visions of the future, Tom guided me, Niamh, Decebalus, Aula and Lucia back to Earth, to Venice in 1586, to locate a magical item that Tom knew was required by the Void’s agents — the Anubis Box.
While retrieving the box, I encountered Will Swyfte, Elizabethan England’s greatest spy, who took me to meet the court’s mystic, John Dee. He directed me to a secret Templar store beneath London Bridge where another magical item was hidden away — a crystal skull that had to be used in conjunction with the Anubis Box.
But the skull and the box were stolen by the Void’s agents, Lucia was murdered and I gave pursuit across the Atlantic to the new English settlement at Roanoke Island, in what would come to be America.
In a ritual in the new colony, Janus and the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders utilised the Anubis Box and the crystal skull to attempt to bind two gods — Apollo and the missing Lugh. Apollo was corrupted by the power of the Anubis Box and joined the Void’s forces in the Far Lands, but with Will Swyfte’s help I saved Lugh.
The colonists were not so lucky. The small group, including Virginia Dare, the first child to be born in the New World, were stolen from Roanoke and transported to the Void’s Otherworldly fortress.
Back in the Court of the Soaring Spirit, while Niamh celebrated the return of her brother, I saved Jerzy from committing suicide. He was terrified he would betray me. During his surgery at the Court of the Final Word, a Caraprix had been inserted into his head so that he could, at any time, be manipulated by the gods. The Caraprix, I had discovered, were mysterious, shape-changing creatures that all the gods carried with them in some kind of symbiotic relationship. No one appeared to know their origins — they were simply
I was determined to seize an advantage in the ongoing fight and petitioned Niamh to allow me to move back and forth between the worlds at will. My plan was simple: to locate as many Brothers and Sisters of Dragons as possible before Veitch found and killed them, and to bring them back to safety at the Court of the Soaring Spirit where they would form the basis of an army that could challenge the Void’s own forces.
In 1851 at Stonehenge, Jerzy mysteriously disappeared from our group. Unable to find him, we proceeded to the Crystal Palace Exhibition at Hyde Park where I encountered the Seelie Court, a travelling group of Tuatha De Danann who were very friendly with ‘Fragile Creatures’, as the gods call us. Veitch, in the grip of his desire for revenge, tried to kill me, but I was saved by an uncanny creature who called himself Spring-Heeled Jack.
It was not until 1940, when London was in the throes of the Blitz, that I discovered his true identity — the shape-shifting trickster Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, ‘the oldest thing in the land’. It was he who had kidnapped Jerzy, for reasons I didn’t discover, and who had been manipulating me for his own undisclosed ends. In the middle of the Blitz, I fought Loki, another god corrupted and controlled by the powers of the Anubis Box. Janus was drawing gods from a variety of pantheons to the Void’s cause, creating what would eventually become an unbeatable force. More by luck than skill, I forced Loki to flee and managed to retrieve the Anubis Box — only for the Puck to steal it for his own devices.
Back in the Far Lands, I journeyed to the sinister Court of the Final Word, which appeared to be behind so much of the misery I had seen — the place where Tom, Jerzy and even Veitch had been so altered. What I discovered there was beyond any horrors I could have imagined. The court squatted on a river of blood, and in its secret confines the god Dian Cecht conducted sickening experiments on humans stolen from our world. Through his studies, he believed he could divine the true nature of Existence and thereby give his people complete control over all that was, guaranteeing their survival in the face of the Void, while at the same time ensuring that they would not be supplanted by Fragile Creatures.
Dian Cecht also revealed that reality was fluid, and that it could be altered by someone in whom ‘the Pendragon Spirit burns brightly’. At the time, I didn’t understand what he was really saying. He also allowed me to look into my own time through another Wish-Post — more from cruelty than kindness, I think. And there I saw Veitch terrorising Shavi, Ruth and Laura, who had all started to awaken from their fake lives. But, separated from them by time, there was nothing I could do to help them.
Devastated by what I’d witnessed in the court, I fled to Earth with Niamh and Tom, shirking my responsibilities for a nomadic life in America during the sixties. There I discovered that the spider-controlled people were attempting to destroy a resurgent hope that had gripped the world, through a series of political assassinations, repressive actions and war in the Far East. The Void was creating the kind of world in which it felt most comfortable.
Some of the secrets of the Void were revealed to me by an unlikely source — the LSD prophet Timothy Leary, the so-called ‘most dangerous man in America’. We talked about the Gnostic secrets John Dee had first hinted at three hundred years before — that when the universe was created, the organising force split into two parts — the Light, or Life, and the Dark, or Anti-Life — the Void. And the Void had been running the show ever since, causing all the suffering in the world — for how could a benign god allow such terrible things to happen?
But the Light had planted the seeds of the Void’s destruction: shards of itself embedded in all humans — the Pendragon Spirit. And the aim of all Gnostic teaching was to awaken that Spirit so that Fragile Creatures could rise up to achieve their true potential.
Much of what I’d experienced suddenly became clear, and the true mountain I had to climb was revealed — to overthrow the dark god that ruled the universe! How could I, or any mortal, achieve that?
In 1967, on the West Coast of America, events were escalating to a climax. Veitch and the Libertarian were working together, and the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders was searching for the insanely powerful Extinction Shears, a tool that could cut through all reality. The spiders wanted to use the Shears to sever the Blue Fire from Existence, and thus cut off the power of the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons.
And once the Shears had been recovered from the Tuatha De Danann’s travelling Market of Wishful Spirit, that’s just what they did. In a cavern beneath the jungles of Vietnam where the Blue Fire poured into our world, the Shears were activated and the flow stopped. The Fabulous Beasts that lived in the Fire were threatened with extinction. Though the Shears were once again lost, all hope was vanishing fast.
At the Woodstock Festival in 1969, the Libertarian came to me and offered me a deal — if I gave myself up to the Sleep Like Death, locked for ever in a casket in the Far Lands, Ruth, Shavi and Laura would not be killed. I’d reached my lowest ebb — I could see no other option, and at least this sacrifice would allow me to hold on to the hope that Ruth and the others might find some way to continue the rebellion. I agreed.
But the Libertarian had one final surprise for me. When he locked me in the casket in the Far Lands, he filled it with spiders.
The potion I had taken threw me instantly into the Sleep Like Death, and I was unaware that both Tom and Niamh visited me to offer their respects — and each left me a vital gift: Tom a sacrament from Timothy Leary, and Niamh the Tarot cards she used to contact the higher powers.
The power of the two gifts combined to transport me, in reality or in my mind, to another place. In that dreamlike state, I encountered a past or future version of myself, and then met the Caretaker, an intermediary between humans and the higher powers. He led me to a cavern where two more intermediaries waited — a strange, frightening man and woman looking into a bubbling cauldron.
