Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

The events that had brought him into being had been inexorably altered, shredded into scraps of amber film, gone now except for the few random fragments he had rescued along with the record of his birth. The steps he had taken in manipulating Time had produced the result he had prayed for, it seemed. The world beneath him was turning, sailing slowly through the ether, blue and whole and covered with swirling currents of air that danced across its surface, heedless that there had ever been any destruction looming. His meddling in the Past had worked. The disaster he had sought to avert had been averted.

At the same time he knew that the events his intervention had put into place had disrupted his own story, had negated the circumstances under which he had been conceived. He did not know if the new path Time was now taking would lead to his own rebirth somewhere in it.

Or not.

Contemplation, both now and before he undertook to alter the Past, had led him to believe against it. He had been brought to life, conceived as a concept, not really as a child, by two scarred individuals, one aged, one made old beyond his years by circumstance, who gave of their lives, their lore, to fulfill a prophecy different from any that now existed in the rewritten history. At least the first part was different; Meridion had been surprised to see Man-wyn utter some of the same prophecy in the new history, in Time as it was now. In the old history it had foretold his birth:

I see an unnatural child born of an unnatural act. Rhapsody, you should beware of childbirth: the mother shall die, but the child shall live .

Why did the Seer utter it again, in the rewritten history? he wondered, cradling his head in his hands. Would the magical sacrifice that Rhapsody, the elderly Liringlas Namer, and Gwydion of Manosse, a broken man dead in the eyes of the world, had undertaken to bring him into the world still be necessary in the Future? With the F’dor destroyed and the war averted, it hardly seemed so. And yet now that the Past had been erased and re-formed, the Future was unfathomable.

Instead of meeting as they had, in the new world, solely for the purpose of forming him to fulfill the warning of a prophecy, his parents had instead met in their mutual youth, had fallen in love and joined their souls of their own free will. Everything they had endured had brought them together again; it seemed little enough to hope for, that they might eventually bring him into existence by the mere happenstance that every other living soul comes out of. Meridion knew that this was merely wishful thinking, however. Just bringing lives together did not guarantee how they would be put to use. It was an observation he had made many times while watching the Past unspool itself as it was being altered. Time was fragile, and subject to change.

It’s your destiny.

Hogwash. We make our own destiny.

Yes , Meridion thought, bitterly amused. Yes, yes, we do .

For now his life hung, suspended in Time, within the glass globe of his observatory, powered by the ethereal fire of Seren, the star for which his mother’s homeland had been named. When the Time Editor shut down, the film of Time would begin to run again, endless and uninterrupted. And he would then come to his ending, winking out like a candleflame.

Have I made all the amends, begged all the forgiveness I need’ ? he wondered dully, running through a list of people in his mind, hoping that absolution would come in any case for whomever he had inadvertently harmed with his intervention. He thought mostly of Achmed, and what the changes in Time had cost him. Forgive me , he thought in silent prayer to a man he had also never met. In my place, I think you would have done the same . He remembered the words of contrition that the Bolg King had offered up to the Patriarch in the new history and smiled wanly. Given the choice, I think you would have wanted it that way, too .

His ultimate goal, of course, had been paramount; all sacrifices, all changes that had occurred between one history and the other had been worth the cost. Whatever detriments had come from the revision were to be added into the balance sheet and weighed off against the result, just as all more fortuitous outcomes were merely coincidence. Meridion looked up once more at the image of his mother in happy events of the new history and exhaled. Had he not sliced his father out of Time in his youth and grafted him back into the Past for the purpose of meeting her, she would never have followed him, never would have journeyed with Achmed and Grunthor, never would have had this moment, and any other happy ones that might follow. And the world would have been consumed in fire. I didn’t do it for you , he thought, staring at the projection. But I am still glad .

Before his eyes the darker image of his birth faded and disappeared into oblivion.

I am fading, too.

Slowly Meridion reached over and shut off the Time Editor’s switch, separating the machine from the light of Seren. The glowing instrumentality vanished into utter darkness. He closed his eyes as the remains of the timefilm he had known ignited on their reels, dissipating like the smoke from the last embers of a long-dead fire.

The circular glass walls of his observatory melted away in a heartbeat.

The last words he heard as the world fell down around him were spoken in the voice of the man who had guarded him from birth, who stood with him until the moment he entered the Time Editor’s enclosure, had comforted him in his own awkward way.

Will I die ? Meridion had asked his guardian, knowing that the answer could not impact his undertaking. He heard the reply again now as the air from the circular glass room left, rushing into the dark vacuum of space. The words reverberated against the disappearing glass of the windowpanes in fading echoes.

Can one experience death if one is not really alive? You, like the rest of the world, have nothing to lose.

Amid the horrific noise and swirling vortex that consumed his life energy, Meridion felt the translucent form that had been his body expand, stretched infinitely out over the vastness of Time and space, then explode in a burst of agony. His diminished awareness ebbed, then grew, only to flash around the outer reaches of the sky, an incandescent beam of light, until it fell like a blazing stone through the windswept clouds, hurtling to the Earth below.

The last fragments of his conscious thought screamed with the anguish of death, howled with the pain of birth, tumbled, blind, through the flashing images of a Past he didn’t recognize, of a future he could barely see, until it stopped, became aware again, like awakening from a dream-filled sleep.

Meridion opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was the familiar, smoothly polished stone and thick glass windows of the high tower around him. He felt the coldness of the marble chair on which he sat, chilling the muscles of his body, a body that had pleasurable heft and weight to it. He was glad to note the reunion of his conscious mind with his physical form; he remembered that the first few times he had meditated, traveling back or forth in Time, he had been petrified there would be nowhere for him to return, but had eventually reconciled himself to the risk.

It was reassuring to step out of Time and back into himself, into his memories, the history he knew both from the old tales, and from seeing it himself.

Whatever he had been seeking on this journey had eluded him. He had always had a sense that there was something different about Time than the way it appeared, but could never find the link, the evidence, that any other reality had ever existed than the one he knew, and could see in his mind’s eye. It seemed to him for some reason that his memories, and the history he was able to view, were somehow new , fresher than one might think they should be.