Page 47 of Spelunking Through Hell

“That’s when the new arrivals stopped,” said Sally. “Before you showed up, we hadn’t seen anyone in roughly three Earth years.”

“Sally begged for an accurate cross-dimensional calendar when she arrived here, and it’s become rather the standard,” said Thomas.

“Without the crossroads banishing people, you stopped getting guests,” I said.

“But most of the people here made their bargains on worlds other than Earth,” said Sally. “How can choices made in our reality, fights fought on our world, impact theirs?”

“If my granddaughter had truly traveled through time, she would have created a paradox,” said Thomas slowly. “Reality is malleable, but it refuses most great transformations as intrusions. So her actions could not unmake the choices we had made or undo the lives we had led. If we made bargains, they were still made, because they were part of our pasts, and we lived through them. The things we paid were still lost; the gifts we received were still given.” He glanced at me, and he didn’t need to say a word for me to understand the message in his eyes.

Out of all the things I’d been afraid of during my long search, Thomas falling out of love with me had never made the list. It was still nice to know that he wasn’t sorry for what he’d done and didn’t wish he could unmake the choices he had made. I was alive because he’d been willing to barter with the crossroads, despite knowing what it could cost us both, and our children and their children existed because of that choice. If not for the crossroads, our family wouldn’t exist.

That was an uncomfortable reality to sit with. “If the pneuma of our world wasn’t killed by the crossroads, just displaced, it could have gone looking for a new source of nourishment,” I said. I didn’t like to think of my own world turning predatory in that way, but we were all demonstrations of the fact that people will do almost anything to guarantee their own survival.

“And if... Annie... stopped our pneuma from being displaced, it would never have become the crossroads of whatever world it attacked, and that world’s pneuma would never have done the same to the next world along the chain, and so on, and so on,” said Thomas. “It’s a paradox, and one that impacts us primarily because we were impacted by things that happened, but now didn’t.”

“That makes no sense,” said Sally.

“Time travel never does,” said Thomas. “In all my days, I only met one sorcerer who thought it was a worthwhile exercise, and he had gone quite mad due to isolation and alienation from humanity. We’re all here because of what the crossroads did, and now they never did any of those things, thanks to my granddaughter being too untrained to understand that she was attempting the impossible.”

“I’m pretty proud of her, too,” I said. “She’s a smart kid, always has been. We did okay.”

“Yes,” said Thomas. “I suppose we did.”

“So what’s the problem?” I turned back to Sally. “I woke up alone—why?”

“Your arrival did not go unnoticed by our enemies, and I’m afraid we’ll have to make a show of force to prevent greater issues.”

“Some of our neighbors don’t like how the Autarch hogs all the hot babes,” said Sally, and snorted with semi-private amusement, like this was some great and secret joke. “They were even more unhappy when the ladies stopped falling through the barrier. Sometimes they could get in ahead of our scouts.”

There was so much about this place I didn’t know or understand. “Is there still life in this world that didn’t arrive via the crossroads?” I asked.

“Nothing very sophisticated: plants and some smaller creatures and the like,” said Thomas. “This world has been dying since before my arrival. It’s not capable of sustaining much life without magical aid. And without a healthy membrane and pneuma to protect it, it’s not generating enough magic to provide the necessary aid. This is an... oasis, of sorts, a place of relative stability.”

“Only because you made it one,” said Sally. “We’re not sure whether any of this world’s original inhabitants have survived to be pains in our asses. The oldest people we’ve been able to find all had stories like ours, about falling through the barrier after their bargains went sour. It may be that the locals hide better, or that people don’t tend to live that long here—”

“But we think we’re an entire world, or at least an entire continent, of exiles,” said Thomas. “I think that I, being British, may seem like an exemplar of an ethos that says, ‘Well, you weren’t using it right, so we took it,’ but in this specific case, that doesn’t seem to be the situation. When I arrived, this territory was being fought over by three different warlords, each of whom had originated in a different dimension, none of whom could communicate with the others. Granting them the ability to converse didn’t solve anything. They’re all long dead, of course, but their descendants still hold their territories as best they can, and all of them would like to reclaim the territory we’ve carved from the bodies of their own.”

I nodded. “Gotcha. Anyone but Thomas here when all this was going down?”

Sally snorted. “Some of the guards come from really, really long-lived species, and they remember what it was like before Thomas became Autarch,” she said. “But boss is the only one who decided to stop aging for funsies. The rest of us keep on getting older at a normal rate. Whatever you’ve been doing hasn’t been an option.”

“And it will no longer be an option for Alice, after this,” said Thomas firmly. “That is finished, thank you.”

I bristled a little at the imperious note in his tone—I’ve never liked being told what to do—but even if I could convince him not to punish Naga for helping me, he was right. “I don’t need it anymore,” I said. “I’ve only been going through rejuvenation to keep me capable of navigating worlds long enough to find my way back to you.”

Sally looked interested. “Is this something ordinary people like me can do?”

“No,” said Thomas and I together. I took a deep breath and repeated more gently, “No. It only worked for me because... because I have a very high tolerance for pain. I’m afraid it wouldn’t work for just anyone. And we don’t have any of the necessary equipment here. I’m aging just like you are right now.”

“I’ll keep my own charm in place until we’re back to where we were when I left home,” said Thomas. “But then I’ll release that as well, and we can grow old together. My days as Autarch will end when I can no longer hold this territory, and I cede it to my heir.”

“Your heir?” I knew Thomas hadn’t been engaged in any activities that could result in him fathering any more children since getting to this dimension, but he could have adopted some. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Mostly because he hadn’t been able to be there forourchildren, and I’m just selfish enough not to want someone else to have had that time with him. What? I’m allowed to be flawed.

“Yes, my publicly acknowledged firstborn,” he said. “Some of the people here are physically compatible, but their children, when children occur, are officially announced as mine. Ser is officially my heir, and I doubt his mother and I would have been compatible if I had been inclined to try, which I was not.”

“Around here, you can found a dynasty if you hook up with someone you’re capable of reproducing with and pass things on to your kids,” Sally explained. “That means it’s mostly only the assholes who have kids, because the rest of us are limited to one, maybe two members of our species. I’m the first human chick to touch down in decades, and even if the boss hadn’t been pining for what we all thoughtwas a dead woman, we would never have worked out. Scuttled alotof hopes that the next Autarch would somehow look like this one, let me tell you.” She sounded deeply amused by how wrong the people had been to be hopeful for some stability.

I nodded. “So these are the descendants of people who made bargains that got them banished, and did so in sufficient numbers that they could build a gene pool capable of sustaining multiple generations?”

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