Page 84 of The Malevolent Eight

The further I travelled through the curtains, the more I saw myself in those strands. My life unfolded with a multitude of different fates, different dooms. It was difficult to focus on them, although perhaps focus was the wrong word, since I wasn’t sure I even had eyes. Though I’d passed through the portal of my own body as a swarm of bugs, now my consciousness persisted inside tiny motes of glittering dust. Was this how the Pandorals experienced their own existences? If so, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad way to live.

‘You have to pull yourself together,’ said a voice behind me, which was odd, since there were so many of me you’d expect at least one of me would’ve been looking in that direction.

The swarm of dust motes making up my physical being spun in the air, momentarily leaving me dizzy until I was able to ignore the infinite strands of the curtains to observe a boy standing there. He was maybe eight or nine, with dark curly hair and bronze skin.

Well, at least I didn’t have to hunt through the entire Pandoral realm to find him, I thought.Then again, this entire plane might be the size of a back-alley brothel for all I know.

‘Think of hugging yourself,’ the boy instructed me, and because apparently he thought I was an idiot, he mimed the gesture. ‘You need to create cohesion between all the pieces of yourself, then you can take a proper shape.’

I attempted to do as he suggested. It was harder than I’d expected, because first I had to make all my dust-mote selves spin around one another to prevent them from colliding. The sensation was oddly cramped. After a few seconds– or maybe it was millennia; I had no idea how time worked here– I managed to shape myself into a somewhat formless blob with two spindly arms and one eye stalk.

‘Try harder,’ the boy told me, placing a hand over his mouth to stifle a giggle.

Cut me some slack, kid. It’s my first time at this. I’ll bet you were an ugly baby too, once.

After watching me fumble around as an awkward cross between a puddle of goo and a vampire kangaroo, the boy said, more usefully, ‘Use the strands to guide you.’

I let my awareness return to the shimmering, dangling tendrils and focused on those in which I was roughly the correct age and not either dead from blood loss (must remember to keep an eye on Temper if I get out of this) or dealing with the charred remains of an arm and leg severed by lightning (thanks, Corrigan).

‘We don’t have a lot of time,’ the boy pointed out unhelpfully.

I felt like swatting his head, but that required a working hand, so I went back to focusing on images of myself inside the strands while ‘hugging’ myself ever tighter. The sensations became more and more painful, like being crushed under thousands of rocks, until I felt the internal structure of skeleton, connective tissues, muscles and fat pushing back against that constriction. After a few dozen tries, I finally assembled myself into a reasonably Cade-like figure.

‘Your smile is crooked,’ the boy observed.

‘That’s the face I make before I slap impolite little snots,’ I told him. ‘But I make it a policy never to hit a child until I know his name. What’s yours?’

‘Hamun,’ he replied. ‘I am Hamun’ren of the House of—’ Then he smiled, and damn if he didn’t have his mother’s smile. Without warning, he rushed over to me and threw his arms round my waist. His face pressed into my stomach as if he were trying to breathe me in. ‘I knew you’d come to find me.’

It was a strange sensation to have a child hug you as if you were really important to him. I’d given up any notions of being a parent when I’d first joined the Glorians, and nothing about my time as an Infernal wonderist had changed that conviction. ‘How could you know I would come?’ I asked. ‘We’ve never met.’

He let go of me, then dangled his fingers through the shimmering strands around us. They warped and shifted, showing moments that might have been pulled from my life these past ten years, though I couldn’t be sure which ones were accurate and which ones mere possibilities. ‘I’ve known you since before I was born, Cade.’ He said my name awkwardly, as if he feared being too bold. ‘You met my mother when she was still pregnant with me.’

‘And you remember events frombeforeshe gave birth to you?’

‘You can find everything here,’ he said, tugging on a single shimmering strand. The images trickling down its length showed the same vision I’d seen in the Glorian Archives when Eliva’ren had somehow drawn me to her in the past. ‘Everything that touches one’s existence, everything thatcouldtouch one’s existence.’

‘This is. . .’ I was staggering under the implications– all the spells I might have been able to discover being attuned to the Pandoral realm, all futile now because even if I somehow survived the war unfolding on the Mortal realm, Eliva’ren had made it clear this plane of existence was going to be obliterated.

‘Hamun,’ said a woman’s sternish voice: a show of authority mixed with a hint of affectionate amusement. ‘What have I told you about conjuring strange men?’

Out of the coruscating curtains stepped Eliva’ren.

No, not Eliva’ren, I quickly realised,but the manifestation of her the Pandorals conjured to raise her son.

Aside from the unassuming robes and the basket of bread she was carrying under one arm, she looked much like the woman I’d left behind in my own realm– the woman who’d sworn to bring me to my doom. Before I could ask whether she intended to do so here, someone else spoke, a voice that shook me to my core.

My voice.

‘Don’t badger the poor kid,’ said a lean fellow wearing the sort of long azure coat I generally favoured. He was my age and height, his raven-black hair smoothed back from his forehead. We might’ve been reflections of one another, except that he greeted me with a patient smile my own mouth wouldn’t even know how to form. ‘Weird, isn’t it?’ He came closer, offering himself up for inspection even as he ruffled the boy’s hair with fatherly familiarity.

I looked down at Hamun, who was staring back at me with a sheepish expression that couldn’t hide his anxiety over how I might react to meeting myself. ‘The Pandorals created a. . . a replica ofmein their realm?’

‘Hamun didn’t want me to be alone,’ the mystical construct of his mother said, then she playfully swatted the back of the boy’s head. ‘Though why he asked the Pandorals to summon an ill-bred, ill-mannered wonderist instead of any number of worthier suitors is ample proof that children shouldn’t dabble in such affairs.’

‘Oh, come on, sweetheart,’ the other me said, throwing an arm around her shoulder. ‘Have I been so bad a husband? I mean, the jokes alone—’

‘Ugh,’ the other Eliva’ren groaned, then she batted at the shimmering strands around us, sending images of me at all kinds of awkward moments in my life whirling around us. ‘Was there not a single path in the life of Cade Ombra in which you were capable ofsubtlehumour? Must your entire existence be an endless series of jokes about genitalia and vampire kangaroos?’

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