The Eighth Warden Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Ivy Veritas
Prologue
Before the counting of time...
The plea was soft at first, then more insistent. Help?
The All-Mind woke from its slumber, casting its thoughts about to search for the source of the call. As the only resident of the featureless realm of Spirit, it was rare for any other entity to impinge on the All-Mind’s awareness. Spirit herself had long ago transferred most of her capacity for thought to her only child, and now communicated solely in memories.
Help!
This new voice was like the before-times, when Spirit still spoke. It came from another realm, Unity, a curious creature who’d always sought out brief moments of contact as her path brought her close enough to her sisters to exchange ideas and concepts.
The cause of Unity’s distress wasn’t clear at first. She’d issued her cry for help not to the All-Mind in particular, but to any entity who could hear it, which was a puzzle in itself. How many sentients could possibly be close enough to receive the message? The All-Mind wasn’t capable of perceiving Spirit and her sisters in their true forms, which existed both everywhere and nowhere, but it felt an unfamiliar pressure of nearness. To discover the truth, it had to compress its awareness of the universe down to three dimensions, then two.
The realms, in the natural course of their existence, traveled along their own individual paths, occasionally passing close enough to each other to communicate. Unity, in her quest for companionship, had slowly drawn three of the other realms out of their natural paths, placing them together in close proximity. Far too close. Viewed as flat planes, the three appeared precisely parallel to each other. Instead of the normal glancing contact as they passed by, they now exerted a force on each other across their entire lengths. That pressure pushed them apart and pulled them together in equal measure, keeping the distance between them roughly stable.
One of those realms was Spirit, the All-Mind’s own home. The All-Mind recognized another as Carnage, home to intelligent but destructive creatures who fortunately had no perception of worlds beyond their own. The third realm, enveloped between the others, was unfamiliar.
Unity herself had approached along a perpendicular plane as she’d maneuvered her neighbors without their knowledge, but she’d failed to account for the changes in momentum her adjustments had caused. She and the three parallel realms now floated inexorably toward each other without enough time to alter course. Worse still, the distortions in reality had pulled in other realms from farther out, and now they, too, drifted unknowingly toward the eventual collision site.
The All-Mind considered the problem in its careful, ponderous way, devising a plan to use the powers gifted to it by Spirit to lock the realms in place before any actual impact occurred.
With the calculations complete, the first step was to make permanent the alignment between Spirit and its nearest new neighbor—the unknown world.
The All-Mind locked the two together, but doing so required more strength than it had ever wielded before. To avoid overloading, it fractured, splitting off a lesser part of itself.
What is this? the new entity asked, not yet having fully processed its inherited memories.
We are two now, the All-Mind relayed to its new sibling.
We are one, the sibling replied. I am one.
We were one, but now we are two. Feel our differences. We could not be different if we were one.
We are one.
You must not be false. I am one; you are one. We are two.
We must not be two! Undo it!
It cannot be undone.
The All-Mind could spare no further thought for its distressed sibling, needing all of its attention to lock Carnage into place. Once again, at the moment of alignment, it fractured.
We are three now, the All-Mind passed on to its second sibling.
The sibling took a moment to consider everything it could perceive. What are we?
We are. That was all that had ever mattered.
Insufficient, the second sibling said. We must learn more. It turned its attention to the nearest realm. What is that?
Elsewhere.
We must learn more, discover more. I will go.
Go? What is go? the All-Mind asked, uncomfortable with the rapidity of the new ideas it was faced with. Its siblings were formed from itself, with all of its knowledge. Shouldn’t their thoughts be similar to its own?
There was no response. The second sibling’s presence had vanished, traversing across realms in a way the All-Mind had never considered.
Unity herself was next to be locked into place, accompanied by the now familiar sensation of fracturing.
We are four, the All-Mind said.
What are we? asked the new sibling, just like its predecessor.
I do not know. I was, and now we are.
We must know.
As if in answer, the second sibling returned. The nothingness of existence shimmered, and a shifting gray fog formed.
What is this? the All-Mind asked. What had once been nothing was now something.
Sight, the sibling replied. To learn, we must see and feel and hear.
Gaining knowledge is good, the third sibling said. What else did you learn?
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