Part One: Hell and High Thunder
"Alas, the storm is come again! My best way is to creep
under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabout: misery
acquaints a man with strange bedfellows
In the still place at the heart of the storm, he slept.
If one were especially determined, they could reach him. The biggest obstacle was not in fact the effort required to pierce the veil of thunder and howling winds—though that was a formidable obstacle indeed, and not a task for the faint of heart—but rather it was the simple fact that unless the searcher knew where to look, they simply wouldn't find him.
The storm itself stretched an unfathomable distance through space and time.
He'd been sealed here by his own volition, lost in the tumult of this world of thunder, and he preferred things that way, because outside of this quiet place the world was a world of misery. He didn't want to wake to that—who would? So, he let himself sleep, sheltering his many deep hurts in the balm of dreams. It was better this way. It was for his own good.
Elsewhere in the solar system, the inquisitor sent from a broken home watched and waited in place unfamiliar to her. The scavenger (to whom all places were more or less alike, in the end) kicked a trail of cheerful moon-dust behind him. The exile, consumed with grim determination, searched for sustenance and supplication.
Most importantly though, the one who walked with scars etched across his memory, the missing piece of this dormant mechanism, looked to his small, bright companion and said, "Shall we check the bounties for today?"
A child slept, entombed in a cradle of earth. A frightfully dangerous object (small enough to hold in two hands) sat secure at the heart of an ancient center of learning while the jungle gnawed the walls around it. A hollow world stuffed with lawlessness and the memory of miracles churned in all its unruly, neon-spangled glory. A room full of secrets and ancient shame lay locked in ice, ready to stir to life at the touch of any inquisitive mind brave enough to come and liberate them. Rusting spires groped desperately at the sky as drifts and dunes of red dust broke against them like waves.
And at the end of it all, he was still there, sleeping. He might have slept for longer, or perhaps forever, had it not been for that little spark of light that replied, with all the flippancy in the world, "Might as well." Ultimately, it was three words that set everything in motion, the smallest thing imaginable that caused the worlds-spanning cascade of things to come. But, then again, that was often the way of these things, wasn't it?
In the heart of the City, a decision was made; across the boundless black of space, a storm brewed.