I remained unconscious for some time, trapped in an endless loop that played a life that never would come to pass; I saw the loves I would never have, the battles I would never fight, the children I would never have, and I wondered who exactly am I if my life no longer exists as I knew it? All of the experiences that shaped me over the course of hundreds of years vanishing the instant my soul was brought back to life in a time so long before my birth, and I did not know if all would be restored if I were to kill myself.
When I finally awoke, the page that was tending to the room I was in informed me that I had been unconscious for nearly three days; I had lost all sense of what that truly meant, as there was no time within the Soulstream, and I had been there for so long. Rather than try to explain such a thing to a child so young, I merely thanked the young Eth and he said he was going to get the Cleric.
A short while later, the door opened and an oddly willowy Bahmi entered the room, her soft blue robes whispering around her legs and arms as she moved. She carried a large staff with several strands of beads and feathers hanging from it, and the entire thing radiated with a faint white glow. The woman smiled, quite serene despite the typical gruff nature of the Bahmi, and set down on the chair beside my bed.
"You've returned to the land of the living," she said in an odd Eth dialect, her tone amused, "and now you've returned to the land of the waking."
She lifted her hand then, a strong golden glow surrounding her fingertips as she reached out and ran her hand over the air above me. I felt a warm gust of air wherever her hand hovered, and I could feel the warmth sink down into my skin. After passing over my body twice, she nodded in a sort of satisfactory kind of way before speaking again.
"I understand that you're from an odd place upon the chronological path of Telara," she said softly. "I am Ykatya Mehroe, Cleric and temporal anomaly specialist. Could you please elaborate upon this for me?"
Temporal anomaly specialist? I'd never heard of it before, and briefly wondered how badly the timeline had been altered.
"Well, in the history I learned as a child, the second war against Regulos finished roughly ten years after the exodus from Port Scion. I was born approximately three hundred and forty two years after the last rift was sealed after that war," I replied slowly. "And I lived for just over a hundred years before dying in what should have been one of the last battles of the Telaran Civil Wars."
The Bahmi woman tilted her head as I spoke, though her eyes revealed a surprising level of understanding amid their calm. She was clearly intrigued by the future that I had experienced, yet I could tell there was more to her thoughts than simple curiosity; this Cleric was more of a scholar than half the Mages I had met in my lifetime. I had a feeling that I would be spending quite a bit of time with her over the next few weeks.
"That is quite a pleasant future compared to our current timeline. Exactly how was Regulos thwarted in your history?" Ykatya asked.
I braced myself for her reaction, given that I had yet to see a single member of the traditional Guardian races here – my guess was that the two sides were still at odds here in this past.
"A rather charismatic man named Raphael D`Angelo convinced the majority of the Defiants and the majority of the Vigil to unite as one force to end Regulos' tyranny and destruction," I explained carefully. "The Endless Court and Regulos' dragonkin could not withstand the combined might of our two empires, with machines that were temporarily empowered by the Vigil, and fell within six or so months of the Treaty of the Argent Knight."
Ykatya stared at me for a very long, tense moment, silent and passive as her mind processed what I had told her. It was clear to me that my guess about the state of relations between the Defiants and Guardians were close to what I thought they were, although it was pleasant that she didn't immediately rip me apart for such a suggestion."
"Intriguing," she said at last. "D`Angelo was murdered a few months ago while trying to sway the common man toward his cause. It is possible that this is what caused the divergence in our timelines."
Something about this didn't sound right to me, and I expressed as much to the Bahmi woman. "If it was months ago, wouldn't D`Angelo's death have rewritten the future already, which would cause my memories to be altered?" I asked, temporal theory not being my strong point.
The Cleric smiled almost serenely again and replied, "This is where things drift from what we know of temporal physics into what we first perceived to be paradoxical incidents. I believe that that the destabilization of the planes has not only allowed passage from one plane to the next, but also has created temporal maelstroms that are causing multiple timelines to emerge simultaneous, and invisibly to one another."
I suddenly felt quite stupid, as I was barely capable of wrapping my mind around what this woman was suggesting. The idea that more than one Telara existed in potentially the same space but in different times and thus different realities was a bit beyond the kind of thing presented in the temporal theories in my day, which were supposed to be more advanced than the past theories. Whatever had begun altering the chronological structure of our world, or worlds, seemed to be causing an early revolution in the field of temporal physics. There were a number of scholars from my day that would be chomping at the bit to get pulled back into such a turbulent period of time…the bloody morons.
"Let me get this straight. It's possible that the reason I remember this future that is largely impossible for this timeline is because when the two timelines diverged, one continued as I remember it and the other continued as it is now," I said, my tone a bit faster than before, "and that these two timelines are essentially running parallel to one another, but are completely obscured from each other all because of the tears in the fabric between Telara and the planes?"
She wasn't fazed in the slightest by my conjuncture. "Precisely, more or less. I suspect that each timeline is enshrouded by a similar type of veil that keeps the Prime Material separated from the realm of the Dead, for example," she replied, adjusting a stray braid. "These discrepancies may or may not be resolved if Regulos is defeated and the planes are sealed as they should be again. All the timelines could converge into one sort of averaged timeline, or they could continue independently, or they could cease to exist entirely."
This was heavy stuff. The subsequent backlashes from each possibility were frightening, and there was no clear way to determine which would be the end result. Several of the more fatalistic outcomes raced through my mind, crowding one another and clamoring for my attentions. I was developing a splitting headache from it, along with a very distinct urge to try and end this lifetime, hoping that it would correct everything for me.
"How many others that have been brought back to life came from these divergent futures?" I asked the Cleric.
Ykatya frowned, which was quite disturbing at this point, the expression deepening as her explanation grew. "Well, that is rather complicated. Every so often, an Ascended Defiant from a rather hopeless future arrives at the fail safe device Orphiel built a few months back," she explained. "Aside from these, there have been roughly five or six that we have confirmed existed in another timeline's future, and of those, only one hasn't gone mad and ripped their soul out of existence."
…out of existence? That sounded ominous.
"Precisely what do you mean by 'ripped their soul out of existence'?" I tentatively asked – part of me did not want to hear the answer.
The Cleric sighed before speaking, "A soul only has so much vital essence to it. While we have learned to heal this essence when a soul is scarred from a death, one can avoid such and allow their soul to degrade until this essence is used up. Once the last threshold is crossed, and more vitality is expended than that which remains, the soul ceases to exist, passing into Oblivion."
Completely and utterly ominous, as expected.
"Wait. Soul scarred from death? We only die once, unless your technicians just keep bringing back the same people over and over again," I asked, my voice rising in pitch.
Silence fell over the room, and the Bhami woman stared at me with an expression of surprise, followed by an expression of uncertainty. I was swiftly starting to dislike this particular timeline, as it was far more complicated and far more harrowing than the one I had come from. Not only had my life been taken from me, but this place sounded like it was on a fast track to the polar opposite of the world I knew and loved.
Finally, Ykatya spoke again.
"You must have fainted before they were able to tell you everything. I…don't expect you to be thrilled with this news, but we are not just reviving the dead and giving them new bodies," she said slowly, her voice soft, "we're raising them as Ascendants, like those the Vigil create to protect the Guardians. Those we bring back are nearly immortal, so long as they do not allow their soul's vitality to dip beyond what they have."
Immortality. That was something that my twin brother had been chasing for years through his necromantic studies, and here these technically primitive Defiants had found a way to eternal life; the irony was not lost upon me, and I could almost hear my brother growling his annoyances.
My head was throbbing with an intense headache as a tidal wave of thoughts washed over my mind, creating a maelstrom of despair and frustration. This wasn't fair.