Ollen70: Geez, it's been, what, a year since I've updated this? More? I'm a bad person. BUT! It's still alive! Kind of. I'm not promising that this chapter is anywhere close to good, but I'm pretty happy with it so far, and motivated to finally finish this story after so much delay.

Thank you thank you thank you to Archica for reviewing the last chapter. I'm still working on the 'having a plot' and the 'resolving the plot' issues, so we'll see what happens.

The Moment

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"Afar above in the eternal and unknown night, the stupendous desolation of the dead world, and the eternal snow and starless dark. And, as I do think, a cold so bitter that it held death to all living that should come anigh to it." ~ W. H. Hodgeson, 'The Night Land.'

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Following after Marle was like learning to walk again. Chrono came with halting steps, not willing to pull her back but hardly eager to head down the corridors. The area where they now stood was apparently familiar to her, because she strode through it as though she'd done it a thousand times already, one hand locked around his wrist and another twisting at the prone key of the Valkyrie.

Sections of the floor weren't actually floor at all, but a conveyor like those in the factories of the far future. Every time he stepped off one, his body forgot how quickly he'd been moving and nearly fell over onto Marle. She hardly noticed, focused as she was on their supposed destination.

Likening this place to the Geno dome made him even more uncomfortable here. The dome had been a factory of death, meant to convert life into fuel, and he couldn't help but wonder what Lavos and the queen's influence on that place had been - if Zeal and its utter contempt for those who weren't Enlightened had shaped the mindset of the mother brain.

And one dark question led to another, as the metal floor of the corridors sounded out under their feet. Had the gurus known the queen's purpose? Hadn't Belthasar been the one to build the Ocean Palace and the Blackbird, and probably the original Skyways and the other devices that had totally stratified the Kingdom? And all three of them had taken part in building the Mammon Machine…

Mentally, Chrono paused. But that's also where things started to fall apart, as far as his theory was concerned. Melchior had been sealed on Mount Woe for opposing the queen. And no one really knew where Gaspar was, but from what Lucca had told him later, it sounded as if he'd been off making the trigger at the time. Had he expected to have to use it? Was it simply another experiment to him, an interesting aspect of the laws of time? But Lorraine…

Marle was right to call her crazy, but there was more to it than that. The look on her face when she'd spoken to him was very familiar. 'This can't be… this can't be the way it ends…" the voice rang in his mind, accompanied by the acrid tang of the air in the Arvis dome in a future that no longer existed. The agony in Marle's eyes, was touched with something more potent. There was nothing but determination, and the absolute assurance that, whatever everyone else thought, she was right.

The reek of the corridors burned his nose and he coughed violently, still somehow managing to keep his feet beneath him. It smelled every bit as caustic as the apothecary's shop, as disinfected and as dead.

"You there, stop where I can see you!" Marle had the Valkyrie in her free hand in a single moment. Chrono wasn't sure what had happened, too absorbed by thought to pay much attention to what was going on around them.

He didn't draw his katana, since the hunched figure was still some distance away, crouched over a console in what appeared to be the control room of… wherever it was that they were. Chrono hadn't remembered passing through any doors, but here they stood, in a three-sided room that opened windows onto a whispery gray light and curtains of lashing snow.

"Well, it's right about time, isn't it?" The black-cloaked figure turned, and Chrono couldn't help but think how oddly familiar the eyes were, even if the person before him was foreign. "Had to turn up sooner or later, didn't you? Though I imagine you've already seen Gaspar and your inventor friend, if you've ended up here, am I right? Have you tried your power against hers?"

"Are you…? Wait a minute, who are you…?" Marle fumbled for a moment, but her outcry caused him to look closer. The man in front of them was young, broad-shouldered and in no way as wizened as the Guru of Life had been in any time period they'd encountered him, but he was very clearly one in the same. "Melchior…?"

"Were you expecting someone else?" came the almost wounded reply. "Gaspar did get a bit carried away, didn't he? Well, I suppose it served the purpose. Largely."

"I Thought you were one of Lorraine's men…"

"And I can forgive you for that. I don't think she honestly intended to send us here, given how lax her patrols are. I've only encountered a handful of workers, and few enough of them had wits enough to answer my questions." He sat back on his heels, finally turning to face them both. "She learned enough from the old queen, it would seem. I've not come across a single one of her followers who wasn't magicked in one way or another. I doubt if they'd follow her, otherwise."

The man lay aside a handful of curious instruments, approaching them deliberately. His smile seemed genuine and his eyes concerned, but Chrono noticed with odd clarity that he slipped a single fragment into the folds of his cloak with a haste that didn't seem fitting. It sparkled like gold for the single second he saw it, but was given no chance to question the guru.

"A relief you're here, no doubt. I wasn't quite sure you'd manage it. If the circumstances warrant it later, I'll sit you both down and have you explain just exactly how you did it."

"Did what?" Marle asked, leaving the distinct impression that she was still rattled by his presence. "Oh, you mean the skyway?"

Melchior nodded, his mouth warming around the edges. "A skyway, eh? I was in my seventeenth year of learning before I attempted anything close to that. Not a little impressive..."

"Admire it later," Chrono bit out tersely. More terse than he'd really meant, and the note of surprise showed in the man's face. Marle, he noticed with a strong pang of regret, appeared vaguely hurt, as if he'd snapped at her. "We're not planning on standing around, waiting for her to finally come after us, are we? You've got some kind of plan, right?" At that, the guru beamed.

"Of course. Rather clever one, I think. Come here, both of you. I'll show you." He gestured them toward the panel, on which lay, among other things, a collection of stones. "These are from the ocean palace, these dark pieces. I had a bit of the metal left on my person, and thank the Lord I kept them after the first disaster." With a long finger, he tapped the more brownish stones laying on the right of the console. "These here are common rocks I collected from the Eternity only a few moments ago."

"You're picking up stones at a time like this?" Marle didn't quite manage to sound incredulous, but the implication was there. "There isn't anything more urgent for us to be doing…?"

"The others can manage all of that for now. It may very well give us the edge we need, if my hunch is right."

"Then, you're looking for similarities in the two spells?"

"Clever girl!" Melchior reached out to pat her arm. It struck Chrono as odd, a gesture that clearly didn't fit the man's newly assumed age.

"Wait… what?" He asked, still a little muddled.

The two turned identically measured glances toward him, and for the moment he felt very small and more than a little foolish.

"Simple business." Melchior held out his hands over the first bit of metal, tracing a trenchant place along its otherwise smooth edge. The smallest of the silver instruments pulsed a weak little glow that Chrono could feel behind his eyes. "Lorraine's a bit new to this business of large spells. Her majesty called on the full power of Lavos to raise the Ocean Palace, and by now we all well know what it cost her. Lorraine hasn't measured out her hand quite so well." At once his eyes shone, sharp and bright, and Marle took a perhaps unintentional step backward. "We might be able to take it all apart, right out from under her. I'll need the help of the two of you, I'm sure you realize. My own magic isn't near great enough, alone."

It was to Chrono that he passed his silver oddment, an eye-piece with a lens like a jeweler's glass and a gear face like that of an old watch. "In this, you can be as helpful as I. All of these sorts of spells take a bit more from the caster than most realize. If Lorraine ever learned that, which I very strongly doubt, it was quite some time after she left our lessons."

"Do you have any idea what her intentions are? Why she went to all this trouble in the first place?" Again, Chrono felt both of their eyes, but couldn't keep the question from his lips. He locked his gaze on the guru, watching for something – anything – that would dispel the growing doubt in his mind. Clearly he knew more than he chose to share, and could be any number of reasons why. He hoped they were harmless, but he'd learned not to take chances. Taking the strange device, he held his breath for a moment when Melchior finally broke his glance.

"I'm ashamed to say I don't. Not directly." The man's thick, dark hair had dropped down to shroud his face, and Chrono looked away, sickened at heart for reasons he couldn't name.

***

Magus's throat was raw, so much so that breathing was a great discomfort. He hung from the plinth, no longer willing to bother supporting his own weight. The machine above him still whirred, and it appalled him to think that when he'd first heard it, he'd thought the sound oddly pleasant. It was a rattling monster crouching over him, waiting for his own unwilling command before it drank even more deeply of his strength.

As the prophet, years upon years later, he'd grown to almost disdain Schala for her weakness, passively crouching there in the warp while the fool Chrono had immolated himself and Magus's own strength had whetted Lavos' horrible maw. But for her to have first endured this…

His anger burned at Lavos anew. A shame, that the thing was already dead. But there was still the black wind, strong as ever, and his skin pebbled because of it. For years, crouched in Ozzie's castle, its presence had been a macabre comfort, if only because it was a bond he and Schala had shared. Never mind the renown it had brought him, or the eventual title.

With a sigh, he reluctantly allowed his thoughts to revisit those old days. His appearance in the forest glen had been a boon for Ozzie, looking for nothing so much as a jester, a freakish human for his faux court to abuse. And then, after it became clear that even Flea was a weakling by comparison, he thought to make Magus a weapon, a mindless wolf-hound that did as it was told. Magus almost smiled at the memory of Ozzie falling all over himself, when the fat lout realized that Magus was no-one's puppet. The magic he'd learned to master in the dark corners of Ozzie's halls was appropriately terrifying – anything less, and the Mystics would have overwhelmed him.

But there had been cost, of course. He'd been naive to think it could have been otherwise. That sort of magic wasn't called upon, like the elements. Dark magic was a river of poison - the longer it was used, the greater the damage. His body showed clear evidence of that, but at the time, it hadn't mattered. His renewal was unprecedented – the magic he awakened had done more than simply horrify his captors. Parts of it had horrified him as well, bringing to life specters he hadn't yet fully laid to rest. It had won him power, though. Power enough to summon Lavos, disastrous as that had been.

The war had been an unfortunate consequence. Playing on the Mystic's hatred of humans had given him both the resource and time to summon Lavos. Even Ozzie never would have allowed it, had he known Magus' actual intent. Better to keep them obsessed with an impossible goal than show them his greatest weakness, the one advantage Ozzie might have used to put himself over Magus once again.

And suddenly their goal hadn't been impossible any longer, and Magus had been secretly delighted to show the Earthbound their place, those who had outlived their betters. Had he held back, kept the Mystics distracted, the Earthbound might not have shown their desperation for a hero. Cyrus might not have risen, and brought with him the brat called Glenn, the one who'd seemed so sniveling, so weak at the time…

There were too many similarities. Magus never would have admitted that, but in his dark moments he suspected that Glenn must have known from the moment he'd discovered Magus' identity. The Janus of the past, nothing better than a fearful child hiding that fear with a petulant defiance…

Hanging from the plinth, Magus snorted. Such a fearsome figure he'd once been.

Vengeance was his purpose and pride his weakness, and he knew these things. But this… this was confusing. Lorraine's presence, and the tear in time, and now the Mammon Machine.

Lorraine had strutted off some time ago, hiding her obvious exhaustion behind a haughty smile, and had yet to reappear. It mattered little. Ineffectual as all her ruses might yet prove to be, she had no small skill in the areas of magic. Certainly nothing like Magus's own. His power was a battleaxe, remarkably effective when swung with a strong arm. Hers was far more exacting, hardly able to last under a direct blow, but subtle enough to prevent him from ever gathering himself enough to deliver one. There was no breaking the bonds she'd laid on him, not as he was now. But it was clear to both of them that the true power of the Mammon Machine wasn't being realized. It had done that for Schala only when she'd yielded herself to it, and in time, Lorraine was bound to be foolish enough to think she could convince him to do the same.

She had breathed her lies about Schala, and the legacy of the device, and all of the promises and glories and beauties of the future she had yet to design, but Magus saw little more than a petty tyrant. Lorraine hadn't fooled him, but the frightening thought occurred to him that perhaps she wasn't truthfully trying to fool him at all. And what unsettled him all the more was the realization that if even a fragment of her ravings about Schala were true and she was truthfully lost forever, he was running out of reasons to resist her.

"Well, this is certainly a predicament, isn't it?" Magus was shaken from his reverie at once, looking up so quickly that his vision swam for a moment. When it cleared, a man stood before him, clad in the purples and reds of a regal of Zeal, but the voice was barely a man's. Some strange cross between male and female with the odd lilt of a child tossed in apparently for good measure. He stared at the figure for some time, wondering what to make of it. The man watched him with wide and somewhat unsettling eyes, not at all touched by the stretching silence.

"Are you one of hers?"

"If I were, you hardly think I'd admit it, do you? Well, no, I suppose that might depend on what you think she would want from you, whether being direct was the best course or not. A bit of a conundrum, yes?" The man cocked his head to the side and seemed much more like a little bird than a blond-haired, well built young man, one of those who had at one time been the soldiers of Zeal.

"Set me loose."

"Oh, my love, I can't do that."

"You're here without her knowing. Of course you can." Magus's original contempt changed form entirely. The strange figure rose up on his toes, bouncing just slightly, and it was an oddness that could only be associated with madness or something worse.

"Well, can, yes, in the sense that I might be capable of it. But not can, in the sense that I'm permitted to."

"Then you are hers."

"That isn't what I meant." Again came the unsettling smile.

"If you aren't here to help me, I hardly see how it matters." Magus half-hooded his eyes, aware that baiting this figure might not be wise, but hardly able to help himself.

"Well, now you're only being difficult. I can do this, can't I?" He waved a hand, and though Magus saw and felt nothing, the rawness in his throat was gone. The dull hammering behind his temples, corresponding to the Mammon Machine's clock-like pulse, was drastically lessened. Unlike healings he'd received in the past, he felt as though he'd been resting for days, a perfectly natural health in place of the false, unsatisfying comfort that came from a cure spell, even those as well crafted as the princess's.

"Would you like a cloak? A tunic, possibly? Seems a bit ridiculous of her to let you risk chill, being chained there like that." With another wave, a jerkin of silver links and light blue silk and an ankle-length cloak of a cut and design that Magus never would have considering choosing on his own unfolded from the air, wrapping over his exposed flesh. "That's better, isn't it? Dashing, I think. Fortunate for you that brocade is such an old fashion. I'd risk making a mess of things if it weren't, wouldn't I?" He laughed at himself and Magus barely managed to keep calm.

"What are you?" he managed to ask, his voice as level as he could keep it.

"What am I not?" The man paused a moment, blinking. "That's… that's not quite right, is it? How would you say that? 'What aren't I?' Is that better? Well, which-ever it is," he went on breathlessly, "it all amounts to the same thing, doesn't it? I am what I am, and you are what you are, and what you are right now is in a bit of a predicament." He paused again and blinked. "Did I already say that?"

Magus only stared at the figure, not quite believing that the man was entirely real.

"I'm not here in any official capacity. Probably shouldn't be here at all, but, one way or another, I seem to have involved myself already." The man spoke largely to himself, though his eyes never so much as darted away from Magus's.

"Then ease my bonds," he said carefully. "How can that be worse than what you've done?"

"It's a different circumstance, dear. A different area completely. If you really needed me to, well, this would be another tale altogether, wouldn't it? It wouldn't be yours, and I think you'd very much like it to be, wouldn't you?

"Are you every kind of a fool?" He asked, bitter because of a rising panic rather than because he honestly believed it. He'd tested himself here already – his power couldn't overcome Lorraine's.

"No," came the startlingly flat reply. "No, I'm not."

"Then… then why did you…" Very suddenly he found himself wishing the odd creature would simply vanish again. Magus had lived long enough and faced terrifying enough creatures that most stories of beings of great power were nothing more than myths to him, but he began to wish that he'd read some of the tomes in Ozzie's library a bit more carefully.

"'For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?'" Once more, the man seemed to be speaking to himself, but his aspect was less cold than it had been just a moment before. "We could banter for as long as you like, love, but eventually she'll come back, and that would ruin everything, wouldn't it? If you'll allow yourself to listen for a moment, I imagine what you'll learn could be of very great value to you." His smile brooked no argument, and when he saw that Magus offered none, he gestured to the device above them.

"The Mammon Machine is interesting enough, isn't it? All the souls in the world, tied into its light. That's where the power comes from, I'm sure you know. Every soul, and each as unique as the glint from every star. Peculiar, to think that so much supremacy hides in so simple a place. Something to consider, no? That all of the power of a being as frightful as Lavos was channeled first out of a place as soft as a dream." His gaze took on a harder edge. "I suppose it isn't always soft."

And with that, the figure was gone. The air did not ripple – there was no smoke or light. The figure was simply there, and then gone. Powerful a mage as he was, Magus recognized the strength of the magic necessary to do such a thing, and could not entirely suppress a shudder, though unspoken questions still filled his mouth.

And yet, thinking on what he'd been told, he felt the edges of a smirk pull at his lips. Yes, perhaps things might become a bit more interesting after all. His eyes closed gently, his mind a crystal sphere.

"Neuga, zeina, zeibor, zom … now, the chosen time has come…"

Ollen70: So there you have it. More is coming soon. And, like always, reviews make me happy, and happiness makes me write faster. Or something like that.