Interlude 5 A Game for Kings and Gods
"There are many people who think chess too complicated and contrived in our modern society; that other games are more representative of the strategies required to win at war and life. The majority of these people have never held the fate of a nation in their hand and would scarcely be able to grasp the ramifications three moves hence as they slide a pawn into place.
It isn't a game for the simple or those unwilling to take risks; in my country, our pieces are lives- our pawns are citizens, our rooks are our armies and our King? Our King is our future. Most people have never held their King, much less claimed another's. They will never learn the lessons a skilled opponent can teach and they will never be prepared to take control of their lives. The gods don't play dice and neither should we. We can find our purpose if we just look, learn and step into it humbly.
If you learn nothing else from your stay with me, remember this, my friend.
This is the true power of the grid.
Ithric Kettar"
The Cherub
Transporting fractured memories and pieces of experience into a specific place in a sea of specific places to fully form oneself into a cohesive being that could be called 'someone' instead- and at the same time- 'no one' was a tricky thing that still took thought to pull off. This itself was a tricky prospect considering that the sea of specific places, and the memories attempting to find the place in question had never actually met. Throwing darts at a map.
Amaranth had done that. It was an apt analogy. A smoky bar in the middle of the slummier area of her favorite city. Throwing darts at a paper target made up to look like a bunch of muffins badly sketched with drunk hands. A map, though. Muffins and a map. They were the same experience playing out at different times with different Amaranths both young and older. It was confusing and it made Yamma's head hurt.
That thought in and of itself formed a physical body in a barren wasteland under a roiling purple sky with white lightning crisscrossing it, looking for a target. Deciding it was probably not wise to linger, she blinked and opened her mind to the sea of specific places once more. Several times she thought she'd found the place, but when she opened her eyes the landscape was always slightly 'off'.
On the thousandth time, Yamma opened her eyes to find the place she was looking for- at least she thought it was; a sunken valley hosted hundreds of ruined buildings made of stone and glass unlike anything she had seen. All of them buried under a sky less void and sealed in with heavy, oppressive air. A field of packed dirt interspersed with rubble crunched softly under her finely tailored boots as she started walking towards the strangest of the glass buildings; it was tall, taller than anything Amaranth- or Yamma- had ever seen. Sheathed in glass the color of soot, it reached into the empty sky like a spire constructed from pure magic and impossibility. As she approached, the structure began to make more sense and she found an entry to it under some fancy lettering in a language she couldn't comprehend.
The welcoming hall was spacious and worn out with countless ages of accumulated dirt forming a thick layer of grime over once opulent carpeting. At the end of the hall blinked a circular ivory glow. The dot was no bigger than a coin but in the otherwise dark room, it was a dominating feature.
Yamma ducked under a fractured archway to avoid hitting her head, having to actually crouch down to navigate some fallen pillars. When she got to the back wall she paused. The dot of light was set in a steel panel beside a much bigger steel panel inset slightly into the wall. It was big enough to be a pair of doors side by side but there didn't seem to be any handle. She opened her senses, careful not to draw on Amaranth's essence and slid a tiny part of her self-consciousness to the council chambers to ask for permission to use some of Elisandra's power.
The other Cherubs debated for hours of thought-time, demanding she divulge her location and becoming increasingly belligerent when she refused. A higher power had asked her to keep it secret, her very nature forbade her from holding it in her mind and so she couldn't have given it to them if she wanted to- which, if she was being honest, she really didn't.
After what felt like an eternity, a vote was cast and her request was accepted. Her heart surged with Elisandra's primal energies, compelling her to seek out guidance from the collective. To obey. But that was wrong. . . One didn't learn through blind obedience.
It was Amaranth's nature to be curious and rebellious, so too had Yamma's baser instincts formed around that central pillar. The concept of unquestionable servitude felt as alien and strange as it had to Yamma's progenitor: it made her want to rebel for the sake of it! To think those snobs knew the first thing about this place when they hadn't left their chambers in ten centuries was absurd. She was careful, though, not to let those thoughts run to close to the tiny part of her she used to communicate with the others.
Instead, she immediately put the blessing to use trying to sense the nature of the magic that controlled the odd button. She pressed her will into it to manipulate the tangles of power to no avail. She even tried to ease out into one of the higher layers of reality to look for a mechanical lock.
Finding none, she frowned slightly and pushed the button. It gave smoothly and the steel door slid to the right with a rhythmic
ding
.
The chamber beyond the 'doors' was tiny by comparison to the lobby, no bigger than a privy with beautiful gold and wood paneling along circular walls and a glass back looking out on the history of desolation. With no wind to stir the errant cobwebs, their sway startled her at first until she realized she was stepping into the strange chamber, curious. She had come to far to go back, she wouldn't turn away now.
After all, she had been promised something special and gods never lied. Even to another gods' subordinate. When Yamma turned, she saw the panel in the wall and frowned. Rows and rows of buttons were staring back at her expectantly with that odd ivory colored glow. Her attempts to sense the magic that might control it fell flat, but after a second she realized only one of the buttons didn't actually have a glow to it. She couldn't make sense of the rune underneath it, but that seemed fairly trivial. She pushed it.
How convenient.
At first nothing happened and Yamma stared at the panel, perplexed. Before she could attempt to exit the chamber the door closed with a soft
ding
and lurched upward. Yamma grabbed the rail, bracing herself as the chamber shuddered and groaned. It slid upward into the gloomy abyss perpetually rising from the ground with a strange kind of friction that made the chamber feel alive. Slow. But alive.
A flash of panic rippled through her- and Amaranth, she was sure- when the Cherub considered her own mortality for the first time in her comparably short life. She could die in physical form, so could Amaranth. If one of them died, the other would follow suit thereafter. Had she already endangered her charge by being reckless? She was better than this, she knew better than to dig around in this place.
She was Elisandra's divine agent, not some stupid mortal. Cherubs weren't supposed to be curious! They were supposed to be servile and astute, looking out for the interests of their patron and charges, protecting and guiding when necessary. This? This was beyond her scope.
Carefully she edged up to the frame where a window should have been. The rustling wind from the ascending chamber blew down over her face. Over the lip of the chamber she could see she was actually on the outside of the building and being propelled up a shaft with a set of bright steel looking posts along either side of the shaft. The chamber- a vertically propelled carriage, she was realizing- continued to climb ever higher into the darkness giving Yamma more than enough time to get used to the awkward movement. As she did so, she looked out over the remains of whatever the place had once been.
The devastation was awesome in its sheer scale but so was the alien sense of preservation; as if the entire area had the luck to have been in a pocket of earth so dense whatever had destroyed the effigies to some obscure civilization couldn't burrow down deep enough to level it all. Curious.
Yamma braced her hands on the support where there should have been a window, watching for the last fifty feet of the carriage's journey. The subtle shift in its ascension told her it was coming to a stop. It did eventually with a jerk.
Ding.
Helpful way to train the rider, Yamma noted and turned from the strange visage. The doors slid aside to reveal a warm hallway wrapped in exquisitely polished wood and marble colored a soft eggshell and a deep salmon that actually made Yamma pause between the two 'worlds'. Surely this was Isira's personal garden, did she have any right to enter, even by invitation?
