Chapter 341: In the Void Between

A group of beings stood in places that maps didn’t cover. The space between the worlds, the place where realms and realities hovered like smudged-out lanterns, didn’t behave like most locations of the void--which had learned to hold its breath. Sheets of pale stone drifted through this space. Light came early and left late. Distance was never to be trusted. Many realities hung below them, or perhaps beside them, their borders obscured in the same way by veils of smoke.

Six figures perched on a sheet of black minerals that should not have stayed afloat.

They were primordials.

Not cheap, lesser beings who thought themselves as good as the oldest dynasties after surviving a few millenia. Their presence had weight. They had not existed in any form before courts and constellations and the later races’ insistence on their own records. None wore crowns. One, a man perhaps taller than the others, wore only a mantle of undisturbed shadow, resisting even the attempts of the void to stir those depths. Next to him--or perhaps behind, given the imprecision of the place--stood a woman whose eyes held the depths of the universe like reflections in multiple windows. The others, meanwhile, held their stances as if they’d stood their ground since the invention of postures.

It was Vaelith who broke the silence.

"This is where Lord Cael’s power fluctuations have been felt."

Nobody asked if the primordial woman was sure, because the doubt would not have entered their minds without reason. The stain that Lord Cael’s power left in this space, after he departed, was too...individual. Too specific to have been imitation. Not destruction, not creation, but something in between that had reached out and touched at the very edges of the void before withdrawing.

Another primordial, the tallest, Orun, turned his head slightly at the remark. "And how long has that been?"

Vaelith’s fingers brushed absently at the air in front of her, following the line of the veil. "The fluctuation itself is recent. The deprivation, not so much. Lord Cael has been missing for three hundred and seventy-two cycles of the First Measure."

The younger-looking one shifted his stance, and he wasn’t young by anyone’s standards. "For that long, after all those years of absence, and now this?"

Vaelith nodded. "Now this."

They let the figure of three hundred and seventy-two stand between them for a moment. Enough time for an empire to rise and decay and serve as a cautionary tale elsewhere. Enough time, even amongst the primordials, for an emptiness to become something of a conclusion. Someone tapped idly at the mineral floor with one booted heel.

Seraq, the tapping one, folded his arms. "We scoured the inner strata. The sealed, the dead, the places he used to use to keep away from the rest of us when it suited him. Nothing. Then this...this fluctuation. Not a return, no. But something familiar enough that it stands out against the silence."

"Not entirely," Orun noted.

"A fluctuation of willpower, perhaps," Vaelith said. "A projection, a segment, a shadow of a system...call it what shall be called. It is unquestionably his origin."

Ilyaen, the woman who watched with layered eyes, finally spoke. "Lord Cael’s presence is not one easily projected or broken. If something like that has shown itself in this area, it is because he spent power, or because something associated with him caused the expenditure."

"A vessel," Serath mused.

"Or his successor," Ilyaen said, "or his captive, if the right teacher had been there for the taking."

The youngest-looking among them, a primordial named Rhen, let out a long breath. "We believed it always, in the end. That he left of his own accord was the nicer thought. Lord Cael disappeared into his business rather than being taken or devoured by circumstance."

It was Orun who scoffed, shaking his head. "Nicer thoughts are for those without alternatives."

The platform beneath them wavered, and for a moment there was the suggestion of something like a green-gold world beyond that veil. None of the other primordials took the bait. They didn’t look that way, not truly.

Vaelith knelt slightly, pressing her fingertips to the black mineral floor, and a few pale stains of energy crawled up her skin before fading.

"The fluctuation, when it happened, was short and orderly. Not the workings of something in want of an ending, but..." Vaelith frowned, more at the thought than the fact. "If Lord Cael is gone, he is not gone. If he is hidden, he is not so perfectly concealed."

Seraq looked into the indistinct distance. "372 cycles of the First Measure. The First Flame’s seat remains unclaimed, the Deep Archive refuses to consign Cael’s designation and name to the depths, and the rest of the race pretends at patience."

"It is not a pretence," Ilyaen murmured, "but an indulgence, born of a poor understanding of events. Lord Cael has never been just power. He was a purposeful presence, and in his absence, quite a few convenient falsehoods have sprung up."

Rhen glanced between them all. "So, what, do we go looking for a retrieval or a resurrection? A notice of intent, perhaps?"

"We simply took notice," Orun said, without looking at him. "That a member of our lineage appeared to us after...after so long, is quite sufficient an occasion for any primordial."

Vaelith straightened again. "The fluctuation originated near an area of denser entanglement, containing several younger realities. Mortal-associated, layered realities. Ones that Lord Cael would most likely have found...diverting."

"Diverting in what sense?" Seraq asked.

Vaelith hesitated. Then, "In the way that a storm is diverting in times of drought."

Silence settled over the assemblage where the void was permitted to touch them. It was never empty. In a place like this, silence carried the press of other realms against each other, the weight of older memories, and the particular unease of a people who knew too much about too many endings. Ilyaen’s layered eyes narrowed at the space around her.

"If he has attached himself to a younger being, then he has done it most uncharacteristically. Lord Cael never invested himself in small things."

"Neither did he fail to recognize capability in the unexpected," Orun added. "If the younger being has, at this point, begun to wake Cael’s...associations, then this was merely the first indication of its appearance."

Rhen frowned. "You’re suggesting this isn’t the end of such appearances?"

"I’m suggesting," Orun said, "that Lord Cael learned little about how to keep a return quiet."

The remark, perhaps inevitably, earned the group’s closest approximation to grim assent. Vaelith turned her gaze away from the stain left by Lord Cael’s imprint, fixing it one after another.

"We do not announce this to the wider body of the race yet. If the houses learn that Cael’s power has manifested somewhere new, they will play politics and perform posturing as they always have and always will. They will bring excessive forces to what may be no issue."

"And we?" Seraq wanted to know.

"We observe," Vaelith said. "We identify the particular layer, determine whether it is Lord Cael himself or...something else present in his wake. And we decide what we come in as: retrieval, or negation of the latter."

"We won’t be doing the former," Ilyaen suggested. "Neither, often enough, is the latter."

That, too, was something like agreement.

The platform moved, and for a heartbeat the veil was thin enough to see the young, green-gold realms beyond it--regular stars and distances, and a world just recently battered by powers far out of its league. Then the fabric thickened again, and the impression was gone save for the feeling of it lingering.

Vaelith’s fingers curled at her side, where the trace of Lord Cael’s power had left off.

"He is not dead," she said, quite unnecessarily, to the space between void and realm. The absence was far too neatly traced to belong to that particular state. "Absence that thorough never leaves patterns this clean. The Lord of Cael is somewhere, and it is long past due for him to announce the place."

Rhen turned his gaze to the spot where those young sky had been, just before vanishing. "Then, we go , I suppose."

"Yes," said Orun.

They raised no banners, called no lightning from the void, nor did they perform dramatic acts to mark the place or the day. Primordials, when they had something to do in this manner, generally favored understatement over ostentation, and for this, too, would have been a suitable thing to do if anyone had ever asked them. Instead, the six primordials turned, as one, as if facing towards the entanged young realities.

The platform of minerals began to glide through the unstable space.

Behind them, the void resumed its customary silence. Ahead, the lingering imprint of Cael’s power waited like an open but unused door.

Vaelith spoke once more as the distance ate in, but she might have saved the words for nothing at all.

"Find the source," she said, and the last words were, "And remember-if it is truly his, we are not approaching a forgotten lord, but the reason the First Measure keeps an empty seat."