Chapter 744 - Timeless

Time.

For the most part, it was a meaningless measure.  To Zeke, that was even more true.  He didn’t age.  He barely felt its passage.  The only factors anchoring him to everyone else’s perception of time were exterior to his existence.  The constant check-ins with his tower were both frustrating and illuminating.  It was easy to see a pattern forming, too.  It didn’t happen quickly, but after a while, the people with whom he met grew older.  More frail.  And eventually, they died, only to be replaced by other, younger faces. 

At some point, Zeke’s contacts within the tower became a revolving door of semi-recognizable people.  Vaguely, he knew he should remember them, that he should at least note their names.  But in the end, they didn’t really matter to him.  Not in any way that would prompt more than a moment’s thought, at least. 

After a few hundred years, he received word that Silik had died.  He took the time to attend the kobold general’s funeral, which turned out to be a grand affair.  He’d been instrumental to their development as a people, and though he’d long since retired from the public eye, his influence continued to stretch across the entire Crimson Tower. 

Zeke felt genuine sadness at his death.

And yet, it wasn’t the same as when he’d attended Tucker’s funeral.  Something about that event had flipped a switch in Zeke’s mind, forcing him to come to terms with the reality of his existence.  He wasn’t meant to form connections.  Not truly.  His job was to push forward and solve the problem so that everyone else could do all the things he could not. 

He was reality’s sacrifice.  Willing and able to devote himself to that role, he couldn’t let himself be bogged down by minutiae like a kobold’s death.  Even if that kobold had been the very first link Zeke had formed with their race.  Even if Silik had risen to the occasion and become a hero to his people. 

Perhaps he was only fooling himself.  Maybe he hadn’t quite moved past personal relationships.  He couldn’t afford to mourn, though.  Instead, he threw himself back into his work, and in doing so, distanced himself even further from his chosen people. 

The span between returns to the tower grew wider.  At one point, he’d made a habit of checking in at least once a year, but soon, that became every few years.  Then, once a decade.  Before long, his absence was marked in centuries. 

Zeke hardly let himself feel it.

When he did, he allowed himself to truly regret the course of action that had led him to the inevitability of his current existence.  With everything at stake – and he could feel reality fraying with every passing decade – how could he balk at his own isolation?  How could he lament the loss of his friends, his family, and his people?  In doing so, he would only allow his dedication to waver.  His questions to fester.  His humanity to rise to the forefront of his mind and threaten to overwhelm his god-like purpose.

So, he worked.  He isolated himself, even from the Waymaster. 

Still, he discovered a few characteristics about his mentor.  The Waymaster was, at its core, a very simple creature.  It wanted to expand.  To fulfill its evolutionary purpose.  But somewhere buried deep within that gelatinous blob of matter and energy was the knowledge that it would never be truly sapient.

And it desperately wanted to pass that threshold. 

That, as it turned out, was why it had created the drones in the first place.  The Ways were simply an extension of its imperative to spread across reality.  It formed connections via divine energy, mana, and an instinctive manipulation of the threads.  In a way, it was like if a neuron had suddenly chosen to expand its influence, extending nerves in every direction in hopes of finding more neurons. 

Or a fungal colony, perhaps, though Zeke didn’t know enough about those to make an educated comparison.  Nor about nervous systems, if he was honest.  But the analogy made sense to him, and that was all that truly mattered.

In any case, the Ways had never been meant for any particular purpose, but after a while, people began to discover the connections.  Gods – both greater and lesser – ventured inside, only to find a stark version of what now existed.  However, they had braved those Ways, and in doing so, they found that they could be used to access other universes. 

Once the Waymaster saw their accomplishment for what it was, it began to facilitate the process.  The simple, narrow pathways became true avenues.  It built platforms where people established cities.  And it created the drones, as much to monitor and police the Ways as to show the travelers and new residents that someone was in charge.

But most of all, it was an experiment.  Like a child watching an ant farm, the Waymaster studied the Ways and all the people who used it, desperately hoping to glean some notion of meaning from the observation.  It wanted to discover the secret to sapience.  It needed it.

And so far, it had failed.

Over millions of years, it had managed to create a passable act, though.  If given reason to do so, it could adopt the appropriate mannerisms.  It could don the façade of sapience like a mask, and for the most part, people wouldn’t know the difference. 

But Zeke saw the truth of its existence, and he couldn’t help but feel pity laced with a note of envy. 

After all, as a non-sapient creature, the Waymaster couldn’t truly ponder the meaning of existence.  It could understand the nature of the problem before them, but it was entirely incapable of feeling the existential dread that came from pondering non-existence. 

Those limits were like a prison, though one that granted a degree of freedom that Zeke could only envy.

He used the tools available to him, though.  The Waymaster was a tireless teacher, always ready to answer any questions Zeke had.  The creature was so powerful that it could monitor countless drones – there were billions of them scattered across the ways and many, many more in other universes.  So, it wasn’t difficult for it to focus a tiny bit of its awareness on Zeke’s continuous study of the negative threads.

Still, it was slow going.

No matter that Zeke had a capable tutor or that he’d already spent thousands of years learning everything he could about manipulating those strings that comprised reality, he had difficulty conceptualizing the negative threads in real time.  It was one thing to know that they were there, to feel that they existed, but it was something else entirely to be completely incapable of perceiving them. 

To say it was frustrating would have been a vast understatement, and for the most part, his training consisted of manipulating the threads he could see and observing the feel of the negative threads.  In that way, he developed a vague idea of their causal relationship.  It wasn’t perfect, but with every passing century, he gained a better foothold.

That lasted until Talia came to him.

She couldn’t access the path to the Waymaster’s dome, so she came to the embassy instead.  There, she spoke to one of the drones, that in turn, conveyed the message to the Waymaster.  It then interrupted Zeke’s meditation on the threads, saying, “Your companion has requested your presence.  She says it is quite urgent.”

Zeke didn’t immediately respond, so deep into his study was he.  However, after a few minutes, he blinked, and his perception of time returned to normal.  Or what constituted normal for most people. 

For him, it was like rolling around in glass.

Falling into a trance and studying the threads came with a certain comfort that he could scarcely explain.  Like reaching nirvana, though without the religious connotations. 

And being pulled from that was very jarring.

So, he was a little irritated when he pushed himself to his feet.  His head spun as he tried to shut off his perception of the threads, and it took nearly an hour for him to push it aside.  When he did, he found himself disappointed by the projection of reality surrounding him.  He wanted to continue to believe it was all real, but after spending so long submerged in the threads, he found it increasingly difficult to accept that position. 

At worst, it was all just a solid illusion meant to protect his mind – and everyone else’s – from being overwhelmed by the threads.  At best, it was a shallower phase of reality that only told a partial truth of its nature.  But it was all most people could handle. 

Either way, it didn’t feel quite real.  Nor did it feel like the shadow he knew it to be. 

Instead, Zeke felt as though he was stuck between two poles, unable to step fully into one or the other. 

One thing he did know was that, after spending the last few decades in meditation, he was not fit for company.  He could have prevented himself from showing the effects of the passage of time, but he’d not felt the need to do so.  Focus was a finite resource, after all, and the last thing he needed to care about was hygiene. 

He found himself regretting that choice as he stretched stiff muscles.  With a focus on the threads, he withdrew some of his hair, arranged his beard, and removed the bacteria causing body odor.  Idly, he created a new set of clothes to replace the soiled outfit he’d worn for countless years. 

Just like that, he looked – and more importantly – smelled like a normal person.  So long as one ignored his obvious power, which he didn’t bother to mask.  Doing so would only invite trouble, as he’d discovered during a few trips into the Ways when people tried to ambush him.  That had not ended well for them.

“I’ll be back soon,” Zeke said to the Waymaster. 

The Waymaster didn’t answer.  Instead, it simply undulated. 

With that, Zeke headed out of the dome and followed the familiar path back to the Ways.  When he reached the platform, he saw a familiar sight.  For better or worse, nothing in the Ways ever really changed.  The Waymaster was incapable of true evolution of thought, and so, once its realm had been constructed, it moved on to other things.  And no one else was allowed to change anything about the place.

Sure, there were a few new banners on the structures, and many of the faces were different.  However, Zeke recognized it all as mere window dressing. 

But beneath it all, he saw the fraying threads of reality.

It was easy to look at that and infer that he still had a lot of time to address the issue. After all, it had been thousands of years since he’d first noticed that things were falling apart.  Surely, that meant that the problem wasn’t that urgent. 

Zeke knew that was just another illusion.  The fact was that, on a universal timescale, it had been no more than the blink of an eye, and in that comparatively small amount of time, there had been noticeable deterioration. 

If anything, Zeke felt more urgency than ever – because despite his efforts, he’d not made enough progress.  There were still plenty of mysteries to unravel, and his manipulation of the building blocks of the universe was, at best, inferior.  Everyone’s was.  He’d long exceeded the Waymaster’s conscious talent, but its instinctual control still far outstripped Zeke’s abilities. 

He had a long way to go, and increasingly, he recognized that he didn’t have much time to do it. 

In any case, he tarried only for a few moments before finally reaching the embassy he’d set up for his people.  There, he found someone he never expected to see.  Talia was waiting for him in the courtyard, her arms crossed as she saw him approaching. 

To date, she’d mostly kept away.  Whatever was left of their relationship had been eroded by years of separation.  She might’ve once been wholly devoted to him, and maybe a sliver of that remained.  However, Zeke was well aware that he’d ruined whatever they might’ve had. 

It wasn’t a bombastic break-up.  Instead, their relationship had suffered a quiet death brought on by the simplest of causes.  After all, it was difficult to maintain a pairing when they were never together.  Talia clearly resented him for that.  Zeke resented himself, too. 

Idly, he’d found himself wondering why he couldn’t just allow himself to be happy.  But he knew the answer to that question even before he’d asked it.  Not only did he have the fate of every universe within their reality weighing him down, but he knew that contentment was the enemy of action. 

If he let himself enjoy what he’d once had with Talia, he never would have found the wherewithal to devote himself so completely to his training.  And given the timeframe before him, that would have spelled doom for all reality.

So, it was with a somewhat heavy heart that he stopped in front of her.  He awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck as he said, “Good to see you, Talia.  I didn’t –”

She interrupted him by saying, “There’s no time for that.  There is a war to fight, and I can’t win it alone.  You’re going to help me.”

Then, she turned and strode back into the embassy.  Confused, Zeke followed her.