Besides….she wouldn’t admit this out loud, but if she tapped into her master’s Remnant, his voice would go away. It would just be her and her unwelcome guest in her head. Alone again.
Yerin continued cycling, focusing on her breath to calm her frustration. She still had plenty of time to reach Highgold. This impatience could only hurt her progress.
Besides, she’d get another crack at the Trial tomorrow.
Iteration 217: Harrow
Suriel landed on hard-packed sand next to a lake-sized plate of chrome. In Limit, this had been a piece of a giant machine. In Harrow, a desert.
When Limit lost its grip on the Way and slammed into Harrow, the two worlds merged together and split the difference.
On the horizon, mountains flickered in and out of existence, as they tried to stabilize in one Iteration or the other. Here, Suriel’s presence was stability itself. Her connection to the Way anchored the world around her to order.
For the most part.
A fractal distortion in space unfolded into a field of impossible shapes before blooming into a two-story creature of dark glass. It had the legs of an origami centipede and the body of a black mirage, and it strained her human senses just by its proximity.
The creature of corruption reared over an upturned iron wagon, which had been half-buried in the sand. A woman crouched beneath it, filthy and ragged, having sheltered there for the better part of two weeks as reality crumbled around her.
Drawn to her sentience, the monster would have devoured her to remove her connection to the Way and to extend its own existence in the material world.
Suriel drew her Razor, now a meter-long rectangular shaft of blue metal, and blasted the creature apart. It dispersed into hissing shards of chaos that were difficult to perceive—they looked like burning nightmares.
Suriel activated one of the many functions in her Razor and the armored wagon dissolved, leaving a terrified woman huddled in the sand, surrounded by what looked like a nest of garbage.
Something hissed at the edge of Suriel’s awareness, trying to get her attention, but she ignored it.
[Mu Bak Ti Yan,] Suriel’s Presence said, and the woman’s head jerked up at the sound of her name. [You have been chosen to live. You will begin on a new world, where you will work to settle a wilderness. Do you accept this task?]
Mu Bak Ti Yan stared at the Presence, a gray figure of smoke on Suriel’s shoulder. Then she stared at Suriel.
In her original world, Suriel had been a pale, scrawny woman with hair like seaweed and eyes that took up half her face. That woman was still there, only…perfected.
Her hair was the color of sunlit emeralds, her skin ivory, her eyes a bright violet etched with vivid runes of Fate. Her childhood friends would have said she had the body of an immortal—flawless and statuesque—which was only appropriate, since they had died of old age more than four thousand years before.
She wore the armor of the Abidan, smooth and absolutely white, as though it had been poured into place. Her correlation lines looked like smoke trailing from the fingertips of her left hand up to the back of her neck, though they functioned more like an instrument’s strings. And, of course, she had just used the meter of blue metal clipped to her hip to blast apart an incomprehensible creature of madness.
In Limit, there were beings called Terava, which looked like perfect human men and women but possessed godlike power. The Teravan were natural energy projections that only took human form to feed, but Limit had never learned that.
Mu Bak Ti Yan, born in the dead world of Limit, must have thought she looked like a Terava.
Suriel raised one gauntleted hand in a gesture of peace, but the woman spooked and ran. She kicked up sand and fell to her hands and knees, still trying to crawl.
For the past two weeks, Suriel had been trying to track the human living in this desert. Most of the planet was clear already—its population dead or rescued—and this was the only inhabited planet in this universe.
As the sentient population fell, the power of chaos grew stronger. And the Way more distant.
Which made precisely pinpointing anyone’s location almost impossible, at least for an Abidan. She had relied on her old powers, following the trail of Mu Bak Ti Yan’s life-force, but the corruption of reality interfered with that as well.
Hunting one elusive prey through twenty thousand square kilometers of madness was more difficult than she remembered. Maybe she relied on the power of the Way too much; she was growing rusty.
Suriel waved her hand, and a blue-edged portal flared into being just in front of Mu Bak Ti Yan. It showed a grassland on the newly formed world of Pioneer 8089, where clusters of crude huts surrounded a great silver bird.
The woman stumbled through the portal, and the silver bird crowed, alerting the rest of the population. A tiny orange moon shone alone in the night sky; none of the stars had formed yet.
That was normal. Iterations started from clustered world fragments and grew outward, like seeds.
Suriel cut off the portal, and the door through the Way vanished, leaving Mu Bak Ti Yan trapped in a world far from her own. She had never gotten verbal agreement for the relocation, which was against Abidan protocol, but people usually only refused resettlement until they realized that staying meant horrifying death or mutation.
Of the two-point-one million survivors that had remained human through the merge and corruption of Limit and Harrow, she had saved one-point-four million in the half of a standard year since she’d been working here. The others had either died or evaded her notice long enough that she had no hope of finding them before the end.
On the first day, she’d sent half a million people to Pioneer 8089. They’d had to form orderly lines through the portal. By now, she was lucky to find one a week.
And this world didn’t have a week left.
She could feel it: the Way was losing its grip on this Iteration. Before she could locate anyone else, Harrow and Limit would accompany one another into the void.
Suriel lifted herself into the atmosphere, the land below her shifting from continent-sized machine to desert and back again. The atmosphere was even more chaotic than the surface, twisting like six hurricanes at war with one another, but she felt nothing inside the bubble of her isolation shell. She dove into stars under its protection; wind was not a worthy opponent.
From above, the world was a rapidly shifting mass of images and impressions, like a nonsense puzzle with pieces that randomly rearranged themselves. It was straining at the Way, ready to break.
And Suriel finally turned her attention to the hissing that had tried to grab her earlier. It sounded like a whisper just at the edge of hearing, like someone trying to call her name from a dream.
[Further contact established,] her Presence reported. [Transmission location still unknown.]
“Best guess,” Suriel said. She liked talking to her Presence, and had chosen its form for that reason: it almost looked like a person. She enjoyed conversation, and that simple psychological trick was enough to cut away the pressure from the isolation of her job.
Usually.
[The most recent transmission raises estimate accuracy to fifty-four percent.]
It was better than the last three times she’d tried to find the source of the transmission. It sounded like an Abidan beacon, as though someone had left a call for help, but Sector Twenty-One Control would have heard about it before she arrived. And it should have been as clear as a voice in her head.
It was quiet and hidden behind static, which meant that either it was not an Abidan beacon, or it had been broken during the violence of the merge.