Divergent Series

Finally, finally, the Exarch yields the secret of his origin, and it stops Emet-Selch dead in his tracks.

Time travel.

Time travel.

This changes everything.

Emet-Selch likes his current body. He had deliberately fashioned it to look like his vessel on the Source. But some things are more important than his idiosyncrasies. He takes the Exarch’s body for his own so that when he returns to the Crystal Tower, it will bend to his will.

A body made half of crystal is unpleasant to pilot. He finds that he must break and reshape the frozen parts with each motion he makes. But he powers through the pain and inconvenience.

What he needs is aether. Fortunately, everything is made of aether. He seals the Tower to keep those meddling Scions out, then configures it to draw in aether from far and wide. By his calculations, there should be just enough aether in every “living” thing that remains on the First for his purposes.

And if he times it wrong, has to do it again? Well, there are other reflections to pull from. It’s not like they’ll serve any purpose once he’s done what he needs to do. Even the rejoinings will be unnecessary once he’s reversed the Sundering itself.

Emet-Selch returns to the day of the Sundering.

His vessel is small and ethereal in comparison to the world as it was and should have remained, but it’s a simple matter to draw excess aether from the environment and make himself substantial enough to interact. He yet remains in the shape of the Exarch; once all is said and done, he can fix that as well.

“—From this temptation, I sunder us!” Venat is there, surrounded by her sycophants and detractors alike. It is now, in this moment, that she is about to summon the false goddess Hydaelyn into herself.

Emet-Selch lifts his pistol and shoots her in the head.

The crowd turns on him. He weathers their ire. It matters not what they think of him, for he has just saved this world.

He is taken before the Words of Pashtarot to face retribution for his so-called crime. His punishment is to be imprisoned, which he can tolerate. It will allow him the chance to see how this world flourishes, as it always should have.

New life is sacrificed to Zodiark. From where he is imprisoned, Emet-Selch watches those souls flow into the one true god.

He waits.

The souls within Zodiark do not emerge.

Something must be wrong.

The prisons of this age are built to contain a whole person, with unsundered body and soul. Emet-Selch possesses the latter, but his vessel’s aether is malleable. He releases back into the environment what he had borrowed, becoming small and insubstantial once more, and slips out to investigate.

Elidibus stands before the rest of the Convocation, having separated himself from Zodiark that he might address them.

“It is not enough,” he says. “Zodiark requires a constant influx of aether to maintain the shield around Etheirys.”

“Then we must sacrifice more?” asks Loghrif.

“When will He be satisfied?” demands the Emet-Selch of this time.

“I cannot say,” Elidibus replies, apologetic.

The visiting Emet-Selch slips away, careful to remain out of sight of his past self.

This was not the correct course of action. He will have to go back further. The Final Days themselves cannot be allowed to come to pass.

The time portal remains where he first emerged. He returns to the Crystal Tower of twelve millennia hence, the portal shutting itself down behind him, and relief washes over him. He has another chance. He can still fix this.

The scrying portal in the Ocular confirms what he already knows: The First is nothing more than a husk. What little life had remained in the wake of the Flood of Light was now gone, its aether used to power his first fruitless visit to the past.

A great wave of anguish wells up from deep within him, but it is not his. His vessel is attempting to overpower him. He forces the Exarch’s will back into the depths.

There are other worlds. The closest, metaphysically speaking, is the Source, but he chooses to leave that be for now. It seems wrong, somehow. The people of the Source are still mere fragments, yes, but they are more alive than the beings of any of the reflections. Instead he sits and calculates how much aether can be taken from the next-closest world, the Thirteenth.

He cannot cross over, himself. Not without losing his hold on his current vessel, which he does in fact still need for its ability to control the Crystal Tower. But the walls around the Thirteenth have been weak ever since Igeyorhm’s failed attempt to rejoin it, and its inhabitants are ever willing to cross through any rift they find in search of a meal.

Emet-Selch opens great voidgates in the wastes of the First. Voidsent pour through only to be devoured by the Crystal Tower. There is far more life on the Thirteenth than there had been on the First, and the aether there is in a far more energetic state; if he uses every bit available to him, the Thirteenth alone should be able to power four one-way trips back through time. He can investigate before putting his plan into action; find the best possible time to visit, discover the cause of the Final Days and prevent them from ever transpiring.

Four trips come and four trips go, and he is no closer to a solution, but his vessel’s body is closer to crystal than to flesh.

By this time, Elidibus has come demanding to know what Emet-Selch is doing. He explains. He demonstrates.

Elidibus will have none of it. He does not believe the past can be meaningfully altered. “This course of action will only hinder our efforts to bring about the Ardor!” he exclaims. “You must cease this at once.”

Emet-Selch knows he is on the right track. When Elidibus tries to stop him by force, he has no choice but to bind his friend to the tower.

He draws aether from the next-closest reflection, the Fourth.

He draws aether from the Eleventh.

He draws aether from the Ninth.

Emet-Selch has lost track of how many times he has gone back. He has learned quite a bit more about the aetheric currents that surround Etheirys, but he has come no closer to understanding why things transpired the way they did. He has watched the onset of the Final Days again and again.

There is something he is missing.

Having exhausted the aether from the reflections, he has no choice but to draw now from the Source.

But didn’t you say that those living on the Source are ‘more’ alive? asks a voice from deep within him. How can you do this to them?

“It hardly matters,” he mutters. “You are not truly alive. Once I have prevented the Final Days, this world will be as it should always have been.”

He shoves down the Exarch’s will once again. It gets easier each time.

Emet-Selch travels back again. He tries turning his attention to anything he might have missed. Obscure corners of the globe. Hypotheses he had once thought discredited.

Dynamis. Fandaniel had postulated the existence of another form of energy, one that both acts upon and is acted upon by emotions. No evidence had ever been found to provide the existence of anything of the sort, but such a thing would well explain the events of the Final Days.

Emet-Selch steals more aether for his ventures through time. He takes it from the Source; from the lifestream, and from the false goddess who tries valiantly to stop him; from the sundered Ascians who yet walk the Rift; and finally, when no more remains, from Zodiark Himself.

With each visit Emet-Selch gathers information, studies what he can, breaks and reforms more and more of his increasingly crystalline body, and pinpoints exactly the time when he can stop the Final Days.

On the final trip, he goes to Elpis.

This time, he fails to avoid attracting the attention of his past self and Hythlodaeus. And he immediately realizes why: These are the events preceding the Kairos incident. He can barely remember what happened here.

Which is… interesting. All signs point to this being the pivotal day. Today is the day when he can fix everything.

“Well, hello there,” Venat remarks when he stumbles across her. “Are you by chance from the future?”

“I had wondered,” Hythlodaeus muses. “The hue of your aether is so very close to Hades’, but something is off. ’Tis as though you share space with another.”

“Don’t be absurd,” grumps the Emet-Selch of this time. “This creature is nothing more than some familiar with its aether fashioned in my likeness. Half-man, half-feline, and all crystal? What was that person thinking?”

The Emet-Selch from the future refuses to answer their questions. He only says that he has come to avert a great calamity.

Meteion. Hermes’ creation, fashioned from dynamis, must tie into it somehow. But how—

Her sisters contact her from beyond the stars, and as she begins to give her report, Emet-Selch finally understands.

You might have expected this would happen, the Exarch taunts him.

He’s caught in chains alongside Hythlodaeus and the Emet-Selch of this time. Hermes is off on some unhinged diatribe about mankind’s worthiness.

Kairos hangs in the air before them, awaiting Hermes’ command.

In the end, Emet-Selch escapes alongside Venat of all people. It disgusts him, owing anything to her — let alone his very identity and the fate of his mission.

What mission? asks the Exarch. Back in the Crystal Tower, the time portal closing behind them, he presses, You have taken all you can. Even the Source is now dead by your hands.

It is true. Even if he wished to reverse course, he could no longer force the rejoinings. The aether has all been spent on his journeys through time.

He looks around himself. “The tower itself remains.”

That won’t be enough. I was present for all of your napkin calculations, remember?

Emet-Selch does not waste time asking the meaning of that turn of phrase. He simply activates the Tower and brings forth his dear friend Elidibus.

One more trip. The aether of an Unsundered should be just enough for one more trip.

Fifty years before that ill-fated visit to Elpis, Hermes had only just begun his research into dynamis. The Meteia were barely a glimmer in his eye.

Emet-Selch emerges from a portal and shoots him dead.

I am honestly impressed, the Exarch remarks. He has been more talkative as of late, but has made no further efforts to stymie Emet-Selch. There’s little point, when the fractured world he values so highly has no future worth speaking of.

A part of Hades wants to remain here, in this new world he’s created. He can’t, of course. There is already a version of himself here; there’s no place for a second Emet-Selch.

And so he returns to the future. It must have changed. It must have. Nobody else would have created anything half so misguided as the Meteia. The Final Days could not possibly happen now.

Though he can barely move his body at this point, Emet-Selch emerges into the Ocular once more. As the portal closes, apprehension gnaws at him. If there were no Final Days, there should have been no Sundering; thus no Allagan Empire, and thus no Crystal Tower. Why, then…?

He activates the scrying portal. Outside lie the wastes of the First, littered with the gates torn open to the other worlds.

“But how—” His face twists in first confusion, then rage. “After all of my efforts, all of my toil!”

You cannot change the past, the Exarch realizes. The world you created marches onward, but nothing you did has affected this world whence we came.

The Crystal Tower rises tall above nothing. The fragments of Etheirys lie dormant, their aether siphoned into other times and timelines.

A figure of blue crystal kneels in the Ocular, curled in on itself, crying out in anguish.