Chapter Fifteen
In the thousands of years while she was absent from Seynorynael, Selerael heard news of environmental and transportation disasters on her home world, the beginnings of what many off-worlders predicted to be the decline of the Seynorynaelian Empire, though to be sure, as far as the closest planetary territories were concerned, it didn’t seem that the Emperor's control over his subjects had suffered in the least.
The outlying territories in galaxy group six had begun to consider themselves lucky that they escaped the most severe political abuses inflicted on nearer territories, though the speed of star gate travel kept them from enjoying too many freedoms. During Selerael's journey to Gwardichardarii, she heard news that the Grand Fleet had been sent to the neighboring Kopran system to impose a severe tax on the metal mining industry. A short-lived riot had broken out, resulting in the termination of more than eighty-five thousand high-ranking Koprantes by imperial officials, who promptly replaced the industry chiefs with off-world experts they had already planned on putting in charge.
Many of the regions had begun to suffer under the strict centralized control of Seynorynael, its indifference to regional concerns, and vain love of collecting intergalactic luxuries. On her way home after nearly fifteen thousand years, Selerael traveled back to some of the worlds in the second galaxy group that had become wasteland since her last interplanetary stop in the area.
The complete depletion of natural resources and Imperial retaliation against revolts had left lifeless, barren planets across the galaxy group—but those worlds had been fortunate. Depleted and rebellious planets that no longer served a useful purpose for interplanetary travel had simply been abandoned by the Empire to survive on their own.
Many worlds were left barren and unable to support life any more.
Ralsin, once called “Aralsynai” teemed with life despite the harsh conduct codes imposed throughout the Seynorynaelian Empire, now called the “Sinanailian Empire”. But the city was not the great center of culture it had once been. Technology and culture seemed to have stagnated, if not entirely regressed since the Empire’s founding. The population that had once valued self-sufficiency, hard work, and well-rounded education had divided society into two categories: a small class of educated elite loyal to the Emperor and their own comforts, and the large mass of the population that somewhere down the line had begun to believe that self-improvement was vanity.
It didn’t take long for Selerael to discover that Firien City, Kerrai, and Kilkor had been demolished down to the last stone, their inhabitants perhaps relocated by command, or else by the necessity of the last great ice whirlwind. The very past existence of the cities had disappeared from living memory, and the transports no longer ran anywhere near those areas.
Kilkor had been inundated by sands; Kerrai, now called Krai and still ideally located just a ways northwest of Ralsin, had been mined and the rugged, mountainous land reshaped and flattened beyond recognition, until the Advisory Council turned it into the sight of the Sinanailian Waste Project, where planetary garbage might be sorted for combustion, restructuring, and recycling. The smell didn’t quite make it all the way to Ralsin, which had grown to the point that an even larger new dome had to be constructed around the city, but even if the grey “Krai clouds” passed over, Ralsin was safe from the stench within its orderly dome.
The population of Sinanail was now severely restricted to the city domes; many had never seen the mountains and lakes of their home world and didn’t even know that such natural phenomena existed on Sinanail. Thankfully, the Sinanalians at least seemed content with urban life.
Lake Firien—what was that?
This was the usual answer the merchants got when they stopped to ask for directions anywhere around or on Sinanail. The Firien province, called the “Firn” province, was still frequented by authorized traders to the mechanized production plants that had been built there, production plants that scoured the land for rare minerals and plants found only in the Firn province. Despite the limited transports to the area, Selerael's last visit to Firien was on foot; she didn’t worry about the satellite systems spotting her and reporting her for unauthorized activities. She arrived in Firien as nothing more than a shadow that had traveled alone across the southern hills.
When she reached Lake Firien, she wished she hadn’t come.
The once silver mirror of Firien’s crystal waters were murky black and gave off a putrid stench that didn’t get any better when it grew colder, and grew positively unbearable when the wind stirred and rapidly suffocated the shore with the heavy, clinging smell.
As Selerael walked along the shore in the changewinds, picking her way over slimy green boulders, no kiri bird sang. The eternal sound of the waves whispered weakly to her. The pebbled shore of purplish-blue stones was riddled with ancient trash, mostly indestructible chordent materials washed up to the shore and products and materials left behind by the production plants and by the merchant traders.
From the shoreline, she could already see that the lyra forest had gone. A few lonely lyra trees, too small to have been of use as construction wood, remained in the great hills that had been home to the Seynorynaelian forest, some with trunks half charred black.
Selerael made her way up the shoreline to her mother's ancient home, now only an empty field where not even grass would grow, the bright white sand shining here and there among the filth in the intense light of Valeria. She searched the naked fields until she found a lyra still standing—a forlorn sapling that had never reached maturity—under the shade of closer trees once grown as an ideal source of paper and resins; touching the smooth bark of the lyra brought a vision of the last destruction to her mind.
She leaned against the trunk of the tree and felt nothing at all.
"Who is that woman?" Regulator Nerranse sat down in the officer's lounge as he came in from his patrol of Ralsin's northeast sector. The other regulators had stopped to watch the transmission in the holo-monitor, where a young lovely woman with a charming voice was speaking—he thought she looked different in t a world where everyone had been grown to appear aesthetically pleasing for aeons.
The strange woman wore the labcoat of an Imperial scientist, but after a moment, Nerranse realized that what she was saying wasn’t normal, and that she wasn’t like any scientist he’d ever heard.
On Sinanail there were only a few professions a person had to choose from, it they chose to work at all, since the humanroids took care of everyone. Merchants were drawn to trade for additional wealth, regulators had controlling tendencies and organizational urges, military officers were generally drawn to the occupation by hereditary titles and honorary commissions, and they struggled dutifully to combat the hordes of invading insurrectionists from the fringes of the Imperial territories, and last of all came the scientists—well, the scientists were the do-gooders.
As far as Nerranse knew, those were pretty much all the possible occupations there were. Everyone had all they needed to live, and all they could possibly want; there wasn’t any reason to do anything. People lived a good five hundred years, too, which wasn’t half bad, and spent most of their time engaging in sexual relationships, real or visually simulated, and engaging in other pleasant activities.
Children—of course no one wanted any, and no one had to have any, because the population was already big enough, but when and if it started to dwindle, there was always the government ectogenesis labs, and since everyone had been raised by a humanroid, there weren’t any troublesome parent-child relationships to spend the rest of one’s life being resentful about.
Honestly, Nerranse had a hard time understanding the ancients whenever he read about their strange and unusually self-torturing habits and ideas. Not that he read very much, or rather, listened to recordings of literature. Some did.
Nerranse momentarily had such a hard time following the woman in the monitor, but not beca
use of her voice. In fact, her language and accent were perfectly comprehensible. It was just his own momentary lack of interest.
Then after a moment staring at her in wonder with his friends among the regulators, Nerranse summoned his powers of concentration and listened to the woman a moment. Now she was openly suggesting that the entire population should leave the planet—but her line of argument was what had fascinated the regulators. She was talking about something they knew little about, the supernova of Vlria—their star. “We can’t expect to keep Sinanail alive forever. We must move on and adapt to a new life, a natural life. Sinanail's glory has faded. The supernova of Vlria is imminent, but our society has already begun to wither.
"We have only one choice to save ourselves. We must accept our fate and leave our home as our ancestors did or face the unpredictable nova that will destroy this system. To keep our people alive, we must find another home and begin again."
Nerranse joined the general laughter that erupted when the scientist finished her speech.
If Sinanail was going to be destroyed, then the humanroids would warn them in plenty of time that they had to leave the planet. And if that wasn’t going to happen any time soon, Nerranse didn’t want to hear anything more about it.
So, Alessia, you have returned, he thought, laughing inwardly, watching the woman who claimed to be a scientist called Selerael. He continued to stare at the frozen image in the frame through the mechanized eyes, but her disguise did not fool him.
Her choice of words had betrayed her—they showed him who she was. She could be no one else but Alessia, the Alessia of the future, now returned to his past to try to destroy him. Marankeil wondered if perhaps she was confused that he had not bothered to stop or censure her many broadcasts these past several years. But he had been expecting her to appear for quite some time.
Such foolishness, he thought complacently. Surely she must know that we have plans to escape. I wonder if she thinks that people will listen to her, but who is she to them? —I have convinced the people that they will be safe, that we will warn them of the supernova.
Yes, Alessia, our people shall depart together as the Enorians left their world, but where they failed we will keep our race, the Empire, strong and unified. No one will attack us if we don’t divide and panic in our attempt to flee the disaster that might be the end of Seynorynael. But I will move the entire planet itself to another system before I see my Empire crumble.
Alessia thinks that because she is half-Enorian that she can foresee the future for our people, Marankeil thought in irritation. But she would destroy our Empire. That will never happen. I will leave when I am ready to do so—when I have prepared where I will go, when I have built a new Imperial intergalactic center. We have five thousand years remaining. Enough time to establish a firm hold in another system.
Why should I fear her now, if this was all the threat that the explorers' singularity of Kiel3 was able to bring against me? If the future holds no further threat than Alessia's feeble warning, there is nothing to fear.
In six hundred years, Selerael had grown tired of the broadcasts. She would have given them up if she could only let go of the hope that she would reach some of the people, but in time her transmissions had become a form of amusement to the city of Ralsin and its many visitors from the off-worlds. Most of the population had ceased listening to her message and spent the time speculating on whether or not the woman in the transmission sphere was an artificial humanroid mechanized unit or clone incarnations of an actual Imperial scientist.
Some people had begun to quote the woman of the messages as an object of popular humor, but the warnings of Sinanail's impending destruction were surely premature.
Selerael had recently begun to consider creating escape ships on her own for the children of Sinanail and the few groups that had taken her message seriously. Her mother's memories made it unlikely that such an attempt at rescue had succeeded in the aftermath of the destruction of Sinanail, but Alessia hadn’t known all that happened after the supernova. Perhaps, Selerael thought, perhaps her own rescue plan had been successfully carried out but had remained unknown in the chaos that ensued.
After six hundred years, Selerael had decided that she would make no more broadcasts. She had lived alone in the city during that time, escaping detection and recognition by living on the fringes of the city in the darker ground level streets until she could bear the loneliness no longer. Like Hinev and her mother before her, she required no food or sleep to maintain her life, but lived day to day as a wanderer.
Life was an endless dream to her. As she lay on the bare ground under the bright light of an artificial street light in an abandoned transport tunnel, she thought suddenly of her mother the way she had looked on Tiasenne in Selerael's early years of life. The thought brought back her own memories of that time when she had lived on Selesta with her mother, Kesney, and Klimyata Fulten-Mira.
Why—after so long, was she permitting herself to think of Alessia?
Selerael sat upright suddenly. Of course. Her mother's physical entity was again nearby! And that meant—
At last it had begun.
Instead of panic and fear, she felt a great sense of relief, and calm.
Would it all be over soon?
For the first time she wondered if the Enorians' escape from their own dimension, if entering into an alien universe, had disrupted the conservation law of mass and energy—her Enorian soul would ever be called back from the constrainment of the physical burden to another time and place despite the serum—back to a remnant of Enor, the paradise of Laina Eilen frozen beyond time and existence.
As she watched the darkened world around her preparing for evening, she could not help but pity the unsuspecting planet that had been over-confident in humanity's ability to predict the uncertain future.
Twilight had just fallen for the last time on the planet Seynorynael.
Valeria, the blue star of Seynorynael, was about to supernova a thousand years before anyone ever expected. And the planet Seynorynael would be eaten by Valeria's violent eruption into space.
In the quiet moment just after star's-rise, Selerael felt the distant gravitational shockwave pass through her. Her first thought was to try to ensure that the population could escape, to try to get them to the few escape ships spread across the planet, but there wasn't enough time to save them all.
She decided not to try. There was no longer anything she could do to save their civilization.
Closing her eyes, Selerael made a quick mental change in plan for a short stop along the way, and then dissolved her own body into energy.
Moments later, Selerael re-materialized in a corridor inside the council building of the Imperial Palace, directly in front of the Main Terminus in the lower levels of the interconnected governmental nexus.
When she stepped into the council room, she saw the chaos. The mechanized Elders were frantically trying to activate their own escape ship. Of course they had once anticipated the possibility of Seynorynael's premature destruction. Thus they had built an escape vessel into the very building itself, from the vaults deep beneath the building up through the council room to the impenetrable canopy of the Imperial dome.
They never expected to be interrupted at that moment.
The Elders paused briefly to consider the humanoid intruder that had appeared suddenly in their midst, their dark, inhuman facades regarding her coldly.
"It’s no use. You aren’t going anywhere." Selerael announced in the language of the ancients.
The Elders didn’t pause at all in their activities.
"You can’t control what is meant to be.” Selerael said, loudly this time. “You are all fated to die with me. And I am here at long last to make sure that you do."
The Elders were not moved. They continued to scramble around, setting commands into motion, all to prepare their e
scape vessel.
Only the Emperor himself spared a moment to respond to the intruder.
"You are mistaken." Marankeil laughed, protectively eyeing the confining perimeters of the Main Terminus. "We are ready to escape Seynorynael, Alessia. As I told you once before, though we may be caught off guard, we will endure.” Marankeil told her. “We knew this day was coming, even if it came earlier than expected. And we knew you would try to stop us. You do at last remember our interviews?”
She glared at him; he took her expression as a sign that she had somehow been able to remember.
“Such a treat,” he laughed. “I’m glad you know. I often thought it would give me pleasure if you knew how much I had broken you, Alessia. Remember how I told you long ago that you would fail? We prepared escape ships—we had them even then, you know. And if you don’t leave Seynorynael now, you’ll perish along with the people of this planet. You had better stop now, and I may be kind and allow you to find your way to another escape vessel. If you do not, I will hold you on the surface until I leave, until it is too late; yes, I’ll hold you with the frequency I programmed into your mind before Hinev ever gave you the serum.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I would.” He laughed. “Poor Alessia, were you gone all this time trying to find that mythical Enorian singularity?" Marankeil said sardonically. "Poor thing, you haven’t learned yet. There is no such thing—only a myth. Myth is fantasy, and legend is only self-fulfilling prophecy. I thought once perhaps there was truth to it all, but certainly now you must know that there is no Enorian singularity. Even if there was one, and if you had used it to get here, it would do you no good. You can’t act while I control your mind.
“Ornenkai was a fool to allow you to believe it was possible to alter the past. He knew what I had done to you, but perhaps he thought the singularity would give you control over me—but what can it do? How can the singularity or going into the past give you any real power over me?” He laughed, regarding her as though she posed no further threat to him; Selerael felt the power of his presence and found herself being willed into submission, felt the pressure against her mind urging her to waver, to turn back, to give up.
He seemed to be enjoying the exercise immensely.
He didn’t know how very wrong he was—yet.
She paused only a few moments longer. She knew she was going to have to use her mindforce to keep them there, to keep them from moving. Did that mean that she had controlled the singularity since she came to Earth? Was there ever truly a physical singularity or had Marankeil and Ornenkai misinterpreted the meaning of the Enorian legend, presuming they understood that language well enough to decipher it?
Perhaps there was no singularity from Kiel3—unless, as the colonizer had said—
She wasn’t a human being but the singularity itself, or whatever that miscopied or misinterpreted word might have been, a creature born of Time and Space—
Perhaps she really was a singularity, only using this semblance of physical form—born of energy, and not of matter—
After all, wasn’t it impossible for Hinev’s explorers to have a child of their own? Wasn’t her existence impossible, because to leave no trace of their own lives behind had been part of the price they had to pay for their immortality?
A hailing siren interrupted Selerael's thoughts.
Meanwhile, Marankeil’s council had finished the launch preparations, and the Imperial Fleet that called to them for instructions waited for a response.
Selerael would not let him go. She had waited an eternity, suffered through years unending for this moment, to stop them, and she would not fail!
She stepped forward without a word, feeling the combined energy of her cells coalescing into a tangible force and began to gather the semi-sentient waves in her mind.
As she moved towards the Elders, a great telekinetic wave burst forward from her, the recoil shock of the force pushing her back a step.
Marankeil's mechanized speaker ceased, and the power to the holo-monitor where he had been about to send his response cut off. Under the pressure of the mental energy brought to bear against him, Marankeil managed a slow grinding step towards her, but Selerael's energy retaliated, increasing its concentration against him to hold him powerless.
The Emperor's eyes stared at her in uncomprehending fury. Then they narrowed mockingly, and she was aware of his thoughts. He would summon the frequency to stop her; he would bring her to her knees before him.
In a moment of panic, he saw his mistake.
He struggled with the concept a long, very long moment.
The time-loop he had thought to escape was inevitable. And whoever this woman was, she wasn’t Alessia— If it was never Alessia who was going to return to the past, but then—who was she? Not Alessia? Who, and how—
"No, I’m not Alessia, Marankeil.” Selerael said. “But you believed you had stopped my mother by programming her mind before the serum to respond to the frequency, that I—she—hadn’t been able to confront you all of these years because of her programming?"
Marankeil's eyes laughed at her. Well, well! Alessia's daughter! No wonder that when I saw her I presumed she was Alessia. Hinev lied to me— or else he was mistaken. He lied about the price of immortality when he said none of the explorers could have children.
“Yes, I tried to ensure Alessia's unwitting cooperation through mind control.” Marankeil admitted. “I was certain I could control her. I was certain she couldn’t stop me. But Alessia's daughter or not, it doesn’t matter,” he dismissed her triumph. “Your actions are futile. Don't you know that I will endure? I have seen to it that my entity lives throughout my Empire. I will return again.”
Selerael’s slow smile should have warned him to be afraid.
He mistook it for naiveté.
“No, I’ve taken care of that already,” she said firmly.
“You think so?” Marankeil's eyes still laughed at her.
His certainty that he had foreseen this obstacle, that he had a trick up his sleeve that still kept him safe from her power annoyed Selerael—but he thought he had won by duplicating his mechanized form.
Now it was Selerael's turn. She saw the other Elders watching the interchange, wondering what the new look of victory on the face of Alessia's daughter might mean.
She decided to toy with them all no longer, and projected one clear memory to them all.
There she was—destroying the last of them. The last of—what?
In the last few thousands of years, she had made a journey to each of the off-worlds holding his mechanized back-up units and destroyed his memories. They were as soulless as the first creation he had made before breathing his own life into its form.
Selerael's last visit had been only moments ago. When she appeared in the Main Terminus, she had only just materialized from the Imperial ship above the planet, where in the chaos of fleeing vessels, she had reprogrammed the last of the mechanized units. When the Grand Fleet attempted to resurrect their Emperor to protect themselves in the aftermath of the Empire's collapse, they would find only a unit specialized for gardening.
Behind Marankeil's fury was a pang of disbelief and a sharp wound of despair in the knowledge that Ornenkai, Riliya his childhood friend, had betrayed him.
And that betrayal would now destroy him.
Yes, Marankeil, in this Ornenkai will atone for his past sins, but you will not see that future.
“You can’t!” Marankeil ordered; he was used to his orders being obeyed.
“Marankeil, why do you want to live forever?” Selerael asked calmly. “What are you living for, except to spread the same misery to others that you carry within you?”
“I live because I want to live.” He replied.
“You want to survive?”
“Yes. Isn’t that what we all want?” He said, looking for an
y possible way to entrap her and to escape.
“Yes,” she admitted reluctantly, “but I want something else more than that.”
“What?” She had his attention again.
“I want to save the world.”
“Save the world?” He echoed, with a trace of surprise. “From me?”
“Yes—from you. And I am going to save you, Marankeil, because no one deserves to have to live forever in this world.”
“I think I don’t want your kind of help.”
“But I must—I will help you.”
Marankeil moved back, his mechanical eyes now peering at her closely, very, very closely. If he had still possessed a heart, his heartbeat would have been racing.
“Who are you?” he demanded, his voice low.
“You asked me that once before, and I couldn’t answer you.” She said. “But I can answer you now. I am Selerael, child of the Zariqua Enassa, and the one destined—to kill you.”
The silence stretched. Then, suddenly, Marankeil’s eyes widened with an expression no mechanized being should have been capable of making.
“Elera,” he said, his voice unable to dissemble the complete shock that engulfed him in response to this blow; he seemed suddenly to be looking past her. “Elera,” he repeated, “I never would have thought it would be you. But you—you were the shadow all along, weren’t you? The shadow that has followed me all my life.” He seemed certain of this, so certain he didn’t even need her to admit that it was true.
She faltered; she was at once aware of her posture, her small humanoid body standing alone before the ring of mechanized faces.
She held them there regardless.
Their Empire will die with me... she heard herself saying, far away, long ago.
Yet Marankeil also heard her words.
“Yes, Elera, we will die together,” he said with a voice fully aware of the irony of his fate, a mechanical voice that sounded profoundly sad; they were Ilikan Marankeil’s last words.
Selerael strengthened her grip on the distraught Elders’ mind, but on Marankeil she had no need, she realized with wonder, and a sense of relief. He had stopped resisting her. As Marankeil began to abandon all hope of his own salvation, time seemed to lose meaning. The seconds passed slowly as in a surreal dream. The other Elders cringed, paralyzed by their fear.
As the memories of the mechanized units were fading into nothingness, Selerael became aware of an entity trapped within a capsule far beneath the Main Terminus, only now stirring to life again.
The original body of Marankeil, the vessel that still housed a part of his soul, even though he thought he had purged it of all life and sentience. Marankeil, like Ornenkai, had held on to his physical body and always kept it near, never suspecting to get rid of it would have been the only way to become an entire machine.
As the end neared, Selerael felt her anger and resentment against Marankeil fading. She tasted bitterness as though its acrid vapor filled the air.
Time was there behind Marankeil’s form, there like a shadow perched on his shoulder, with its mocking grin.
The grin was fading...
She was no longer afraid of the eye of Time, and neither was Ilikan Marankeil.
The room was terribly quiet when the world suddenly fell out beneath them and quickly turned into energy and formlessness. Selerael heard the last terrorized shrieks of the mechanized elders, but instead of embracing death, her atoms began to turn into sentient energy as the light of the nova descended around them.
No! Her conscious protested the energy trying to keep her alive—she had never accepted the serum! She had nothing to be punished for!! She refused to be kept here alone, powerless, formless energy, now when she could see the face of Time turning into the beloved visage of loved ones she had not seen in more than fifty thousand years.
Then out of the void around her, she knew the answer. It was so simple—she was not a human being; she had chosen to make the journey into existence out of the energy of Time and Space, so now she might choose to return to that form—
She was not merely willing to die; she wanted the peace, to return to the light. This was the key to reclaiming her Enorian soul, to finding a way back to the tapestry of light where the souls of all the living lived on, far from the reality of the physical universe.
Yet the others—why hadn’t she saved them? So many Seynorynaelians were doomed to die here with the end of their planet—of all the things she had tried to do to ensure their survival, none of her efforts had succeeded.
She tried not to stop torturing herself with the guilt of her failure; for was it not true what her mother had said long ago—the fate of the population wasn’t hers to decide, and their lives were not her sole responsibility. She had done what she could to protect the future from the poisoned touch of the Seynorynaelian Empire.
And of the Enorians before them who had tampered with their lives.
Spirits were beckoning to her. As Selerael hovered between one dimension and another, she reached out around her to embrace the frightened people of her planet with her energy and go among them towards the vision and the people that urged her to join them on the other side of the dimensional barrier.
But as she reached the barrier itself, she turned to look back. Time stood still, she paused a moment, hesitating to release herself to that other world.
Behind her, she saw the Tiasenne of the present—her father's people, and outside the Valerian system, she saw Alessia on her journey to Celestian with the explorers, and a small flotilla of ships escaping from Sinanail—Seynorynael, on the tail of the Grand Fleet.
Then the present gave way to the future, and Selerael looked beyond the circle of time where her own entity had traveled, returning in a spirit that was everywhere at once to Kiel3, to the beloved Earth of her childhood. For a moment, she saw herself as a young girl there, growing up as events passed in quick succession, but she watched her own life as if a different being, and soon the future had dawned.
She went again to the Earth in the wake of the aliens' departure, and outside the window of a city dwelling, past the rising sun, towards a small girl who sat eating breakfast with her father and mother, a woman she knew; it was Moira Mathieson-Blair, her beloved adoptive Earth sister, and Moira’s husband and child.
"Why do you suppose those aliens came and left us?" little Erin asked reading history from a picture book; the watcher knew the name of this child, knew it as one knows everything in a dream. "Why did that ship never come back?"
The mother laughed, but with a numb ache of a pain that had the power to hurt years after the event that caused it. "I don't know. Some things never have an answer."
"But why?" The child’s eyes were moon-round; she refused to accept any simple explanation.
"Well perhaps they aren't meant to," Moira offered; her daughter wasn’t satisfied.
"Don’t you think things sometimes happen just because we think they're going to? Not because they’re supposed to?"
Her parents laughed.
"I don't know, but think of all the things that happen that you or I will never know about. Some times people's roads cross, like yours and mine. Some say it is destiny. But I don’t really know the answer, sweetheart.”
Selerael left, passing by Moira with a lingering sweep of airy benevolence. As she soared away, she laughed and cried to herself.
Yes, Fate and Time hoard the answers, for they are not ours to know in this lifetime. But we will know someday, just as Zariqua Enassa said. I know the secret now.
Selerael looked away, and the Earth gave way to another planet on the other side of the ancient Empire's domain but equally tied into her destiny. The planet's future solidified, and she beheld New Tiasenne and its prosperity. Then one by one, the vision gave way to the hundreds of worlds that still existed beyond the Seynorynaelian time loop, and she knew that her civili
zation had not been forgotten, that a few of her people still lived, but the poisonous touch of Marankeil had left the galaxies.
And there he was far behind her when she turned about, the soul of Ilikan Marankeil, now but a hollow-eyed child, a moment later the young man she had come to know in the golden fields at Lunei.
He stared at her, in an instant that must have seemed forever forced to endure the horror of himself and what he had been; in that moment, she felt certain his soul had been immersed in the hell of understanding, of understanding the full effects of all he had done, the hell of knowing and regretting all that had been, for she herself also passed through that cathartic fire of knowledge; and then, after that eternal, suspended moment, the pain was gone.
The others were calling to her, and she heard their joyous voices grow louder ahead; she turned aside, waiting for Marankeil to catch up; and when at last he could pass through the void of fire and reach her, she knew that her purpose was finished, that she had saved him because even he was not beyond saving. Were not all the creatures of the universe but instruments of a larger force? And if that force should embrace them, was there any to say that even the least being was not deserving of returning to the tapestry of light?
As they reached each other, they felt a beautiful sense of conscious sleep descend upon them, a moment in which Time truly had been suspended, or perhaps expanded to infinity.
What were all their concerns to them now?
Before them, a great forest of lyra trees parted, and behind it the light revealed a gleaming city of tall white towers and a beauty that words alone would fail to convey. There Selerael felt the presence of all those whom she had loved on Earth: her mother, father, sister, and friends, and those whom she had loved throughout the galaxies, all waiting for her in the Enorian paradise, frozen forever in time, time that was a friend in this dimension, a jealous friend that had been waiting too long for her and for Ilikan Marankeil to return.
Selerael, the last child of Enor, had fulfilled her destiny, and found her way home.
Author’s Note
On Seynorynael:
Because the planet Seynorynael was 109 kilometers from the star Valeria, five years passed on Seynorynael for every seven and a half Earth years.
Because Seynorynaelian seasons were so long, some animals lived and died only during a single season. Still others had adapted to live through many seasons and to tolerate the extreme, long cold season between the cooler periods. Cold weather dominated the life cycle so much that many Seynorynaelians thought of winter as a long unending cold season, and put all else aside to enjoy the brief summer. During dangerous periods the sudden thaw or early freeze threatened to push the planet into runaway glaciation or towards a runaway greenhouse effect. The people of the planet united at such times to carefully check an impending environmental disaster—-the danger they faced gave Seynorynaelians more respect for the awesome power of nature than any other civilization it later encountered.
Throughout the year, the oceans and rivers on the planet remained frozen in some places far to the north except for a brief period of time in the warm season. A few of the aquatic animals survived by shutting down their bodily systems into a kind of suspended animation as they froze within the waters, reacting to the change in temperature by secreting enzymes to revive themselves when the ice began to melt.
The Northern Ice sheets of Seynorynael reflected some of the heat and ultraviolet radiation of the blue-white star Valeria, but the animals of Seynorynael had made other adaptations to protect themselves from the sun's damaging rays. Scientists concluded that nocturnal life and creatures in the mid-depths of the ocean must have developed first because there they had been naturally protected from the radiation.
Then gradually, the animals of Seynorynael must have built defense mechanisms and migrated to land. The effects of the harsh environment were still evident in the fact that animals often had only one or two offspring at a time, their maturation rate was slow, and all life on the planet was longer-lived than the average animals encountered by their explorers. Not only were Seynorynaelian animals more hardy, but they were larger and more intelligent, as only the strongest, most innovative survived.
However, the constant fear of runaway glaciation or a runaway greenhouse effect gave most Seynorynaelians a fear of extremes and the belief that all one's actions held an invisible and potentially deadly consequence. If this belief made some of them cautious to the point of lethargic, it made others desperate to remove the pre-set conditions of their existence and to establish a new freedom of man over everything that bound his will: his environment, the source of his fears, his very mortality.
Dramatis Personae and places in Shadow of the Empire
Alessia Valeria Zadúmchov—Uh-LESS-ee-yuh Zuh-DOOM-chav—one of Hinev’s explorers, daughter of the last Enorian Zariqua Enassa and Nerena Zadúmchov; the child taken by Marankeil to be Hinev’s assistant
Ariyalsynai—Ar-ri-YAL-sinn-eye—”white mountain” or “star mountain”; the ancient capital of Seynorynael
Berrachai(y)i—Bair-uh-KAI-yi—an alien race
Calendra—Kuh-LEN-druh (soft "k")—a woman from Firien; Kiel’s fiancée
Celekar Calain—SEL-i-kar Kal-LAIN (harder "s")—technician at The Firien Project; one of Hinev’s explorers
Eiron Vaikyure-Erlenkov—AIR-on VAI-kyure ER-lenn-kahv—Selerael’s father
Elera Erlenkov—ELL-err-uh ER-lenn-kahv—a woman training at the Lunei Center; Ilikan Marankeil’s companion
Enor—EE-nor—a legendary planet and civilization
Ettrekh Meilacu-ra—EE-trekh May-LAK-ku-RAH—a Kayrian man, father of Undina
Fynals Hinev—FY-nahlss HAI-nev—the greatest scientist of Seynorynael, son of Jerekkil Hinev and Undina Meilacu-ra; the scientist who created the elixir of immortality known as “Hinev’s serum”; one of Kudenka’s explorers
Goeur—Gerr, like the French "coeur"—planet
Ilikan Marankeil—ILL-li-kahn MAIR-enn-kee-il—man who one day becomes a mechanized Elder, then Emperor of the Seynorynaelian Empire
Jerekkil Hinev—JAIR-ik-keel HAI-nev—an explorer and proto-telepath raised in the region of Lake Firien; father of Fynals Hinev
Fielikor Kiel—Fee-YEL-ee-kor Keel—a spacecraft engineer on The Firien Project; later the leader of Hinev’s explorers
Firien—a city and region on Seynorynael surrounding Lake Firien; north of the weather-safe ring
Kudenka—Koo-DEN-kuh—a scientist who leads Kudenka’s explorers; friend of Hinev
Lake Firien—Lake FEAR-ee-enn—a province of Seynorynael; also a large body of water
Lierva Kazankov—Lee-AIR-vuh KA-zan-kov—Major in the Martial Scientific Force in charge of The Firien Project; later one of Hinev’s explorers
lyra—LEER-uh—the beautiful, mysteriously undying trees of Seynorynael; a formerly abundant, seeded, but now fruitless tree that can no longer be replaced once destroyed
Nalya—NAL-ee-yuh—young woman of the Ariyalsynai elite
Nerena—Ner-EE-nuh—daughter of Nalya and General Zadúmchov; mother of Alessia
Rigell—Rai-jehl—a white star
Rikhsehr Gerryls—RICK-zair GAIR-rilss—a botanist; one of Hinev’s explorers
Rilien Ornenkai—RILL-ee-yen OR-nen-kai, a biochemist; later a mechanized Elder and then Vice-Emperor of the Seynorynaelian Empire; finally, the computerized entity on board Selesta
Selerael—Sel-AIR-ay-el (softer "s")—the daughter of Alessia and Eiron Vaikyure-Erlenkov, the one destined to end the Seynorynaelian Empire
Sesylendae—Ses-ILL-enn-day—starship of Kudenka’s explorers
Seynorynael—Say-NOR-i-NAY-el; often Seh-nor-i-NAY-el—planet in the Great Cluster Galaxy
Selesta—Sye-lerr-ESS-tee-uh— the greatest explorer spaceship ever to be built by the Seynorynaelian Empire; once a ruin by Lake Firien, the vessel of the ferai-lunei, the comet riders.
Tiasenne—Tee-uh-SENN?
??planet in the Rega system
Tulor—Too-LORR—second planet discovered by Seynorynael
Undina Meilacu-ra—Un-DEE-nuh May-LAK-ku-RAH—young Kayrian woman; mother of Fynals Hinev; creator of the “science of individualism”
Valeria—Vuh-LAIR-ee-uh—blue star of Seynorynael
Zariqua Enassa—ZAIR-ee-kuh or ZAR-ee-kuh Ee-NASS-suh—last colonizer of Enor; Alessia’s father
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