He closed his own eyes and nodded. “Even now, I can see you holding a transparent ball, but I can see no blue flame.” He tossed his own marble up and caught it. “As for mine, however, I can pierce it quite easily with both my bloodline powers and my perception. It is the same for you, yes?”
Lindon nodded slowly. “So what did you think it was?”
“Naturally, I assumed there was something inside. I thought it was a Lord-stage barrier meant to protect a small treasure, or perhaps a pill or construct. And I was very curious to learn what Copper had caught the eye of an Underlord. It was only later that I began to suspect it had been produced by someone far above any Underlord.”
He held up the void marble, inspecting it. “As far as I knew, this was the only example of such a heavenly relic in the world. If I ran into another, I would have expected it to look like mine. How interesting that I was wrong.”
“I would love to hear that story,” Lindon said, sensing an opportunity. “I'm only too happy to share mine.”
“He is,” Yerin confirmed, fiddling with one of the edges of her outer robe. She must have been bored. “Shared it with me more than once.”
“And I would be delighted to listen,” Eithan said, closing his fist around his marble. “Later. Unless this heavenly messenger told you something urgent?”
Suriel had said he had thirty years, and he'd spent slightly more than one. He supposed he could wait a little longer, though the curiosity might kill him in the meantime. He sighed and shook his head.
The glass ball vanished into Eithan's pocket. “Excellent! Consider our conversation a prize for when you defeat Jai Long, hm? Something to look forward to.”
Lindon dipped his head in acknowledgement, but he wasn't satisfied. Suriel had seen something in him, even if he wasn't quite sure what that was. She must have seen something in Eithan as well, or at least someone else up there had.
Eithan had said more than once that he wanted to pursue the sacred arts to their height. And he thought Lindon and Yerin had what it took to join him.
Maybe the heavens thought so too.
Chapter 2
Outpost 01: Oversight
People from various worlds often likened the Way to a tree, or a branching vine. Suriel had always thought of it more as a network of veins, stretching out in all directions from a central heart. The Way touched everything, bringing order, stability, and protection from the ravages of the void. Only in the shelter of the Way could life and reason exist.
In the center of that heart of the Way, at the nexus of everything that existed, was Oversight.
As she drifted in endless blue, thousands of kilometers away, she could see the entire station: one blue-and-green planet of standard size orbited by no less than sixteen moons. Each of the moons was so close that it almost looked like they skated along the planet's surface, and she could see city lights blanketing every surface over all seventeen spheres.
This was the headquarters of Makiel's First Division: the Hounds.
He had created this system himself, hand-selecting the fragments from the void and binding them together with the force of his will. He had positioned it here, manipulating the Way to enforce natural laws. The inhabitants of Outpost lived as naturally as they would in an Iteration, but with an endless blue sky devoid of sun or stars.
Twelve billion people lived here, and the vast majority of them were not Abidan. They were simply people. They went about their lives, living and dying with no knowledge of the greater cosmos.
These were his ties to Fate. Every sentient being was a tie to the Way, and even here at the heart of it all, Makiel wanted to be closer.
As staggered as she was every time she thought about the vast expenditure of time and personal power that must have gone into the creation of this outpost, it frightened her as much as it impressed her. Every other division of the Abidan was headquartered on Sanctum, so they shared a cultural understanding that facilitated interaction.
Not the Hounds. The First Division was centered here.
They tracked targets forward and backwards in time, reading Fate to find criminals and predict disasters, and their official excuse for their location was a desire to see as clearly as possible.
Suriel had no doubt that was true. From Oversight, a sufficiently talented Hound could glimpse the destiny of every Iteration in existence. It was especially easy to locate those places where one Iteration's fate overlapped another's, and investigate for violations.
But even here, she couldn't sense Cradle.
She touched the Way—so easy here—and simply adjusted her position in space. One blue flash later, she stood on an endless arctic plain, a layer of gray clouds overhead and snow drifting in the wind.
The north pole of Oversight’s main planet. Makiel’s home.
She glanced down at the two hundred meters of snow and ice beneath her: this was Makiel’s front door.
Suriel tapped the Way, flexing her authority as the sixth Judge of the Abidan Court. Blue power flared from her back like wings, and the seal on the door responded.
A symbol shone blue in response: a three-headed dog, one hundred meters in diameter. The symbol of the Hounds.
The ice cracked, sliding apart, snow trickling down in white waterfalls. The ice split beneath her feet, but she stayed floating in the air until it had parted enough for her shoulders. Then she let herself drift downwards.
Into Makiel’s lair.
The room beneath her was huge, hundreds of meters, its tiles marked in a giant circle of runes meant to focus sight. It was lit by a diffuse purple glow, all emanating from violet-edged “screens” that floated in the air at various heights. These were celestial lenses, used by Judges and most high-ranking Abidan for monitoring Iterations from the Way. They displayed images of the future, which looked odd to the naked eye, as though they showed dreams. Actions would have two results, or would rewind and play again on a loop. Numbers flashed with each image: chance of occurrence, temporal deviation, Iteration number, and so on.
The lenses opened like eyes even as others blinked shut. They were rectangles, some as small as a palm and others as big as a barn wall, all angled toward the center of the room. The chamber was packed with them, such that no one could possibly see them all at once.
Unless you were both powerful and very skilled.
Makiel stood in the center, surrounded by eyes. Manifestations of his Presence. His white-gauntleted hands were a blur of motion as he tapped one eye and another, transmitting messages to one sector or another. When he tapped an eye, it flashed blue and disappeared, transferred through the Way to its destination. For every eye that disappeared, a celestial lens vanished.
By her brief count, he was tracking over a thousand threads of Fate at once, over hundreds of different worlds. Any other Judge would have delegated this work, in order to focus their power and attention only where it was needed. Not Makiel. The only busier Judge should be Telariel, the Spider, who coordinated communications for all the Abidan and simultaneously scouted for invasions…but he used his subordinates to cover practically every one of his duties.
No wonder Makiel’s Hounds worshiped him so. He was worth a division all on his own.
The First Judge himself had an unremarkable appearance. He looked like a natural human, as though his genetics had remained the same since birth. Suriel, and every other Abidan she knew, had altered themselves in some way to improve their performance. Rumor said that Makiel never had, and that he worked solely on natural talent, but of course he would never allow a scan to confirm those rumors.