Was I wrong?
Kaylin, it doesn’t matter. If Gilbert—for reasons of his own—attempted to kill you now, and you stood still and reasoned with him, you would die. The Shadows may have their reasons; they may have motivations that you could—with effort—understand. But they would devour you whole if you did not flee or destroy them. You faced the Devourer.
I didn’t hate him, though.
It doesn’t matter. Hate him, not hate him, he would have destroyed not only this city, but the world in which it is situated. Sometimes motivation doesn’t matter when survival is immediately at stake.
Gilbert’s eyes glared pointedly at her. “What?” she demanded. “I’m still moving!”
She was, but it was hard. The badly drawn door didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
“Gilbert,” she said, to take her mind off the multiple fears that were all screaming for attention she really didn’t want to give them, “you said it was your job to fix time, right?”
“A vast simplification, but yes. Why?”
“How do you know when it’s broken?”
He stared at her, or rather, his eyes did. At this point, he was dark enough, amorphous enough, that she had no sense of which direction he was facing, and had to take it on faith that it was forward. “Ask the water, Kaylin. The water feared that I would destroy it.”
The water was easier to talk to, in all ways, than Gilbert. Do you understand it?
Yes. I hold the Tha’alaan within me, but it is not the whole of what I am. When I returned, some part of me was not bound by the Keeper and his Garden. The Garden is gone.
But—the world exists because of the Garden.
Yes, Kaylin. Yes, and no, as you must now understand. The fiefs exist because the Towers could contain those living within their boundaries. But the fiefs of Kattea’s experience are dangerously unstable. She has not spoken of all of it; I am not sure she is even aware of the differences, although she will grow to be so. There are four stones in the Garden.
Yes.
There are five cages, in your time.
The Devourer.
Yes, Kaylin. But he, too, is not what he was. He has heard our voices, and Evanton’s voice. He sleeps. When he wakes—and he will wake—the Towers will not be proof against him. It was always, and only, a matter of time for the small pocket of your world that remains. For Kattea and her kin. For the Barrani. She hesitated. The worlds the Devourer destroyed were all part of your world, in some fashion.
Kaylin’s head began to hurt.
The way in which they were connected is through time. But time, for many beings, is flexible. It can be manipulated. Such manipulations are not guaranteed to destroy. Think of creation as a vast plane. It seems endless. It is endless. You cannot see its beginning; you cannot see its end. You can dig. You can build. You may build a city. A country.
But you cannot take the whole of the plane and fold it.
...
The Keeper’s Garden is built on a foundation of elements and emptiness. Out of this, the natural order arises in this world.
Other worlds have different—
Yes, of course.
Even the ones that are part of that plane?
Yes, of course. When the plane is folded, it wakes—or once woke—Gilbert and his kin. He flattens it. It is what he does. He can see the plane as it extends through layers of time—but each layer must be distinct, its own. The layers do not contain him; he can pass between them, at need.
If the perturbation is concise, distinct, if it does not materially alter the shape of the plane, it is possible to ignore or overlook. Or to miss. But that is not, I think, what occurred here. What occurred here did not fold the plane—my appearance did.
What occurred here? Kaylin paused. Stopped. Thought about three non-corpses, three stones which must have been meant as anchors, and Arcanists. She hated Arcanists. The familiar—still in his most common form—bit her ear. Clearly, this was not the time for ranting, even if she kept it to herself.
“They didn’t fold the plane,” she said aloud, which probably caused some confusion to everyone who wasn’t the elemental water. “They just cut a chunk out of it. Or they tried to cut a chunk out of it—and they’re trying to anchor it, somehow. The chunk.”
“Yes,” Gilbert replied. “That is what I believe occurred. I do not know the reason for the attempt. Perhaps it is not about immortality as you define it. Perhaps it is...more.”
“What was this building supposed to do? Do you even know?”
The Arkon said, “I think that largely irrelevant.”
“But if we know what it was supposed to do, if we understand how it was supposed to work—”
“Private, your grasp of subtlety is nonexistent. It is almost a negative. When I say irrelevant, what I mean is forbidden.”
“Forbidden?” Mandoran asked, voice cooler.
“By Imperial Decree.”
“You’re the Emperor now, are you?”