Before I relay my father’s story, gentle reader, I feel I should explain how Temporal magic works. Without getting too bogged down with the intricacies of Time and dimensional harmonics, the best way I can think of to do that, is to fall back on another of my famous facetious analogies from my college days.
Temporal Magic is like Looking for your Keys.
(Once again, I was marked down for my ‘irreverent treatment of the subject.’ I’m sure you’re sensing a pattern.)
Have you ever misplaced your keys? You know they must be in your house somewhere, but that knowledge does nothing to save you from wasting a chunk of your day turning your house upside down and inside out. Now, suppose you didn’t know for sure they were in your house, but they’re definitely somewhere in your street, or your town, or your country… Imagine having to search your entire world to find your keys. (How did you lose your keys that badly, you may ask? Well, it seems to me you can either (a) blame a Trickster, or (b) accept that this is an analogy and just go with it.)
Now imagine you have access to time travel. You might think that makes things easier – just go back to the moment you lost them and sort of un-lose them. Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. It’s like when a friend asks you, “Where did you last see your keys?” If you knew that, they wouldn’t be lost. Asking “When did you last see them?” is equally unhelpful. Because now you have time travel, so maybe you last had them sometime in the last year or ten years or a hundred years… Time travel doesn’t solve the problem, it just makes it worse.
Even if you lived outside of Time, even if you were immortal, you wouldn’t have all the time in the world, because that’s impossible: space and time are infinite. In fact, this only compounds the problem even further, because you now have to search for your keys in an endless amount of time in an infinite number of places. Plus, how many times have you eventually found your keys behind a cushion on your sofa, when you know you already looked there three hours ago? So now you have to search an infinity of time and space TWICE. Even if you could do that, even if you were Timeless, even if you were immortal, would you want to spend your entire life searching for your keys?
For the Guardians, looking for specific events in Tempestrian history is just like looking for your keys – the problem is knowing where to look. That requires co-ordinates.
When I say co-ordinates, I don’t just mean a set of numbers or symbols. It doesn’t work like that. Just as teleporting requires an image of where you want to go, temporal co-ordinates provide a vital sympathic impression of the destination.
This also explains why it is impossible to travel independently into one’s own personal future: It’s impossible to know for sure exactly where and when you’re going to lose your keys. After all, you don’t plan on losing them, do you? If you’d tried to predict exactly where your keys would be tomorrow, on the day before you lost them, you’d have been wrong, wouldn’t you? In the same way, I can simulate possible futures, but if I were to try to travel to those imaginary co-ordinates, where would I be? The answer is, nobody knows.
I might go nowhere. On the other hand, in theory, I might literally go nowhere. Some vast, endless no-place where there is nothing. Even if I could survive that, with a starting point outside of all reality, could I get back, or would I be stuck there forever? Would forever be a thousand centuries, or a split second? In this no-place, where nothing existed, how could I tell the difference?
So perhaps now, you can appreciate some of the difficulties and dangers of what the Guardians and I do. In short, we must know precisely where and when we are going at all times. In terms of my analogy, what you need is for your friend to tell you that they’ve found your keys for you. They were behind the cushion on the sofa in their room. You left them there when they fell out of your pocket when you were playing that game last night before you went home. Fortunately for the Guardians, they have friends like that: they’re called historians.
One of the great misconceptions about Time travel is that it makes history books redundant, when in fact those books are some of the most valuable tools any Time traveller could have: they tell you where and when to look.
*****
Our history books have helped me turn my gaze to the times and places in which the Original Three Guardians lived their early lives, and tell their stories independently of the way they may have recounted those stories in retrospect. In short, it’s a first-hand account.
The reason I mention this, gentle reader, is that my father is different. He is not from this mortal realm, he’s a higher planar being. So, when I come to try and detail his personal past, in addition to a universe of time and space, I have whole other planes of reality to consider. An Infinity of Great Cosmic Sandwiches. Once we get to the era when Daelen met Cat, Mandalee and Dreya, history books once again come to my rescue, but Daelen StormTiger has been around for a long time, so some of the most significant parts of his story happen in places and times beyond any books.
That’s one of the reasons Mandalee has gone to fetch him: we need more information if we’re going to fight the Monster that now threatens us.
My decision to remove Daelen from that particular point in his own Timestream was not arbitrary. The ‘right moment’ had to satisfy three conditions. He must have met Mandalee and Catriona, so he’d be inclined to help. He must be at the peak of his powers, so he’d be able to help. And he must be alone, yet in a precisely known location, so we would know exactly where and when to look for our key. Our key to survival that is.
The last condition was the hardest because it seems like a contradiction. If somebody knew precisely where he was, how could he be alone? If he was alone, how could anybody know for certain precisely where he was? The answer to that conundrum I will keep to myself for now. (I may have promised you an accurate account, gentle reader, but I still reserve the right to delay the reveal of specific details for dramatic reasons.) Suffice to say, Mandalee and I wanted to bend the rules, and the other two Guardians were having none of it, so we locked them in my room and did it anyway.
If all goes well, we will return my father to his Timestream a moment after we took him, but by doing this, for that short period, to all intents and purposes, Daelen StormTiger will not exist. If I’m right, the cosmos will be able to survive without his presence for that short time, and he will help us save the world. If I’m wrong, and the cosmos can’t survive without him, then everything we know will collapse into the void, and worse still: his ego will be completely insufferable.
My point is, when history books fail us, we must fall back on legend. The Legend of Daelen StormTiger. Or to put it another way, gentle reader, I believe it is time, at last, to take us all the way back to the beginning…
*****
…Long ago, before any known history books were written, Daelen StormTiger gazed upon the world below him like a tiny, shining bauble. A precious, delicate thing to be handled with care. He was its Protector now. He had to be because, the way he saw it, he was partly responsible for the danger it was facing.
Daelen’s people were at war – war beyond the imaginations of the mortals Daelen watched below him. It was not known how long this war had been raging, or even how to relate the passage of time in the higher realms, to what mortals experience on Tempestria. Suffice to say, a very, very long time. Daelen was a frequent visitor to our mortal world, treating it as a refuge from the war at home.
It was a simple matter for entities of his kind to Descend to the lower planes. To make the transition, he needed to shed those parts of his essence that couldn’t fit within the confines of this realm. He would leave those parts of himself behind, ready for him to reclaim when he returned, like so much left luggage. The hard part was returning. That required a dimensional control device to form a connection between the two parts of his essence and bridge the void between the planes. These devices were endlessly customisable, taking on almost any shape, design and colour. To many of his kind, they were as much a fashion accessory as a practical device. As a young boy (or at least his species’ equivalent) Daelen had often enjoyed dropping down a few levels to wind up those who called themselves ‘gods’ of Tempestria, though they were no such thing. In fact, Daelen knew one person who firmly believed that mortals could one day surpass their so-called gods. Perhaps even the shadow warriors – Daelen scoffed at the idea.
Kullos had long been a friend to Daelen’s family, ever since Daelen’s father had been killed in the war. In fact, having no family of his own, Kullos was soon accepted as part of theirs. As a shadow warrior Champion, Kullos was at the forefront of their war, and as Daelen grew up, they became close. Daelen worked hard and quickly grew in power until he became a shadow warrior, too, and Kullos’ most trusted Lieutenant. His right hand man.
However, it is often said that war can change people, and the change in Kullos epitomised this. He became increasingly agitated, nervous and paranoid, finding neither sleep nor rest. Daelen saw the shift happen almost overnight, but no-one knew exactly what had happened to initiate such a transformation. Whatever the cause, Kullos began to see enemies in the shadows and in the light. He saw danger where there was none, except that which he created himself, though he could never accept that. He began to lash out at his allies, his friends and ultimately his family. At first, it was verbal, and Daelen was able to pull him back from the edge of the abyss. He frequently opposed taking action against Kullos, firmly believing he could get through to him if only he kept trying. Despite his efforts, however, things continued to get worse, until one day, Daelen came home to find his mother, Farrella, severely injured and unconscious. He immediately summoned healers and rushed to her side.
The healers arrived, and as they began to stabilise her for transport to a healing facility, Farrella came around and whispered Daelen’s name.
“What happened?” Daelen asked. “Who did this?
“Ku—Kullos,” she croaked.
Daelen was stunned. He hadn’t wanted to believe Kullos would go that far, but clearly, he had.
Sharing her thoughts telepathically, Daelen saw it had finally happened: Kullos had turned on Daelen’s mother in a ferocious attack, accusing her of plotting against him. He had raved that she was in league with his ‘real enemy,’ another shadow warrior, who was planning to kill him.
Consumed by rage, Daelen growled, “Well he’s right about that. Another shadow warrior is planning to kill him: me!”
Farrella had fought Kullos as best she could, but she was really only alive because Kullos had suddenly rushed off, deciding he had a ‘better idea’ of how to find his ‘real enemy.’ Farrella had slipped into unconsciousness then, so she didn’t know where Kullos had gone.
The healers interrupted to say they really needed to take Farrella to a healing facility for proper treatment and she allowed herself to be transported away.
If Kullos’ shadow warrior instinct was untempered by thought or reason, if he truly believed some imagined ‘real enemy’ was plotting to kill him, there was no telling what he might do. Daelen had not a moment to lose. He had to find Kullos before he did any more damage.
Forcing down his fear and panic, Daelen admonished himself to calm down and think. He remembered that Kullos kept a personal energy record – a kind of diary – and rushed to find it. He broke into it, feeling they were way beyond issues of privacy and quickly scanned his most recent entries.
No-one knows precisely what Daelen read at that moment, gentle reader. All he would ever say was that he felt himself go cold.
“Of course,” he berated himself. “I should have known!”
Kullos had long been against Daelen’s penchant for visiting the mortal realm and one world in particular. It was the world upon which Daelen now cast his protective gaze. The world we now know as Tempestria, but according to the legends, in those days it had another, more ancient name. Some say that knowing the world’s original name would reveal Daelen StormTiger’s true motives for his self-imposed status as this world’s Protector. Others believe that the revelation of this name would spell the end of the world. Daelen always refused to confirm or deny any of this.
More than once, Kullos had forbidden Daelen to ever again take corporeal form. He considered it, “an obscene, filthy, disgusting state,” but Farrella disagreed and always overruled him. Daelen realised this is where Kullos had gone.
Presumably, in his delusional state, Kullos was convinced his `real enemy` was hiding here and plotting against him. If he was here to kill that enemy, then he would tear our world apart without a second thought to do it.
Daelen had no choice. He Descended quickly – too quickly. Setting up his control device would take time. Time our world didn’t have. He had to stop Kullos and protect our world before it was too late. But if Daelen Descended without a control device, there would be no way to access what he left behind. Maybe his people would be able to help him, but he didn’t know for sure. As far as he knew, Descending through the planes without a control device had never been done. This action could very well mean there was no way home. But he couldn’t stand by and let Kullos destroy this world, so he discarded his excess self and Descended.