The Guardians are getting creative. The two I’ve got locked in my bedroom, that is.
As you know, gentle reader, I’ve frozen my house in a bubble in Time, but it’s challenging even for me to stop two Guardians from gaining a foothold and interfering with what I’m doing. I suppose I should have been suspicious, the way they suddenly went quiet, after working so hard to break through when I first put them in there. I naively thought they’d given up trying to beat me. Not so.
From my first instalment, gentle reader, you may recall that I wedged my bedroom door shut with my mother’s old staff and cast an adaptive anti-magic field on my room. Now, you might wonder how I expected that to work, considering I later told you about my mother’s discovery that anti-magic fields are useless. Well, the key lies in the word `adaptive`.
Back in the day, my mother’s solution, later adopted by Aunt Dreya and eventually by pretty much everyone, was to determine the magical frequency. Then the mage could either adapt their own magic to use the anti-magic field itself and/or absorb its power into themselves. However, techniques evolve with time, and so did anti-magic fields. Now we use adaptive versions that change frequency at regular intervals to prevent tampering. But the two Guardians that I have imprisoned, the modern successors to Catriona and Dreya, were not picked by lottery. So, in the face of my `attack` (which I suppose it is, from their perspective), they got creative.
Their overriding opinion is that we should be out there actively working to stop the void-creature (a.k.a. Daelen StormTiger, my father). Dealing with current events. Aunt Mandalee and I believe that this is futile without help, hence our Illegal Time Intervention. Besides, since I’ve created my own Timeless zone here, there are no current events. That means there’s no rush. I thought that would make them content to wait until I let them out, but I underestimated the power of ego.
Every True Guardian who has replaced one of the Original Three has suffered from inevitable comparisons, and, let’s face it, my mother and Aunt Dreya were hard acts for anyone to follow. This means that the two in my bedroom have got something to prove. That’s what drove them to try and break through my anti-magic field, running through the frequencies at random and punching through with a portal, of all things.
As Aunt Mandalee told Daelen, we don’t use portals anymore – we have better techniques, now – but the brute force approach almost worked. The advantage of portals is that although the co-ordinates need to be precise, the frequency doesn’t. The disadvantage is that they damage the fabric of reality, which is why they’re banned except in an emergency. (Still, I can hardly blame them for doing something borderline illegal when they’re convinced that they’re trying to save the world.)
Unfortunately for them, they’re forgetting who they’re dealing with.
I’m not a Guardian; I’m unique. Although I appear to be a human woman (my Faery spots only emerge in hot sunshine), of about eighteen to twenty years, I’m nothing of the sort. From a Tempestrian point-of-view, my date of birth was almost a thousand years ago, but calculating my actual age is problematic, given Timelessness, Immortality and time spent on other worlds. Suffice to say I have far more life experience than my youthful exterior would suggest, and my true nature extends into places that humans can’t perceive. That means I don’t need to open the door to reach inside my bedroom. It’s similar to what Kullos and Daelen were trying to do in their Final Battle, extending their higher planar nature, their essence, extending their ‘light’ outside their ‘box’. Except I know how to do it gently, with care, control, and precision, so I don’t risk tearing reality apart.
Let me put it to you this way, gentle reader: A two-dimensional royal family keep their two-dimensional crown jewels in a two-dimensional vault with a single two-dimensional door and protected by two-dimensional guards. One day, the guards capture a three-dimensional human trying to steal those crown jewels. They lock him up, but he escapes with those crown jewels. He didn’t come through the door and he didn’t breach the walls, so, question: How did the three-dimensional human escape his two-dimensional prison?
Answer: That three-dimensional human can reach into that two-dimensional vault without damaging anything, steal those crown jewels from above and escape the same way, because it’s wide open in that dimension. It’s wide open because those two-dimensional people can’t perceive ‘above’ the way humans can.
Now, if they’re really clever two-dimensional people, they might be able to intellectually grasp the concept of ‘above’. They might even have magic or technology that operates in that dimension, but they can’t perceive it.
In the same way, back in our plane of the cosmos, the Guardians’ portals operate within the parts of reality that humans and other ‘mortals’ (for lack of a better term) can’t perceive. But I can. I can exist there and effectively stand in their way so they can’t access their portals. That’s how I put a stop to their escape attempt. They’ll probably try something else in a while, but for now, they are contained, and I can get back to telling my story.
To begin this instalment, gentle reader, I need to go back to the beginning. Yes, I know I’ve said that before, but I mean it literally this time. All the way back to the Cataclysm that began the cosmos.
*****
In the beginning, according to myth, the Creator Entity somehow annexed part of the void and created an ordered cosmos. As a balance to this Act of Creation, the IT Entity came into being in the void beyond the boundaries of everything. As the cosmos developed, it separated into the layers of what I continue to call the Great Cosmic Sandwich, and life came into being at all levels. At first, life forms were confined to their own native layers of the sandwich. Indeed, at first, lifeforms were blissfully unaware of the existence of other layers, but over time, sapient creatures evolved, some of which began to speculate that there might be more to Creation outside their experience. Among these, some particularly intelligent individuals started to devise ways to detect the undetectable. Much like my mother, they viewed ‘you can’t do that’ as a challenge to do it anyway.
Eventually, it became possible to contact neighbouring planes. This was not always a good thing. Even with the best of intentions, there were misunderstandings. Those from the higher planes often considered themselves superior to those below, while the lower planes would often be jealous of the abundant energy resources of the higher levels.
The people of my age (that is, the age in which I live) are very much aware that Tempestria is one world among many in this middle layer of the sandwich. Many of these have joined together in a co-operative way, to form the Commonwealth. Moreover, we know that this plane is one of many more, each of which contains countless worlds, peoples and civilisations.
There is a tendency to view the lower planes as the primary source of trouble. The creatures we call demons continue to invade, as they pull energy from inter-planar forces – magic – and Ascend. Once here, they have an abundance of energy, which they mostly use to wreak havoc, maim, kill and even drag innocent mortals back down to their plane. The deeper their native plane, the more energy they need to come here. That’s where summoning magic comes in, using the magic that’s available here, wizards pull Greater Demons from the deeper levels of our sandwich. Once they are here, they can be very challenging to control because the energy demons require just to live, is very small compared to what they can now access.
Thankfully, gentle reader, there isn’t enough energy in the whole mortal plane to summon the Keeper of the Underworld.
Before the war with the void-creature began, the people of my age generally didn’t see the higher planes as a big problem. The Fall of Kullos was a thousand years behind us, and for a thousand years before that, the sum total of higher planar beings in our world mostly amounted to two shadow warriors (one of which was split into two clones), one Ysirian (Pyrah), one leopard god (Shyleen) and one demigod (Ossian Miach Kaidool, a.k.a. Michael). You can count them on the fingers of one hand, depending on how you count the shadow warriors and how many fingers your species has on one hand. Of these, history viewed only Kullos and Aden as a threat, whereas there had been uncountable demon attacks in history and pre-history, and (except perhaps for Tricksters) all have intended harm.
That has helped to create the misconception that, for the most part, the lower planes are `evil` and the higher planes are `good`.
But that wasn’t always the case.
If you go back beyond two thousand Tempestrian years, though we know nothing of our world at that time, there is considerable evidence that higher planar beings came and went, freely. They interfered with countless other mortal worlds as they pleased, so it’s reasonable to assume that our world was no exception. Often, these beings had the best of intentions, but to quote from the edicts of Balance, ‘Power wielded in ignorance is dangerous, regardless of intent.’
As you know from my previous instalments, gentle reader, a single shadow warrior was more dangerous than an army of demons. People could deal with demons – Aunt Mandalee is one of a long line of demon hunters – but until the time of the Fall of Kullos, no mortal had been able to stop a shadow warrior. The only reason that danger passed, was because Blessed Alycia threw up her barrier that kept higher planar beings from manifesting here. Of course, Shyleen found a loophole, thanks to her unique relationship with Mandalee, who willingly shared her soul. However, as I say, ours was not the only plane to suffer from attacks from higher levels.
According to legend, such trouble began with the Creator contacting the spread of Angels in the plane immediately below. The Creator actively encouraged those Angels, in the spirit of showing off, to explore the whole of Creation, see the beauty that had been Created, and extend the Creator’s Blessing to all the peoples of the cosmos.
Angel sightings are abundant in stories throughout the whole of Creation. Every world we’ve encountered, both in and out of the Commonwealth, has such stories, and interactions with beings from higher planes suggest they may be truly universal. Of all these stories, though, only one is known to be literally true: the story of the Angel who called herself Purity.