After the End: Serenity

“That’s the same question!” Dinatha protested.

The First Memory didn’t answer. He must think she was an idiot or he wouldn’t have rephrased the question so minorly. Was there really a difference between knowing why the vision kept changing and why it kept happening?

She huffed in frustration. There had to be or he wouldn’t have emphasized the difference. No matter how she thought, though, she couldn’t see where it mattered. She ought to be able to push through the visions to see the threads that mattered, the paths where those visions didn’t happen. She couldn’t. She’d tried.

“Either way, how do I stop it?” The First Memory had to know. He might not have been an oracle; if she remembered correctly, his Talent was exactly what he was named after, Memory, but he was Mimir’s Memory and Mimir was an oracle. It was close enough. He could remember everything Mimir ever knew.

Even without the ability to see the future himself, the First Memory was powerful. He didn’t need the ability to see the future when Mimir already had, at least for that first generation. Mimir didn’t see everything in his long life, but he saw enough.

“Ask the right question.” The First Memory’s voice was calm and firm. It made Dinatha think he saw her as an unruly child, someone it wasn’t worth spending emotion on. That couldn’t be right; he was here because of her.

“Fine!” Dinatha spat the words towards the man she couldn’t see without turning her head entirely too far. “Why is it happening?”

“You are seeing the possible future,” the First Memory calmly informed her. “You know that much, I hope?”

Of course she knew that much! “That’s what I do,” she grumbled. “I’m the Memory of Light. I see what we need to know.”

“Well, then, you missed something very important.” Despite his words, the First Memory’s voice didn’t sound as contemptuous as she expected. Desinka risked a glance towards Eternus, but it was clear he hadn’t heard the scathing evaluation of her lack of skill; what she could see of his face was calm, as though he weren’t even paying attention. She wondered what he was thinking about.

She was grateful he’d decided to wait for her to talk to the First Memory without interfering. The interaction was bad enough now; if she had to actually tell him what the First Memory said, it would be awful. She hoped he’d give the First Memory the respect he deserved, but she knew that he’d say that they knew better than a ghost of the past if he didn’t like the advice. He’d probably be right, too, but Dinatha couldn’t help but think that there had to be a reason she’d called for the First Memory’s help.

Was that why he didn’t appear in the Chronicle? Did people not want to record that he only appeared when they made a huge mistake, something big enough for Mimir to see it across time? That made all too much sense; she couldn’t afford to dismiss the idea.

“When did the visions of a horrible future start?”

The First Memory’s question wasn’t easy to answer, because Dinatha couldn’t exactly say when they started. It depended on how she measured them. There was only one timeframe that she could be certain of. “They became all I could see of the future a few days ago.”

The First Memory sighed. “Do you know what happened to bring that on?”

Dinatha shook her head, then realized the First Memory probably couldn’t see it. “No.”

“Then you need to go back farther than that. Don’t look forwards; look back. What do you see?” From anyone else, the instructions would have been patronizing. From the First Memory, they were simply advice. The First Memory was wise and knowledgeable.

Dinatha slipped into a light trance without much effort. That was the point of a Seer’s Chair; it made it easy to See. Looking backwards along her own timeline was … well, it wasn’t easy, exactly, but it wasn’t hard either. It was something she was well trained to handle, even if Time liked to skip on her. She had to find the first instance of one of the dreams she’d started calling “the storm.”

It probably wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone with lesser skill and training, but there was something they all had in common. It wasn’t a commonality of event but something about the way the winds of Time moved around the edges of the vision. They were almost angry, as if they were trying to tell her something obvious and she wasn’t hearing them. Dinatha wanted to scream at them that if she knew what they were trying to say, she’d do something about it. She just didn’t know!

That was why the First Memory was there. It had to be. That wasn’t a simple guess, either; now that she’d thought of it, she knew it was right. He felt like the visions, somehow.

It all made sense now. He was here specifically because of these visions; that was why he felt like them! He was here to help her resolve the storm.

Dinatha pushed herself back in Time, looking for the same feeling. When had she first felt the winds move in the gust that became the storm?

A flash of the face of a disgraced Valkyrie slid by Dinatha. She remembered that one; too proud of herself by half. It was a trend Dinatha had noticed in the recent Valkyries and one she’d told the Mistress of Novices to do something about after Ann’s complete failure on the Trial Steps made it clear she needed a complete retraining and retempering.

Why was that memory related? Ann was minor, other than as evidence that she needed to pay more attention to her Valkyries’ training. Even so, she felt the same winds outside the flash as she felt from the gathering storm.

The next flash was another Valkyrie. This time, it was an image Dinatha had never seen with her own eyes, only with her Sight: Morgan and her guards, the ones who stayed with her after her disgrace, training together under the eye of a clearly experienced taskmaster in a way that wouldn’t be permitted by the current Mistress of Novices. Perhaps it was a partial answer to the question of how to solve the situation with Ann, but Dinatha could tell that wasn’t why she saw it.

No, she saw Morgan because the storm winds also whipped around her. They weren’t angry; indeed, they were calm. She could feel where they had once raged against the woman and where she had somehow calmed them. Dinatha knew she couldn’t show the weakness of asking her how, even if she could contact Morgan, but for a moment she wished she could.

Dinatha traced the storm earlier and earlier. It was faint but she could still see it in patches. A vision she’d disregarded because it said it was unlikely to happen pushed its way to her attention and she knew that it was the first warning she’d had of the oncoming storm, the first scent of rain on the horizon. It wasn’t the first breath of the changing wind, but it was the first time she saw the horror.

“A haze began here. It started everywhere and nowhere. At first, only the sensitive noticed, but after a few days people began to die. Those who were the closest to death went first, followed by some who did not know they were in danger. As more died, the haze became more and more noticeable until everyone could see it. Some tried to flee, but the portals would not let them go. More and more died, until the world broke. People began to fight over everything and nothing but it did not matter. They still died. Everyone died.” Dinatha’s voice choked for a moment on the horror of the memory. It wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever seen, but it was up there. “It was a terrible weapon, but one that would not be used so I did not pay much attention to the vision. It was the first of many but without anchor.”

“A terrible weapon,” the First Memory agreed. Emotion was clearly present in his voice, for once, a sort of suppressed anger that seemed appropriate for such a terrifying event. “It is certainly unlikely that it will be used here; still, there must have been a trigger for the vision.”

“The storm winds started earlier,” Dinatha agreed, but her mind wasn’t on the winds for a moment. Instead, it was the oddness of the First Memory’s response that caught her attention. He clearly knew what the weapon was and agreed with her assessment of the vision that said it wasn’t going to happen. That was strange, unless Mimir had foreseen this, so long ago.

How could Mimir not have foreseen an event that was strong enough to call the echo of his First Memory, the strongest Memory of all, to the future? Of course he knew more than he was saying. “You know what it was, don’t you? The thing that started the storm winds on their way. Why won’t you tell me?”

“I do. If I told you, would you believe it as much as something you saw yourself?” The emotion faded from the First Memory’s voice as he spoke. By the end, he sounded almost amused. “You don’t have to answer; you won’t. No one does. Therefore, since you can see it, you should.”

Dinatha frowned at that. She wanted to argue against it; it would be much easier to just have him tell her what she needed to do and be done with it. The problem was that he was, in many ways, right. That didn’t work with her subordinates, not in the long run. She had to get them to really understand what was happening before they stopped making the same mistake repeatedly without even realizing. “You’re a teacher, aren’t you? I never knew the First Memory was a teacher. It makes sense, someone had to teach the other Memories.”

“Don’t think about me,” the First Memory scolded the Memory of Light. “You have a vision to trace. Follow those storm winds of yours back. Why are they blowing?”

The question triggered something Dinatha had been avoiding: a true vision.

The Memory of Light saw herself talking to Eternus. Well, listening as he spoke, mostly; that was what she did. He was wise, so it was best to listen. When it was over, she found herself describing the vision to the First Memory. “Once I knew of the forbidden change in Time seen by Eternus, I sent the Valkyrie Morgan across the Timestream to find it and resolve it. That is the first breath of the storm, the cold gust of wind that started it all, but I do not know why.”

Dinatha expected Eternus to say something, but it was like he didn’t hear her words; he simply sat there with his hand on her shoulder. The gesture that should have been comforting suddenly seemed something else. Dinatha set her hand on top of his. When she squeezed his hand, he didn’t return the gesture. “Eternus? Eternus!”

As if to belie her fears, Eternus pulled his hand away from hers. He patted her on the forehead, then stood. “Take the path into the future that you can see. It’s no longer my place to guide your steps.”

She couldn’t hear him leave. She couldn’t see it, either, with her face streaked with tears.

All she was left with was the final words of the First Memory. “Eternus has made his choice. You have yet to make yours. Abandon this quest he set you on and the storm shall abate. If you take another step on this path, the future may be less kind to you than the past was to Eternus.”

Once she scrambled out of the Seer’s Chair once more, she found out that the First Memory’s words were not quite the last thing she was left with.

Eternus’s body lay unbreathing and quickly cooling in the entrance to her suite.