Shadow of Worlds

SHADOW

OF

WORLDS

By JD Lovil

Shadow of Worlds

Digital Edition

Revised July 2018

Copyright © 2013 J D Lovil

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN: 9781516356478

DISCLAIMER

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank Dr. Linton Yarbrough, who was my favorite Professor of Physical Chemistry, for inspiring his class to think for their selves.

I would like to thank my Philosophical and Mystical friend Magus Zeta for the endless discussions on the nature of reality. I finally talked him into putting the philosophy into print in his new book Quantum Sorcery Basics.

I would like to thank the long line of analytical thinkers who created our world with their ideas. These people range from the Neolithic shamans and animists, the Sumerian Astrologers and Magi, the Alchemists and Chemists of the old world. It also includes the contributions of Maxwell and Galileo, Einstein and Penrose, and all those others that I could not possibly find room to list.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 DOWN TO A CAMBRIAN SEA

2 THE DAY AFTER YESTERDAY

3 THE DREAM

4 NERGALGARD

5 THE QUEST

6 FORTRESS AMERICA

7 WORLD'S END

8 THE STEWART'S ROAD

9 THE SPEAKING STONE

10 THE DYING EARTH

11 THE THINNING WORLD

12 LAND OF TWO SUNS

13 LAND OF SORROW'S BINDING

14 OUR ENEMY STARS

15 WHERE STRANGENESS GROWS

16 THE GUARDIAN'S KEEP

17 SUMMONING THE TITANS

18 RAISING THE OLD ONES

19 UPON THE FIELD OF BATTLE

20 THE PRIMAL LORDS

21 THE LEGION OF THE FIRST CITY

22 AN INVASION OF SORCERERS

23 THE BATTLE OF ORDER AND CHAOS

EPILOGUE

INTRODUCTION

The world we see around us is but one of an infinite number of worlds. Every one of us walks from world to world in our lives, never knowing that we do so. If you ever have noticed that life always is as you expect it to be, this is the reason.

Rafe is one of the few who can consciously walk through the shadows of the worlds. Anything that he can imagine, he can find in the worlds that might be.

Our earliest ancestors knew that this Great Veil existed and that it was possible to find the object of your desire in the place of your dreams. Whether you sought Meaning in the Dream Time or power in Arcana, the fools call it magic, and the wise call it Truth.

When our distant ancestors saw those who walked between worlds, they called them gods. Odin, Zeus, or Enlil, Brahma or Kali, all of these awoke to the truth of infinite worlds and learned to travel among the worlds with purpose.

The world lines encompass all possibilities and all possible worlds. There is an infinite number of worlds in which humans, and some who are nearly human, live. Beyond these worlds are the ones that twist the mind into madness, worlds where the rules are not the familiar ones that we expect. Far from the places of humanity, there are places where, in all the universe, there are no places to stand, where even the stars have never formed and some in which the hydrogen that fills our universe can never be.

Far beyond these worlds are places so incomprehensible that the eye refuses to see there, and the ear cannot hear there, places that are beyond madness, where the mind dissolves with the merest experience. In this place which is neither dark nor light, where no rationality or order is possible, there are things that live beyond time and space, things that hunger for all things.

The Scourge is from this darkest place, and it slowly intrudes into the shadows of order, bringing madness to both Man and world. It falls to the Walkers in Shadows to unite and to seal the way against the Scourge, before the stain of the Scourge’s touch can twist all worlds everywhere into madness

.

1 DOWN TO A CAMBRIAN SEA

Isit akimbo in the midst of the fog, seeking the line that I remember in the Shadow of Worlds. I can hear voices in the distance, in the background, whispers and laughs and screams and songs, the low voice of men and the sweet high tones of women and children.

In the distance through the fog, I can see glimpsed shapes, human, animal, and sometimes other. Infinite emotions charge the atmosphere, and sensations, pain, pleasure, and all the scents of life and death are here. Time and distance have no meaning here, that which was may well be not yet born, and that which is to come may have already spanned its life. This place is a place of infinity and eternity, where the waters of time may flow forever, without marking in the slightest the face of this place.

I reach out with my mind, winnowing the shadows for that which I seek. The area about me slowly rearranges into a view of a craggy, rocky path, which leads past two great Oak Trees and to the smoky mouth of a dimly lit cave. A chattering sound comes to me from the tree to the right, a chiding for my trespass, no doubt.

I walk the last few feet to the mouth of the cave and standing at the threshold, I call, Seer, have you seen my coming, and what I would ask?

From a darkened corner of the cave, a barely seen Form moves, and says, "Even Herakles could foretell your coming, and you would ask after the shadow that passes the Shadow of the Worlds. You would know what is out there that could threaten an infinite number of worlds, and what kind of thing is it that we feel across the breadth and depth of the Shadow.

Seer, may I cross your threshold?

Rafe, you are welcome here.

I step into the cave. Turning to look the way I came, I see that the trees are whipping in a great wind, and almost continuous lightning lights the sky, and a constant roar of distant thunder fills my ears. The storm has obviously been raging for some hours, yet I had but seconds past stepped off a sunny path. This display of alternate worldlines was a special aspect of the Cave of the Seer. While I can walk to that which I desire in shadow, the Seer can walk out of his home to any place in shadow that he wishes to visit.

The Seer says, There is a place which I foretell will yield a vital clue to the nature of the multiversal scourge which we all feel. It is a place that is Cambrian in its essence, and I have been there once in following the path of the destroyer.

Have you seen any of the old Walkers recently? I am asking if the Seer had seen any of the other persons capable of walking from world-line to world-line like ourselves. I have met many ephemeral people in many shadow worlds but rarely met another shadow walker like myself. In places close to the origins of the Originals, sometimes there are doppelgangers, shadow copies from close by world lines, even copies that can walk the shadows.

The Seer says, I saw the one-eyed son of Bor, and his one-handed son but a century past. Just recently, I saw a red-headed Walker named Nancy, and from a nearby mountain, some decades past I did see a duel between Enlil and the destroyer, Shiva. I did not see the end of the duel. The discharges and the mists that are common to such Walker battles obscured the battle.

It was typical in such battles for the combatants to try to manipulate the fabric of local reality to promote their victory and the defeat of their opponents. When the manipulations are at odds with one another, the distortions of reality sometimes displayed as energetic discharges, and the eye would see fog where the form of an object was in dispute.

And have you seen more sign of the Scourge’s presence? I had seen several places where an unexpected ‘bleed-through’ of one reality into another had caused unusual changes and events in the local areas where they occurred. The universal lethality of the events in these ‘fairy circles’ left little doubt in our minds that the source was malicious. Sleeping people had awakened to find themselves melded to the rocky places that had been their beds. Some had found themselves merged with trees, roots become arteries, legs, and arms frozen into limbs, trapped evermore. These were disturbing sights but were not close to as ominous as some other sights.

In the last twenty years or so, I had run into signs of a destructive force that spanned entire world lines. I had seen whole shadow Earths that were lifeless, some from war, some from the plague, and some appeared to be a hunting ground for some voracious predator that had literally eaten every human on the planet. I found one shadow where a universal madness had struck humanity, ending at last in a mindless apathy. The survivors quietly lay down and starved to death.

The Seer quietly smokes a pipe, looking out the mouth of the cave at the thunderstorm. I extract a cigarette, and we sit smoking for a time. When we have finished our smokes, Seer gets to his feet, dons his coat, and takes up his staff. I regain my feet as well, ready to be off to wherever the Seer would lead.

The Seer waves his staff in the direction of the cave’s mouth, and the scene shimmers and fog rolls up, obscuring the storm from view. For the space of thirty heartbeats, nothing outside the cave is visible. As quickly as it arrives, the fog rolls away, and now the cave opens to a sunlit sea, and sandy beach lies before us, braced to each side with reddish sandstone boulders.

The Seer says, Shall we go down to the sea? Something by the sea draws me, a Truth that will answer a future question. I know that this is the place of an ancient conflict, where a good species went down to ruin before the Scourge. There are answers here.

The Seer and I walk between the stones, and down to a shallow sea. A few feet from the gentle waves, the sand, is mixed with a slimy green film that makes a living mat of doubtful pedigree and exuding an earthy stink. The smell of the mat is barely discernible over the almost overbearing stench of sulfur in the air.

I see tiny movements on the beach of crustaceans which are apparently consuming bits of the bacterial goo, and at the edge of the water, I see what appears to be a trilobite cast ashore by the waves. In one area of the bay is a darker colored patch of water, which seems to be hard put to mix with the rest of the waters, and in which I can see several dead hard and soft creatures.

I say, I recognize this place. Trilobites place it as Cambrian, and the anoxic waters are a distinctive feature of the End Botomian Era, some 517 million years in the past in my world line.

The Seer walks slowly along the beach. I feel that our destination lies just around this mound. There was a great catastrophe here less than a thousand years ago.

We seem to be in the beginning stages of the extinction event. Most of the trilobites and similar animals will be rare by the end of the Botomian. The fact that there are no land plants suggests that we have not made it into the Ordovician. How could our problem have anything to do with events this far back?

We round the mound and find a massive black basaltic structure standing in the shallow water near the shore. The structure is several times the size of the great pyramid, and the great stone roof of the building is partially missing. This huge structure is an awe-inspiring sight, and its presence here in the middle Cambrian is an unexpected mystery.

I point. What the hell is that?

Seer says, Let’s find out. I think that I can pull a record of past events here from shadow overlaps nearby. We need to stand exactly where we are, and give me a moment to concentrate.

The Seer plunges the end of his staff into the sand, and there is a simultaneous flash of light. The view of the artifact shimmers, and suddenly a hundred or more creatures can be seen around and entering the building. The creatures are some variety of Cephalopods, with a long upper body, with a rather ugly head on top of a long torso that is a basic greenish-brown column, ending in a muscular looking mass of tentacles, which they used in a very leg-like way. These creatures seem to be at home in the building, suggesting that they are the builders and not interlopers.

While we are watching, an object approaches the building from the far side, moving without noise through the air. I