The Last Keyholder Chapter One

To say that Tengan was blind was, at the very least, misleading: he was blind only in the strictly physical sense—he had been born without eyes. The Kamigumo had seen fit to take them while he was still in his mother's womb and replace them with starlight. In doing so, They had blessed him with the Sight, enhancing his senses beyond even the acuity of dragons. But even among the Sighted, he was blessed; Tengan's starlight eyes perceived the world as if with the eyes of the Weavers Themselves: he saw in all directions at once, in every spectrum of light. Despite having no eyes, he had perceived more in his thirty years of life than most sighted beings dreamed throughout their entire lives.

In the topmost chamber of the Hoshi Mitsumeru Library's observatory tower, in the western quadrant of the grand city-state of Raizer, the ceiling had been retracted to let in the clear night sky, bathing Tengan in the soft silver luminescence of the moon. His body hovered upright several feet above the floor, his face upturned, his flesh silvered by the moonlight, a dim incandescence radiating from beneath his closed eyelids.


 His body floated there in the observatory, but his consciousness had gone elsewhere, to a place where the Infinite Tapestry was lit by starfire.


 It was within the white-hot heart of his birthstar that Tengan manifested his astral self. There, in that place of starlight and destiny, he had come to take advantage of one of the many gifts granted him by the Sight: the gift of perfect recollection. By following his lifethread, he could return to any point in his life and witness it again, examining it in as much detail as he wished.


 Taking up his lifethread, he drifted out of his star into the deafening silence of space, immersing himself in the immaculate peace he always found there. He allowed himself several moments to bask in
the brilliance of white starfire that was his life force, the blazing anchor to his lifethread.

The endless beauty surrounding him was unspeakable; a heartrending panorama of stars, planets, galaxies—a riot of light and colour cast upon a field of blackness as deep and as unfathomable as the mind of a god. And laced through it all, the innumerable, web-like threads of life woven amongst the stars: the Infinite Tapestry that he was so blessed, so privileged to be a part of.

He belonged to that sacred place. If he could forsake his corporeal form to remain among the stars for all eternity, he would not hesitate to do so.

Reluctantly, he pulled himself from his reverie and returned his attention to his task. With the speed of thought he moved along his lifethread until he reached the moment in time he was looking for. With the ease of long practice he slipped into the Tapestry and manifested next to his own bed where his past self was caught in an uneasy dream, just before he'd awoken with a scream trying desperately to claw its way out of his throat.

He'd been unable to remember the dream, but it had plagued him throughout the day. He'd projected himself here to experience the dream again, for his instincts told him it was important. By entering the mind of his past self he could relive the dream. It would be made clearer by virtue of experiencing it while awake, made clearer still by virtue of the Sight.

It took no more effort than thinking and he was in the dream. He found himself surrounded by a heavy physical darkness that pressed on him from all sides like a great weight. He knew—in that strange, inexplicable fashion that dreamers often know—that he was deep underground, in a vast spherical chamber carved from the heart of a mountain. But even his enhanced senses could not penetrate the darkness that enveloped him.

Tengan waited, allowing the dream to unfold at its own pace, to reveal to him the secrets he'd forgotten in waking.

Presently, the room began to glow with an unearthly green light, as if the moon had come from behind a thick curtain of clouds. Looking up, Tengan beheld a strange sight: through the tons of rock crushing down on him, across the vault of the sky above and hanging in the inky blackness beyond it shone a pale green star, its light impeded by neither distance nor substance. By its light Tengan finally saw what the vast chamber contained.

A massive freestanding tablet of black stone stood erect in the center of the chamber. It was three times as tall as a man and twice as wide. Its surface was perfectly smooth except for the outer edges, which were graven with strange, twisting designs and alien geometric patterns that Tengan could not identify. The tablet did not reflect the light it was bathed in in any way; it just stood there, brooding, imposing its presence upon the chamber.

Before the tablet knelt an elf. He was old, even by the measure of his long-lived race. There were bright streaks of silver in his honey-blonde hair, and many graceful lines creased his angular, careworn face. He was naked, staring intently at the tablet, his gaze rapt and giving every appearance that he was paying very close attention to something only he could see and hear—but to what, Tengan could not say.

Tengan tried to circle the tablet to examine it from the opposite side, but was arrested after only a few steps—for the table remained facing him!

At first he thought it was some trick of the light, but no—as he made a complete circuit around it, the tablet's face remained turned toward him.

He approached to within a few steps of the tablet to examine its markings, but was confronted with another mystery: he could not focus his gaze upon them! It was as if the markings actively resisted being known—or his mind actively resisted knowing—for his eyes slid away each time he tried to discern their form and meaning. Over and over he found himself staring, without intending to, into the inky black depths of the tablet's smooth face, until finally—and not without effort—he tore his gaze away in bewilderment.

Something tickled the back of his mind, the faintest echo of memory, but when he tried to catch it, it was gone.

The elf had not moved, had not spoken, had given no indication that he was aware of Tengan. He just continued to stare as if all his world were contained within the depths of the mysterious black tablet.

It was then, as Tengan focused his Sight upon the old elf, that he noticed his aura, a tainted sense of wrongness pouring off him in a cloying psychic miasma that Tengan could almost taste.

He knew then, that the dream was no idle nocturnal flight of fancy. It had all the feeling of prophecy—it had been given to him with purpose.

But why? he wondered. What am I supposed to See here?

The star.

Tengan looked up. The green star was not known to him, in itself an aberration. He'd spent a considerable portion of his life among the stars; they were more familiar to him than anything terrestrial. For him not to recognize a celestial body was something that demanded his attention

Leaving the old elf to continue staring at the mysterious black tablet, he rose through the mountain, crossed the sky, and in as much time as it took to think it, he floated before the green star.

It was unlike any of the millions of stars he'd ever seen before. Its fire was more akin to a banked ember in a hearth than the radiant balls of light and fire he was accustomed to. It gave off no heat, either, but Tengan nevertheless sensed a prodigious amount of energy within it—more than any one star he'd ever encountered.

From the deep well of his memory, a name surfaced and whispered itself to him: Wormwood.

In the observatory chamber of the Hoshi Mitsumeru Library, Tengan's levitating body shivered.

Wormwood. The Wanderer. The Fell Star. An omen of ill portent, it was whispered of only in obscure texts, all of which agreed that Wormwood wandered the void, belonging to no galaxy. Its pale light cast its pall upon the skies once every few hundred years, and wherever its light touched, calamity struck. Tengan had never imagined he would see the Fell Star in his own lifetime.

Curiosity overwhelming his trepidation, he looked for the lifethread that Wormwood anchored. No star existed without one.

It should have been readily visible to his Sight, but Tengan was surprised at first not to See it. Determined, he reached out with all his Sight, seeking the Fell Star's lifethread... seeking... and finding!

There! A tenebrous yellow ribbon leading from the heart of the star back toward the world of Ryzen K'tarn—his world. Strangely, the lifethread was unconnected to any other thread he could See. Even in dreams he'd never Seen a lifethread uncrossed by any other thread in the Infinite Tapestry. It made sense, however, after a fashion. If centuries passed between Wormwood's arrivals there'd be few—if any—other threads still effected by it.

But to whom or what is it tethered? he asked himself. He felt that he was finally coming upon the purpose of his dream.

He peered down the lifethread's length and was startled to find the lifethread was tethered to the black tablet, and the tablet itself was tethered to the elf! Unable to comprehend what he was Seeing, Tengan reached out and closed his hand around the mysterious tablet—

—and reeled in horror as a place worse than any hell conceived by mortal, oni, or the Kami Themselves exploded before his mind's eye!

In the observatory, Tengan's eyes flashed yellow as his body spasmed violently.

Even as his horrified mind shuddered under the dizzying onslaught, Tengan recognized what he was Seeing. One did not forget such a place; and though Tengan had only glimpsed it once before and only for the slightest fraction of a second, he'd have happily traded his soul for the ironclad assurance he'd never See it again. It was a place that had no right to exist—did not exist, not in the 'verse to which Tengan belonged; but somewhere outside it, separate from time, space, and— impossibly—the Infinite Tapestry Itself. It was Soto-gawa, the Outside, an impossible, inchoate realm lying far beyond the blackness behind the farthest stars that no sane mind could possibly reconcile.

Tengan's soul shrank away in terrified panic from the impossibility of what he was Seeing, quailed at the knowledge that the elf, the black tablet, and the star Wormwood were all somehow connected to that place; Tengan was one of the few souls that knew the sacrifices that had been made to ensure that the Outside remained outside.

His panicked mind scrambled to make sense of it, to find stable footing in the quicksand madness in which he was mired—but there was none to be had. He was drowning in the impossible vistas of Soto-gawa: the harder he fought the vision, the farther he sank.

Somewhere in that mad chaos, something was waiting for him—he could hear it, calling to his sanity with a compelling siren's song, saying, Come, See!

In the observatory, trapped in his dream, Tengan loosed a strangled howl, denying the dream, denying the song, denying it all:

"Nooooo!"

Back in the waking present, deep in the primordial blackness at the edge of infinity that lay beyond the ken of even the most learned mortal scholars, Wormwood waited. For years—centuries, millennia— it had waited, wandering ominously among the stars, through the unspeakable gulf of time, waiting with a limitless patience and a malevolent certainty that the purpose for which it had been cast into the void would be fulfilled.

Relentlessly, the chaotic barrage of maddening visions continued beating at his consciousness, driving him quickly to the ragged edges of his endurance. For one horrendous moment, Tengan stood upon the precipice of his fracturing sanity and stared into a yawning black crevasse from which there would be no returning, a black crevasse within which waited that unknowable thing that invited him so enticingly: Come, See!

For one horrendous moment, Tengan stared down into that yawning black crevasse from which there would be no returning, and knew he wanted to leap.

Stargazer!

Something grabbed him then, and ripped him violently from his nightmare. He was suddenly back in the waking present with the dream elf's yellow lifethread inexplicably before him. Beside him, with Her slender eight-fingered hand holding tightly to his shoulder, was a woman of unearthly beauty. It was none other than Cassiopeia, a Kami that served the Weavers of Threads as Their liaison to mortals.

Stargazer! Her ethereal voice echoed all around him, coming from all directions at once. The Tapestry reverberates with your anguish; what is the meaning of this? Her liquid black eyes, speckled with starlight reflected from the panorama surrounding them, searched his for an answer.

Tengan had no words for what he'd just experienced, so he opened his mind to Her and let Her See.

Cassiopeia Saw, and became furious. Impossible! She cried, Her beautiful face contorting with rage.

Cassiopeia's outcry was immediately answered by a tremendous uproar as the Kamigumo became aware of what Tengan had shown Her. All around him, colossal, silver-bodied spiders appeared, scuttling across the Infinite Tapestry—the cosmic manifestations of the Kamigumo swarming upon the lifethread that had no place in Their Tapestry.

As the aether seethed with Their fury, Their disbelief, Tengan suddenly understood the impossible truth:

They didn't know!

The realization was staggering. But how could the lifethread have been hidden from Their Sight, and to what purpose? Who would dare?

It no longer mattered: the offensive thread had been discovered; it would be severed and unstitched from the Tapestry.

In Cassiopeia's hand appeared a pair of shears. Fashioned from the fangs of the Kamigumo, they were sharp enough to cut the soul.

As Cassiopeia reached out to sever the elf's blasphemous lifethread, Tengan peered down its length. Something wasn't right. He could feel it in his soul. In one direction, he Saw the strange, silent tableau from his dream: the enormous black tablet through which the elf was inexplicably tethered, the aged elf himself, still kneeling before it, staring.

Looking in the opposite direction, he Saw it: the green star Wormwood, the Wanderer, off in the deep black nothing, waiting.

Waiting for what? he wondered. Why am I suddenly so afraid?

In the observatory chamber, Tengan's body broke out in a cold sweat.

Tengan was right to be afraid, for Wormwood was no mere star: it was a living entity—something come from Soto-gawa—with a will of its own, cast into the void for one sinister purpose. Over the centuries that it had wandered the stars, it had carefully laid a terrible trap, baiting it with a lure the Weavers could never resist. It knew that the Kamigumo would never suffer to exist a lifethread tainted by anything that had no place in Their design; and when Cassiopeia's shears cut into the lifethread tethering Wormwood to the elf, its trap was sprung.

It happened in a flash: Cassiopeia, the beautiful Kami that so faithfully served the Weavers of Threads, was no more; She was devoured instantly by Wormwood's lifethread, devoured utterly. Her divine essence was ripped apart, drawn through the tainted conduit and absorbed by the Fell Star. Tengan and the Kamigumo alike were left in shocked stupor at the immediacy of Her absorption, the sickening finality of Her demise.

Deep within Wormwood existed a volatile maelstrom of unbelievable power, a cataclysmic cauldron of energy that had waited more than a millennia to be unleashed. Tengan had sensed only a fraction of what Wormwood contained, but he had been right in thinking the Wanderer akin to a banked ember, for, with the sudden infusion of Cassiopeia’s divine energies, that ember exploded into a supernova the likes of which had not occurred since the cataclysm that first forged the Multiverse.

Before the colossal tsunami of stellar energies could blast its way through the cosmos, obliterating whatever lay in its path, it was drawn back in upon itself into a mighty singularity focused at the heart of Wormwood. Then the energy was fired through the tenebrous yellow conduit, screaming across the black gulf separating Wormwood from the world of Ryzen K'tarn, extinguishing the Fell Star with the sheer violence of its eruption.

Tengan saw the yellow starburst of light blossom deep in the black nothing where Wormwood had been a moment before, heard the Kamigumo scream as One in anger and fear, Their cries echoing across infinity. Acting on pure instinct and driven by fear, he threw himself along the elf's lifethread. He was desperate to reach him before whatever was coming from Soto-gawa did, but he was already too late: the lance of vile energy had already closed the staggering distance, punched through the screaming Kamigumo as They clustered together to intercept it, and streaked past him.

Tengan was momentarily stunned by a cacophonous storm of alien images and sounds flooding his mind as the sentient energy blew past him in the aether, the foulness of the Outside washing over him in its wake and clawing at his grasp on reality.

In the observatory chamber, a storm of Tengan's uncontrolled magic energies broke out and wreaked havoc throughout the room.

Fighting to maintain control, Tengan chased blindly after the entity careening toward his world. He did not have the power to stop whatever was happening, but it was his responsibility to See. He had to know what it was doing in a 'verse in which it had no right to be.

The baleful yellow energy, formless and chaotic, hurtled through the chasm of space separating it from Ryzen K'tarn and crashed through its atmosphere like a phantom thunderbolt, dragging him in its wake. Tengan caught a glimpse of a distinctive mountain range rushing up to meet him before he passed through it, falling deep into the stone and emerging into a vast spherical chamber in the deepest heart of the mountain. There in the center was the brooding black tablet, and kneeling before it on the cold stone floor was the old elf from Tengan's dream.

A titanic sense of otherworldly delight that was not his own flooded Tengan's mind as the yellow energy triumphantly crashed into the black tablet and vanished.

There was a moment of utter, black silence, and a darkness so complete that Tengan thought his senses had fled him entirely. Then, the strange etchings surrounding the edges of the black tablet began glowing with that same alien yellow light—but the light illuminated nothing. They came alive and writhed across the tablet's smooth face, contorting themselves, shaping themselves into a strange diagram.

Then the elf screamed.

With his scream came a smoky yellow light that poured out of him in liquid ribbons from his eyes, from his ears, from his mouth, the tips of his fingers, the ends of his hair. The elf's tortured howl was the sound of annihilation, it was the sound of the end of all things.

Paralyzed by the horror of it, Tengan could only watch and wait for the end to come.

In the observatory chamber, Tengan's ears began to bleed and tears of despair poured from beneath his glowing eyelids.

The elf's flesh roiled like churning, oily water as a horrifying transmutation began to take place. Tengan could not discern what precisely was happening amidst the screaming and bone snapping and flesh rending; he was helpless to do anything but watch the unholy spectacle unfold. All he knew was that when the transformation was complete, there would be nothing left of the elf, and what remained would not be of this 'verse.

And he knew that, no matter what, he must See.

Suddenly the walls of the vast chamber lit up as powerful magic, long dormant, activated. Ancient silver runes, laid by the Elder Elves, thrummed to life in violent response to the intrusion from Soto-gawa. Painting the darkness in bright, crackling cerulean, the runes discharged their deadly power, lashing and snapping like living things at the transmuting elf, rebelling violently at his existence.

Coils of coruscating blue energy encircled the elf; there was the briefest hint of a struggle between the ancient elven magic and the thing from beyond the barriers of space, time, and sanity; but the eldritch energy faltered, was overwhelmed and, ultimately, failed entirely.

As quickly as they were overcome, the ancient runes sparked back to life and rallied their immense power. But tendrils of yellow light exploded from the elf, reaching out in all directions at once. They poured themselves into the silver runes, smothering them again, changing them!

When the tendrils withdrew, the Elder Elves' ancient runes surrounding the vast stone chamber were gone, each replaced with a miniature replica of the diagram now glowing brightly where it stretched across the once smooth face of the black tablet and Tengan—in an instant of bowel-clenching clarity—knew!

Dear Weavers—the Yellow Sign!

Tengan knew in that moment exactly where he was, understood what was happening, and knew what he had to do. He turned his panicked mind to the one person he knew must—must— be warned. He reached out with his mind, knowing that the one he sought would be close at hand, would never stray far from that place. He found his target immediately, his mind scrabbling at the other's like the desperate fingers of a drowning man.

Keyholder! he flung his telepathic scream across the psychic aether with all the power he could muster, The Yellow Sign!

The consequences were as immediate as they were painful; the elf, no longer resembling anything belonging to the terrestrial spheres, turned its eyeless face in Tengan's direction. An explosion of bright yellow light seared its way through his mind, sending him screaming back into his own body with such vehemence that he was thrown across the observatory chamber where he was dashed against the bare stone wall.

Senseless, he slumped to the floor, a single word upon his quivering lips:

"Keyholder..."