Meridion held the filmstrand up to the light. Satisfied, he draped it over a secondary lamp on the Editor’s instrument panel, and focused it on the wall next to the screen that held the picture of his parents.
In the dim light he could barely make out the image, a small, elderly figure in pale robes woven in the symbology of the ancient Namers, her long hair white as snow, braided and bound simply back in a black ribbon. Her face was lined and scarred, her body bent under the weight of age, though held steady in the grace of a strong will. In the crook of her arms she cradled a white birthing cloth, a garment used to catch a child as it emerged from the womb. Her hands reached aloft, as if in supplication. It was the moment of his birth in the old life.
He avoided looking at the next frames of film fragment that lay across the panel, coiled in a tattered spiral. Within those next few moments of time had been great agony, gruesome death. Though he had never known his mother, upon coming into existence he had still felt her love, even in those last moments of her life, and in the wake of her hideous demise. He had changed Time, and probably her fate, but he still could not bear to witness what had happened to her again.
The reel that held the film of the new history caught Meridion’s eye, resting patiently on its pinion. Idly he took the end and unspooled it, holding it up to the ambient light of the observatory. Unlike the shards of fading Past that were melting before his eyes, this new thread was clean and strong, vivid. He spun it out farther, looking for moments that had been particularly rewarding to witness: the meeting of Emily and Gwydion, the boy she had called Sam, in a green summer meadow; the Three emerging from the Root into the air of a new world they otherwise would never have seen; the moment Achmed took the throne, and the destiny, of the Bolg, as his own; the reunion of his parents; the victory over the demon; the rebuilding of the new world. Yes, he thought, running the smooth, thick film along the edge of his finger, it does worth it indeed.
But what of the Past as it had been? There needed to be a reverence for its loss. The outcome of events in that course of Time that had led ultimately to failure had been disastrous, for certain, but there had been moments of glory, too, heroism and brave acts of selflessness, choices, both wise and foolish, and love. He looked again at the frame of Achmed watching his parents’ wedding and smiled wryly. Certainly there had been love.
An overwhelming impulse seized him. Before he even had time to process the thought his hand darted out and swept the fragment of timefilm from the lamp, gathering it up from the floor with the last remaining scraps of the old life, the first history, the rewritten Past. He laid the disappearing snippets on a glass panel, the bottom half of a slide that rested on the Time Editor, and snatched a bottle of fixative from the whirling prismatic disk hovering in the air beside the machine. Feverishly he doused the shards with the. glimmering potion, preserving them. His eyes blinked rapidly as he pressed them carefully between the glass panel and a cover plate.
He opened a drawer in the Time Editor, lifted the slide he had just created, and slowly slid the panes of glass into the depth of the cabinet, then closed the door softly. He breathed shallowly, trying to regain his calm.
A sense of great dread coupled with relief washed over him. He had no idea what other moments of the rewritten Past he had just rescued; it might be as much a dire action as a good one, but it had been as strong an impulse as he had ever experienced. Since he did not know what lay ahead for him now, he decided he was right to trust the compulsion.
A shadow on the wall caught his eye. He looked up to where the last image had been projected to see shadows of it still there, as if burned into the glass. The outline of the elderly woman’s body was dimmer now, her hands reaching up into diffuse light and gray patches. Meridion put his hot forehead down on the cool surface of the Time Editor and tried to summon the courage to take the next step.
Even though his body was formed only of thought, lore, and pure will, his consciousness unhindered by the limitations of human flesh, Meridion was still capable of feeling the pain of imminent physical loss, the sting of tired hands, the delayed weariness after so much despair. He struggled not to be swept up in the choking fear of the unknown that faced him now.
The events that had brought him into being had been inexorably altered, shredded into scraps of amber film, gone now except for the few random fragments he had rescued along with the record of his birth. The steps he had taken in manipulating Time had produced the result he had prayed for, it seemed. The world beneath him was turning, sailing slowly through the ether, blue and whole and covered with swirling currents of air that danced across its surface, heedless that there had ever been any destruction looming. His meddling in the Past had worked. The disaster he had sought to avert had been averted.
At the same time he knew that the events his intervention had put into place had disrupted his own story, had negated the circumstances under which he had been conceived. He did not know if the new path Time was now taking would lead to his own rebirth somewhere in it.
Or not.
Contemplation, both now and before he undertook to alter the Past, had led him to believe against it. He had been brought to life, conceived as a concept, not really as a child, by two scarred individuals, one aged, one made old beyond his years by circumstance, who gave of their lives, their lore, to fulfill a prophecy different from any that now existed in the rewritten history. At least the first part was different; Meridion had been surprised to see Man-wyn utter some of the same prophecy in the new history, in Time as it was now. In the old history it had foretold his birth:
I see an unnatural child born of an unnatural act. Rhapsody, you should beware of childbirth: the mother shall die, but the child shall live.
Why did the Seer utter it again, in the rewritten history? he wondered, cradling his head in his hands. Would the magical sacrifice that Rhapsody, the elderly Liringlas Namer, and Gwydion of Manosse, a broken man dead in the eyes of the world, had undertaken to bring him into the world still be necessary in the Future? With the F’dor destroyed and the war averted, it hardly seemed so. And yet now that the Past had been erased and re-formed, the Future was unfathomable.
Instead of meeting as they had, in the new world, solely for the purpose of forming him to fulfill the warning of a prophecy, his parents had instead met in their mutual youth, had fallen in love and joined their souls of their own free will. Everything they had endured had brought them together again; it seemed little enough to hope for, that they might eventually bring him into existence by the mere happenstance that every other living soul comes out of. Meridion knew that this was merely wishful thinking, however. Just bringing lives together did not guarantee how they would be put to use. It was an observation he had made many times while watching the Past unspool itself as it was being altered. Time was fragile, and subject to change.
It’s your destiny.
Hogwash. We make our own destiny.
Yes, Meridion thought, bitterly amused. Yes, yes, we do.
For now his life hung, suspended in Time, within the glass globe of his observatory, powered by the ethereal fire of Seren, the star for which his mother’s homeland had been named. When the Time Editor shut down, the film of Time would begin to run again, endless and uninterrupted. And he would then come to his ending, winking out like a candleflame.