Chapter 11, The Way the Gods See It

The Year of Wrath 1231, Season of Harvest D.65 Odeza

     "You wanted to see me, Enlightened?"

     "Ah Acolyte Jesse, yes.” The guild leader had removed his spectacles as he heard the door open. “We believe due to your rapid ability to understand the teachings we have given you, that you should speak to someone who will accelerate you even more." The Enlightened of the Guild told me. He was sitting behind his desk writing out a letter for something. He got up and strode over to one of the many carved bookcases in the room.

     The smell of cedar wood and mahogany filled the office. The richly lacquered desk top reflected my nervous face back at me. I stood in an awkward silence as the guild leader flipped through a few pages and wrote something down. I was waiting to be allowed to speak, at least until my nervousness got to me.

     "Uh, very well. Do I have to meet them anywhere? Now really isn't a good moment for me Sir. I was in the middle of one of the lessons by Heightened George." I was anxious, if I needed to travel this was going to need a little planning on my behalf. I was already running through a list of preparations and who I would need to speak to for the proper portal settings.

     "Oh, this wasn't really a choice of yours. The God's eyes are quite, how do I say it?” He scratched his brow, and sighed heavily as he drew his fingers together in an exasperated expression. “Not impatient, but very... impulsive." He stated rather flatly.

     "The the the the God's eyes?” I stammered out, certainly not helping my nerves. “Sir, I'm not sure, could I have more time to prepare?" I was beginning to sweat now.

     He snapped his book shut and turned to me. He had a gentle smile on his face. "Acolyte, you are ready now as I see it." He snapped his fingers and a distortion in the air appeared. A slightly green ringed circle, the entire inside of the portal shifting endlessly from dark silver to a starry night sky. "Odeza, Mistress. The man you wished to see is here."

     A voice spoke back, though it was strange and lilting. It sounded as if several people were talking. "I know, I have spoken to him many times before. If you please." An immediate sensation of being pulled inward filled my chest as a teleport was cast on me without warning.

     The world in front of me shifted violently. I was no longer in the Guild masters office. I was on an endless field of soft white sand. The night sky above my head was pitch black, and filled with stars. The Azulian Nebula drifted lazily in the sky, its rich green and amber light tinting the sand.

     The air felt thin here, I found it hard to breeze a bit. I felt lighter, almost weightless. I took a step forward and the sand under my feet drifted upward in slow motion. Looking around I was a woman in the gold hemmed robes of the God's eye. Though something was off about her though. For one despite being the one who teleported me a seemingly vast distance, her face was calm and her eyes were closed. An eerie serenity about her. No, that wasn’t the unnerving part, for one she was floating.

     She also had massive wings similar to a butterfly. They glowed iridescent in a thousand shades of fire, and water. She was sitting in the air, legs crossed and she appeared to be meditating. Her face to the sky, I followed her gaze and saw the sun cresting past a massive blue orb. I watched and studied it further, I could see landmasses, and a massive continent. I watched as thunderstorms rose and fell, great cloud systems flowing across the planet's sky. Then I suddenly realized I was looking down at my planet. I rasped out "Are we on the moon?"

     She suddenly appeared right in front of me and grabbed my hand. Her eyes were a bright emerald green. She was slender in figure, though her grip belied a great strength. Her robes floated out away from her, and I realized I was floating with her. "My my my, what a ponderous soul you have here. In this place, in this time, in this branch. Well I suppose time and place as to you anyway."

     She vanished away from me, I saw her again a few hundred feet away from me sitting on a small hill of the white sand. "You simply must realize that the Great Tree is a vast and immense thing. The tightly coiled branches are an endless possibility." Her voice was distant, as if I was hearing her through water. Though somehow quite distinct, and close to me despite the thin air and the distance she had put between me and her.

     "Let us begin again Jesse. I have spoken with you a thousand times in a thousand different branches. We have done this before, but this entity before me has yet to awaken. Let's open your eyes, wake you from your endless dream." She was suddenly behind me with her arms around my waist.

     "What are you?" I asked her, I was conflicted. She was terrifying with her ability to appear and disappear at will. I knew full well that the God’s Eyes could teleport at will, I just expected some kind of delay. There was also the issue that she had effortlessly teleported my many thousands of miles off the planet. She should have terrified me, though… I couldn’t quite explain it, she wasn’t threatening, her smile was charming and she filled me with a strange calm. “It has to be the thin air, I’m delusional right now!” I thought to myself.

     "No, you are not delusional, Darling.” I fell back, with a shock, how did she know I was thinking that? “Hmm, a question I will not answer. Irrelevant to the task at hand." She purred in my ear. There was suddenly a soft melody playing through the thin air. A melancholy tune, but also rhythmic and lively.

     "My dearest mothers of old would have loved this melody. I prefer to work with some music, it soothes the nerves, No?" She was in front of me again. Her massive wings took up most of my vision. So that all I could see was her grinning face and her wings.

     I took a step back from her, but she only stepped forward. "No no no, you mustn't be afraid, child. You must let go of the inner self, the outer self, the selves yet to be seen."

     "I'm not a child Mistress. I am thirty years old." I huffed back out at her, I wanted to be mad. She was pushy, irreverent, and whole heartily inappropriate with her antics. But, I sighed to myself inwardly, I liked this. 

     She cocked her head to the side, and smiled at me with a mischievous grin. "Age, yes. In the grand scheme of it, you are young, you are old, you were only just born, you have died many years ago. You have always existed, yet never have." She clasped the side of her face with her hand and shook her head at me. She suddenly didn't have eyes anymore.

     I fell back again, suddenly terrified again. Only this time the air around me felt far more hostile. "The Great Tree, or as you would call it anyway. It has always existed, yet branches never have. A flowing construct of power, an ever present, absolute. A scream in the dark that had shattered the quiet. The rhythms of sound and blood feeding the tree. Thus yet the tree had always been, only now full and unending.”

     I started speaking slowly, trying to understand to a degree. "The Great Tree, the entity as we call it, the folded planes of existence that allow us to unfold, and pierce reality to open our portals. We move the folds of the planes closer together to make distance irrelevant." The air immediately lost its hostility. Though my forehead still glistened with sweat. 

     "Well, yes and no. Reality, a funny term when one thinks about it, once one has seen. Reality is a matter of perspective, no?" She asked me. Appearing right in front of me again, her hands clasping mine. I was starting to get used to that juxtaposition, an extreme visual disruption paired with a tactile sensation.

     “Does she do this on purpose?” I thought. She only smiled sweetly at me. 

     "Reality is a matter of perspective. What do you mean?, I thought that reality was the fold, our existence in it."

     She was behind me again, she was upside down, her long green hair hanging below her and also slightly obscuring my vision as she had teleported just enough to let it hang over my eyes. "The Great Tree is possibility made manifest. All possibilities have always existed, all outcomes, all interchangeable variables. All exist and don't exist. You have always existed, yet in some you never have."

     "I don't understand Mistress." I said as I moved her hair out of my eyes.

     "You will. Here", my vision blurred and we were no longer on the white sand plane anymore. We were looking at an endless mass of black branches in an immense void. The branches all connected back to a thin sliver from a singular point. She had pointed and drew us nearer to one of the branches just before a fork in it. I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

     "See here" She traced her slender finger across the branch and pulled a thread-like piece from it. A portal had clapped into existence next to us. Turning my head I saw myself looking back at me, both God's eyes smiled at each other, spoke different words. "Yet here we are, looking at the here and now" 

     "Yet here we are not, as we have made a new branch to the Great Tree."

     "One where you know" 

     "And one where you do not. That YOU knows, know, and so do you!"

     My head hurt from trying to follow that. My confusion was evident on my face, I understood that there were two of this woman talking at once and finishing the sentences, but the me in that place and time looked just as confused as the me in the here and now, was. 

     We snapped back to the surface of the moon again. My mind was beginning to reel. "So, you are telling me, the Great Tree is everything. All possibilities, all possibilities are reality. It only depends on whether or not the self of me, in this branch, this fold, can see that all outcomes are true."

     She grabbed my hands and pulled me in the air again, and we slowly began spinning. She wrapped my arm around her waist and placed my hand at the small of her back. I felt the muscles work as apparently her wings were actually attached to her and not just some illusion. "You are beginning to see the barest tip of the truth Accepted."

     She was speaking as if several dozen versions of herself were talking at once. "The truth you must see if these parallels, these selves of what we see exist. Portals are not just moving things from one place to another. They are capable of interacting with the other branches fully. For the punctures in the fold we make are all part of the same tree. So that being said, why don't we invite a few more to experience this?"

     She snapped her fingers and six other Odeza's and Jesse's appeared on the lunar surface with us. They were all dancing in that soft spin we were doing as well. The music in the thin air was now a rhythmic driving beat. "To experience the full depth of what you are capable of, you simply must realize that these people around us,” She took hand and held it off to the side. "Are all you, are all me. In an endless search to be found."

     The other God's Eyes around me all started speaking. "Fore we are all real, we are all here from our own branches. The planes of reality that you understand are all the same plane, just folded many many times in an endless fractal nature." She snapped my focus back to her, and she purred at me again.

     "This Great Tree, endless parallels, any reality to puncture with our portals. Time has no consequence, reality has no consequence. For when you pull on the Great Tree to access something from afar, you seek to pull from a different branch where that thing was already within reach."

     "So what you are saying is that not only can we pull from our reality, but all that has ever existed?" I asked her.

     She squealed with delight. "Yes! You are finally beginning to awaken from your sleepless dream of the godhead! But, also no. The gods are not happy with playing with their creation, so you must be careful my love." She reached out to one of the other Odeza's and the tips of their fingers touched, and she disintegrated away.

     The look of horror in my eyes must have given me away. "Care not for the outcome, she always knew this was the end. She was glad to teach you. One of great potential. Only remember that the Great Tree started from a single event, a terrible fate met upon my oh mothers of old." She snapped her fingers and a few other portals opened.

     I saw myself in the same place as her. Meditating in the same way she did, in the same God's Eye's robes. Another where I was working a field back on my family's farm. Yet another where I was toiling away in one of the archives. All with silver threads tied to them, back to the great tree in the expanse of the void.

     “Now hold on, Mistress. What do you mean a tragic event of your mothers of old? What event?” She only shook her head and her mouth disappeared.

     "So these are all me, just, not the me experiencing this. Only that they are real, but I am as well. This is what you mean but all possibilities are only but a part of the tree." I continued on, expecting her lips to reappear to answer. 

     "Yes!" She hugged me tightly. "To see that the Great Tree is only but the whole is the start of it! That the possibilities you can see, are all real, have always been real. Only that the paths we choose are part of the tree that already exists. The tree expands on endlessly to account for all possibilities. Many many parallel versions of yourself, myself, of all selves. Of all natures made manifest, of all variations of the world in which we live, exist."

     She let go of my hands, and untwined herself from me. I hadn't even realized she was so close to me. I think I was beginning to understand more of the potential. "How do I open portals to different branches of the tree Odeza?" I asked her, reflexively reaching for her hand again.

     "In due time" Her voice was distant again, indistinct. "For now, you have realized that our magic is beyond space and time. It exists separately from the world. It allows you to reach across vast distances, distances in immensity, distances spanning various universes. To reach across time and space to ask yourself questions that you already have answers to." She sweetly smiled at me, and her eyes had reappeared. Though they were immense, they stayed within her body. They seemed to expand in the endless void so that they were the only thing that I could see. They seemed like they left her face in great waves of green fire. Matching the color her eyes had been before. 

     "So what is this? What are you? What is this place? What have you learned to be able to interact with the branches like this." I asked her.

     "An apotheosis of sorts. Not quite ascending to godhood, not quite transcendence. Only a look into the truth, only a brief glimpse of what you need to, to begin to understand the creation. The abstract made clear. The point at which the gods began their work. A sudden realization of the truth to our magic, the tragedy that befell to allow this to work."

     "Where are the gods? Why can I not see them here inside the branches of the tree?"

     "Oh they are enigmatic and reclusive. Believe me, I see them, they see me here, with you. They see me here with all versions of you. They live outside the branches, though have always been a part of it since the beginning of the Great Tree’s roots. They seem unreachable, though are well within reach. I only need to find out how." She pondered to herself, touching the tips of her fingers to her lips. The air around her shimmered and fractured. Reformed and she was whole again.

     "Well, that wasn't the solution." She looked back at me, and pointed. "You need to wake up Jesse. You need to return and work further, to join me in my search. To join us all in our search of the truths."

I was back in the Enlightened's office again. I collapsed on all fours gasping for air. I was drenched in sweat, dripping from my face onto the hardwood floor. My back ached and I was tired to my bones. Felt it in my soul. Though my mind was clear, I understood more of what I could do. What we could all do, the great potential in this magic.

     "Welcome back Enlightened Jesse. It would seem that Odeza was more thorough with you than most she asks for." He breathed out a puff of thick leathery smoke from his pipe.

     His words slowly sunk in as my hands and knees finally gave out. I only laid there for what felt like a few moments. I slowly raised my head to look at him "Enlightened, you mean..." I trailed off. He only nodded his head.

     "You have gained a deep understanding of Wayfare magic she revealed to you, what very few have ever been able to see. Very few have been able to comprehend. I have yet to see the tree as such. You will be given more training to utilize what you have learned. Though as I see it, you need some rest." Another puff of the smoke.

     "Yes… rest." The God's Eye's face swam in my memory. I had to. I must. "Just one more thing Enlightened, Sir." I rasped out, hearing how tired my own voice was.

     "You do not have to call me Sir anymore. But, what is it?" He peered curiously down at me.

     "Does she always flirt with everyone like that? What is she? Why did she have wings?" I said breathlessly, the effort just to speak as I lay on the ground was exhausting.

     He laughed "That's a first, never have I been asked that. I do not know the answers to any of those. Though the wings are a new addition. Could you describe them more?" He said as he lit the pipe again with a small flame on his finger.

     My eyes were heavy, and they shut on their own. "No, I really don't think I could." 

     The last thing I remember is waking up in my bed at the Guild, having no memory of how I got there.