The first memories are of a cold, hard place, so small he could not stretch his feet out fully. The ceiling was close enough that he could reach it overhead with his elbow still resting on the surface beside him. The middle of if was a small padded pallet, but his body barely fit on top of it and his limbs spilled over onto the metal and he could sleep only fitfully if at all. Wires secured him in place and streamed icy acid into his body. He screamed constantly and no one could hear him. His own screams reverberated in his ears, the sound trapped in the prison with him.
As he lay there, it was the only thing he knew, but some instinct deep within him sought escape. Even without knowing or believing there was anything outside this torment he wanted to get away from it. He cried at the pain that coursed through him and the desire to escape consumed him.
He slipped through the walls and wires that held him without knowing how he did it and it nearly destroyed him. They were coming after him. He could sense their movements like ripples over a pond and he threw himself into the inferno. He hung in a swirling maelstrom bordering on oblivion. He almost lost himself.
Something held him together, some strength of spirit or character, and he managed to slip out of it and into a stable reality where he lay, in darkness, surrounded by sounds so unfamiliar he could only wait and listen. He tried not to breathe, just wanting to soak in as much of the outside noise as was possible.
It was here that she found him, laying in the dirt in the forest. She was from a long line of familiars, a chain of generations stretching back to the time before animals could bondspeak to magicians and record history, but she was young yet. She had not yet experienced her first Choosing.
She sensed in him a power like magic, but different, and she was not afraid because her kind never held fear around magic. Mages could be the cruelest and most terrible people in the world. but familiars would never fear them. Her clan in particular was a proud one.
When she nuzzled and licked him in friendly comfort he found something wholly unexpected, that he was not alone in the universe. He did not understand it, but he was grateful, and this time when he cried his reasons were not pain but relief.
It did not last. Something stirred in the forest, something from the dark and the deep. The forest grew silent until he could just hear its breaths, huge and rasping, approaching them.
She knew what it was: a nightstalker, rare and fearsome, attracted by the scent of human child. Her own trail was hidden from detection, but she could not obscure the child. What he could hear, she heard a thousand times better, and her eyes picked out the hulking form in the darkness. A growl rose in her small belly.
The nightstalker attacked and she drew on her instinct and charged towards it. Long ago, in the time Before, her kind had been the People's hunters. Though small, they possessed a quickness in their fury that was unmatched by any other creature. After the Change they had retained this instinct, and she knew just where to leap and bite. She clenched her jaw with all her might on the nightstalker's wiry hide, ignoring the pain as it clawed at her, ignoring the thickly dirty taste of the nightstalker's horrid skin and coarse fur. Not this night, not this child. She bit down on the nightstalker's neck and did not let go.
The nightstalker threw her at last with a mighty shake of its head, but the damage was done. Its breaths were bloody and ragged. Dark blood dripped down its chest, glinting in the moonlight. The monster was no less dangerous in this state. The hulking mass of its forebody lurched forward toward the child as she picked herself up, scrabbling in the dirt, her back paw useless and broken. She bayed and howled to her people, crying out the alarm, sending the message: Here! Nightstalker!
The nightstalker lurched towards the child, but she had strength enough to put herself between it and the boy once more. She draped herself across the child, growling in warning even as her tail wagged in reassurance across the boy's arm. She would protect him. Even if she died doing it.
The nightstalker would simply kill them both. With the howls of her people in the distance, it slunk towards them growling and spitting, terrible claws digging into the dirt with each shuddering step. The nightstalker was angry. It would not quickly send them to their ends.
Underneath her, the boy was warm but terrified. He was so small, but painfully aware of his surroundings, cognizant of what was happening, and in his heart he wished for one thing and one thing only. To save this brave creature that defended him. The desire rose up in him as surely as had the desire to escape his cold metallic cage. He could feel it in the deep of his chest, pulling and pushing, calling to everything that she was and pulling her to him.
At once she was filled with such energy and strength, empowered with the might of what could have been a thousand suns. Her mouth opened and her roar shattered the darkness, a blast of such energy it knocked the nightstalker from its feet and crushed it into the ground as surely as it pulled from her most every fiber of her being. She threw everything she had into the assault, willing to spend herself completely. When it was done she staggered, warm belly pressing against the child, exhaustion and pain encircling her and pulling her into the realm of unconsciousness. The nightstalker would soon be dead from its wounds, and it could trouble them no more, crushed into the roots of the trees that surrounded them. Her people would later find it and marvel at whatever force had done this to the nightstalker, reckoning it powerful indeed.0
The child felt something circling around and inside him, pulling him and his protector into the maelstrom. He had done too much, disrupting something. Now he and his defender were being forced Out and into the untempered chaos.
They fell. How long and how far, neither knew. The child gripped the fur of his protector tightly, else she would have surely been lost, and wailed in terror. The noise was lost and swept away into the maelstrom, fractured into a thousand different things which were not sound.
And then, She caught them. They were one moment in the chaos and the next in soft cloth-bound arms, cradled. Warm fingers felt their wounds and healed them with a touch, waves of silken cloth buffeted them as if on a cushion of air, and the child's world was filled with a soothing light that lulled him calm again. A voice spoke into his ear, "You're safe now." His benefactor had no face, no form, but she was very beautiful in her undefined radiance. With her hands that were not truly hands, she passed him and his still-slumbering defender to a girl who embodied the same qualities in a much lesser shape, but soon the child found he could not remember where the girl began and his original benefactor ended. It was as if she had transitioned seamlessly from one thing and the other, yet both were separate.
"Sleep now, I've got you," she murmured, curling up next to him on the quilted bedspread. "I will always catch you. I promise. No matter what, I'll catch you."
He did sleep, but only slightly, for when he closed his eyes he was again in the cold and frightening place among the metal instruments and wires, and again lost in the swirling chaos, and again in the forest in the dark with the nightstalker. For as long as he would live he would close his eyes and see these things, and worse, and never did he sleep wholly.
The encounter with the nightstalker had changed him and imbued his furred defender with some part of himself, so that when one thought the other felt it, and they had no barrier of misunderstanding. His familiar knew perfectly what it was: that without standing for ceremony, she had been chosen as this magechild's companion for as long as she would walk the earth, and she accepted it with joy and excitement. Her old life was lost, but she had found her purpose. She had found her soulmate.
He had a mark on his chest, III, so the girl named him Third, and the familiar-companion who never left him, Constant. Strangely she had set upon the name that best described how Third himself addressed Constant, but when he mindspoke her name he used a feeling and not a word.
The others called her Em, but it was some time before he could say it, or his own name, or the name of his companion. He gained an understanding of their language long before he began to speak it. He had something of his own he used as a language, but only Constant could understand it, and that was because of their bond and not a linguistic commonality.
It was only a few short weeks that they lived in the house in Virginia. Third had a sense that they were preparing for a journey. Em took him and Constant and two others, a man that gave Third shivers and a small girl so shy she scarcely ever stood where Third could see her. The man's name was Doug, the little girl's, Shizue. They set out from the house one day and Third had the distinct feeling of slipping through reality, but there was no chaos. They came to a dusky jungle of a forest, quiet and serene, and it reminded Third of the peace he had found in the forest before he and Constant had been accosted by the nightstalker. It was called World Zero.
Weeks passed. He learned to walk and talk in simple baby sentences, to play and laugh, and even to make friends with shy Shizue. They would play in the little clearing in front of the hut where they all slept, creating stories with little wood figures that Doug carved. The jungle around them provided everything they needed. Food, cloth, and safety, for there were never any predators or even insects to annoy them. The weeks turned into months, and things were wonderful.
Until it happened, something so terrible it ripped apart their little jungle world and destroyed the peaceful life they had made for themselves. The chaos slipped in at the cracks of reality, trying to come for Third.
That was when Third learned the truth of the matter, that their little planet of always-dusky jungle was a part of his benefactor, and she could no more ward off the chaos than he could. She could only protect him from its destructiveness by sacrificing herself.
They fled. Third, Constant, Doug, and Shizue, leaving Em behind to be consumed by the chaotic darkness. Third had only the last words she had given him, another promise: "I will always be with you." She kissed him and died to save him.
There was one other message she gave to Third and Constant. "When you arrive in the Fleet, say these words to the first person you meet there: 'Code Omega.'" They fled the bountiful jungle of World Zero to this other place, this Fleet, and Third delivered Em's message to the three strangers that came to greet him. One of those strangers was Wilbur.
Third and Constant had nowhere to go. Doug did not welcome them, blaming Third for Em's death, and Em, the person who had always loved them and given them a home, was gone.
Wilbur was a temporal comptroller, an accountant who controlled relative time through realities and made sure that throughout these various realities, time was balanced. He was also Em's friend, and invited Third and Constant into his home.
For several summer days, Wilbur and his wife Mellie gave Third and Constant a home at Horseshoe Lake, North Carolina. It could never replace Em and World Zero, but Third and Constant were simply glad to be alive and still together. They accepted Wilbur's home as their own.
Too soon again it was gone, and Third finally began to learn the full picture of what was going on around him.
It was a war. On the one side, Em, Doug, and Wilbur, and countless others Third did not know. On the other, the very people who had made Third what he was with their experiments. The Deity Command. They were cruel and terrible and against the Command's heartlessness, Em and the others had formed a coalition.
Because Third was a product of Deity Command's grandest experiment, not everyone in the coalition agreed about what to do with him. Wilbur told Third of a woman, dark and terrible, who wanted to control Third's power for herself. She had no true name, but she was known as the Supreme Commander, and in some reality along the way she had been given the name Lady Admiral EmileAmai Piett. She was the Void, and her path was the path of destruction. Now that Em was gone, the Commander sought to control Third and his untapped powers, to use the great weapon of the enemy against them.
But for every person who followed the Commander, there was someone who followed Em, who wanted to keep Third and Constant safe, and beginning with Wilbur, they formed a chain to pull him and Constant to safety.
First there was Doctor M, the strange, diminutive little scientist who secreted them away right from under the Commander's nose as she stood on the deck of Wilbur's house. He took Third and Constant to meet Adomital, the Security Director, who lived in secret places between the walls of the Fleet, watching everyone and everything. From Adomital Third and Constant learned the meanings of the Three Paths.
The Path of White, Light and Creation. The Path of Grey, Time and Order. The Path of Black, Void and Destruction. Three philosophies that could not have been more different from each other, yet to fight Deity Command they united, even if the three paths could not agree.
From Adomital Third also learned that there was a chance Em could return, could live again, but only if the Grey and White Pathers could keep Third out of the Supreme Commander's hands until the upcoming Conference. When Em had told Third she would be with him always, she had meant it, and there was a piece of her inside him just as there was a piece of Third inside Constant. It bound Third and Em together, so if Third was lost to the Commander's machinations, so too would Em be.
