Jiann pulled the conjoined boats smoothly up to to the shore about a half-mile south of Rankin Inlet -- far enough away that they wouldn't be disturbed, but close enough that the boats would be discovered eventually -- and the three of them disembarked and trekked a few dozen yards inland. Orton fumbled through the process of building a small fire, his hands and arms trembling with exhaustion, while Enna looked on with a worried expression. "Jeez, you look like you've been through the wringer. Are you sure you don't want to rest first?"

"I've wasted too much time," sighed Orton, giving up and igniting the fire with a quick spell. "Besides, this is actually a good state for me to be in for this kind of a ritual; the more empty I am of power, the less the intrinsic nature of the fruit's quintessence will clash with my own."

"Except for th' part where you'll be too zonked-out to interpret it," grumbled Jiann, ambling up and sitting on a fallen log. "We only get one shot at this, Orton. Ain't like we can go and ask Jehovah for a second seed if'n we don't use this one rightly."

"And that's another thing," chimed in Enna. "Isn't this, like, a holy relic and artifact that half the religious world would kill for? Do we really have the right to be using it?"

"First of all," responded Orton wearily, "if we don't do this, nobody's going to be around to thank us because everyone will die when Gentry destroys the planet. And secondly, we'll only be using the seed in this worldline; anyone else who goes looking for it will probably be in a totally different reality and thus find it right where they expect to."

Enna looked puzzled. "But... what if we meet those people later? Won't it be confusing if we both have the same story?"

"I like how you think it's not confusing now," muttered Orton, "but even discounting the fact that we'd be very unlikely to meet anyone from a different worldline at all by definition, I'm pretty sure that unless it comes up in conversation, neither of us will know. I don't even know if worldlines can converge, and it's probably pretty academic anyhow."

Jiann blinked. "So yer sayin' that if we need another seed o' th' fruit, we can get it from another version o' ourselves?"

"Not us, exactly. But another group of magi, maybe." Orton tiredly dragged his limbs into a lotus position, then held out his hand. "Anyway, I'm ready. Let's get this over with."

Jiann reluctantly brought out the seed, holding it carefully over Orton's upturned palm. "You really, really sure? You ain't exactly in top form right now."

"I know," mumbled Orton. "But the more loopy I am, the less rigid my mind will be at interpreting whatever happens. You both remember how tripped-out you have to be for your first magical experience." Enna and Jiann glanced at each other, then nodded ruefully. With great solemnity, Jiann deposited the seed in Orton's hand.

Orton beheld it, calmly; it seemed so small as to be insignificant, a tiny black dot on the white expanse of his calloused palm. "What's going to happen next will probably look extremely weird to both of you, but stay calm. I have totally done this before."

"You've eaten the seed of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil before? In another timeline?" Enna queried.

"Oh no, that part is foolhardy and insane. But I've eaten mystical subtances and semiophagically divined their essences before, which is more than either of you have done." Orton sighed. "So here goes nothin'."

With a single motion, he jerked his palm towards his mouth, catapulting the seed onto his tongue and swallowing it before his nerve could fail him. As it slid down his gullet, he arranged his hands palm-up on his thighs, controlled his breathing, and began attuning himself to his own essence to watch for changes in his spiritual totality.

At first, everything seemed normal, but he knew from his experiences in Tibet that the changes would begun slowly and subtly. His sight beyond sight -- already the keenest and most-practiced of his extrasensory faculties -- was the first to notice the change, being attuned as it was to an entire spectrum of qualia very much at right angles to typical sensory input. He perceived it at first as a gentle shift in his personal etheric vibrations -- not so much a change or alteration, but rather an attunement, a sort of vague alignment with --

Abruptly, his mind exploded.

Wingbeats air currents at two point eight one five degrees delta shift from norm sedimentary rock true love iron is the foundation of industry Pantone T925–5–5 over polycarbonate FT-428 divided by two to the fourth times four is 107 plus one is 108 gems beads sins the fall of man is inversely proportional to the rate of expansion within a controlled system a young boy in Kazakhstan is the direct male-line descendant of Lucius Artorius Castus in the fire of our discontent and we shall be molded within its crucible a bright wind a feather a silence containing all words that will ever be written --

He could see everything, understand everything. A small, very distant part of his mind noted with interest that the seed must have contained the original building blocks for the entire universe -- every natural law, philosophical underpinning, and emergent convergence, as well as an eternal and immutable link to the spiritual wavelength upon which everything resonated -- but the rest of him was howling, scalded beneath the endless white-hot cataract of information erupting into and through him. He had scant moments before his consciousness frayed, but he had prepared for this; he just needed to marshal his thoughts, erect a controlling structure before --

Oh, it's way too late for that, Denny boy.

Before he could react, a noumenal grasp seized his essential consciousness and plunged it firmly back into the stream of incandescent divine data, exactly like a cruel hand holding his head underwater. He gasped, floundered; fought mightily to retain his awareness and identity. But his will, already deeply eroded by the preceding month of grinding and arduous ordeals, had very little to draw upon, expertly isolated as it was from the volcanic eruption of power devastating the rest of his psyche. Stripped and deprived of all the other components of his mind, the tiny fragment of his most fundamental self-concept could only watch, stunned, as everything went so very, very wrong.

Gentry shuffled through the papers on his desk aimlessly, then gave in to temptation and erected a servitor process to do his work for him; after all, there wasn't much point in being the godlike master of an infinite army of demons if one didn't put them to use. As the low-level spiritual construct flicked through the pages and digested their data, a picture of fully-formed information bloomed in his mind like a prize-winning rhododendron; so, that was the current obstacle. As if protests had ever solved anything, he thought drily; he would never understand this country's obsession with them.

He directed the servitor to send a memo to get things moving in the right direction again; he was already nearly six months ahead of schedule, but he hadn't gotten where he was by resting on his laurels. For the streets of the city to give form to the great glyph Oghredu, the sign of the blackest beast and burning wheel upon which the engines of change would turn, everything had to be exact. Magic of this sort, as Gentry was possibly more aware than any other person in the universe, had no tolerance for error whatsoever. Satisfied that everything was back on track, he rotated smoothly in his chair towards his second monitor and unpaused his media stream; and now, he thought with exquisite pleasure and anticipation, the secrets of baking a proper Jaffa Cake shall also be mine.

Enna groaned, awakening slowly; every part of her hurt as though she'd been flung repeatedly against a rough, rocky surface artistically adorned with jabbing and cutting surfaces for the most bespoke injurious experience possible. Nearby, she could hear Jiann stirring, but everything seemed blurry and out of focus. Wasn't it supposed to be dawn? She remembered Orton meditating, eating the seed, and then... and then what? There had been some kind of light...

As her vision cleared, she rose up on all fours, blinking furiously; her mind struggled to make sense out of what she was seeing. Abruptly, an ice-cold hand wrapped around her upper arm, lifting her gently; she staggered, holding onto Jiann for support. "What... where...?"

The area around them was a vast nightmare realm; rivers of hot crimson blood surged through forests bedecked with dangling corpses in various states of decay. Every rock was in the shape of a skull; every leaf, the form of a grasping hand. Far above, barely visible through the clutching branches and protruding plum-colored tongues of gibbeted victims, a black sun burned with hateful tenebrescence in a sky the color of bruised flesh.

"I got answers to both them questions," the revenant began sullenly, "but you ain't gonna like 'em."