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Sean, In A Letter

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Haley, I’m writing this to you as I sit in Wonderland, next to Cecilia. She’s got a whole company of card soldiers out here jumping at her whim, she’s quite the drill sergeant. I wish you could see it.

Things got a little weird there, for a bit. I think I’m actually dead. I feel awfully spry for a dead guy, but that’s this new reality we inhabit for you. From my perspective it’s been a lifetime since I, as Sean, got killed by Flagg. I was reborn as Sheriff, lived my whole life on his world, then came back and merged with Sean again, dying in the exact same way. Now I’m here with the memories of both. In relative time it’s been maybe 10 minutes since I last spoke to you as Sean. In absolute time, by my line, it’s been a hundred and fifty years. I guess that’s why I’m writing to you- it’s just now sinking in that we probably won’t be spending a lot of time together, in the near future. I’m feeling a bit melancholy about that.

Do you remember that time when my company bought that little business down south, and I had to go down there for a week at a time to integrate them into our software environment? I think those weeks were the longest we were apart in almost ten years. I wasn’t used to being entirely alone. It was like I was missing the other half of my brain. Now I’m still firing these thoughts out, but they aren’t being rearranged and sent back, and I don’t know what to do about that. I guess what I’m saying is, I miss you already.

So. Let’s make this a useful letter, instead of a mopey one. Let me summarize the things we know about our universe in our favorite format of all, the hand-written rambling paragraph.

The worlds we’ve encountered are composed of stories. As far as we know, all of them. It seems like every story has a narrator to give it shape. The powers of the narrator are unclear- even their causality is unclear, in the case of narrators who exist inside the scope of their own tale. We know a couple of things based on our own situation- there can be more than one narrator for a story, for example, but only one at a time. We don’t know what happens at the end of a story, or what happens with multiple interpretations of events or retellings. If a second author extends the original timeline, does that mean it is canon with the original story? Oh god, does that mean the Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson Dune novels are canon? Say it isn’t so!

Ahem. We know that stories can interact, with some clashes over priority. It’s unclear if the interaction requires a narrator in-universe to anchor each story, or if that is just how it played out for us. Perhaps one person could narrate multiple worlds together, if they were aware of what they were doing. Anyway, the magical and physical systems within these stories seem to cross over poorly or not at all. On some level the baseline assumptions seem to interact- anything that works in our conventional understanding of physics seems like it will work with most of the other stories. But anything more advanced, anything specific to a story, seems like it hits limitations when it tries to cross those boundaries.

Magical results, summoned items and the like, tend to work just fine. So you can’t mind control someone with out-universe magic (for long, anyway), but you can summon a bat and hit them. Which suggests that perhaps it’s only the underlying realities of the magics themselves that are incompatible. Are there compatible magical systems out there? What about essentially-magic science fiction technology?

Most interesting of all to me is that the characters of the story do not appear beholden to the narrator, in the moment. What’s the interplay there? It’s weird to me that Aslan’s narrator, whoever it turns out to be, would describe him going as wildly off the rails as he did. But we haven’t witnessed anybody actively narrating, yet. Maybe the default is past-tense and most of them don’t realize they can change things, if they narrate in the present? What happens if narrator and character disagree on some fundamental level?

Or maybe I’m wrong in my assumption. I’ve never told a long and complicated story before. Maybe no author really has full control over their characters, and Aslan being far more bloodthirsty than he should have been was just how he was always going to be, once the door opened. Was CS Lewis viewing the events of Narnia with far more rose-colored glasses? I like that interpretation, because it means I was never really in control of you, in whole or in part, instead just taking my turn relating the events of our story.

I have so many questions. What about the 6-billion background characters to our story? Are they really people? They always felt like real people to us. But is there something to distinguish protagonists from everyone else? Or is everyone living out their own story, to greater or lesser degrees, and the existence of any one dominant narrative just another trick of camera perspective? I asked Cecilia and she threw her megaphone at me and told me she’s not an NPC. Fat lot of help there. I think we have to go on assuming that we’re more like superheroes- gifted in some way, but not the only people in reality that even matter. To do otherwise, to think of people as background material, would be drift into stories that disturb me too much to contemplate.

Then there’s this barrier. What I’m learning out here is that it’s very unusual for stories to stay separate, to not interact. Our universe seems to be practically unique in that respect. Stories don’t cross over into each other every day, but Cecilia says from what she’s heard it’s not at all uncommon for them to blend at the edges, in the rest of the multiverse. For a person to walk offstage in one story-verse and enter somewhere else. Makes me wonder how many copies of earth there are, nearly identical but for one person having some crazy adventure. I wonder if there’s some earth out there that’s exactly like ours in every way, except that in some corner of it Hogwarts exists- but then, even that one tweak would fundamentally change it all, wouldn’t it? And why were we the only ones that couldn’t get in or out, until the night of the Swap- and then it all went mad at once? Questions on questions.

I guess that’s the other part of why I’m writing to you. Do you remember when we first met? It’s so long ago that for me it feels like three lifetimes, but it’s still perfectly clear in my memory. When you described yourself to me- your core utility function was to save the world, from everything. To do that, you needed to seek power. I know you disagree with that but- bear with me. Mine was to educate and my first derivative was to seek knowledge. And now, look at us- you’ve got power, handed to you on a silver platter. And me? I think I’m being handed an opportunity to seek knowledge.

I remember the first time I really understood what a hero was. You were teaching the online Intro to Physics course for veterans with PTSD, and they kept having breakdowns in the worst ways. Some of them were completely unable to accept a woman holding any sort of authority over them, even in an education position- it was truly eye opening how violent they got about it. Death threats and suicide letters and worse. Some of them ended up in prison, no matter how easy you tried to go. They just detonated their whole lives over a bad grade. For me, work was just a job- something to endure, to make money at so I could get home to you. After the third or fourth time someone sent us pictures of our house in the middle of a threatening rant, pictures not taken from Google Maps, I asked you why you didn’t walk away. It didn’t pay well, it didn’t mean anything, if you weren’t doing it they’d get some other adjunct, but you looked at me calmly and just said “They need this.”

That was it. They need this. I understood what you meant. You weren’t there in spite of the worst offenders, you were there because of them. At some point in their lives these guys, and it was always the guys, were going to encounter that resistance- better it be you, you felt, than a wife or a girlfriend or someone they might do real harm to. You set yourself up as a mental barrier and you helped the ones you could, and you filtered the ones you couldn’t. And you treated them all with compassion and respect, no matter how much they raged. You did all that with low pay and no recognition, because it needed to be done. I grasped then how different you and I truly were, in a way I hadn’t before.

I’m sitting at the edge of a vast multiverse full of magic and wonder, and there’s only one direction I can’t go- back into our bubble. Back to you. On some level that’s good, because it is absolutely the one place I would go, above all others, and then we’d never know what it’s all about, why all this is happening. I could still sit just outside the barrier, write you letters, hope the Dog brings you around for day-trips to Wonderland. But he said something to me, a few days ago- that I needed to tell the story of myself. I think the me I want to be is the guy who got up from this spot and walked out into the universe, and went to all the wizarding schools. We’re separated either way- but this way, I may be able to figure out a way past that barrier. And I’ll write to you in the meantime. Every day, if I can. But I think this needs to be done.

Cecilia says Randall is coming. Wrapping this up for now.

Okay, got that taken care of. That guy should have got his name changed from Walkin’ Dude to Running Man, if there isn’t some kind of copyright dispute on that. Ran me across half of Wonderland before he slipped up. I’m sitting here next to his no-doubt-fake bones, just waiting for the Dog to show and take this letter and the gate-ring back to you. The ring isn’t working here in Wonderland, but you might find a use for it. Hopefully I delayed Flagg long enough for whatever scheme you were working on to bear fruit. I certainly got my satisfaction.

I forgot to mention earlier- Cecilia told me about the original version of us. It was a romance. I plan to pick up a copy before I leave here. I find it hilarious but also, somehow, entirely appropriate. If I wasn’t shooting the devil and you weren’t out-levelling Goku, I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing than generating long pages of exceptionally purple prose about how much I love you. Do you remember that time, at your parent’s house over Christmas when we thought everyone had gone to sleep, and what we were getting up to when your dad nearly tripped over us on his way to get a glass of water? It is possible that everyone in the multiverse had access to that moment. I’ve passed all the way through mortification into a strange kind of pride, at that thought.

Please don’t forget that, in the days to come. I don’t want you to feel like this is an end. From the very start of this I’ve worried so much about radical change, and I know you have too- that it might transform one or the other of us in ways that make us incompatible, that we might lose what we have. Over and over I’ve learned that I’m wrong about that, and now with this revelation I understand why. Even if we’re entirely different people, the next time we meet. The core of me is that I love you, and it can’t be anything else.

Until we meet again, and forever after, I’ll always be yours-

Sean

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Colonel Kaur, Volo Ingenium

1 week after the tower explosion

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The war had been brief and now it was over, but Charles Kaur still wasn’t sleeping well. That dragon woman had defeated his enemies and healed his wounds, but something inside him was deeply, profoundly broken. He stared at the window of the idyllic palace that they’d placed him in. He knew it wasn’t heaven, but the endless green cityscape, stretching up and into the sky on every side made a good facsimile. Even the bug people had changed, become more human, less monstrous in this place. Or perhaps that was just the ones they had assigned to him. They hadn’t even done him the courtesy of locking his doors- he was free to wander about as he would, with a couple of escorts tailing politely behind him at a reasonable distance. They know exactly how little threat I am, in this place.

He felt he should hate them. Should hate something. All his life he’d fought, first in Gulf 1, then in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo. He’d climbed the ranks, fighting enemies. Kept his family safe at home, from the realities of enemies. Made his name and earned his station, with enemies. Then he’d met an enemy he couldn’t beat- the ending of his very world. But he’d cried out and salvation had come to earth during the greatest crisis he’d ever faced, in the form of the Lion. And it had demanded too much of him, all of his children, and he’d broken, and named it enemy too. But had it actually been the real thing? Was it ever really the savior he’d been told would come, at the end? How could it have been, when it lost ? His faith was shattered. His men, when he saw them in this strange place, each with their own discrete observer, wouldn’t look him in the eye. His children? He still hadn’t seen them, by his own choice. He was terrified of what they might say.

He had no enemy now. The woman- she’d saved him, saved his children, defeated the god he loved and feared. She asked nothing of him, offered nothing. His hell was personal now, and he had built it himself. He knew that. He was not a fool. But what was he? Leader without an army, devout man without a faith. He’d ordered genocide, these past weeks, and now he lived at the pleasure of those he might have exterminated. He’d ordered his men to their deaths, knowing it to be a hopeless last stand, and now he had to live with that betrayal too. He needed strength for these trials, and he found none within. And without?

He looked up, at the alien sitting in front of him on the sofa of this apartment. She was almost human in form, but the details- that shiny-black skin, the white round head with strange horn-like protrusions and large black faceted eyes- they kept her apart. Still there was a readability to her, an… empathy, that he could feel for her, where he had not been able for the more inhuman forms he had seen before. She cocked her head to one side in a gesture he read as amusement. It was the very alien he had encountered on that field a week ago. Back then she’d been more of a mantis, the one leading their evacuation right out from under his nose. She smiled at him, in her own way. “Still deciding how you feel about us?”

He looked away, ashamed. “No. Deciding how to live with myself, knowing I ordered your deaths.”

She stood up and walked towards him. Slowly, comfortably. She did not fear or hate him- he could not fathom why. He would have hated an alien who had done to his people what he had tried to do to theirs. “You did. Do you remember why? ”

He thought back. “The disaster. The rapture. I thought you were… a test. Some sign from my god, some threat that we had to beat. Innocent in small numbers, but… dangerous if allowed to grow.”

Her tone was neutral, held no anger, no judgement. It was as though for her, these events were centuries in the past rather than days. “You knew even then that it was wrong. You had to overcome your own empathy to view us that way. Did you think that was part of your test, as well?” He nodded- he had, though perhaps not that clearly. “What kind of god would have demanded that of you? What kind of god is so bloodthirsty that he’d have asked that, and your own children, to boot? That’s why I’m here. We want to understand. Why you could believe these things of your god and worship him all the same.” Something in her gaze was… heavy. Like she was regarding him with a million eyes, stacked one behind the other. He had seen them change bodies like he changed jackets. It was possible that she really contained multitudes.

Part of him rebelled, to hear his faith questioned. But he owed them this much, and more. Considering, he stared out the window. Let this be his confessional, in the Catholic style, then. “When I was young, Jesus was presented to me as a father figure. He represented… home, and family, the moral center of our world. We carried him with us, when we went on our missions in our late teens. Two years I spent in Brazil, knocking doors with only my fellow Elders and my books and the few people who’d listen to us as company. I was… obsessed isn’t the right term. Immersed, perhaps. He was my life, spreading the word about him was my purpose. I spent so much time discussing Him that I never really got around to considering Him.”

There were… flyers, out there. People, or rather infomorphs, with great gossamer wings, dancing between the bridges and towers. He watched them idly as he talked. “When I got home, went to college, got married… I stopped feeling it. The sense of purpose. It made me itch. We weren’t taught to think about ourselves, to self-reflect in that way. I just thought God was trying to tell me something. So I enlisted, ran off to the air force, dragged my poor wife halfway around the world trying to chase that sense of mission. God, for me, was duty. In a way it didn’t matter what it was a duty to.”

He put his hands on the windowsill, leaned on it. He wished it rained more often here- this was the kind of self-reflection he’d have preferred to do while staring into a good thunderstorm. “It’s ugly now, considering that. We were taught that God’s approval was a feeling, a physical thing you could feel in your core. Just consult it, and you’ll be fine! But it was bullshit.” He turned toward her, to see her reaction to all this. She stood so still she was almost lifeless, head still cocked quizzically, encouraging. “All I ever consulted was my own sense of self-satisfaction. I killed for my country, bombed targets we never confirmed to be hostile, and told myself that God would let me know if I got it wrong. But he was never speaking to me, was he?” He slid down, until he was sitting on the floor, knees in front of him. “I don’t think I ever knew Him at all.”

She nodded in understanding, but prompted him to continue. “But you went home and you had children, and you raised them in your traditions.”

He put his head on his knees. “I did. We started late, by LDS standards, well into my thirties- late twenties for her. She… I barely knew her, you know? She was a good woman. It wore her body out. She died, the one after Boden- and I couldn’t raise them alone. My career took all my time. I hired nannies, other community members, put them in homeschools with other kids. Anything I could do to hand them off. I barely raised them at all.”

She nodded again. “Did you fear them? Avoid them?”

He shook his head in the negative. “No, no, nothing like that. I just didn’t really… think about them. My own father was barely around, when I was young. I thought that was just how fathers were. As Jesus had been to me. Kind but distant, as far away and as cold as the stars in the sky. Search your heart for his love, that’s all you need. What I wouldn’t give…” he choked up, “to go back now, and tell Hunter how proud I was of him. But I’d lost touch with all that, before the thing you people call the Swap.”

She came and sat on the floor next to him. It was comforting, in a way. Intimate. “And when the Swap happened, you were already so lost in your life, just waiting for a sign again, you seized on the first one that came to you.”

He snorted, a dark chuckle. “You make it sound so… innocent. Like I didn’t order the deaths of hundreds of innocents, to try and play into a prophecy I barely understood.”

She didn’t shift. “Not innocent. Never that. But… a decision, in context, that many of us might have made. A call to Holy War. We have tried to interpret the whims of our gods for thousands of years, and rarely did any two of our clans agree on any of it. The part that fascinates us is what came next, for you. Your god returned, and spoke to you, or so you thought. And you rejected him.”

The core of it then. The sin that he couldn’t overcome- past the neglect, past the murder. He had declared war on his own faith, without really understanding why. “He shot first. Killed my men, took my children. Came at me from a position of strength. But... “

She prompted again. “It was his right, if he was your God. So why resist him? Why did you not turn over the tower, and the world, then and there?”

A tear ran down his face. He was paralyzed by the weight of that decision. He’d do anything to revisit it, to make it right with the Lion. But... “It wasn’t right. God help me, I knew it wasn’t right. ” And he did believe that, he realized. Some core in him, down past the self-satisfaction that he used to think was God’s own approval, the military indoctrination, the family he’d never really known- there was some moral center to him and it had rejected that being, completely and utterly. The violence that it represented, that was on some level just himself, reflected back at him. “I… summoned him, didn’t I. Somehow. I called to him. When the Swap happened.” He knew it as he said it.

The lady-alien leaned back. “Interesting. We had speculated, after attacking the children’s faith in Aslan had no real impact. But we couldn’t know for sure. You brought him into the world. His rapture was your understanding, and you gave your children to him, unknowing.” He curled tighter as the accusations hit him like lead weights, for all the polite neutrality of their delivery. “In the end, you rejected him, even as you believed in him. As you reject yourself now. CS Lewis would have been proud of you, you know. He maintained that a fixed and absolute cultural knowledge of good and evil was the proof underlying all Christian theology. Some part of you has known yourself to be in the wrong for a very, very long time. And you used it to deny your own icon of the faith! Ironic.”

He couldn’t find the irony, only black despair. “To see my own faith take physical form, and come to me… as an avatar of ruin, of endless death. It killed my son.”

Another voice spoke then, another woman, outside his apartment. “As our faiths often do.” He looked up- at the window overhead, her great golden nose was poking in. We’re four stories up, he thought in the back of his mind, as Delmutt stood from his side. The great golden dragon spoke again, to her. “They told me you had reached a verdict.”

The alien lady with the black carapace nodded. “We have. Colonel Charles Kaur, this vessel has played host to much of Clan Arbitration, this day. Your trial has concluded.”

He started, angrily. I thought we were talking privately! “And what, I get no defense ?”

She shrugged. “Our ways are not your ways. When we put one of our own on trial, the entirety of their mind is exposed. What need is there for maneuver or debate? We know the facts, and the intent. For you, the circumstances were different. But we have seen the heart of you, here.” She stood tall and squared her shoulders- she seemed older, suddenly, like she’d stood in that spot a thousand years. “Our conclusion is this: you are a cowardly, bloody minded, and foolish man, and you have done great evil to your world and ours, whether you intended it or not. But there are those among us who would have done worse, and for worse reasons.” Her voice softened dangerously. “To kill you would serve no purpose, would not restore those lost. Your sentence is this- you will live out your days here, knowing full well who and what you were when the world hung in the balance. You will raise your children, if they will still have you. You are not forgiven, for you have not asked for forgiveness. Far worse than that.” She looked at him, sitting on the floor, and it felt like she towered a hundred feet above. “You are understood. And you have our pity. Do better, Charles Kaur.”

She turned, and left, and for a moment he thought he was alone. Then the dragon in his window cleared her throat, and the blast of it shifted his furniture and knocked him over. He quailed, assuming his death was at hand. She only looked at him with one great eye, through the window. “My husband thinks I’m a hero, you know. I stood there like an idiot and let him carry out that ridiculous scheme. Played your summoned god’s apocalypse games, got him killed. Maybe lost him forever. And still he writes to me, from some place beyond heaven and hell, and tells me how brave and noble and good I am.”

She leaned in, and somehow that eye filled his world. “I am this close to letting go, proving him wrong. Showing the world how monstrous I might actually be, with you as my prime example. I said I wouldn’t judge you, and yet-” she loomed, and he found himself on his knees, more terrified even than when Aslan himself had battered at the gates of his mind, “and yet. Skylar.” The pressure on him was gone, just like that. “She loves you, Charles. I think she even understands what you did, and despite everything, she loves you. If the world was nothing but Skylars there’d be no need for me. No need for saving.”

She pulled away from the window, and he found some ability to breathe again. “You don’t die today, Charles. But you don’t get to live, either. I can’t find it in me to be as wise or as merciful as Delmutt or her people. Skylar is your lifeline, now. You do right by her, become the father she wants.” She pulled away from his apartment, and he realized she’d been sitting down the whole time- she was simply big enough that four stories weren’t that high up for her, anymore. Even as she turned he still heard her last sentence echoing inside his own mind, and it shook him to his core. “The day she stops loving you, I swear by whatever god you still believe in, they will not even whisper your name for fear of calling down the vengeance I will lay on you.”

She did not need to swear by any other god, he mused, as she winged away in a blast of displaced air that knocked him down once again. She had killed the last one and now- in the back of his mind- quite thoroughly replaced it.

---

It was some time later when his final visitor arrived. Skylar, looking five years older than when he’d last seen her, glided into his apartment without any discreet escort. She was the first human he’d seen who was given such freedom- but then, from what he’d heard, she had earned that respect. “Father?” she called, and he rose from his position on the couch, unsure if she would want to embrace him or not. She did. After everything, she still did.

“The others?” he asked, holding her tightly.

“Weren’t ready yet. But there’s something you have to do. You need to tell the story of us. It was you, the whole time. Miss D told me. But you have to say it, from start to finish, and then we’ll be done. Finally done with all of this.”

He choked. “But Hunter- he, I-”

She nodded while still hugging him. “He died, yes. You didn’t know what you were doing. But some part of you does know, the whole story. You have to say it, it has to happen, if you want to be forgiven.”

They sat down, still holding hands. To think this little girl wasn’t even 11 and she was leading him around- some part of him swelled with pride in her, and grief, knowing he had had no part in her maturity. “I don’t- for some reason, your parts are a blank to me.”

She smiled. “I found another story, I think. But that’s okay, I can fill those in. You tell the parts you do feel.”

He sighed, knowing she was right, feeling it. Reached deep inside, to the place in his heart where the truth of the story was sitting. Spoke in a voice that was his and not his, holding the hand of a daughter who was his, and not his either, anymore.

“Once upon a time there were five children, Hayden and Hunter and Piper and Skylar and Boden. They were home on a weekday night, and they were quite bored, for it was storming ever so heavily outside...”