The in-between

Neither here nor there

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: Yana’s attempts to complete Kaenamor’s portal spell have succeeded at the cost of her life…

Somewhere.
Somewhen.

Look, over there. Between the stream and the window, in front of the herb garden. You observe those two plinths?

I do.

Made of ivory, carved from the tusks of a southern gargantan. Ivory helps to conduct magic, you see. Hence we do all like our ivory towers.

I am aware. I, too, am practised in the wielding arts.

Truth be told, I know not who you are, or how you intrude upon my thoughts. But it is of no consequence. Observe, atop one of the plinths, the obsidian sphere, hewn from the tail spike of a koth.

What happened to the koth?

An irrelevant question. This will be my greatest achievement: to transfer the sphere from one plinth to the other. Not through physical, kinetic movement, but via direct displacement. True teleportation, within our grasp at last.

Your spell does not work. It malfunctions. You have not fully considered the risks.

Who are you to lecture me? I am without equal in the application of magic. That is not mere hubris, but a peer reviewed and universally accepted fact.

What results are you expecting from your experiment? Tell me your hypothesis.

This is the culmination of decades of research. I have no requirement to humour you, but, given we are the only ones here, I will use our conversation as preparation for tomorrow’s lecture. Direct transportation of matter has remained elusive for centuries, remaining locked to physical reality despite our best efforts. We can manipulate the elements, we can affect gravity and adjust individual molecules, but to simply move from A to B requires an object to be carried, inch by inch. If I want to position myself at the far side of this hall, I am required to tediously walk its length. To travel from Bruglia to the Peak, or to the Blue Towers, is a journey of days. The far side of the planet remains weeks or months away. Progress is stalled, and when we are not able to travel efficiently w are prevented from communicating and collaborating effectively—

You speak to me as you would an undergraduate. You do not need to define the parameters of transport. You hoped, then, that this spell would hasten your ability to travel?

Direct transportation of matter. This experiment was to test a small object. Moving it from one plinth to the other without passing through the space in-between. Instantaneous delivery. Teleportation, my dear.

Are you incorporating quantum tunnelling into your process?

I...am unfamiliar with your terms, but can guess at their meaning. Which begs the question of where you would have gained such insight. Long distance energy absorption, yes, and channelled—

Channelled into the creation of a two-point wormhole. The sphere then falls through one side of the wormhole and emerges instantaneously on the other. From one plinth to the other.

One plinth to the other, yes. Tell me, who is your mentor?

Much of your theory was sound. The opening of portals does work, but not between two physical points on this plane.

What do you mean?

You ruptured dimensional boundaries, creating the wormhole but not from point A to point B. You lost control of the spell, never completing it, and opened Palinor to other realities.

Why do you speak of this as being in the past? Who are you?

Walk with me. Perhaps I can show you. Look, even now the spell is beginning, the portals are opening.

They are so much larger than I had calculated!

Many of your calculations were inaccurate. The consequence of an incomplete dataset and too many assumptions. Do not bother trying to harrumph in my direction. Come, we should go. You would not want to witness what happens here.

It is so black, and featureless. Is it solid? Where are you leading us? Can we pass through it, then? Astonishing.

The effects can be disorienting, but I suspect we are already more disoriented that we have ever been, and ever will be. This is Earth, or ‘Mid-Earth’ as it will be renamed, against its protestations.

Everything is different.

Not everything, but yes. This is another world, parallel to ours. This is the city of London. Walk its streets. You see the people, the clothing, the carriages, the architecture? There are no koth here, no aen’fa. There is no magic.

No magic? What do you mean? How can there be no magic?

The rules are different here. These are events that I only know from history books. We call it ‘the Joining’. There is another portal, look - it goes to Max-Earth. Follow me.

A third reality? And look at the scale of these structures? What is it that flies between them? Are they mechanical birds?

Max-Earth’s technology is beyond our understanding. They have travelled to the planets. Here, look down upon the surface of their Moon. See the lights in the dark. The space station roaming through the black. Come here, to Venus, and the bunkers on the southern slopes. Here, to Mars, and the settlements in the canyons and atop the great mountain.

How are we here so suddenly?

I suspect we are not truly here at all. We are unstuck, and momentarily linked through your unfinished spell. We are moving through memory and space and time. Look at this, now.

What is it, that floats in space, enormous and unknowable? Is this a creature?

After a fashion. It is known as a megaship, with a mind of its own.

It has a mind? It is sentient?

Perhaps. Now, back through the portal. This is the Kingdom of Great Britain: watch as its tendrils reach out across the continents, see as it conquers one foe after another. Napoleon, The rebels in the Americas. Eastern Europe. North Africa. The portals that opened in London give the Kingdom total dominance.

And Palinor? What of home?

It remains locked in feudalism, warring city states and a stratified society. Bruglia gains influence through the portals, as did London. A spark of rebellion to the south lights a fire that still burns. We call this new combined reality the triverse. All three universes were forever changed.

This is a greater achievement than even I had anticipated. To think that all I expected was to shift a small sphere a few feet across the room. All that you have told me - it makes me think you are from years yet to come?

I was born almost two hundred years after your experiment.

Then you know the future. And what of me? Of my legacy? Do they speak of my name, as the creator of this ‘triverse’?

Your name was struck from historical records. The university denied involvement in the creation of the triverse. There was much suffering, and it was easier to present it as a natural phenomenon.

What are you talking about, woman? I would not stand for such treatment.

You were not there to defend your position.

Then where was I?

The spell inflicted more of a strain on your body than you had expected. You did not survive the experiment, and much of the university was destroyed.

Ridiculous. I’ve taken every precaution. And besides, that would make a nonsense of us even having this conversation. What brings you here? What is it that binds us together in this place?

I have been considering the same question. I am unsure. There is a haze surrounding my thoughts. They flitter away when I try to grasp them. Perhaps that means I failed. Or it could be that I succeeded. Given your fate, I would assume that, either way, my time is done.

At what task were you toiling?

I was finishing what you’d left behind.

My spell.

It was incomplete. I was hoping to connect the final two portals. Completing the spell could even halt the advance of portal tears.

Portal tears?

It’s complicated.

I have so many questions about this new world. New worlds, I should say. Where even to start? Is it a wonder? Is knowledge still prized above all else, as it is in my time?

By some. What you did opened our world to dangers and suffering. Two hundred years of chaos.

If a wielder always feared the unknown, they would never do anything at all.

Perhaps that would have been better.

Do you truly believe that?

Probably not. There has also been much joy.

Well, then. Assuming that we have become connected across time by the spell, and that this conversation is a metaphysical manifestation rather than actual reality, we can also assume that this is a finite moment.

We are entangled, to borrow a Max-Earth term.

The question, then: what happens next?

I don’t know. I would imagine that at some point, once the spell has run its course, we will simply...stop.

Photo by s. asah. on Unsplash

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Meanwhile.

Thanks for reading!

So, last week’s Triverse chapter ended up being age-gated, meaning that anyone in the UK (and possibly, now, Australia) has to verify their age before reading. I have many grumpy thoughts about this, for which I’ll have an essay going out on Monday. In the meantime, some initial thoughts over on Notes:

This week I tallied up Tales from the Triverse as it exists within my enormous Scrivener project, and this is what it looks like:

That’s a lot of words and pages. I want to do print and ebook versions of Triverse, but it’s going to take some thinking in how to split it up.

This was a lot of fun to write about:

At last, I found some time to continue the Babylon 5 rewatch, so do hop on over if that’s of interest:

And last but certainly not least, a friend of mine is launching their third poetry book on Tuesday and you can head along to the online event:

Author notes

I went back and forth on whether to include this chapter. It’s quite a departure in numerous ways: stylistically, structurally. It breaks up the pacing. There are various reasons not to do it!

My reasoning for going ahead was that it helps to give Yana a send-off, it ties everything back to the prologue in a satisfying manner, and it injects a breather into all the frenetic action of the finale — while also building in an extra cliffhanger gap following the conclusion of the ‘Magic’ storyline.

It’s a chapter that nearly happened earlier. I had originally planned to insert it during the ‘Magic’ storyline, seeing Yana’s experience in this in-between space at the same time as Erik was holding back PB. That ended up feeling like it would be too jarring. Using it as a coda of sorts works better, I think.

Another alternative would have been to use it as the very final chapter of the entire serial. That would have a satisfying loop back to the start, but the truth is that both Kaenamor (especially) and Yana are supporting characters, and giving them the final POV would have been an odd move. And so, it sits here.

Stylistically I knew I wanted to try something different with this one, but I wasn’t sure what. I fiddled around with various approaches before settling on an exclusively dialogue-driven sequence. I considered trying a more lyrical style of prose, or even going down a poetry route, but neither felt right (I also wasn’t sure I could pull them off). Once I tried the dialogue exchange, it felt right.

That style switch isn’t just aesthetic: it’s meant to represent the interaction Yana and Kaenamor are having, and it also avoids having to use direct description of the space in which they find themselves. It’s intended to be vague and defy standard definition; the ‘in-between’ should be unknowable, and any attempt to describe it on my part would only be reductive.

From a character point of view, we get a couple of hopefully satisfying moments. First, there’s Kaenamor having to come to terms with his failure and the consequences of his actions; then, we have Yana finally meeting this man she’s been fascinated by her whole life, and finding that she is in many ways his superior. There’s a teacher-student relationship there, despite them never having met, and at this point, this final moment, she knows that she’s surpassed him.

None of that will help Slava, Daryla or Lola feel any better, but it’s something.