Chapter Text

----

Sean, Location Unknown

Moments Ago

----

For a second time I flew through that infinite crystalline space full of dancing points of light, but this time I was not merely an observer. I was one of the sparks, splitting apart from my partner in that twinned spiral. I cried out with a mouth I no longer possessed, reached back with hands that did not respond, but I continued to move along my path. I exited that solid sphere and I could only watch in horror as my partner, whose name I could not remember, could not even remember I’d forgotten, became entangled in a fierce and rolling battle with others just waiting to pounce. A battle I could not participate in.

A voice spoke, in my head. “Conflict.” I turned- other sparks, and not sparks, shapes I no longer had the senses to comprehend, were gathered in a great audience. The drama played out before them like a stage- and I sat beside it, suddenly feeling like I was on trial. “A conflict has occurred. Judgement is sought.” The voice was light, feminine. “Two sources of resurrection. Both are blocked.”

Another spark lit up. Masculine, booming. “One resurrection has already been claimed- a questionable decision. The Deep Magic does not apply unless the Lion claims this narrative retrocausally, and even if it did, that death was no sacrifice for another. The other resurrection is much weaker- mechanical, not narrative. It does not overrule the knife’s claim to absolute death.”

I couldn’t speak but I willed. Send me back. I need to go back. The feminine spark silenced me. “Interference in deliberations from participants will not be tolerated.” Its attention was hot, searing, oppressive. I would have breathed in relief when it turned away, had I had the lungs to do so. “The source is weak. But the source’s claimant may yet narrate this world in its entirety.”

A third light spoke and this one sounded like nails on a chalkboard, like the ending of the world. It hurt my soul just to hear it. “Irrelevant. I do not relinquish my claim. All will be mine, in the end. Without her claim there are no other sources left. The judgement must be absolute death.” I know I’ve heard that voice before. I couldn’t place it- didn’t have access to the mind that contained those memories, now. But it had left a groove in my very being, once before.

The masculine voice objected. “ You have interfered too often as it is. This assembly will not debate the validity of your claim until this cycle has played out. In the meantime- no absolute death. Banishment. The narrative must continue.” The other lights bobbed in agreement and I wailed- no, no- send me back - but it was too late. They were gone. They had never been. Time resumed.

My light trailed upwards and away- and I was reborn.

-------------

They didn’t call me Sherriff at first of course, and I didn’t recall that name, not having brought any memories with me. I came blinking into the sunlight of a strange world as a new consciousness in a full-grown vessel, part of a compact among a caravan of traders, rolling across the great grasslands toward the western coast. They told me I was part of clan Bex, a wealthy family from the cities back East. I was born knowing how to manage the sails of the great grassland wagons, each being a wheeled wind rider and shallow-draft barge in one. I was born knowing how to aim and shoot a rifle. I knew very little else.

They told me that I was labor for the journey, that if I steered and shot along with my siblings, we would be made full members of the clan when the caravaneers reached their destination. For a time, that was enough. We traveled the great savannahs and sailed around the vast mountains via deep blue rivers. We traded with native infomorphs, and we fought off raids by ferals and infovore predators. Native information was so plentiful that we hardly stored any- every day saw us crossing new flora, new ways of measuring and recording and assessing the word, and we harvested them all. Several of my siblings were conceived for the sole purpose of holding onto those samples without digesting them, for further study. But it was not an easy trip. The hazards were fierce, and the natives were not always receptive. Wagons broke, and disease swept the caravan at intervals. We lost more than one of my siblings to simple accident, falling from the masts or simply crushed beneath the great wheels.

The wind blew, and the ground moved beneath us, and gradually we died, on that hard road. It was many months before I noticed, but when I did it was inescapable- it was by and large entirely my siblings and I who bore the risks. If a dangerous job in the rigging needed doing, or a predator needed rousting, we’d invariably be the ones sent. For a time it seemed to be our lot in life, and I did not question it. But one day, while hanging from the back of our wagon to scrape prairie corals from the outside of the officer’s quarters, I overheard a conversation. “They’re really dropping like flies out there, aren’t they! You think we brought enough spare vessels for this trip? If we lose too many more we’re going to have to camp for the winter and breed another batch!”

It was my wagon’s Bosun. It had charge of the rigging and sails, and was merciless in the assignments. But it’d always maintained that it was for the good of the caravan, and stood solemnly at every funeral. It was answered, in turn, by the voice of the First Mate, in charge of wagon security. “I swear somebody’s not putting good mind-stock into the punters. Half of them don’t know which end of a rifle’s dangerous. Still, better to keep them stupid. Some of them actually think they’re going to get an induction at the end of this trip, instead of a shallow grave. Ha! If anyone outside the clan even knew we’d bred them it’d be all our asses in a waterlogged vessel at the bottom of the nearest ocean.”

I paused in my work, then, and discovered that I’d been gifted a third talent, perhaps by one of the officers too ashamed to retain it any longer- a burning passion for justice. The mutiny was swift, and thorough. When the caravan reached the western shore at last, the settlement of Boatwright didn’t question that none of us seemed to be full members of clan Bex. They were simply grateful for the guns we brought, the ammunition and tools and trade goods that loaded down every wagon. When we tore the wagons down and built homes instead, they welcomed us with open arms. In our town I became the law man and de-facto leader, and my siblings called me Sherriff.

There were good years, and bad. Clan Bex came looking for the remains of their caravan, eventually, and we lost much of the town in driving them away. There were wars with the natives, and brush battles with other settlements, and the occasional brawl with some drunkard or lawbreaker. With each new conflict I rode out, six-shooter at my hip and rifle over my back, and killed far more than my fair share of infomorphs. I would not kill for money, and eventually I learned to avoid killing in general except as a last resort. But I made mistakes. There were faces that would haunt me, those I could have saved, or might not have killed, glimpsed in the moments between sleep and waking. All of them were known to me, except one. She, and I knew it was a she, remained a mystery. But it was for her that I never took a partner, never found love. Something deep within me knew I’d get back to her some day. The quiet madness of loving someone I’d never met, someone so deviant as to be gendered, kept me withdrawn, isolated from others.

The railway linking the coasts was completed, after many years in that wilding place. Eventually soldiers came, said they were from back East, that the clans had formed a government. That we were all going to be part of it, by hook or by crook, and we’d need to pick leaders, and follow these laws, and pay taxes. Well, we didn’t take kindly to it. The people of Boatwright were an odd lot, outcasts and clanless and wanted morphs and deviants, stuck together at the edge of the world more out of necessity than anything. My siblings and I, those who’d survived these decades anyway, we were all unregistered births, clanless in the eyes of the law. We had nothing to gain and everything to lose, we thought. So we banded with other cities, and we fought.

It was long, and it was bloody, and terrible. The power of the repeating rifles from the East was overwhelming, but we knew the land. They had to scrape us off every rock and out of every valley. Every one of my relations was killed, eventually, and after long enough I forgot why I’d begun fighting in the first place. The war stopped feeling just and started feeling like it just was, and that was when I quit. One day I just took off my uniform, put my things on my back, and walked away from camp. I heard they didn’t take kindly to deserters back in Boatwright, and I was still unwelcome back East, so I built my own homestead. Lawless and alone, I lived off the plains and took care of them folk as found their way to me.

Eventually the war ended, a stalemate- the West formed a loose coalition of city states and got a government all their own, and the East gave up on the conquest and went back to building. I didn’t see the point of any of it. After another ten season cycles, a community had grown up around me. Other deserters, and those too wild or attached to freedom for the bigger towns. We took care of each other like my siblings and I had done, in the old days. And try as I might, I was still their Sherriff. I spent my days getting drunk off my ass on the strangest patterns I could find, and my nights dreaming of her.

One day I was sitting out in our fields, keeping an eye out for the great fat grass-ticks that had been latching on to our vessel herds lately. The ticks were vulnerable things, easily killed if you weren’t currently their host- if you were, they’d eat the memories of themselves right out of you and you would die of starvation without ever understanding why. I was walking the herd, doing an inspection when a young morph came up to me. I knew it by reputation as a respectful one, but we’d never talked. “Zer Sherriff?”

I wasn’t in the mood for company, but I turned anyway and met it. “Yeah, kid?”

“I was just wondering- I hear that back East, morphs can live practically f’rever. Like there’s people there that are five hundred cycles old! But you’re only a few decades past a hundred, and you’re the oldest person here by far. Where’s all the old people?”

I sighed. The young were so quick to forget, now. “Dead, kid. You don’t get that old out in the wild lands, and these are wild lands, even if the last war was two decades ago. We’ll tame them some day, but until then- if you want to be fat and happy and live to 300, you get to Boatwright, and you take that train as far East as you can go.”

He thought about that for a while. We were still a free people, he really could have picked up and left, and not a one of us would have said boo. “Well then, why are you still here?” he asked, eventually. “If it’s so great and all back East.”

I paused, then, and took another hit off the wildroot nodules I’d been carrying in my vessel’s digestive pouch. The scrambled information in them staggered me, briefly, and the world softened a bit in my perception. “I ain’t never been, kid. But as to your question… this is home, for me, and I guess I ain’t so attached to living, as all that. I wouldn’t walk away just to get more centuries if I didn’t know what kind of centuries they’d be. ”

It walked beside me for a while, looking at the herds as we passed. “There’s this other morph, in town. We grew up around each other, and they get me, and I get them. We want… I don’t think it would be so bad, to go East and live, if they were with me.”

I nodded casually, not looking at the kid. “You hold onto that. Hold on tight. People’s what makes this world worth sticking to. What’s your name?” The kid told me- Aimer. We never grew close, but- I kept a lookout for Aimer after that. Like one of the siblings I’d lost long ago.

Another couple of decades passed, and the town grew and the land got tamer, and I begin to contemplate the prospect of a two hundredth birthday, somewhere down the line, still alone in my travels. And then one day I was woken up by a cry from the town square- rustlers had stolen a herd of vessels in the night, and Aimer had been out among them. The rest- well, you remember it. The chase, the firefight, the rescue, and dying in his arms in that cave- only to find myself in a new world, saved by myself, the human me, from my own past. A past I could finally remember.

And I met her, all over again and for the first time, and realized all my dreams, all my life, had been the lost memory of that woman I’d already known, once upon a time. But I had his memories now- my doubled-up consciousness was swimming easily through both. I didn’t know his future, even though I’d lived it once- only my inclination towards Haley had survived my round trip through time. Somehow, I don’t think the first version of me ever noticed my feelings- I suspect they got mixed up with his own for her, strong as they were.

I watched, and I talked to myself, and I helped out where I could- a shot placed here, sacrificing my ability to speak there, a moment of advice to firm up the courage somewhere else. My past self didn’t need much handling- by my count he had it more figured out than I ever had. Then came that first terrible near-death, when the bullet took him in the leg, and our shared body lost consciousness. I found myself in the void once more, without truly considering my actions I slipped us out of the world of humans, and back to the plains of my home. In two separate bodies.

I had a moment of doubt. I eyed his back, as we stood there, and he knew what I was thinking. If I’m tethered to him and he dies here- do I go back? Do I get that life with her to myself? Or am I stuck here, forever? He shamed me, then. I shamed myself. “I trust you, Sherriff. Whatever else you are, you’re an honorable person. I’d give my life to save yours, they’re one and the same, but-”

But what kind of person would I be if I sabotaged my own self, eliminated those memories for another day with her? How would that even work, metaphysically? I stood up and came to stand beside him. “But it’s not our life we’re fighting for tonight. I won’t leave miss Haley in the lurch, you have my word on that.” And we didn’t stop fighting. But we did leave her in the lurch, in the end. Days passed at the bunker and before I knew it I found myself, throat torn open, on that great white mound once again- for the first time, from both our perspectives. But I was swiftly remembering that I had been here once before.

One last time I returned to that void, ejected from our hardened sphere of shared story, but this time I anticipated it, and remembered. This time my mind was not lost to me. Sean’s whole life, and Sherriff’s, and then the strange amalgamation of both from the memories of his final week. One sequence of events, viewed twice, from the same mind in the same body at different points on its own timeline. I retained it all. Looking out then, I saw my original Sean-self split off and enter that great loop once again, arcing back to repeat history. The tribunal did not re-appear. Had it ever existed? But the me-that-was-me now, that had taken that ride and now carried both lives, didn’t move. I was… free? Free of the burden of that causality loop, free to choose my next move outside the world that was my home, as long as I did not return to it. Banishment, they’d said. There were other spheres nearby, abutting our home, and one of them seemed strangely familiar. I dove into it-

-----------

I was standing in the endless gardens. Not reborn, I noted mutely- I supposed Wonderland might not have anything analogous to birth. You entered it whole of body or not at all. Perhaps it remembered me from my past visits. Distantly I could see the castle of one of the Queens- I forgot which suit, at the moment. The first thing I did was check my body. Human again, then. I even had my weapons, the pistols Haley had enchanted for me, what seemed like a century ago by my time. But also just hours behind me. I stumbled then, and held my head. Human brains were not meant to contain the kind of memories that mine was now assimilating. I continued checking my person- my ring was missing? A memory flashed, then, of Flagg slipping it off my finger as I collapsed. That bastard.

I was Sean now but also Sherriff. I was both, and neither. An old soldier and a young husband. We meshed astonishingly well, our attitudes and instincts blending into one another seamlessly, except in a few areas. There was an enormous amount of friction around the use of violence, for one. Sherriff, for all his reforms, was still a cold killer at heart. Sean would rather die than point a gun in less than the most extreme self defence. I had to look away from that whole area of my mind, lest I begin arguing out loud with myself. I began walking, instead.

It was inevitable that I’d find Cecilia, if I spent long enough in this place. When I finally found her, I noted that she’d come up in the world. She wore a noble’s robes with the heraldry of Hearts emblazoned on it, and sat in what looked, to me, like a lifeguard’s chair with a bullhorn. Two-dimensional card soldiery scurried about beneath her direction, maintaining the gardens and occasionally bodily lifting her chair and moving her along the hedge maze. They didn’t even glance at me when I walked up- no longer intruder then, I supposed, but… guest? Resident? I shuddered at the thought.

“Sean” she said, laying down her megaphone. “Welcome to the afterlife.” I grimaced at that. I knew I’d died, I had a pretty good feel for that by now, but-

“Don’t call it that. You’re not even dead, you’re just a part of the Dog, and in every sense that matters I’m still kicking, and I have all my memories. It wasn’t death in any way I’d recognize it, just a… long detour.” I walked alongside her chair as the guards hefted it once more.

“You’re dead,” she said, “and you’d best get used to it. You exited that story and you shan’t be going back. Even if the world did allow it, even if you had a body on the other side, that barrier prevents any of us from crossing.” She reached out and rapped on thin air with her knuckles, producing a sound like a hollow iron box being struck. “See- it’s everywhere and nowhere, right up against us but totally impassable. But… it is odd that you retain your body here, and your memories. Usually you’d simply be reborn into some new form.”

I tapped the pistols at my hip. “Tried that once already today, and it didn’t take for very long. I passed the old narrative off to Haley. But I think my own story is still playing out.”

She nodded sagely. “Yes, almost anything sounds plausible if you start gabbling about narrative, doesn’t it?” I glared at her and she cackled. “Accept it! You don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on, and neither do I.”

That did bring something to mind. “But you have had a clue, haven’t you? How is it that you, and Aslan, and Randall, and everyone we run into seems to know all about us?”

She turned in her high-chair and shouted at the card guards. “You there! I see you slacking! You think that just because I don’t chop heads, I won’t have you all shuffled like a blackjack deck in a Vegas casino? Back to work!” They scrambled, no longer paying attention to our words, and she turned back to me. “Got to take a firm hand with these fellows. Sean, you know the answer. How do you already know about them? ”

I considered it for a moment, and the answer hit me like a wave. “ Stories,” I breathed. “We’re all stories. Each of them is just a literal story in our world. By extension… we must have been a story in theirs. Anywhere outside our own, people have been telling and retelling the tale of us. But that would mean…”

She grinned, “We know how it ends? Don’t look at me. They talk about it a lot around here- how sometimes if two worlds cross you’ll find some version of yourself, how you would have been had things gone different. But how they’ll be now? Nope, sorry, this version of us is an unknown from the inside. Some think if we’d heard our own version before, we’d just ‘Forget’ the parts we haven’t encountered yet. But I think we’re altering all of time, backwards and forwards. A whole new version of events. The story we write between our worlds here will become the story that everyone’s always remembered. That’s how Aslan works- the worlds he preys on, he takes their stories, becomes the hero.”

It made a kind of sense. But it was disappointing as well. “So I guess you don’t know how it all turns out, huh. Then what was the story, if we hadn’t collided?”

She laughed delightedly, and I could almost imagine her being that young girl I’d seen the first time we crossed paths. “Oh, that’s the beauty of it! I came from your world, of course, but once I got to Wonderland I looked you up. They have the most wonderful libraries here, it’s remarkable that Carroll never mentioned them… anyway. Half the pages were missing when I found the book about you- a tatty old thing called ‘Dragon Wife’ by H&S McCarthy, wonder who that could have been,” she waggled her eyebrows at me and I rolled my eyes, “and it was about a young couple who loved each other very much, and then one of them got turned into a dragon, and then… oh, their love only deepened after that. Salacious!” She cackled again. I turned red, listening to the implication.

“Wait… you’re saying that the original copy of our story, the path we’d have gone down before all our worlds collided with each other, was a… a… trashy romance novel? That I, or we, turned Haley into a dragon for some weird interspecies-” she was laughing so hard I was afraid she was going to choke.

“Yep! Hate to break it to you boyo, but half the known universe has probably seen into your bedroom. But,” and here she turned deadly serious, all humor dropping from her in an instant, “I would never call it trashy. Absent any conflict, what did you two do?” We loved each other. I nodded, taking her meaning. It wasn’t the kind of story I had any interest in reading, but- it was the kind of story I’d want to be in, if I had to pick any at all. The kind with a happy beginning, middle, and end. And that was taken from us? She saw where my thoughts were going and shook her head. “Can’t get back there now, I’m afraid. She’s got a world to save, and you,” she waved vaguely in my direction, “have got to decide what to do with your life after death.”

I pondered that for a while. “I have to get back to her, but I can’t. She can’t come to me, she has a job to do. I…” I hated this, but it was true, “I’ve learned how to wait. I can fill my time, as long as she knows I’m out here. Will you take a message to her for me?”

Cecilia nodded. “I’ll do you one better. I’ll bring you closure. Wiltshire Dog is coming, and he’s bringing you an old friend.” Somehow, I knew exactly who she meant, and my grin was fierce and predatory.

Some time later- the world shimmered, slightly, and I was surprised I could see it. Previously when Wonderland changed, it tried to distract me, hide it from me. I guess it no longer considers me an outsider. A door formed in the hedgerow, and Cecilia and her guards bustled away at top speed. I waited next to it, still and silent as death. Ten bullets left, after the Lion tried to eat me. That’s all I have to finish this. One would have been enough- I was motivated. The door opened, presently, and Randall Flagg stumbled out. He looked somewhat worse for wear- right hand shriveled and red-raw, like it was regrowing, winded and cursing. Guess Haley got a shot in after all.

I stepped up behind him. The Sherriff in me wanted to give him no chance, put a bullet in the back of his head and be done with it. The Sean in me disagreed. He sidesteps death as easily as we do- play for time, give he more room to work. But… I do want to see his face when he realizes. “Hello, Randall,” I said. “I threw that stabbing, you know.”

He whirled, his face a rictus grin of fear and vicious hatred. “ Fucker. You should be dead. Where’d you send me, dog? You telling me to go to Hell?” He cackled madly. “Been there, done that, got the postcard!” That unsettling laugh cut off, and he refocused on me. “If you’re the trial he’s set me, I guess it’s my lucky day. I already know how to kill you, ” he said swiping a finger across his neck viciously. It would have been more effective if that memory didn’t seem both a century and a few hours old, to me. As it was it merely created an interesting ripple where half my body shuddered, and the other half failed to react at all. He caught something in my lack of affect, and his eyes widened. “Where have you-”

My right gun left the holster and pointed at his face in the blink of an eye. The pistols Haley had summoned for me were beautiful, I thought, appreciating them with the eye of a master examining his instrument. Perfectly tooled, chromed with an inlaid silver dragon down each barrel, mouth ending at the tip. So easy to use it felt like cheating, so devastating that anything I shot was torn apart by fire and thunder. They weren’t Roland’s guns, forged from fragments of Excalibur itself, but I figured they’d serve just fine. “ Away, Randall,” I said, staring at him down the barrel. I put the weight and hatred of a century of warfare into my stare, and it shook him. “I’ve been away. Settler, soldier, sherriff- time moves differently out here, and you gave me a hundred and fifty years of practice. ” He began to back away, step by slow step, horror dawning on his face. And they said revenge wasn’t satisfying! “You’ve always had problems, haven’t you, Walter Padick. Marten Broadcloak. Covenant Man. Walkin Dude. Problems with gunslingers. ” He broke, then. Saw the shape of the story I had crafted, built with his own help, and knew where it ended for him.

The man in black fled across Wonderland, and the gunslinger followed.

----

Skylar, In The Throne Room

Present

----

Skylar cried out as the tower shook, lost in the mist and terrified to run for fear of falling off one of those tall balconies. There were sounds of gunfire now, and she couldn’t see her brothers or sister. She kept low to the ground and began crawling, instead, hoping to find the others before the men found her, once again. Instead she found the dais, the four thrones. Her life seemed like a great well sometimes, a tremendous slope where no matter what force she exerted, she ended up closer to those things than before. Piper was there- she had already given up, sat on one. She looked at Skylar with despair. “What else can we do?” she asked. “I want this to be over!” Skylar agreed, but… not like that.

Her brothers found them soon enough, drawn by that same inevitability. Hayden had taken a bullet, somewhere, and his arm was covered in great gouts of blood but he still stood, grimacing, at the base of those thrones. Boden came to her and held on tightly, like he would be pulled away by the force of the terrible things. “Skylar, I don’t want to go in the chair! I don’t want any of this anymore! I just want daddy!” he sobbed, and she felt tears in her own eyes. She was nearly 11, she knew she was mature, but she had never been ready for any of this.

The gunfire died, and footsteps sounded. Skylar readied herself. If it came to it, she’d die before she got in those thrones, she decided. No matter who tried to make her.

But it wasn’t one of Flagg’s men, coming out of the mist. It was… an alien. Not human, not infomorph. Not any of the kinds she’d seen, anyway. It stood on two legs, with two long arms, like a human. But it had a black insectoid carapace, and a hard white chitinous head with two huge faceted eyes and a pair of antler-like mandibles extending upwards. It wore a dress, or perhaps more accurately an elaborate and high-collared red leather duster, and it carried a long, pointed rifle more fantastically futuristic than all the guns Skylar had seen so far. It was flanked by two more of its’ kind, and around its neck… the necklace given to her by Aslan. She recognized it- her- then, at long last. “Miss D? You changed again!”

The insect-woman laughed, rich and mellow. “And you’ve stayed just the same! We’ve had a hundred years in a time chamber with nothing but our minds, a handful of genies, and a pile of electronics full of every secret of biology and physics known to your race, little one. We took the opportunity to make some changes. But we’ve kept an eye on you during your long stair climb- you were the only one we could watch, in fact, until your ring and Hale’s cut out. When the simulacra went silent, we knew where we’d find you. And Haley put our minds to solving your Lion problem, as well. Come away from the thrones, children. We’ll get you medical attention, take you where you need to go.” The others quailed but Skylar calmed them. She knew Miss Delmutt wouldn’t offer her any harm. They’d been dragons together, just this morning!

Together they walked from the misty chamber of thrones, to the balcony and the sky-car hovering there, as if by magic. This high up, the sun hadn’t fully set over the horizon yet, and the children blinked in the red-yellow glow. Several more of the humanoid vessels were hauling a massive pallet off the back of the vehicle. “What’s that, ” Skylar asked, pointing at the device. It looked like a large metal cone with a black tip, 6 feet long and 2 feet wide at the base. There was something written on it but she couldn’t make it out in the scurry.

Delmutt waved the thing inside the throne room, and the kids onto the hovering vehicle. “Just a loose end, and an end to your throne problem. Never you mind. Your attention should be on what’s inside the dragonfly.” There was a piece of furniture in there, incongruous among the jump seats and military hardware.

Skylar looked at it in shock. “Is that…”

Delmutt nodded. “Yes, I believe it is. We picked it up on orders from Miss Haley, before she was cut off. Before we get away from here, we need you to do us one last favor- open it.”