Author's Note: The story resumes on March 1st. I will update every two weeks (or every ten days if I can swing it), and will complete a full cycle before going on hiatus again.

I have a now. It is dot com slash sabien, if you are interested.

Interlude

On a cold, heavy world, an alien runs—runs at the snail's pace that is the fastest anything can move through an atmosphere as thick as quicksand. It is pursued by seven creatures with cracked, black skin like cooled lava—they howl, and the alien stumbles. It trips over a root, a living tendril that has been growing for a thousand years, that was made to grow for exactly this purpose—trips, and falls, and dies soon after, pierced through by needlelike claws.

This is allowed, by the rules of the game.

The seven creatures drink in the memory of the hunt, and their thousand thousand brethren chitter in satisfaction. They have learned a new way to kill, and it is wrong, subtly wrong—their enemy has fallen more easily than it should have, and their confidence is unfounded, tainted by hubris.

This is allowed, by the rules of the game.

The creatures depart from the surface, returning to their ship, and their ship darts away from the massive star, slipping into the white non-space that lies between and behind the usual empty blackness. It travels for a distanceless time, emerging into reality just as a pulse of radiation sweeps through the void, the violent echo of an explosion half a hundred parsecs hence. Their shields are adequate, and they barely notice, but a cascading chain of tiny reactions causes a wire to shift and a valve to close, sparks the formation of a scattering of new isotopes in the mixture of their fuel. Their ship is fractionally faster, though they do not know it; they will arrive at their destination sooner than expected, and at their next destination sooner still, the changes compounding until the day when they land on this continent instead of that one, because that one is on the far side of the planet, and the creatures are not patient.

This, too, is allowed by the rules of the game. There are a trillion trillion pieces, and all of them significant, their interactions governed by a shifting web of causality as delicate as a neutrino and as old as time itself. The web may be touched—nudged—shifted—once in an epoch, or possibly twice, a single strand may be snapped. Any more than that, and the game is forfeit. The players dance in slow infinity, calculating the fractal geometry of self-fulfilling prophecies, anticipating the impact of anticipated acts, and acting in reaction to events far in the unfixed future. Thus do cause, effect, and chaos mix, until even all-seeing eyes begin to miss things. There is always error, after all, and it is a chief characteristic of error that it is random—it being reliably willing to cancel itself out, it may safely be ignored. One can only go so many places beyond the decimal point before one is wasting resources more wisely spent elsewhere—a waste one's opponent will spot, and convert into advantage in accordance with the rules.

And so—things happen. They are outside of the realm of prophecy, beyond the reach of fate. They are not allowed by the rules of the game, and neither are they forbidden.

An alien speaks a word as it dies. The word is heard only by its enemies—they do not speak the language, and they pay it no mind.

A lump of rock falls into a star. The star explodes, as it would have anyway—the fire peaks a tenth of a degree hotter on a scale measured in the hundreds of billions.

On Earth, a girl is born. Her name is Rachel, and she is not supposed to be there.