36: The Struggle

Mirai, Mirai #36. Serial fiction: multiverse family drama.

Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

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Previously, a meaningful conversation between Hades and Makaria was cut short by the intrusion of a new dimensional rift…

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Makaria moved first when they saw the rift open, throwing her hands up in a blaze of white flame. Hades extended a warier gesture, examining the anomaly as best as he could without getting in her way. It was a rip in their reality, raw and angry, with the herniated folds of other spacetimes pressing in behind it. Up close, he could see very clearly how the girl was working to pick out the threads that should go together and yank them tight again across the gap. Her power felt familiar, very much like his own, and yet not quite. Was it a difference between their masters? The addition, maybe, of some of Persephone’s powers?

A sharp pop behind him warned Hades that he’d spent longer in study than he’d thought. “I couldn’t wake The Matrix!” Jacob called.

Makaria turned her face slightly to be heard better. “I’m not surprised, after everything that last fight took out of him! Mheksos has to be trying to wear us down.”

Jacob reappeared off to the side, crouching on the roof of the stairwell with his arm over his head against the strengthening rain. “The others are on their way. Should I try to get Baz or Ignis up here too?”

“If I can get it closed before he widens it enough to push his forces through, we won’t need anybody—” Her hold on their spacetime slipped as the rift ratcheted open further, and she stumbled back half a step on the wet concrete. With one hand Hades steadied her, and with the other he caught the threads she’d dropped. He hadn’t entirely known that he could, but—of course he could. It wasn’t so different from picking up coordinates in space to form a portal. He handed them back to an open-mouthed Makaria with a thin smile.

“We’ll get it closed,” he said.

“...thank you, Father.” She nodded gratefully toward the other end of the rift, which had begun to spiral outwards like a malignant vine searching for purchase. “I’ll hold this side, and you take that one.”

Zipping the tear back together turned out to be relatively simple; that was an intellectual exercise in matching up the torn bits and letting them remember how the world was supposed to be. Spacetime, governed by inertia as much as any of them were, could do that much by itself. The unexpectedly difficult endeavor was to take the wide-apart edges and draw them in. As Hades worked—or tried to work—he found that closing the gap required a personal force of character that did not come naturally.

His hold slipped now, and the gash stretched open further in front of him. His clammy hands were shaking. How could a thing like him come up with the necessary resolution to impose his will on reality itself? He could give himself over to his master, let his strength and personality suffice, but—that would diminish that small part of him that was Liam even further. And then there would be no buffer between Archangel and Makaria at all.

No. No, he had to do this himself, somehow. Liam focused very hard on the thought that this world had to be worth saving—he didn’t know how it could be, but—

The rift pulled away from him again, and he grabbed wildly. No, it was. It was good. This world had sunlight and laughter. It had Christabel, and her anger, and her pity. It had his daughter, their daughter, who had come all the way across the multiverse to save it. It was a good world, and if he wasn’t worthy of that, then he’d find a way to become so. Bracing himself, Liam pulled back in turn on the edges, and was relieved to feel them obey this time.

With his newfound determination he was able to work his way almost to the middle, with Makaria just about a foot away. Then the material behind the rift suddenly buckled, sending them both toppling. He fell forward, through the mist, into the fifth dimension and the heaving chaos beyond.

He kept falling. The weight of a thousand parallel realities pressed in on him, throwing him further in and further down—whatever meaning down still had. Within their gauzy folds, image after image of his own face passed him like the reflections in a house of mirrors, each staring back in astonishment. Before he could give in to the urge to reach out to one, another scene emerged from the mist before him. Just beyond the threshold of reality, an unassuming man of indeterminate age sat surrounded by mechanical odds and ends, cleaning blood from the feet of a Mhekanite. As the distortion between them faded, the man looked up and seemed to see Hades approaching, and scowled.

“That wasn’t supposed to be you,” he said. As he spoke, something in his face suddenly glitched, as if briefly exposing another face beneath, identical but not quite in sync. “When you get back, tell The Matrix I’ve had enough of his tricks. I’ve seen far more of the multiverse than he has, and he can’t imagine the suffering that ensues if he succeeds in his stupid little campaign. Tell him to give up now, before his interference contaminates the timeline any further.”

“Your Mightiness, I presume?” Hades spoke quickly, seeing Mheksos’ hand lifting to banish him. This was the sort of thing that did come naturally. “You must know I have my own motivations in the matter, nothing to do with The Matrix at all. You must know also that our timeline has already been so contaminated that surrender would do you no good without wiping out nearly every person who’s become involved.”

Mheksos hesitated, his expression narrowing in silent confirmation.

Hades pressed on. “Perhaps, however, if you in your wisdom might advise us—”

“Perhaps,” Mheksos said curtly. “What did The Matrix tell you?”

“Nothing.”

“Naturally.” The Master of the Multiverse lowered his hand. “He never told me anything, either.”

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⏭️ Next week: Mheksos the Mighty…in his own words.

Thanks for reading! For more stories set in this universe, see my superverse directory.

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