At the end of a long hallway, Hunter dropped his shoulder and hit the double doors hard. As they swung open, they revealed an enormous warehouse. At the center was a large, round seal. Hunter was on a plateau far above the floor. There were many shelves on his level. All of them were stocked with meticulously labeled boxes. Mechanical parts covered in multicolored wires were lying naked on the shelves. Hunter made for the stairs. Before he reached the top stair, however, he heard a loud whooshing sound, then a thud. The seal in the center of the floor shook. Smoke billowed out around the edges of it.

“Oh no!” Hunter exclaimed.

His eyes rolled back into his head and he became Dahjaat. His consciousness wandered the void for a few seconds before returning to his giant body. He had shifted in the nick of time. The seal had popped off like a cork coming out of a champagne bottle. A column of thick smoke rocketed toward the roof. Smoke filled the room. The roof exploded in the center and the column rose higher and higher into the heavens. Then, Hunter heard a loud creaking sound. The roof was collapsing. The ground beneath his feet shook like an earthquake.

“Tiyana!” He screamed.

As he turned, he saw one of the rafters falling toward them. He grabbed his wife and leapt off of the plateau. He hit the ground hard and absorbed most of the impact as he dropped his wife carefully onto her feet. He looked up and saw that Virgil had vanished. Hongo had managed to dive underneath one of the fallen shelves. The thick metal rafter rested on top of the pile. Hongo was struggling to get out.

“Hold on Hongo. I’m coming.”

Hunter winced as he bounded up the rubble to the plateau where Hongo was pinned down. Virgil was nowhere to be seen. When Hunter reached the shelves, he bent his knees and lifted the shelf pinning Hongo down. The big Kenyan crawled out.

“I am fine Hunter. What about Tiyana?”

Hunter looked back down at her. He could barely see her through the smoke. He blinked and raised his index and middle fingers to his third eye. He pressed the bulb and felt sound waves bouncing off of everything in the room. A large metal truss was falling.

“Not again.” He muttered.

Exhausted and injured from the fall, he bounded back down the pile of rubble to Tiyana’s position. He picked her up, draped her over his shoulder, and ran for the door. The crumbling roof had bent the large sliding door out of shape. Hunter saw an opening. He bolted for it. Rubble rained down on top of him. He protected Tiyana as best as he could and kept running. He was screaming. He tapped his third eye again and became aware of someone running behind him. It was Hongo. They reached the crack in the bent door as the door and part of the wall collapsed. Hunter, Tiyana, and Hongo dove through the crack as the building collapsed inward. Covered in soot and dust, they crawled away from the wreckage. The giant smokestack still billowed into the sky. It seemed to be accumulating in the low-hanging clouds.

“Ma Ang’o!” Hongo exclaimed. “What is that?”

“Ghaelvord.” Hunter said. “This must be his plan.”

“But what is it?” Tiyana said.

“You know what it is.” Tiyana heard Virgil’s voice.

She turned and saw him, unscathed, standing behind them.

“How...?” She started, “You know what? Forget it.”

“He knows how to do it. He is doing it.” Virgil was saying, “He needs mass to become a Titan and he will take it from the field.”

“Is this what you were talking about before?” Hunter asked Tiyana.

Tiyana nodded.

“There’s something about the synchrotron.” She said. “He used it to channel energy from… I can’t say it.” She shook her head.

“From chaos.” Said Virgil.

“Fine. How do we stop it?” Hunter asked through gritted teeth.

He looked above him and saw the accumulation of smoke moving. It was drifting southeast toward the Alps. Virgil shook his head.

“Hunter, I am so sorry.” Virgil said. “I take full responsibility. You did everything that you could.”

“Hey!” Hunter yelled. “What are you saying? Snap out of it Vee!”

Virgil kept shaking his head.

“I am proud of you.”

“I haven’t done anything yet.” Hunter said through gritted teeth.

Virgil exhaled heavily through his nose and went on, “You did everything that you could, everything that I asked of you.”

Hunter gripped Virgil’s robes in his massive palms.

Virgil looked up into his eyes, “Hunter, we failed. It is over.”

Hunter shook him. “It is not over!”

Tiyana was on the verge of tears. Hongo stood by awkwardly, not knowing what to do or say.

“I must return to the Kingdom. The War will begin again. It is the only way. We cannot fight a Titan alone.” Virgil said.

“No!” Hunter shouted.

He was on the verge of losing his temper.

“The epoch is coming, Hunter. Remember the prophesy.” Virgil said solemnly.

“That poem, or riddle, that you told us back in Shambhala?” Hunter was exasperated.

“There are many epochs and one is coming.” Virgil said. His tone indicated that he was mortified at Hunter’s stubbornness. “It is imminent.”

Hunter growled like an animal.

“I make my own prophesy.” Hunter said as he let go of Virgil’s robes.

Virgil fell to the ground. Hunter had not realized it, but he had lifted the monk off of his feet.

“Hunter.” Tiyana said pleadingly. “I don’t want to lose you.” She said candidly.

“I don’t want to lose you either.” Hunter replied.

Hunter swallowed deeply and stared into her eyes. She knew what he was waiting for. They might be responsible for the death and enslavement of millions. Hunter was considering a reckless course of action that would endanger his life. On the other hand, he was Dahjaat now, like the rest of them. He could handle himself. In split seconds, she wondered what was right. She tried to think not about what she wanted or what he would want, but how to act out of grace. What would be the right thing to do? She knew what it was. She hated it. It went against the core of her being. She thought about her child and she almost turned back, but she did not. She took the plunge.

“Go. Do the right thing.” She said.

Hunter embraced her. He leaned his gargantuan forehead to hers. She felt the sweat roll down his face. She felt warm in his embrace. He kissed her.

“I love you.” He said. Then, he was gone.

“Wait!” Virgil called out. “Take this!”

Virgil held out his staff.

Before he handed it to Hunter, he uttered a brief chant, “Senyar aut caelu.”

Hunter took the staff and gripped it hard. It weighed nothing. Actually it weighed less than nothing. It pulled his arm up toward the sky.

“The effect will not last long. Use it to float down to the detector chamber.” Virgil said. “Good luck and Godspeed.”

“Thanks.” Hunter said.

He made a fist and held it to his heart. He made eye contact briefly with each of them. Then, he was gone, climbing up the rubble that used to be the CERN facility. They lost sight of him in the smoke.

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Virgil said ominously. “He is quite brave.”

• • •

Hunter leapt from one piece of rubble to the next, climbing ever higher the pile of wreckage that used to be the CERN facility. From the fumarole at the wreckage’s apex, vapor billowed out in a column that rose into the troposphere and then flowed southeast toward Mount Blanc, where it accumulated in a dark, spinning vortex. Lightning illuminated the mountain intermittently. An unnatural storm was brewing.

Hunter could only see a few feet in front of himself when he reached the top of the rubble. He put his hand into the column of smoke and watched his fingers disappear. The smoke was thin and misty. There was air inside it, though breathing it was difficult and painful. Hunter’s lungs burned. He wasted no time.

Hunter dove into the center of the column, holding Virgil’s staff high. The staff pulled him upwards. The rising column of smoke and fog pulled him upwards as well. Gravity, however, was stronger than the upward pull. Hunter drifted slowly down into the shaft. He floated slowly down, like a feather dropped from a skyscraper. His lungs burned and he could not see more than a couple of feet in front of himself. He heard the roar of the column fill his ears.

Eventually, he landed. He immediately felt the field of energy around him. He felt it fill his body with vibrations from his feet to his head. He was standing on top of the great ATLAS detector. He dropped to his knees, still surrounded in the vaporous column, and placed his palm on the muon spectrometers.

He could feel the powerful barrel toroid magnets inside and the solenoid in the center. The thrum of the cosmos hummed in the back of his head. As his hand touched the spectrometers, Hunter felt the power from the magnets course through his body. His perspective changed. He saw the world turn paper thin and stretch out before him. He was part of it, but part of him was submerged beneath it. He looked closer and the paper was made of fibers and the fibers were the great vibrating strings that he had felt so many times since he became Dahjaat. He was awestruck to find that he could see beyond the dimensions of the paper. He could see an unimaginably breathtaking series of interactions coalescing in a cosmic kaleidoscope. He saw all of this happening to unfathomable depth. At the surface, the fibers held the world together. He could see his own body, translucent and vibrating with the fabric of reality. He saw a vast expanse of matter and energy beneath and above him, before and after him, around and inside him. He saw his own body taking up only a sliver of this space. He sensed little creases in the fabric. Through the creases, other dimensions opened up in front of him. He saw the world laid out in front of himself like the tip of an underwater mountain poking its head up and out of a infinite ocean lying beneath it. He saw reality and everything in it propped up by this vast expanse of dark matter and energy. It was not a void, it had substance. Hunter saw the viscous aether that existed beyond the tangible world.

He saw order. It was glorious. He felt grace. His emotions overwhelmed him. The underwater depths of unseen things propped him up and supported him. The foundations branched out and supported his family, his wife, and… Hunter choked, despite himself. He could see life pouring into his wife, coming from the depths of the aether. There was nothing arbitrary or capricious about it. It was beautiful. He heard it move. The sound was like a melodious orchestra.

Hunter fell to his knees. Tears streamed down his face. He felt stricken. Then, he heard a voice. He could not tell where it came from. It could have been from the depths or it could have been from the fibers of reality. It resonated inside his head.

“Stand up Hunter! You have a job to do! Go on! Move!”

Hunter blinked a few times, swallowed hard, and slowly climbed to his feet.

“Can you see him?” The voice asked.

“I don’t know.” Hunter replied.

“Look.” The voice urged.

Hunter looked and he saw nothing but the ATLAS detector in all its complex brilliance. He looked up the utility shaft to the surface. He saw smoke billowing out. He followed the smoke, but the concrete and dirt blocked his view. Then, he looked through a tiny crease in the fabric. He saw the smoke’s destination. He saw an enormous mountain. The smoke accumulated around its white peak.

“I see it.” Hunter said.

“Are you sure?” The voice said.

Hunter looked closer. The fabric of reality was torn. Someone or something was drawing darkness from the aether up into the light through those tears. It was swelling to monstrous size. On the mountaintop, the creases in the fabric were oozing matter into the fabric itself. The fabric bulged, but it held together. The bulge in the fabric defied the order that Hunter saw in the depths. It was a small piece of chaos in a vast, elaborate, sophisticated constitution.

“Yes, I am sure.” Hunter said.

“Then go, you know what to do.” The voice said.

“But how?” Hunter asked.

“Take the quickest route.” The voice told him.

Hunter’s instincts told him to move his body, and when he did, he could feel the entire mass of himself move with it. He lifted his arm and he felt the weight of a hundred arms lift with it, only the rest of the weight was outside of the fabric of spacetime, invisible to him and imperceptible until now. The extra weight of the rest of his body was underneath and around him, but connected to him.

“Not that way.” The voice told him. “Go through it.”

“What?” Hunter asked, confused.

Then, all of a sudden, he understood. He released himself into the depths of the aether. As he vanished from the thin fabric of reality, he swam like a fish through the viscous underworld. When he arrived at the mountaintop, he surfaced again, caught by the resonating fibers of reality. He was back in spacetime, in three dimensions, careening along the timeline. He stood on one of the great ridges overlooking the Genovese valley on the top of Mount Blanc. He was not alone. Ghaelvord was there, surrounded in a tornado of smoke. Ghaelvord stood naked on a cliff overlooking the valley. Smoke and particulate matter swirled around him in a small tornado. He had his arms outstretched with his palms turned upward. The tornado grew wider above him. It rose up far above his body and widened as it rose. At the peak, it joined with the dark vortex. Without turning around, Ghaelvord spoke.

“Welcome.” Ghaelvord said in his throaty, cloying voice.

• • •

Ghaelvord reached down and picked up a dark robe. He wrapped it around himself and turned to face Hunter.

“So, you’ve seen through the holes into the dark part of the world. You understand how small and insignificant we are in it.”

Hunter’s brow furrowed, “No, not at all. It supports us. It’s our foundation. And it’s not dark, just unseen.”

Ghaelvord cocked his head to the side, “That is one way to look at it, I suppose. Why are you here?”

“I am going to stop you.” Hunter said resolutely.

Ghaelvord laughed long and hard and deep. The laugh boiled up from his belly and exploded out of his jowls.

When it wound down, Hunter spoke again, “What are those things, the little creases in the fabric?”

Ghaelvord became serious, “Black holes, Hunter Price. Those are very small, short-lived tears in the fabric of spacetime. In the center of each is a singularity. Inside the singularity, past the event horizon, all dimensions are crushed. They muddle together. We, the Dahjaat, can see through these gateways beyond spacetime to the other dimensions. We alone, know not through our reason, but through our senses that the world is so much greater than all of this.” He waved his hands about, gesturing toward the snow and the rocks and the mountains and the valley below.

“Where are we?” Hunter asked.

Hunter’s mind was racing. He had no plan. It was just him, Ghaelvord, the swirling vortex, and the mountain. He said a brisk prayer inside his head and hoped that his course of action would become clear while they talked.

“We are on top of Mount Blanc, Hunter. Look down and out over the valley. A storm is imminent. I am becoming elemental, atavistic. I might lose control for some time. Look out at the farms and cities stretching out beneath us. Because of your meddling, they will likely be destroyed. I want you to know that this was not my plan. I never wanted this. It is only a last resort. I only want to bring Elysium to Earth. Is that so wrong?”

“How can you say that? You’re bringing chaos into the world. How can you rationalize that?”

Ghaelvord smiled paternalistically, “You are too young to understand this. Mortals are like sheep and they need a shepherd. Imagine the race guided by the collected wisdom of the ages. Imagine the birth of a true meritocracy. Imagine our capacity, what we can achieve. Would you deprive humanity of this, of utopia?”

Hunter stammered, “That’s...that’s not what you are doing. You are no god. I can tell you that from personal experience.”

Ghaelvord sighed, “You are young. Come now, you and I have had our differences, but let us end this sciamachy. I am not your enemy. Think of our past as so much water under the bridge. Let it go. Hunter, I have grown to respect you. You foiled my plans and pushed me to the brink. You are a man of action. I admire that, your proactivity, your tenacity. There will be a place for you in the new world and your family. You will be a king.”

“And what does that make you, a god?” Hunter asked sarcastically.

“Hunter, there is power in the aether, the power to change the world, and I will change it for the better.” Ghaelvord’s eyes widened as he said this.

“Yes, but you can’t control it or create it. You are only molding it.”

Ghaelvord became angry, “I am making something new. I am making something good.”

Hunter shook his head, “You’re just changing what you see. You have no idea how the system will be affected. In the end, all that’s left will be chaos”

Ghaelvord narrowed his eyes. He was furious.

“There will be no chaos! I will fix it! I will will what I will!”

“But…”Hunter stammered. He searched for the right words and came up empty. Finally, he just said, “You cannot stop the entropy.”

“But nothing.” Ghaelvord’s anger subsided. “Hunter, I have stood in your shoes. I understand your feelings. One day, however, you will look around you. You will see pain and suffering everywhere. It serves no purpose. Chaos is already loose in the world. Our fates are arbitrary and then the void awaits. You and I; we can make life good for us and for those around us. We can mold it, craft it, shape it, and perfect it. If you are strong enough, you will try. I can help you. We can do it together. So what if we cannot create bliss? We can leave it better than we found it. What else can we do? We must create our own concept of the world, meaning, and the mystery of life.”

Hunter channeled his response from somewhere deep inside.

They felt like someone else’s words, like Virgil speaking through him, “There is more beyond the depths. It’s not just a void. This is temporary, but we are not. Our souls are not. You have to see that. I saw it, in the depths.”

At that, Ghaelvord chuckled, “I will worry about life, which I can control, not death, which I cannot.”

“But you saw how infinitesimally small this life is in aether! You saw the depths! You know that there is more, so much more.” Hunter almost whispered the last part.

“That is not for me. For me, the netherworld means nothing, only this life matters.” Ghaelvord said, shaking his head and snarling. “I only think about what I can control. I only control what is in front of my eyes.”

Hunter became impassioned, “But you can’t control life! You can only accept it or reject it.”

Ghaelvord looked askance at Hunter, “Bliss is perfection and I hope death leads to bliss, but for me, it may as well lead to nothing. We came from the void and so we will oneday return to it. Hunter, you and I are the agents of providence. No cavalry is coming. Death is desinence. Life is what we make it and we have only our instinct to guide us.”