57. Statues and Pilgrims

  Hien Ro looked at the recorder in his hand. He had come to a decision. It was a difficult one for him to make, but now that he had made it, there was no looking back.

  He pressed the button one last time, and then, once he had drained himself entirely of emotion, he crushed the device into a solid ball of metal. He threw it in the wastebasket and walked away, to where he found his daughters playing tag with Atla and Little Bug’s youngest sister.

  He spent a few minutes watching the children play, until the corners of his heart began to remember what it was to feel again, and then he smiled. His daughters finally noticed him watching, and they abruptly hid behind Atla. They had been shy around him lately, sensing the strangeness in him when he had just used the recorder.

  “What’s this?” he asked, stepping out into the courtyard. “Are you afraid of your old man?”

  The girls shook their heads, but they continued to hide behind Atla.

  “Well then come here and give him a hug!”

  They glanced at each other, then nervously rush to embrace their father. The hug turned into a tickling match. Yara came out, hearing the laughter, and she smiled at him sadly, knowing that this joy would be sent off soon to a tyrant in another dimension.

  Ro hadn’t told her about his conviction to destroy the recorder yet, but he told his family over dinner.

  “I crushed it. The thing that was taking me away from you,” he said between mouthfuls. “Thank you for your efforts in keeping me grounded and reminding me who I am. But I shouldn’t be forgetting again. Although if I do, then smack me upside the head and tell me I’m being an idiot. If I ever forget how much I love you, then I’ll definitely deserve it.”

  The girls giggled and exchanged happy looks, but Yara’s expression grew serious. She didn’t say anything in front of the girls, but once they had been bathed and put to bed, the adults sat on their bed while she looked for the world.

  “What about the arrangement with Beailor?” she asked. “You’re reneging on your responsibilities.”

  “He knew that I would eventually,” Hien Ro said. “He got what he asked for. More than he deserved. It took me a while to realize this, but although the arrangement was predatory, he never said that he’d withdraw once he’d committed his forces. I don’t think that he can.”

  “You’re gambling the future of our dimension on this,” she said.

  He shook his head. “No. I refuse to believe that the future of this war would be decided by one man’s actions. Even Beailor isn’t so petty as to throw us under the wagon because of simple pettiness. Besides, he’ll have established his own arrangements with Lord Loshi as well, and he can’t renege on those. It will be fine. Everything will be fine, Hien Yara. My love.”

  He smiled at her. “I still can’t believe that we’re married sometimes,” He confessed.

  “Married with children,” she amended, motioning towards the room where the girls slept.

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling. “Try for a third?”

  She frowned. “You haven’t touched me since you got back. What brings this on all of a sudden?”

  “Beailor doesn’t deserve to feel how I feel about you,” he said, and he kissed her. They made love with the quiet passion of parents trying not to wake their children.

  ~~~~~~

  I made several public appearances while Shisuke and Tonilla were off-world, acting as my intermediaries to the Emerald Court. I gave speeches, praising the heroes of the Battle That Never Happened, and also offering an official explanation of exactly what had happened.

  “The magic that allowed me to revert time and revive those who had perished in the combat is not something that I expect I’ll be able to use in combat again,” I said. “It was only a confluence of unique situations which allowed me to perform it in the first place. While it may seem that the only effects of the reversion are the destruction of the wards of the Coliseum of Mer’cah, I assure you that they are far more far-reaching than that. I cannot predict the outcome of defying fate on this scale.

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  “The simplest explanation of how I made it appear as though the battle never happened is to imagine time as a long rope. I looped the rope, where the battle took place in the loop. When the enemy was defeated, I purged their souls, and grabbed fast of the souls of all Atlians who were alive at the start of the loop, then pulled them from the end of the loop back to the start of it.

  “If this doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry about it too much. It makes sense to me, and that’s all that truly matters.”

  Unfortunately, despite phrasing my ability as an advanced technique, which is what I saw it as, my acknowledgment that I was responsible for the reset at the end of the battle only added to my legend as a deity. My worshipers developed a new symbol for me, one that I recognized from other lives. While they presented it as a rope looped in on itself, it was often used to symbolize the infinite.

  It was ∞. Before long I saw this symbol embroidered upon the clothing of my followers and devotees. While I don’t think that any of the languages of Atla used that symbol previously, it was widely known in the multiverse, and claiming it as my own would be seen by many as the height of hubris.

  But then, I hadn’t claimed it. My followers had claimed it for me. So when it began to appear on the clothing that the servants provided for me – I had stopped questioning where my clothing came from a long time ago – I simply embraced it.

  I made some overtures to those who were lost in their personal hells following their deaths in the alternate timeline, doing what I could to heal their souls. Unfortunately, this was seen as yet another miracle.

  I put a hard stop to the attempts by the nobles to purchase healing. The wounds that these souls were experiencing were wounds that I was uniquely qualified to heal as a powerful soul cultivator. But common illnesses and wounds and deformities? Common healers were more experienced and better situated to deal with those.

  Instead I had Atla direct me to the worst effected of the soul-wounded and quietly healed them as best I could, while others were brought forth to the temples of me that were springing up all over the place, eventually requiring that I make the rounds.

  I reluctantly consecrated these locations. I told myself that there was no harm in my religion, for so long as I was there to guide my followers and keep them on the right path. I would have a very long life, after all. Not only as a powerful cultivator, but as a Xian Lord, I would live for millennia before the weight of ages pulled me back into the waters of samsara.

  Compared to me, however, Atla had very few compunctions about limiting the spread of his religion. Matla temples were sprouting up all over the place, and she had no issue with manifesting at them each to pronounce them sacred.

  I was worried that he was stretching himself too far, but she assured that it was easier to answer peoples questions than it was to have them keep on shouting her name at her.

  For example, she introduced the practice of placing a statue in the temple, or in some other public place where anyone could interact with it. If a man touched it, its eyes would flash green if they were fertile and red if they were infertile. If a woman touched it, it would flash blue if they were fertile, red if they were infertile, and golden if they were pregnant.

  “It’s so much easier to let the statues do all of the work,” she told me. “Of course, it really does have to be somewhere that they can get to it. I was really annoyed when one temple tried to lock it up at night, because that’s when a lot of the young women go to ask the question. I don’t know why they don’t go during the day, but whatever mortals are weird. And the men like to check on it on night as well sometimes. I don’t know why, since they don’t get pregnant and I think that’s what the young women worry about, since most of them are when they check on the statue at night.

  “Anyway, so yeah, the priests of this village tried to lock up the statue and charge people to touch it. So I burnt down their temple and shrank their balls and only the statue is left. The statue still works, but those priests got ran out of town.”

  I sighed as he told me about all of this, but decided that it wasn’t really my place to interfere. “Well, if you say that your statues make it easier for you—”

  “They were making the statues anyway, but now the statues do more than just make teenagers horny. And this way they don’t have to bug my priests or keep shouting prayers at me. They go to the statue, ask once, and I answer. Poof, so much less work. You should make statues too,” he told me. “And more temples. You know that there’s a pilgrimage coming to see you, right?”

  “There’s what?”

  “Yeah. I mean, a lot of people are just waiting for the masses to arrive in the way-gate cities, but once they do there’s going to be millions of them in the streets coming to see you. After the battle, when we worked together to turn back time, everyone who was on the fence about you being a god or not suddenly decided that you were,” he explained. “So now there’s a pilgrimage to see you or your home or your temples or whatever.”

  I sighed, rubbing my temples in frustration.

  “Fine. It’ll be easier if I go to meet them. Atla, can you direct me to the largest confluences of the pilgrims so that I can meet them and tell them to turn back?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  Fixing that little event took several days. At the end of it, I sensed several powerful cultivators approaching Atla and rushed to the north to meet them.

  The delegation from the Emerald Court had arrived.

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