Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) - Gary Stringer (read e book TXT) 📗

do that, even if you were Timeless, even if you were immortal, would you want to spend your entire life searching for your keys?

For the Guardians, looking for specific events in Tempestrian history is just like looking for your keys – the problem is knowing where to look. That requires co-ordinates.

When I say co-ordinates, I don’t just mean a set of numbers or symbols. It doesn’t work like that. Just as teleporting requires an image of where you want to go, temporal co-ordinates provide a vital sympathic impression of the destination.

This also explains why it is impossible to travel independently into one’s own personal future: It’s impossible to know for sure exactly where and when you’re going to lose your keys. After all, you don’t plan on losing them, do you? If you’d tried to predict exactly where your keys would be tomorrow, on the day before you lost them, you’d have been wrong, wouldn’t you? In the same way, I can simulate possible futures, but if I were to try to travel to those imaginary co-ordinates, where would I be? The answer is, nobody knows.

I might go nowhere. On the other hand, in theory, I might literally go nowhere. Some vast, endless no-place where there is nothing. Even if I could survive that, with a starting point outside of all reality, could I get back, or would I be stuck there forever? Would forever be a thousand centuries, or a split second? In this no-place, where nothing existed, how could I tell the difference?

So perhaps now, you can appreciate some of the difficulties and dangers of what the Guardians and I do. In short, we must know precisely where and when we are going at all times. In terms of my analogy, what you need is for your friend to tell you that they’ve found your keys for you. They were behind the cushion on the sofa in their room. You left them there when they fell out of your pocket when you were playing that game last night before you went home. Fortunately for the Guardians, they have friends like that: they’re called historians.

One of the great misconceptions about Time travel is that it makes history books redundant, when in fact those books are some of the most valuable tools any Time traveller could have: they tell you where and when to look.

*****

Our history books have helped me turn my gaze to the times and places in which the Original Three Guardians lived their early lives, and tell their stories independently of the way they may have recounted those stories in retrospect. In short, it’s a first-hand account.

The reason I mention this, gentle reader, is that my father is different. He is not from this mortal realm, he’s a higher planar being. So, when I come to try and detail his personal past, in addition to a universe of time and space, I have whole other planes of reality to consider. An Infinity of Great Cosmic Sandwiches. Once we get to the era when Daelen met Cat, Mandalee and Dreya, history books once again come to my rescue, but Daelen StormTiger has been around for a long time, so some of the most significant parts of his story happen in places and times beyond any books.

That’s one of the reasons Mandalee has gone to fetch him: we need more information if we’re going to fight the Monster that now threatens us.

My decision to remove Daelen from that particular point in his own Timestream was not arbitrary. The ‘right moment’ had to satisfy three conditions. He must have met Mandalee and Catriona, so he’d be inclined to help. He must be at the peak of his powers, so he’d be able to help. And he must be alone, yet in a precisely known location, so we would know exactly where and when to look for our key. Our key to survival that is.

The last condition was the hardest because it seems like a contradiction. If somebody knew precisely where he was, how could he be alone? If he was alone, how could anybody know for certain precisely where he was? The answer to that conundrum I will keep to myself for now. (I may have promised you an accurate account, gentle reader, but I still reserve the right to delay the reveal of specific details for dramatic reasons.) Suffice to say, Mandalee and I wanted to bend the rules, and the other two Guardians were having none of it, so we locked them in my room and did it anyway.

If all goes well, we will return my father to his Timestream a moment after we took him, but by doing this, for that short period, to all intents and purposes, Daelen StormTiger will not exist. If I’m right, the cosmos will be able to survive without his presence for that short time, and he will help us save the world. If I’m wrong, and the cosmos can’t survive without him, then everything we know will collapse into the void, and worse still: his ego will be completely insufferable.

My point is, when history books fail us, we must fall back on legend. The Legend of Daelen StormTiger. Or to put it another way, gentle reader, I believe it is time, at last, to take us all the way back to the beginning…

*****

…Long ago, before any known history books were written, Daelen StormTiger gazed upon the world below him like a tiny, shining bauble. A precious, delicate thing to be handled with care. He was its Protector now. He had to be because, the way he saw it, he was partly responsible for the danger it was facing.

Daelen’s people were at war – war beyond the imaginations of the mortals Daelen watched below him. It was not known how long this war had been raging, or even how to relate the passage of time in the higher realms, to what mortals experience on Tempestria. Suffice to say, a very, very