Three days had passed since the incident.
Despite the physicians' protests and their insistence on rest, Butler rose as though he had no time to heal—returning to the palace, to his rightful place, as if his absence had been a betrayal.
On the morning of his arrival, Simon sat behind his desk, submerged in a leaden silence, when a faint knock echoed at the door.
"Enter," he said without lifting his head.
The door opened, and Butler stepped inside with measured strides, wearing a faint smile that belonged not to the realm of convalescence, but to duty.
Simon looked up. For a fleeting moment, an uncanny satisfaction flickered across his face, as though something unspoken had come to pass.
Butler, studying him with quiet astonishment, remarked:
"You smile like a man whom God has visited in secret and promised paradise."
Simon laughed, then sighed.
"I've overstayed in the nest, Butler… and this bird has finally begun to stir its wings. It's time to fly—far from its mother, from fear, from waiting."
His gaze lingered on Butler before adding:
"But what of you? Are you well? Leaving the hospital so soon is madness. Need I remind you that you're an old man? Death requires nothing more than a single misstep to politely invite you."
Butler chuckled darkly.
"You're right, my lord… A weary old man, every step a gamble. Yet I couldn't wait. If you meant to leap from the branch, I wanted to be here to witness it."
He stepped closer, his voice grave:
"But I beg you—this leap of yours… Do you have a plan? We'd hate for this legendary scene to end in blood splattered across the ground, should you discover mid-flight that your wings… do not work."
Simon recounted everything that had transpired in Butler's absence.
Butler stiffened at his lord's swift resolve.
"Well, if Morgan is already hunting for the *Clonmachnoise* ship—though finding it borders on impossibility—"
Simon cut in:
"Was it not said that the Storm Captain sailed to the world's edge and never returned? None knew whether he perished… or found a path known only to him. I'll risk it, Butler. If the odds are one in a thousand, that's enough."
"If you mean to chase the Storm Captain, I pray our oars prove sturdier than his luck. I'll follow you… but don't expect me to bless this folly," Butler muttered, sinking into the chair opposite the desk.
"I don't seek your blessing, Butler—only your theory."
"My theory? On what?"
"Everything. Why do you think the Holy Magicians said nothing? What privilege did they gain from silence?"
Butler did not answer at once. His eyes fixed on some unseen point, as though something beyond this world whispered to him. At last, he spoke:
"My lord…
The truth, as I see it?
I'll say it—not to dissuade you, but to burden you with its weight.
Imagine you are not yourself. But copies. Fractures. Shards of a being, each living, thinking, acting, screaming, dying… in your name.
In one world, you slit your mother's throat.
In another, you denied her existence.
In a third, you were never born.
Every thought you've entertained has come to pass.
'I would never' loses all meaning—because somewhere, you already have. You are neither innocent nor guilty. You are nothing but an echo reverberating through infinite possibilities.
Men fear not the idea—but the admission of it.
To realize you are not one, but a amalgamation of all you've desired and despised,
To have no fixed face, no conscience,
To gaze into a mirror and watch it rend you apart, for no reflection can ever be 'you.'
That is evil, my lord.
Evil lies not in murder or betrayal, but in not knowing who is the killer and who the victim.
In being both.
In the inability to choose a side, because all sides are yours.
In there being no 'good' to belong to, no 'evil' to flee—only you, repeating, splintering, rotting in the cesspool of your own possibilities.
As for the gods…
If there exist beings greater, crueler, colder…
They do not hear you. They do not see you. They do not care.
And the terror is not in their existence, but in the possibility of their indifference,
Or worse—that they exist, yet are not gods… but jailers.
And the most wretched truth?
That in one of those worlds, you are one of them.
That you are the god… yet no different from the rest.
Just a mind presiding over realms drowning in blood and screams,
Then snuffing them out… like a dream extinguished.
Do you understand now?
The Sorcerers concealed the truth not out of fear for us,
But because they had seen enough to loathe even themselves.
And so, they fell silent…
Leaving us to live a lie—
One that at least… resembles the truth."
Simon listened, pensive. "I see what you mean… There is much validity in this. The existence of infinite versions of oneself forces a harrowing question: 'Who are you?' Even as we cling to the notion of 'I,' the answer fractures. Identity is unstable—could it truly be so fragile?"
"Without a doubt," Butler replied. The two laughed, a sound both sharp and unmoored.
---
As Simon and Butler conversed in hushed tones, hours slipped by unnoticed. Then, without warning, a hesitant knock echoed at the door as though the sound itself feared to intrude. The door creaked open, revealing a diminutive man with a waxed mustache and an inscrutable face, clad in a violet coat that seemed dyed in twilight.
He offered no greeting, merely producing an ancient scroll from his inner pocket. Unfurling it with care, he recited in a monotone laced with something indefinably eerie:
"To Lord Simon,
By decree of the Grand Wizards:
Spacetime magic is now sealed
Intercontinental travel is forbidden until further notice.
Anticipate intensifying spatial tremors.
Reinforce your residence with appropriate wards. Avoid unnecessary excursions.
We thank you for your cooperation."
With a perfunctory bow, he departed as silently as he had come.
Simon exhaled. "Marvelous. Spacetime magic is locked, the world crumbles, and they dispatch a purple-clad jester to deliver the news. Is this the Grand Wizards's notion of professionalism?"
A month had passed since Mogan began his search for the ship. He forged a path through the Blue Mist Desert, where horizons had no end, and the only sun that rose did so from the earth's core. The air hummed with voices unlike any language.
On his left shoulder coiled a serpent of crystal, guiding him through the folds of reality. In his hand, a staff carved from the bone of a dead star. The Clonmachnoise—the legendary ship—was no ordinary vessel. It was not mere wood and sail, but an entity that defied the laws of existence, hiding in the fractures between worlds, sailing through the dreams of the dead and the forgotten wishes of children.
Mogan waded through lakes of liquid glass, climbed a ladder of smoke petrified by spirits at the edge of oblivion. With every step, another layer of reality peeled away, as though the universe itself rearranged to test him. He sought not just a ship, but the shattered meaning behind its existence—the original sin that drove Simon to seek it… and the end that would consume all who laid eyes upon it, though he did not yet realize it.
Mogan stood at the brink of a bottomless chasm, yawning downward like an idea fallen from the mind of a sleeping god. Above him, the sky was a shattered mirror reflecting futures yet to pass, his body flickering with the breath of the wind.
The earth reshaped itself with every step—sand turned to bone, bone to stone birds flying against gravity, dissolving into light. In the heart of the Glass Forest, he walked among trees sprouting from the mouths of sleeping men, their trunks pulsing like living veins. A colossal mirror grew from the soil like a flower, showing his shadow aging, dying, then reborn—holding a tiny model of the ship, orbiting him like a lost planet.
Everything was a riddle. Every path led to a question, never an answer.
Mogan paused before a dead tree, its branches hung with melted clocks and petrified hearts. Each pulse of the earth became a melody weighing on his eyelids. He lay down—not to sleep, but to slip inward… into himself? Or into something vaster? He did not know.
In the dream, there was no sky. Only a throbbing expanse, as though the universe itself were a heart beating in endless dark.
An Entity appeared.
It had no form, only motion that birthed shapes—whorls of thought, of barrenness, of a beginning never begun. A thousand eyes opened and closed, yet they did not see—they thought. Its voice was an idea planted in the marrow, not heard but lived.
"Mogan…"
The name came like a sigh from forgotten time. The space around him unfolded, revealing an entity that expanded the more he tried to grasp it.
"The Clonmachnoise… does not dock in water, but in the folds between lines—where even the Holy Sorcerers go blind."
Visions cascaded through timelessness: a black wing folding, a mirror shattering inside a skull, a throne of tears. Then, the revelation:
"Seek the Fairy. Small, her eyes of flawed emerald. Once imprisoned in Lord Athvalis' castle, of the Seven Bloodlines. Sold two moons past in the Forgotten Market beneath the Tower of Bones. She is the first thread in the tapestry of the impossible."
Darkness swallowed all. Morgan heard himself whisper:
"And if I reach the ship?"
The entity's final words were a wound in memory:
"When you see it… you will no longer be you."
Mogan awoke, his face wet with dew that had not fallen. The sky above had inverted—its clouds now walking backward.