The Multitude
that alternate world, the brutal fiefdom of Virtus now thrived. A land with a long history of mayhem and bloodshed, and religion had nothing to do with that.Gabriella glanced over her shoulder at a curtain of smoke still following her after so many years. She’d rendered it invisible to avoid embarrassing questions by onlookers, but she still knew what lurked where others saw only shadow—not just a portal to another dimension but a constant reminder of the hard lesson she’d learned. Wars, murders, rape, and treachery had all been on the increase in both dimensions since 1945. If anything, the world needed more messiahs, not fewer.
Hiroshima day. She’d had enough of her annual pilgrimage. She found an elderly man dozing on a nearby bench and escaped into his dream.
“I’ve seen you before,” he said.
“I visit on this date every year.”
“But for such a young girl to come without her parents, always alone…”
The word bit hard enough to bring more tears. An all-too-brief friendship with Asura had eased the ache of loneliness for a while. After that, solitude. She turned away to hide her face.
“Crying won’t shame you,” the man said.
She fled to a woman’s dream in Tokyo and then to a boy’s in Hong Kong. She leapt from there into Europe, dashed across the ocean, bounced through New York, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, and finally emerged from the World of Mortal Dreams into a region of northeast Texas where the hilly Ozarks fade into thinning forest.
On the other side of the portal lay a different place despite its perfect correlation with these geographic coordinates in the southern U.S. During one of her earliest forays through the smoke, she’d matched the two areas by studying the stars, but the solution to that little mystery only led to more questions. Why had God opened a gateway to one particular location—Sanctimonia, a peaceful wooded region bordered by the hostile and violent fiefdom of Virtus? Did a messiah live in the immediate area? Thus far, her search for one had proven fruitless.
Yet she still couldn’t shake the notion a savior in Sanctimonia might be a step in God’s grand plan. The original world remained deeply troubled despite once having been blessed by the birth of Christ. Perhaps a second, newer messiah would emerge in Sanctimonia, travel to Virtus, where he’d show the barbarians the light, and then march across the portal of smoke to try saving God’s original children again.
Hence the butterflies dancing in Asura’s garden just before the atomic bomb exploded.
Surely God had given a sign to her in 1945 Hiroshima. To believe otherwise would be to admit she’d committed perhaps the most heinous act of defiance against Him since Adam and Eve bit the apple.
But could mankind be saved? And what could she accomplish from a distance? Whenever she stepped through the smoke, the barrier circling the cabin grounds held her captive. God hadn’t hinted at a solution yet, or if He had, she’d never noticed. His signs remained maddeningly ambiguous.
Cold rain pouring down through the trees sizzled behind her.
She turned to the smoke. “What do you hold in store for me today, old friend?”
Her dogged shadow never provided any answers.
* * *
Sanctimonia: A moment later
Gabriella crossed from chilly, damp weather to summer warmth, witnessing again the spectacular repercussions of her simple conversation with a biblical king. On Sanctimonia’s side of the portal, her erasure of Christianity’s birth had caused different patterns of settlement, a delayed beginning of the industrial revolution, less deforestation in critical areas, and many other factors leading to a radical climate difference.
The sun-drenched meadow before her led to a nearby forest. As always, the trees teased her with a scent of pine she’d never been able to savor up close. But she always tried. Gabriella took a deep breath and started walking until the barrier announced its presence thirty-five paces later. The invisible bubble held fast against her probing hands.
What a fool she’d been to expect anything different! She’d risen in the morning with a rare hint of optimism, believing this day might hold something special in store. Forty years had passed since her act, and that number carried biblical significance. Now, her failure to break through the barrier spoke volumes about God’s anger with her. Misguided hopefulness wouldn’t change the situation.
A mild breeze brought the lilting voice of a woman lurking somewhere near the garden. Gabriella headed back toward the smoke and around the cabin, admonishing herself for her recklessness. The sunshine must have addled her mind!
The local Mystic tribe had no way of knowing about the bubble unless some fool of an angel flailed against it in broad daylight. These natives passed through the barrier unimpeded, as did the birds, the butterflies, the squirrels, the leaves blowing in the wind. Anything and anyone except Gabriella. The invisible wall existed for her alone, and not by some freak of nature. She’d taken it upon herself to redesign God’s grand plan, and this clearly represented His punishment—a taste of the world she’d created, but access to only an acre of it.
The Mystics were a cynical people likely to reach the worst possible conclusion if they learned about her imprisonment. They couldn’t be expected to straggle into a sinner’s garden for the blessings, dream interpretations, marital advice, biblical teaching, and the many other charitable acts she’d been performing to regain God’s favor. Thus, she’d taken great care to cultivate the image of an eccentric priestess who restricted her wanderings to the cabin grounds by choice rather than heavenly edict.
Luckily, the dark-haired young woman waiting on a bench kept her gaze fixed on the garden and seemed lost in the melody of the ballad she sang. In fact, Gabriella came all the way over and settled onto the facing bench before attracting any notice at all. The woman had been twisting her long braid of hair in the lap of her weathered dress. Now she released it, clearly startled.
“Abyssus.” Gabriella used the Latin word of greeting.
Latin still thrived on this side