Chapter Three
William Solan hadn’t moved from where he sat in the leather wing-backed chair in his study for quite some time. All around him, the myriad multitude of clocks on the wall ticked discordantly. Time had been altered, and it showed.
With the slightest of gestures, the Time King pulled a gold pocket watch from the inner pocket of his suit, popped it open, and glanced down at it. This pocket watch was not like any other in the multiverse. It was so much more than it appeared to be, its extra dimensions stretching through the telling symbols of an astrolabe and even beyond that, to the remembered places of long dead stars.
He gazed at the watch. It, too was off. And it never had been before.
William closed the watch and returned it to his pocket, then pushed out of the chair and strode to the door, leaving the cacophony behind for a new mess of sound, as the hallway was also lined with clocks from different eras. He continued through the hallway, a man bent on solitude, until he’d descended several flights of stairs and was entering a long stone corridor.
William flicked a switch on the wall. Coiled lanterns from the era of Tesla sizzled to life to light the walkway, which stretched hundreds of feet into the distance and ended in a single door. The Time King reached the door, grasped the handle, and hesitated. He closed his eyes.
Beyond this barrier was a world he’d never shown to anyone. It wasn’t that it was a huge secret; it was only that the room was fairly new. He hadn’t yet had a chance to reveal it to anyone… but he could well imagine doing so.
William pressed the release on the door handle latch and swung the heavy wooden door open. It creaked in its hinges, the doorway as old, if not older than most of the objects inside the room it protected. He stepped inside.
Here, in this quiet place, the world changed. Time, in all of its ever-ticking presence, was not marked here. Its passage was not recorded, nor was it yet kept. Among the collected objects here in this massive space that ended in absolute darkness on all sides, there were no clocks. Aside from the one in his pocket, there were no time pieces or astrolabes. No reminders of who and what William was, and hence – there was peace.
William stepped into the room, allowing the door to swing heavily shut behind him. He heard it lock safely and moved further into the space. It yawned open like a physical echo, eternal and alone.
Like him.
William smiled wryly at that thought as he made his way to his favorite item in the vast museum of history that was without time. It was a car manufactured fifty years ago, one of several he possessed that were created prior to the electronic dashboard and its inevitable reminder of passing minutes and hours. This one was a 1967 Mustang Shelby, and like all of his belongings, she was in mint condition. He’d named her Lilith, after an old friend.
William opened the door and a waft of well-oiled leather greeted him. He slid into the driver’s seat, which was notched back as far as it would go to accommodate his great height, and then he shut the door again and closed his eyes.
At last, there was no off-mark ticking. There were no discordant chimes.
He had created twelve rifts in the fabric of reality, complete and perfect. Within those twelve rifts, he had hidden away twelve of the thirteen most precious objects known to the multiverse: the Queens. He’d done so to protect them.
The evil that was even now born on the horizon, gaining strength and momentum, possessed an impetus that could not be stopped. Not by anyone or anything. Except those twelve women. And the other one. The last one: The thirteenth Queen.
The Thirteen Queens were all that stood between existence and its end.
William had been at the end before. He’d been at the beginning. He knew its emptiness. He would do anything, even steal that which kept his best friends alive, to prevent the multiverse from going there again.
But doing so was exhausting. Behind closed lids, the Time King’s eyes glowed an unearthly and terrifying hue. Within their vivid green-black depths, deep down in the recesses of his private being, the mechanisms of the multiverse rotated, slipped and slid, clicked into place and pressed ever onward. No one could see these workings, not without him allowing it. But they were there, intimately a part of him.
His soul was clockworks and pixie dust, magic and machine, as this was the foundation of all that ever happened in the multiverse. This was the basis for happening in general. Nothing happened, nothing moved forward, nothing occurred at all without his old friend, Time.
Hence without William, its king, there was nothing.
But right now, he wanted to throw a wrench in those workings, watch them grind to a halt, and stop all that ever was and ever would be. He wanted to see it cease as it was, full and mid-motion, rife with color and chaos and life. He wanted to prevent the future. Now more than ever. The Time King was shattered and seething, and had never felt more scared.
I can’t do this again. In the background of his mind, a quieter voice echoed, I can’t lose her again. He’d always assumed he deserved her, or could at least earn her. Her affection, her attention, her love. He would finally have a family. A wife. Even children. He was born of nothing and therefore had no parents. He had no siblings. He was alone and always – in every sense of the word “always” – had been.
Helena had made him think that could all change. As she did for everyone, she gave him hope and made him believe. But in the end, he always lost her. Every single time. It always – in every sense of the goddamned word “always” – ended bloody.
Maybe it’s not supposed to be me.
William’s eyes flew open. Upstairs in the room he’d left behind, the clocks on the wall stopped for an interminable fraction of time before starting back up again.
Aye, there’s the rub, he thought.
For that was the true crux of the issue, wasn’t it? That question right there, the one he’d been too afraid to ask himself all this time, was at the heart of it all. It had ended wrong so many times. And why was that, exactly? Was it perhaps, just maybe, because she wasn’t supposed to be his after all? Because he wasn’t supposed to win? Because she was not his other half… but Death’s?
I can help you, said Time.
William remained perfectly still, his eyes moving the world, his body a column of hard coiled magic resting easy in that leather bucket seat.
I can give you what you’ve always wanted. For a short while.
“And what exactly is it you think I’ve always wanted?” he asked aloud, but so, so softly. His voice was deep, his words beautifully accented by the many places of eternity.
A chance.
William lifted his head and straightened, sitting up slightly in the seat and opening his coal-burning eyes. He was the image of controlled power. And that was exactly what he was.
“Go on,” he said softly.
You’ve sent the Queens into worlds of your design, Time told him. I can do the same for you.
“Send me into one of my own worlds?” he teased gently, his smile cruel.
No, said Time. One of mine.
William’s head tilted ever so slightly. His shoulder-length brown hair brushed the collar of his fine suit. The fingers of his right hand curled over the leather of the gear shift. “I’m listening.”
It cannot last long. The worlds will collide; I cannot forever stop them from crossing paths. But I will create a world for you and the Promised One. It will claim you both for a short while.
William waited. He knew what was coming.
But it will welcome your enemy as well.
He understood the offer; it was the last bit that drilled the point home. If it were truly possible, Time was offering William the chance to win Helena fair and square. He would meet her somewhere else, somewhere new, in some other space and time where and when she was not the other half of Fate, and William was not the Time King – and their enemy was not Death.
The third player had to be there. There had to be that conflict, William knew. Helena needed to make a choice, even if it were to choose neither of them. There, she would not be swayed by Fate or the threat of destruction to the realms. Instead, she would learn and grow and face her decision as she deserved to. Without influence, without malice, with freedom.
And William would learn once and for all whether she could ever truly love him.
If she could – if she did – then there was hope after all. There was a chance. In all of the Cosmos, there was only one force stronger than Fate, and hence stronger than Death. It sounded trite in this day and age. It reeked of platitudes. But the insane thing was, it was true. The one thing stronger than death was love. The proof was in death itself. For the love someone had for another being never died with the stopping of that being’s heart. It never vanished, never diminished. Not even a little. If anything, it grew stronger in the grief of loss that followed.
Love was stronger than death by far.
So William knew this: Should Helena love him, then she was his Queen. If she loved him, they were meant to be.
Death. Be. Damned.
William gazed steadily and unseeing into the shadows of the timeless room. Upstairs, in another part of his eternal manor, clocks on the walls ticked. Time waited. The worlds waited.
Then the clocks on the walls stopped.
“Do it.”
As you wish.