Welcome to my worlds. 

More….. Spoilers.

Emily Hawthorne was reborn as Emily Von Teasa, but she was born with an obsession. She missed her love, and she hated the one who took him away. In book three, her obsession culminated in total retribution against her nemesis, Saul King.

But then what, when your all-consuming vengeance has been satisfied and all your bridges burned, there is no going back…. And there is nothing left to live for.

The Professor finds this unacceptable, and so, true to his nature, He fixes it.

If the source of her vengeance has its root in her love for William, all that is needed is to erase it. But is she looks at the holes in her mind too closely, what little remains will unravel and she will be even worse than before. What is worse, you can’t lie to an empath. So a cover story must be constructed, one that can be believed.

So now she thinks herself to be a clone of Williams lost love Marguerite, so as to explain the sensations of pain and loss she feels whenever William is around. All of her remaining actual past life memories are explained away as artificially created memories.

She does not like William, something about him bugs her, but she can’t put her finger on it.

No good deed goes unpunished. Halcyon the hero, who saved the Tesseract King from certain doom at the hands of the Dark Master with a simple but crucial independent thought, when all his brothers in arms froze in indecision. The King lost a third of his forces to a woefully underestimated enemy and his confidence is sorely shaken. The Randian society, missing vital sections of its rigidly defined culture is in crisis with no known way out. SO they turn to their hero, their savior… Halcyon.

The very thought sickens him.

SO he creates the Crimson Guard… a new force numbering exactly the losses against the Dark Master. No longer clothed in gaudy Gold, his force is clad in the dull brown and rusty red of the dead, a private joke that has turned sour as his demeanor. He never expected the Randians at large to approve of his outlandish scheme, but the Randians are not the sort to questions the decisions of their savior. Not even the King, who promises to abdicate the instant Halcyon requests it will second guess him.

He blames the outsiders that warped his mind, so he is less than friendly when they show up asking for his opinion.

Diana is dangerous and complicated. Her mother Hypolita made certain of it. Before Diana was born, the race of Muses were in a decline as the inherited power of the progenitor gods grew more dilute over the ages. Only women could be muses, so it was thought. Then Diana was born, but not alone. She and her twin brother were both blessed with the Muse abilities of healing, an equal measure of what the Muses called Gaia’s Vengeance. All muses are immortal and upon reaching maturity, un-aging, at least until they gave birth to children, and then that immortality passed to their progeny. Diana’s mother knew what to do, but for the Muses, and for her house. The boy, the first male muse in living memory, would  become a breeding stallion to the Muses, but for a price paid in influence. This was the great game of power begun. Diana had her role as well, to use her Muse powers to maintain he brother’s body in youth and vigor, and to use the influence that his services purchased to dominate the other houses. Diana, the 500 year old “eternal virgin”, rules with an iron fist and an eye towards Eugenics. The Girls born from a male and female Muse grow more powerful with each new generation, and she owns the only male Muse. But 500 years wears long on a mortal man. Her brother’s mind is long gone and it grows harder to maintain his body with each passing year. She must have a new male, and soon, if her power is to continue to grow. Fortunately she has learned her mother’s secret…. The seed of an Interweave traveler, like that of her father Arturo De Planetae.

Helena, aka the Muse Huntress, is just what her muse name implies. She can find things. She has been tasked, though Diana declares it “challenged”, with the Muses Oracle and Nightingale with a singular task. Surrender her immortality and power to William de Planatae in exchange for his seed. She does not want this, but she has no choice. She does not know that Diana’s end game is the birth of a new male muse, only that her house is weak in the Great Game. As Diana told her, the one who seduces the Planetae and succeeds in getting pregnant will be greatly rewarded. The one who fails will be left out in the cold to the wolves.

Barbara, aka The Muse Oracle, is gifted with that must classical of gifts, visions of the future. Her status as Muse grants he control of this power without the use of mind-altering chemicals. She too has been charged with seducing the Planetae by Diana, but despite the taboo of self-prophecy, she knows what her future holds. Succeed or fail her power will be lost. It is only a matter of how much she will suffer. She has to win, she knows this, but her powers are not as omniscient as she would like. The future is seldom clear when the subject’s future choices are not yet made. Rather, they are a blur of potential possibilities that grow fuzzier the further out you look. She has grown accustomed to picking out the more likely path, but where the Planetae is concerned she can see nothing. She doesn’t know why, but it is because The Book allows him to skirt the limitations of probability and causality.

Lord Chao is one of the only two true immortals. The Great Fractal Tree may span nearly all of time from beginning to end, but for the true immortals, then end of a one-time cycle is simply the beginning of the next. Chao is not even remotely human, so describing him is a little awkward. The nearest analog to human understanding would be that he is a self-aware expression of what is commonly called “Yin”. Asian cultures describe Yin as…..

Moreover, he is the source of what we perceive as Time. The human race, minus the variable quantities of entropic “Grey Vampires” appears to be the engine of chaos, driving time forwards, ever faster and more diverse. This is not entirely correct. We do not move through time, we stand still, as time moves around us. We do not drive towards the future. The future time is dragged into the present and then shoved into the past by our actions. In mainlines with a high ration of chaos, time move more quickly tough the Now than it does in other mainlines. This is how you are able to have stories in the far future that are only now being written about. If you look at the history of those particular mainlines, great periods of human-inspired chaos have transpired. As a quick example, Star Trek, note all those wars and the near devastation of Earth before warp drive and the Vulcans brought them back from the brink.

But the Grey Vampires are insidious, and so as a desperate measure, long in our past but far in Lord Chao’s future, the Black Vampires were created to consume a mainline in total chaos. One more way for stories to die…. The world moves on and the stories become antiquated, irrelevant, or just plain unbelievable. When was the last time you read an Elizabethan romance? Some people are still forced to read the Canterbury Tales, at least in part, but what of Chaucer’s other works?

The other of the true immortals, whose cyclical lifetime is endless, is known as Lady Entropy. She is the Yang to Chao’s Yin in every way. She appears as a white marble statue with pit black singularities for eyes. When one looks, one can not see her move even though she does. She simply appears to change position without any apparent motion. Her presence in a mainline will shrink the Arrow of Time, causing time in that mainline to move slower through the Now than others around it. The Grey Vampires, the human sub-species made up of those who are just slightly on the entropic side of the line, are expressions of her will, trying to slow time down, blocking change, and stifling innovation. When the ratio of Chaos to Entropy crosses that half way point, the passage of time relative to other mainlines slows down. This process continues until 100% entropy, and then Time simply stops and the universe unravels. This is what happens when a story is forgotten, the Medium is dead, and the last copy of their work destroyed unread..