First I was nowhere, nowhen. I step through a door, then another. And now I will sit here. In this spot, I felt comfortable. The locale around me is clearly opaque, suffused with emptiness. I will be comfortable because this place is what has always been, more home to me than the world is. It’ll be hard to explain. I sat standing in the Everywhen. Around me, I can see everything that ever once will have been about to be. It swirls about in colorful grayscale, as though drawing one’s eye while warding one off. Time here won’t pass so much as ebb and flow. I waited in my standing seat for a time. The journey through the nonexistence that shouldn’t have been takes much out of me. But I will survive, given time.
From behind, I was reminded that I didn’t come alone. A voice without a source speaks, echoing silently around all time. “So we are back among the real,” he’ll seem to speak into existence. I forced a smile, knowing that I dragged my dear father here along with me.
“That was my intent when I fixed time, Papa,” I reply, my forced smile evident wherever he isn’t.
Without a moment’s effort, he’ll be able to tell the smile is forced. “There is no need for rudeness, Child,” he scolded me halfheartedly.
“This is all partly your fault,” I remind him, “Remember?”
From all around me, his voice will echo in a whispered reply. “I remember you and your friends were cruel to your elders.” It took a moment for my father to compose himself. “But that is not why I am here,” he says more pleasantly.
“Why are you here?” I’ll know whether he’s lying.
He sighed before he continued. “I came here to offer you a path. Directions down through this ocean towards where you ought to go.”
He’s not lying, but he’s hiding something. Something that will upset me enough to avoid talking about it. He never came along in my sojourns through the Everywhen before. And I never need directions. It’ll take a moment, but I’ll realize it. “You’re stuck,” I said, for the first time in this conversation, my smile was genuine. “Our actions untethered me from reality. And existing intertwined with me, you’re stuck in this ocean until I retie that tether.”
His groan is also genuine. “So it seems,” he’ll quietly reply, “I have charted this land that might be and know the ebbings and the paths, but I cannot pass through the doors.”
I shook my head. “Well, you’ll just have to wait. I neither need nor want directions. I’ll wander until I end up where I’m meant to be.”
He looks at me and carefully says, “Be careful trusting wandering, as while it may sometimes be led by fate, more often it’s led by randomness.”
He might be right for many people, I’ll never be led astray by fate or randomness. Wandering is what I was, what made me who I am, and what I existed to be. “What is your rush?”
“Time here may not pass like it does in your world, that does not mean it doesn’t exist. There are many other ways time can pass.”
I shrug at my clever father. He may not be as familiar with this land as me, but he’ll more than make up for it with his understandings of realities. At least, when it came to certain aspects of how things worked. “And what of it? We will get to where I’m meant to be when I’m meant to get there. It is not as though having directions and a path will make the journey last any longer or shorter.”
I can hear his chuckle. “Perhaps you’re right,” he’ll whisper in the wind, “But let me offer you a bit of wisdom, hard earned through a long existence: Quite often indeed, where one is meant to be and where one needs to be are two very different locations.”
I took his warning to heart, but that did nothing to my resolve. I know this already, as just like Papa, my existence is a long one. But I’ll walk the path I always will pass. And, like many times before, if my wandering took me somewhere unexpected or unfortunate, I learned and moved on with existence. Such is the life of a wanderer. We’ll always adapt to our circumstances and find a way forward. Every generation I’ve trained has proven that time after time.
With the prodding of my father, I begin my wandering in the only direction that makes sense: forward. Around me I’ll notice out of the corner of my eye everything that ever once will have been about to be. Papa referring to this place as the land that might be wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t nearly accurate. Because while all of it might be, time in the real world doesn’t work to allow that. Whether those doors that will be untrue to what I remember as real past events can be gone through, or simply exist as windows to possibilities of how things might have gone, I shall never know. Because I’ve never been led by my wanderings to any such vision.
My wanderings take me past some scenes with players I recognize. I’ll spot Jim, sitting in a cafe with the demon-woman scientist whom all the trinity of secret societies shun, negotiating for the tools us wanderers would come to find quite useful, our suits. To another side, I saw Isaiah, blood caked on his face, walking through the plains towards a forest, clearly on a hunt of his own. In another place at my periphery, I notice a heavily scarred Randy, and a limping Jim yelling at one another, with Randy getting so angry he throws his ledger at Jim’s head, only for Jim to redirect it with his roped triangle and throw it right back. Even in the possible existences of the Everywhen, my friends will get on one another’s last nerve. And yet, none of these did I feel drawn to. I am driven onwards, deeper into the ocean, deeper than I usually go. I’ll always wonder if time, to thank me for fixing it, will let me in to see what is, was, and could be so that I might be able to fix it.
My theory was soon confirmed. As I wander further, to my left I see a scene from the battle. From the moments that will lead inevitably to our terribly destructive action. I saw Alice, surrounded on one side by cultists and the other by builders, fighting without hope and awaiting our victory or our death. And to my right, I see Stanton in a makeshift town, trading trinkets for food and supplies. But neither of those would confirm or refute my theory. What I saw right in front of me did that. A new god, one I didn’t recognize, rising up into reality like those before. This will be the future that time wants to avoid. Made perfect sense to me, the last time any gods decided to rise, we normal humans ended up breaking time to destroy them. Most of them, I realize, thinking about Papa hovering around in what must feel like some kind of purgatory for him. If we’ll be able to stop this before it comes to pass, then time needn’t worry about any more breakage.
I wandered away from that image, towards something else. That city that isn’t pulls me through its timeline. The doors in the timeline of the city that won’t be will show me images of my Wanderers dead. They all seemed to die in the battle that never could have been, before we created a hole in reality. And yet, as I press past it, I also see them all alive, separated, living their own lives elsewhere after the war is over. This would hold more meaning if I knew what the world’s past actually will hold in this regard. But I was not present for most of it, and what I was I do not see. I never see doors for moments in which I actually am present. And still I will continue onwards to the door I shall pass through.
Papa let himself appear beside me. He looks up at me, seemingly an older man with a cane. And yet, his appearance won’t exactly process visually. It was an experience fit only to overwhelm all of the senses. His being is much better in tune with itself this time, as compared to what it smelled like in the Nowhen, and I feel no paresthesia when looking upon his citrusy visage. It still won’t quite be right, won’t quite have the perfect feeling of balance that it will likely return to once I pass through the door to retether myself. “Are you certain this is where you wish to pass through?” he asked earnestly. He isn’t even trying to trip me up or hide his worry, as though he knows what is ahead and honestly does not wish me to go through here.
“No, but it is where I will end up regardless,” I’ll say, though I doubt he will be particularly understanding.
He shook his head in disappointment. “So, child, you once again are moving, acting, making choices without thinking first.” He sighs before he wistfully says, “I would have thought you learned your lesson when you died, but perhaps you never shall.”
I’ll simply smile and turn to face him. Looking up at him now, for he stood before me appearing to be a young woman of about seven feet, I reply with the simplest answer possible, and likely the most infuriating to the clever god. “What’s the point of wandering, if not doing things without active thought?”
I’ll laugh, though it will not be appreciated by my audience. I looked me level in the eyes, for now he seemed to be me, or a mirror of me at least. “If that is what you think, I cannot stop you. You know this, it’s why you feel free to be insolent. But through that hole that is a door, you will not find your solution to the problem you saw. You will only find other more urgent and personal problems. And if you let yourself be distracted by these problems, which, if we’re both honest, even you will admit you always let yourself get distracted, rather than solving that great problem in the future, you may well end up causing it.”
I take a moment to think about it, at least. After all, unlike myself, Papa would be able to see the doors of possibilities involving me. He could have been tricking me, as he was generally wont to do, but he could also have been warning me about what might have been to come. Then I realize a simple thing, that it doesn’t matter. The whole theory behind wandering will be that worrying about the past and the future will only cause problems in the present. When you just lived in the present, the past and the future worked out as it worked out, and generally that was the best way for the world. “You’re probably right,” I admit to my father, though my smile grows. He’ll realize what I’m about to do as it happens. With a bow of my head at my father’s mirrored visage, I stepped one foot backwards over the door that was a hole. And I let myself fall through to the other side. Whatever will await will be there to deal with.
The world goes white as I’m pushed through to reality, and my bindings tying me to existence wrap themselves around the spirit of the world once more. I can feel the seething judgment of Papa in my head as he, too, finds his way forced back into what his version of reality seems to be. And then, it happens. I know time is truly fixed, because for a moment that feels like an eternity, there is nothing but the uncomfortable silence of emptiness and blinding light of reality. Just like there always is when I finish a sojourn in the Everywhen.
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