Shards of the Infinite: The Myriad Man
Compendium 2020 – Story 52
By Andrew Hawnt
Author's note: This story completes a trio of tales that act as the finale to the Compendium 2020 project, namely The Living Shard and Coming of theVeilwalkers. I would advise reading those to prepare you for what is to come.
*
Writer Daniel Clay had not had the best week. His holiday in Scotland had been curtailed by a story bursting out of him, quite literally. Then an alien invasion descended on his home, millions of shadow monsters attacking the planet as one, only to be fought back by warriors from another dimension.
The weekend seemed a long way off.
On Earth he was known as a moderately successful writer of strange stories, but his reality was far stranger. Daniel Clay had not always been human. Originally a Shard, a piece of the universe itself, a thing of cosmic energies that had gained sentience, he had used his gift of being able to gaze across dimensions to tell myriad stories. The power of those stories, while just words on a page on Earth, meant that across the stars there were battles being fought and won, evil being banished and universal balance being maintained.
The writer had been encased in living black slime, his body sealed in a stasis field and carried on the Mage Malaris' Void ship. He was taken through the stars, between universes, between times, the ship twisting and warping as it moved through this world and that, then and now, things that had been and things that never would. All of this gargantuan effort for one solitary man in a cheap hoodie, old jeans and battered trainers. As the Void ship continued to traverse all that existed on its journey home, the dreamed.
He dreamed of other worlds, other times. The muscles in his fingers twitched in the dark, eager to write those stories down and use them against the architect of his misery, the Lord Watcher himself, Kiasi. He could not move, and in the stasis field he couldn't even breathe, but in his mind he was free.
It had always been that way. Ever since he had become human and hid back on Earth. He had always loved stories and had inhaled book after book, film after film, anything he could find. It fed a hunger within him, a hunger that had manifested at last as stories. They had given him a career, but had also been his curse. Every time they came, they felt like the apocalypse taking over his flesh. He couldn't rest until they were told, as if they went unfinished, the pain was too much to bear and he grew closer to being consumed by the darkness that hid within him.
The ship had docked with the Cathedral and he had been moved into its central auditorium, a massive circular space with a raised platform in the middle of it. Atop that platform stood Kiasi in all of his overtly regal majesty, a despot and a mad king all at once. Stairs led up to the platform. The column of light blazed behind Kiasi, and the writer could make out tiny images within it, places, worlds, people.
The writer was sure he had done a story with a place like this, in which a time traveller had battled alongside her own future self in order to save the continuum from collapse. That was the side effect of stories. They melded together in unforeseen ways.
Stood in a giant, freezing room in a space between dimensions, trapped in a floating Catherdral of gothic spires and impenetrable mazes, Daniel felt very underdressed in his hoody and jeans combo. This was especially true when compared to the overbearing form of the Lord Watcher Kiasi. The man's elegant violet robes were enhanced with fine golden stitching that added a chain of interlocked infinity symbols around the cuffs and hem of the garment. Daniel stared unwavering at the observer of rogue worlds who had taken it upon himself to wage war against the living Shard and in turn all that existed.
A war that Kiasi had now won. Daniel Clay, the Living Shard itself, was in his possession. In his observation chamber at the heart of the cathedral would be the battleground where victory would be claimed.
“Welcome, Daniel. You hid well. When you were stolen by that rogue Veilwalker and hidden on Earth, going back there in a new form was a stroke of genius.”
“Cheers,” Daniel said without humour. “Do I get a biscuit now?”
Kiasi grimaced, and a bolt of violent lightning blasted from the column behind him, striking Daniel full in the chest. He screamed and was flung back over the edge of the platform, forcing him to grab onto the edge of it with his fingers. Thankfully his mountaineering instincts kicked in and he was able to pull himself back over the edge and onto the platform again.
“Upper body strength comes in handy after all then,” Daniel said, sniffing. “Come on then Kiasi, let's get down to business. You know what I am and what my brain can do. What's the endgame?”
Kiasi strode over to Daniel, grabbed him by the throat and slammed him down hard onto the stone platform, winding him. He squeezed Daniel's throat, and the human grabbed at the Watcher's wrists, trying to pull them away from him. He couldn't breathe. Stars flashed in his vision. Kiasi grinned, staring at Daniel's plight as he throttled him.
“Don't try to hide your fear behind bravado, Daniel,” snarled the Watcher. “It won't work on me. You must understand how frail this human form of yours is. I didn't bring you here to bargain. I brought you here to die!”
He let go with one hand, calling an arc of lightning from the column over to him. It danced around his hand and he examined it. “Do you know what this is, storyteller?”
“Is it my arse?” Daniel chocked out through the pain.
Kiasi let go with his other hand and slammed his charged fist down onto Daniel's chest, the lightning entering his human body and setting his senses alight.
The writer convulsed, the Watcher's attack forcing a charge of pure cosmic fire into his body. It arced through him, shaking his physical form to its core, and raged through the cavernous expanse of his imagination. He felt it surge through his thoughts, and he understood what the column was.
The Watcher, maddened by aeons stood observing the turn of the Multiverse, had been twisted by the dark energies that lurked between worlds, amplifying his own sinister psyche and making him one with something that should never have had a consciousness.
Nothing. An actual Nothing. It hungered to silence all that existed. It twisted the Watcher into its toy, and the Watcher had allowed it for the power it brought,. He had gathered an army of shadows, a slave in the Mage, a fleet of warships like the one that had hung in the sky over Sheffield. Unimaginable power.
But as with such things, no amount of power is enough, and Kiasi had fallen ever deeper into the madness of the Nothing. He would not stop until he could annihilate all.
To do that he needed the Living Shard. Daniel. A piece of reality's soul that was trapped in human form. Easy to control, and even easier to break.
The Multiverse swam before him as more lightning spat from the column and into his body. It lifted him higher so that he hung in the air over the platform, writhing in pain.
The Watcher had begun to tear his every atom apart.
Daniel screamed again and again, his body convulsing in pain, his mind burning, the feeling of the Watcher's influence bleeding into him from his prison of lightning. He tried to focus on something, anything around him, but there was nothing tangible. Nothing in the chamber of any use.
He twitched his fingers amid the maelstrom of agony and imagined a keyboard.
The writer began a new story, one in which he could pull the watcher into this vortex of agony with him. As the words formed in his mind, he reached out with one hand and was able to deflect one of those flashes of horrible power. It connected with the Watcher, too fast for him to avoid it.
The Lord Watcher was engulfed in the same vortex, and more lightning poured from the observation column, trapping them both. The watcher grabbed at the writer as his robes billowed out, their edges crackling with blue fire, but the writer ignore him,. His eyes closed tight, fighting the pain as he kept his fingers moving.
He added a plot twist.
With one final flash of wild energy, the chamber fell silent. The observation column fell dark. All was quiet.
Beyond the chamber, the writer had dragged the Watcher into the insanity that lived between worlds.
Into the chaos where stories came from.
*
I am the Myriad Man. I am Daniel Clay. I am a lost crystal shard of reality's soul. I am all and I am none. I am stories to be told. I am able to pull stories from so many realms because there is a fragment of me in all of them. In all realms. I am not one shard. We are legion.
We are all shards of the Infinite.
This is my dominion, Lord Watcher. Not yours. You crave power over all, yet have ignored the possibilities presented by your own mind. Let us see where this battle takes us.
How far does your imagination go? Will it go further than mine?
Let us find out.
*
The two of them tumbled through kaleidoscopic chaos, an unbearable cacophony of light and sound and images and sensations. Visually it looked like a violent sea, albeit one where instead of foaming waters, the crashing waves were glimpses of other dimensions. In this Nothing, this Nowhere, this Elsewhere, Daniel bore witness to Kiasi's true form.
Where once he had been a benevolent mystic, the layers of his ancient psyche had been worn down over aeons by the dark forces that swirled in and out and between universes, the dark legions that always sought power, dominance and the total subjugation of all that existed. Kiasi himself had been reshaped as an instrument of those dark forces by their sheer will, evil without end pouring from the observation column and teasing him with stories that all could be his to control, but at a price. That price would be existence itself. Its current form was chaos, unpredictable and endlessly rejuvenating. The things that lurked beyond all had transformed this observer into a tyrant with a cataclysmic arsenal at his disposal.
Not here in the Nothing, though. This was not a thing to be tamed. This was imagination unleashed.
By bringing the writer to the heart of a tear in reality, the Watcher had enabled him to return home, to the seas of mind, the shared consciousness, the endless, cascading energies that all dreams were born in and all memories swam amongst. In craving the power of the Living Shard, the twisted Watcher had returned it to the Infinite. The writer was welcomed home.
The writer pulled the Watcher through a manic gallery of his own human life. Ridiculed and beaten as a child at uncaring schools. Held back in adult life by managers and supervisors and marketers who said they knew what was best and what he was doing was wrong, all wrong, too strange, too weird, too odd to be a real person and be part of normal life. The writer plunged the Watcher into a hell of despair, anxiety, paranoia and screaming terror.
Daniel slammed the Watcher another way, tearing through an unseen wall in the raging cosmos, revealing a sea of skin and eyes, limbs reaching up from the mire and grasping at his thrashing form. Daniel held on through it, determined to show Kiasi the true extent of what he was. On they hurtled, through a sky of living blood and into a realm of screams, where all that existed was built from anguish. He pushed on, now surrounded by other Daniels from other planes, all wearing the same hoody and jeans and trainers, all of them clawing at the monstrous form of the distorted Watcher.
Their violent journey and raging battle continued through a universe of weeping stars, a world of sentient lava, a dimension formed of the ghosts of suns, a sea of white-hot plasma, skies made of ideas and lands made of madness that reached out with claws of stone and crystal. They passed through a world of singing trees and people who battled one another on the backs of enormous beetles.
They came to a universe much like the one Daniel had been from, and watched a man in a small fighter ship destroy a timeline. They watched a princess defend her kingdom. A boy on a bloody battlefield being given another chance by a mythical creature. Places where giant machines blew up cities. undead murderers lurked in the bodies of toys. Versions of humanity lost in the stars and lost in machines. Gigantic beasts clawing their way up from terrible chasms.
The writer showed the Watcher that no matter how chaotic the Multiverse was, there would always be those fighting to restore order. He showed the Watcher thousands of realities where warriors and healers fought unending battles against great evils. They observed entire galaxies where single-cell organisms eventually evolved and became the ruling races of entire quadrants. They saw heroes rise up from squalor and pain across endless dimensions in order to fight against the very forces that had pulled the watcher into the dark.
Finally the two of them ended their journey, hanging in a void, looking down at the image of Daniel himself, sat at a desk, tapping away at a laptop keyboard, spinning stories that were half-glimpsed through myriad realities and half his own creation.
“When I am sat at that keyboard,” Daniel said to the Watcher, “I am more powerful than anything. Even through all of the pain I have endured with the shadow hiding inside me and the exhaustion brought on by the visions, I know that as long as the stories come, planes of existence are surviving.”
“Survival is not living!” Kiasi barked, pushing away from Daniel. “Survival is just waiting for death a day longer. What did you hope to achieve with this light show? I am still here! I am still the Lord Watcher, Kiasi, Watcher of All! You cannot scare me with cheap visions and a speech. I am forever!”
Daniel, hanging in the void as though he could fly, smiled and glanced down at the vision of himself writing. The vision faded away like the top layers of a sand dune beneath a sudden breeze.
“Which is exactly what I need,” he said, pointing down.
Kiasi looked in horror at the space where the shard had been broken out of reality's essence. It was roughly oval, its edges crackling with the same lightning at in the chamber. Beyond it lay the soul of time and space and matter and energy.
“The hole, where the shard came from, has caused countless new realities to appear over the last year. Your signature is all over the energy that was used to steal part of the universe. It would take something powerful and eternal to seal it again, as I wish to live.”
“No,” the Lord Watcher said quietly. “Please, Daniel, not this.”
The writer twitched his fingers, calling up a new story in which a terrible wizard who wanted to control reality was imprisoned inside the very damage he had caused himself. His body was forced into the gap in the universe and the writer moulded the edges to secure the wizard in place. The wizard screamed as the writer backed away into the darkness, but nobody would hear, no matter how many eternities he screamed for.
Daniel ended the tale by calling forth the Void ship that had brought terror to his home town. He wrote that the Mage and the remaining shadow beasts were tossed into the maelstrom and that he was to have a quiet journey home.
The writer began his journey, and upon his arrival back on Earth, wrote a story that he was human. As the story drew to its close, countless realities rejoiced.
*
The weekend came around again soon enough.
He drove into the night, watching the city give way to countryside and eventually the moors. The country stretched out around him in all of its deep green grandeur. He parked up at a Bed and Breakfast that had a vacancy sign glowing in its window. Taking his phone out of his pocket, he switched it off and put it in the glove compartment. Sally's neuroses could wait a night.
Donning his backpack and grabbing the holdall from the boot, he looked around at the rolling hills that awaited his boots. It would be a good weekend. Daniel walked in and enquired about a room for a couple of nights. Once that was organised, he took his gear up to his room and headed to the bar. He ordered a pint and a thick-cut ham, cheddar and mustard toastie.
The landlord placed a foaming pint of beer on the bar before him and Daniel took a long drag from it. He had the look of a man who had earned it.
“So what's your story?” The landlord asked jovially.
Daniel took another drink, then smiled at the old man.
“Where shall I start?”
© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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About Compendium 2020:
Compendium 2020 is a project from author Andrew Hawnt that consists of 52 original short stories, flash fiction stories and vignettes given away for FREE in 2020. Featuring science fiction, fantasy, horror and more, this began as a personal quest and due to the weirdness of 2020 has become an ambition to provide free distractions for anyone who needs them.
About Andrew Hawnt:
Andrew is based in Nottingham, England. Known for his music journalism career, comics writing and film critique work, Andrew is a prolific writer and is the author of a growing stack of books, including the cult hit VHS Ate My Brain. He made the movies The Demon And I and The Demon And I: Birthrite completely in lockdown with cast members filming their scenes remotely, and new films are coming.
Andrew is also the creator and presenter of the YouTube shows Planet Hex, Turn One Shock and the VHS Ate My Brain series as well as the video versions of the Compendium stories.
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© Andrew Hawnt 2020
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