The Sketch Rift: The Seal of Demons

No More Helmets

A sultry draft typical of this coast harassed Sam's breath, but he accepted it fondly. All was sentimental today; September was past, and the past beckoned.

He, Irene, Alice, and Bella stood aligned on a meadow of metal foliage. Its flowers were scaffolds and its grass concrete crumbs, but they appeared all the greener to the four, as if a cheery aberration portending their terminus. Ahead, a well-trodden trail; a ways behind, a ledge overlooking their original vista of a collapsed Smith's Cross, reclining seaweed-wrapped in the tides lapping its company's open sepulcher. A door, however, obstructed that view.

Lint Corp's time machine had been rebuilt.

Hemingway's forebears and protégés as "tinkerer" had pored tirelessly over corporate blueprints and secondhand recollections, but even with Moth's guidance and Nathaurus's Soulless conjurings, the endeavor would have been condemned to failure were it not for the pseudo-Sulukridger's final bequest: his Vorren. It nestled in a capsule atop a boxy, elevator-reminiscent structure, strangled on all sides but its gateless entrance by jungles of cables to dilapidated machinery. Some expense was spared on the interior, wearing a lonesome button on the back wall, but, being wide enough to lodge only its four anticipated passengers who would not dawdle there long anyway, no one paid it mind. Moreover, thanks to vastly increased Vorren vibration, this iteration was actually presumed to be more precise than Lint Corp's, bearing a Riverift that did not branch for four who could not part.

The passenger count indeed capped there, because upon the machine's revelation at the second Waise Wells assembly, Hendera shouldered dual retreats: one temporal, one planar. Sam, Irene, Alice, and Bella welcomed the development, attentive less to their security than their paradoxical responsibility to prefigure the 21st century. Yet when they presented the other survivors with an opportunity to return alongside them, Hendera refused unanimously. They cited what Sam had against the Semblance: less their security than their solidarity, even in a grim future's way.

Likewise, Hendera denied safe harbor in the Semblance – at first. Some longed to embrace the Sketch, others to destroy it; as compromise, it would be essential cargo in their migration. No scouts had yet entered, but if hunger, space or concealment were of vital concern, it would provide necessary solace, assuming a majority remained outside at any given moment to circumvent its erratic time dilation. The Sketch was their onus now.

Meanwhile, Nathaurus's plan for Sogbury was already in motion; the departing hardly snagged a chance to thank the tinkerers before they bustled to their next project, but having constructed a functional-looking time machine virtually from scratch augured confidence about a handful of steamboats. (Moth claimed that it would operate by virtue of its very existence, and few wished that false.) Even if their endpoint by ocean was unclear, morale was lifting in post-Hendera.

Its sallyers stared, not quite disappointed, not quite elated. They would not be ready until their audience of dozens was: Marsh, Emma, Sydney, Anibar, Nathaurus, Moth, and unnamed columns of undaunted comrades from campaigns years past. General thanks were given secondarily. This instance, no airborne, bomb-laden constraints forced any hands; this farewell would be on its takers' own terms.

"Hendera, the Crusade – endurance at all," Irene mused before the many. "What you all have realized is extraordinary."

"Extraordinary, yes," Anibar qualified, "but unreachable without your groundwork."

Irene put up with praise, but Sam reacted more introspectively. "Did we not betray you in Iminentia?" he reminded. "That day... on the bridge. You bid us goodbye with so much fanfare, and it seemed so sincere. Climactic. We held it on such good faith we were goners to each other. But now that parting should be final, and that pedestal is destroyed. You ought to resent us." Irene, like the gathering, hung her head low to concede.