Six

13 - The Trial of Acceptance

He trekked across an impossible landscape, outfitted in bloodied and broken armor, with no one but the data core of KT clipped to his belt for company.

He didn't sleep, he felt no need for it. He didn't eat, he had no hunger. Not that he could have eaten anything anyway, given how desolate this strange scape he found himself in appeared to be. He did feel cold, that encompassing chill that had been with him since he'd awoken here, but there was nothing to be done about that. Fire didn't spark here, he'd already tried. The only thing he could do was walk, even if he didn't know where he was going.

Tobias had naught but theories for where he was. He'd already entertained the idea that he was dead, and it could very well be the case. One didn't just see ghosts without perhaps being something of a ghost themselves. But Dimitri and Tyra had seemed different from him, if it were even them at all. Perhaps there was still something corporeal to him in a way that they no longer were. What kind of afterlife would that make this, then? A starless night sky with only those strange glittering shapes above for guidance, an eternal cold? Was that heaven? Was that hell? Or was it somewhere in between, or nowhere at all, something totally unforeseen?

Eventually, however long and however many miles it took, he came to the base of a mountain, the largest he'd yet seen. Its peak stretched high above, unseen behind the dark clouds it pierced. He could hear small sounds like a rushing of water, but he did not see it. Perhaps it was within the rock. Like an automaton, he began to ascend. There was only the path, and this mountain was clearly part of it.

This could all be part of some strange, elaborate trick to get into his head. Maybe Spyglass hadn't been totally destroyed in Regis' destruction. Maybe he'd been captured by New Humanity forces, and this was all a simulation of some kind to sedate him, to make him docile and an easy plaything for the AI to manipulate. If it was, he vowed to find his way out of it, but truthfully, he acknowledged that this was the weakest of his theories. As far as he was aware, the bulk of Spyglass's mind had been housed on Regis for safeguarding. Even if the AI had survived, whatever was left couldn't have been in any reasonable state to be much of a threat, much less be able to take Tobias and escape the blast somehow. Something more powerful was at work here.

At higher elevations, the sloping ground of the mountain gave way to sheer walls and narrow crags. Wordlessly, Tobias climbed them. He stuck his fingers into any cranny he could, pulling himself up foot by foot, inch by inch until the tips of his fingers wore away into messes of blood and skin. He could hear the rushing of water, stronger now, and even saw small glints of what looked like reflections deep within the cracks of the mountainous stone.

He nearly fell once, and only managed to grip the edge by a hair, one of his fingernails ripping free. He pulled himself to safety and continued upward without so much as a grunt, only pausing to ensure that KT's data core was safe.

The third of his theories was what he was coming to believe most; that all of this had to do with the Codex. That damnable alien artifact had shunted his life sideways and put him on this path from the beginning, so who's to say it hadn't managed to shunt his death as well? To him, it was clear that this place was of a supernatural nature, or something to that effect. Metaphysical hive-mind monsters, alien artifacts that could affect gravity and space across time, he'd seen it all. From the Amalgamation to the Architects to Spyglass, there was little that would surprise him at this point, least of all there being some kind of unique failsafe in the event of the Inferno—the wielder of the Codex—meeting an untimely end without first passing it to someone else.

But would that be best? He wondered if maybe, for the sake of the galaxy's safety, it wasn't just better for the Codex to disappear altogether. He liked to think he was a decent person, despite questionable choices he'd made in his life, and had used the Codex as responsibly as could be done. But who was to guarantee the next Inferno would follow the restraint he'd shown? Or the next, or the next? Spyglass had wanted to control Tobias to wield the Codex, and very nearly succeeded. Humanity would have been doomed. The Architects hadn't created the Codex, only discovered it, and their manipulation and tampering of it combined with their harvesting of other species led to the creation of the Amalgamation. Anyone who sought to use its power ended up unleashing destruction.