Spires of Infinity Chapter 24

I've finished and uploaded the first draft of Chapter 24 of Spires of Infinity. You can download it at the bottom of this page

This is a short chapter, only 2000 words. Normal chapters are 3000-5000 in length. Basically this is a transition chapter that establishes the Apostle of Cain's presense in Ethos, the world where Gabriel has found himself, and that she knows about the Spires of Infinity. The timelines in this story are a little bit messed up, and that really comes out in this chapter. We have three completely different storylines taking place in this book and not all of them are running on mountain standard time. I've mixed them together as I have to keep the story moving forward and keep things entertaining, and not focused on one set of characters too long.

The Apostle of Cain left the World Closest to Perdition where she grew up almost two hundred years ago, and has been jumping around doing her nasty business ever since. At this time she is nearing five hundred years old, her training to become the Apostle lasted three hundred years. She has arrived on Ethos on the same day that Gabriel did, even though these events happened in much different places in the storyline, they actually have happened on the same day. Raven sent Gabriel to Ethos at the exact moment that the Apostle appeared there to protect the Spires of Infinity from her. He was unable to send gabriel there sooner because there is a randomness to the Apostle's jumps between worlds that makes it completely impossible to predict where and when she will appear next, so Gabriel could only be sent at the exact moment that she arrived, instead of giving him a head start.

There are certain laws of causailty that Raven must follow, even though he is the lord of time and space. He can't disturb timelines directly by, say, causing something not to happen to change events at a later date, only send proxies to interfere with them as they happen in timelines relative to his own. There are grave consequences for messing with events that have allready happened, and those will be gone into in detail later on in the story. That is why he took Gabriel at the moment that he died, because that was the end of Gabriel's timeline, and rather than wasting him by letting him go to the afterlife he took him and gave him a new body on a new world in a timeline completely unconnected to his own.

Raven has power over all time and space. He can see all of time and all of reality from the creation of the universe to its death. There are variable's however, and those are time travelers. He can never see when or where they are going to appear until after they have in their own personal timelies in relation to his own. It's a ballance to the power he's been given, to keep him from becoming too powerful. He's not a God after all. He's only middle management. But he's also not stupid, so he didn't put all his eggs in one basket with Gabriel. He sent Kari, Jonathan and Michael out into the universe as nother variable to counter the variable of the Apostle. The Laws of probability state that two objects moving randomly through a field given infinite time will meet sooner or later, though it cannot be predicted when. This same law also states that once they have met the chances of further meetings grow exponentially. (omg, he actually did his physics homework before he started writing. THE HORROR!!! THE HORROR!!!) He knows that since he sent them out they would meet up with the Apostle sooner or later. These are not the only plans he has put into motion, but they are the only ones we will see.

Of course this is background information that you will never see in the actual story itself. A sort of tip of the iceberg type thing. There's a line in a Doctor Who episode that really explains the seeming plot holes I've created in timelines here. "The life of a time traveler doesn't always happen in the right order." Little does the Apostle know that the thing she's been searching for is something she already has. She can already travel through time. She just hasn't figured out what she's been doing yet, because she never goes to the same world twice. I've given clues to this in a few different places if you look for them.

Kari, Jonathan and Michael have also been traveling through time, though they have accepted Keir's explanation and think that the difference in time is because it flows differently on different worlds. While this IS true, it is not the explanation for why Keir is suddenly twenty-four years older. Their father purposely misinformed Kier of this to keep his children in the dark about it. He doesn't want them to know that they're time traveling because of an event that happened in Exile. He doesn't want them to try changing the past. (there is a scene I plan to include in the second draft that better explains the reasoning behind this) He placed the restriction that they could never visit the same world twice so that they could never discover that they have been traveling through time as well as space. Their beginning in the timelines are a bit better to explain then the Apostle's because they came into it from a place that exists outside of space and time. They basically just popped into existence at the exact moment in the timeline I felt that they needed to. Again, this is a tip of the iceberg thing that isn't ever actually going to be said in the story, however it's a part of the story that I had to come up with behind the scenes to explain why the things that are happening are happening the way that they're happening.

On further drafts I plan to clean things up a bit so that it's better known that events are not exactly taking place in the right order through this book. Plus there will be a little clearing up of that fact once all of the characters meet and compare notes.

The first draft is now at 85,524 words out of an estimated 120,000.

And with all the timeline and background info explanations in this post it's probably now longer than the actual chapter it is announcing XD. To tell the truth I could actually probably write a longer book just about the things that are going on behind the scenes here that the reader will never see and only get a small whiff of in the actual story itself. People I talk to about writing rarely realize how much material you have to have ready before you even begin to write a book.