Looking up, I saw other projectors overhead, mounted on tall slim poles spaced evenly around the platform.
Beyond them was Sheol, so close that it covered more than a quarter of the sky, so huge that it seemed to be pressing down on me, hanging over me like some enormous massive doom that was squeezing the breath out of my parched lungs.
The star was so close that I could see mottled swirls of hot gases bubbling on its surface, each of them larger than a whole world. Sickly dark blotches writhed here and there, tendrils of flame snaked across the surface of the star. Its color was so deeply red that it almost seemed to be projecting darkness rather than light. It seemed to be pulsating, to be breathing in and out irregularly, gasping with an enormous shuddering vibration that racked its whole wide expanse.
This was a dying star. And because it was dying, the planet Shaydan was doomed also.
“Enough.”
With that one word Set pushed me out of his mind. I stood half-blind, cringing at the stinging whips of the scorching, cutting wind, alone on the world of my enemies.
But Set had not cut the mental link between us fast enough for me to be ejected from his mind empty-handed. While I had gazed upon the face of Sheol through his eyes, I had learned what he knew of the star and the other worlds that formed our solar system.
The sun had been born with this companion, a double-star system. While the sun was a healthy bright yellow star with long eons of stable life ahead of it, its smaller companion was a sickly dull reddish dwarf, barely massive enough to keep its inner fusion fires going, unstable and doomed to extinction.
Huddled close to the sun were four worlds of rock: the closest named after the messenger of the gods because it sped back and forth in the sky so swiftly; the next named for the goddess of love because of its beauty; the third was Earth itself, and the fourth, rust red in appearance, received the name of a war god.
More than twice as far from the sun as the red planet lay the orbit of the feeble dwarf star that Set and his kind called Sheol. A single planet orbited around Sheol, Set’s world of Shaydan. Doomed world of a doomed star.
Unwilling to accept the death of his kind, Set had spent millennia examining the other worlds of the solar system. Using the seething energy of his planet’s core, Set learned how to travel through spacetime, how to move himself through the vastness between the worlds, and through the even greater gulfs between the years.
He found that beyond Sheol lay the giant worlds, planets of gas so cold they were liquefied, gelid, too far from the sun to be abodes for his kind.
Of the four rocky worlds orbiting close to the warm yellow star, the first was nothing but barren rock pitilessly blasted by the heat and hard radiation of the nearby sun. The next was beautiful to gaze upon from afar, but below its dazzling clouds was a hellish world of choking poisonous gases and ground so hot it melted metal. The red planet was cold and bare, its air too thin to breathe, the life that had once flourished upon its surface long since died away. Worse yet, it was too small to have a molten core; there was no energy to tap on the red planet.
That left only the third planet from the yellow sun. From earliest times it had been the abode of life, a safe harbor where liquid water—the elixir of life—flowed in streams and lakes and seas, fell out of the sky, thundered across planet-girdling oceans. And this watery world was massive enough to hold a molten core of metal at its heart, energy enough to warp spacetime again and again, energy enough to bend the continuum in response to Set’s will.
The earth harbored life of its own, but Set saw this as a challenge rather than an obstacle. With enough energy and a central driving purpose, he could accomplish anything. Far back into the earliest time of the planet’s existence he traveled, sampling the millennia and the eons, studying, watching, learning. While the others of his kind watched Sheol shuddering and writhing in the beginnings of its death throes, Set pondered carefully and drew his plans.