A moment before, he wouldn't have been able to say what the Realm of Sapphire looked like, but the moment he saw it it was as though the memories had been there all along, as indeed they had been. The six arches were standing on a round, flat topped island circled by grey rocks against which the waves beat in thunderous sprays of foam. It was surrounded by a great ocean, but it wasn't alone. There were other islands visible in the distance, the nearest of which were quite small. Mere outcrops of rock covered by flocks of screeching gulls. Further away were larger islands, though, and the entire horizon ahead of them bore the dark smudge of a land mass hundreds of miles across. Nahul, Thomas remembered. A sparsely populated country, peaceful and prosperous, where the climate was always pleasant and the soil always fertile. Home to a race of physically perfect human beings descended from people they’d brought from Tharia, who sang the eternal praises of the mighty beings who'd created their world for them.
Barl led the gem steeds to a nearby island that was mostly flat, about half a mile across, and covered with a luxuriant carpet of waving, green grass. He brought his steed in for a landing, and the other two steeds landed alongside, flapping their wings madly for the last few feet so that their landing was soft and gentle. The three climbed out of their saddles and dropped to the ground, and then Barl ambled towards them, a broad smile on his too young face.
"Any memories coming back?" he asked Thomas. "I brought you here, to Tak's Realm, because I hoped it would be familiar to you. You should be feeling almost as if you're coming home."
"Home," said Thomas, and Lirenna looked up in surprise at the note of anger in his voice. He looked out to sea, and saw that there was no horizon in that direction. Just the sea receding into greater and greater distance. This world's not round, like a planet, he remembered. It's flat, like a tabletop. How wide? Thousands of miles? And how far down does the ground go?
The answers popped into his head the moment he thought the questions. This realm was a hundred thousand miles wide! This one realm had a dozen times more surface area than the entire planet Tharia! And the ground only went down a couple of miles. Beneath that was another landscape, upside down, the gravity pulling in the opposite direction. There were places where holes led through from one side to the other, some of them miles across. There were entire empires and kingdoms here, as well as vast tracts of untamed wilderness that Tak had stocked with the most fearsome monsters his imagination had been able to conjure up.
There were no continuous land masses, though. Only islands. Some of them thousands of miles across, but islands nonetheless. Tak had wanted to encourage diversity by making it hard for people to travel very far from their homes. Travel between the major island masses was only possible by means of ocean voyages lasting well over a year. They couldn't fly. The gem steeds were restricted to the elite; the Gem Lords themselves and their chosen favourites.
Thomas stood, pale with shock as these facts cannoned into his head, leaving him trembling with wonder at the beings who had accomplished all this. Maybe they were right to call themselves gods, he thought. Even the True Gods Themselves would surely by astonished by what they'd created here.
"You made your people worship you," he told Barl, and it suddenly came home to him that this person standing before him in the deceptively young body of an apprentice wizard was one of the awesome entities that had created the Realms. He could probably snuff out his life with a single thought!
"Not at all," replied Lord Ruby, however, smiling gently. "When we told them that we were responsible for creating their world, they worshipped us of their own free will. Some of them still do, although we no longer set ourselves up as objects of devotion. It gets a little boring after a while."
"Some still do?" asked Lirenna. "What about the others?"
"Over the centuries, as they spread and multiplied, several communities forgot about us and invented other gods. Entirely imaginary ones. There are even worshippers of the true Gods here, although their worship has never really caught on. Their miracles don't look much compared to the powers the people see us wielding."
"Yes, that's right," agreed Thomas. "Even with thousands of years, the Gem Lords couldn't possibly keep in touch with the inhabitants of all the lands they created. There are entire countries where they've never heard of the Gem Lords, where they have no idea where the world, or their ancestors, came from." He stared at Lord Ruby. "And the seven major Realms are only part of it, aren't they? There are also hundreds of minor realms. Specialised environments, some of them bizarre beyond imagination."
"Playgrounds," agreed Barl. "Arenas in which we invent new games and sports with which to compete against each other, or habitats for strange creatures from far distant dimensions. And sometimes we just compete with each other to create the strangest realm. After a while they're generally forgotten, except by the people who sometimes find their way to them and live there, being forced to adopt lifestyles unlike anything ever imagined."
"How many people live here?" asked Lirenna in an awestruck whisper. "How many people in all, in all the realms?"
"No way of knowing," replied Barl, "but it has to be thousands of millions at the very least. If the average population density is the same as on Tharia, and if there's as much living space as a hundred Tharias..."
"Ten billion people," breathed Thomas, who was beginning to feel a little faint. "Great Gods above!"
He looked at his wife, expecting to see the same dumbfounded look on her face, but she was beginning to show the vaguely blank expression she wore whenever she tried to think too far beyond the normal experiences of her life. She'd worn the same expression when Thomas had tried to tell her about the various races that had inhabited Tharia in the past, millions of years before. She'd nodded, as if she was paying attention, but he could tell that she was having difficulty grasping such immense timescales. The longest span of time she was really capable of conceptualising was a few thousand years, long enough to span the rise and fall of human civilisations. Anything beyond that was just numbers to her. She was unable to really give meaning to them, and now she was having the same difficulty grasping the size of the Realms.
He'd encountered the same difficulty when talking with Dallon, Lirenna's grandfather, and various trogs he'd known during his lifetime, and he'd formed the theory that only humans were capable of thinking big. Humans were the only race that built empires. Every other race concerned itself solely with their own community and their immediate neighbours, rarely forming social groupings of more than a few thousand individuals (although the trogs came closest to rivaling humans with their great underground tunnel cities of up to a million inhabitants). They'd never learned to think big, and that was why humans, who lacked the longer lifespans and superhuman abilities of the other humanoid races, still managed to dominate the continent of Amafryka.
Lirenna was trying her best, though, and even if she couldn't get her head around one hundred Tharias of living space, she still knew it was big. Really, really big. "How did you do it?" she asked, staring wide eyed at the Gem Lord. "How did you create all this?"
"It virtually creates itself," replied Lord Ruby. "If we want a few thousand square miles of clear ground for a new project, it's far easier to create a new realm or extend an existing one than clear an existing stretch of land. Sometimes we create entire Tharias of land without any clear idea of just how much land we're creating. We'll create as much new ground as a whole planet and then only use a few square miles of it. The rest remains unvisited and unknown to us. There's no need for us to use land efficiently when it's so easy to create it."
"But what about the soil, the water, the air..." said Thomas. "It's all very well creating empty space, but then you need stuff to fill it."
"And it all has to be designed, arranged," added Lirenna. "When you create a new island, for instance, it must take ages to decide where each and every tree will go, where the rivers will run."
"All taken care of," replied Barl smugly. "Back in the early days, when the entire Realms was barely larger than a small country, we cast spells so that all the new land we created would be landscaped at random. We allow blind chance to decide how the ground will rise and fall. Soil is added evenly all over, and is quickly eroded away from the highest points, and then water is added, which runs straight away to the lowest points, creating lakes and seas. Seeds of thousands of plant species are scattered everywhere. Arctic plants, tropical plants, desert plants. Which ones grow depends on what conditions are like at that particular spot. We speed up time in that area, allow a few tens of thousands of years to pass. Enough time for the landscape to become eroded and interesting. Sometimes we allow millions of years to pass if we want really impressive landscape features like Sheena's canyons and mesas. If we want something specific, like disconnected islands or floating moons, we simply specify it in advance."
He was smiling proudly, but both Thomas and Lirenna were frowning unhappily. The act of creation turned into a child's game... "It must all get rather passé after a while," ventured Thomas carefully. "Don't you get bored?"
"Sometimes," the Gem Lord admitted, "but there's always something interesting going on somewhere. With the human population spreading outwards in all directions at walking speed, new cultures and new civilisations forming wherever they go, we could spend eternity exploring the Realms and never see all it contains. If it was a thousand times smaller we'd still never see it all, and we'd have to keep going back to places we'd visited earlier to see what changes had taken place since our last visit. You have no idea, no idea at all, of the infinite variety of human civilisation. There are thousands of cultures here, thousands, and no two are alike, and none of them is the same from one century to the next. And if we ever do get bored of the endless succession of novelty, there are other forms of distraction available to us. You'll find out soon enough, if you haven't already remembered."
Thomas was indeed remembering. The memories were coming fast now. Every glance at the familiar landscape, the salty scent of the sea breeze and the distinctive colour of the sky, brought another batch of memories. Centuries of them at a time. Memories in such number that he couldn't begin to assimilate them. He feared for a moment that they would overwhelm him, that Thomas Gown would be lost amongst the sheer quantity of knowledge and experience possessed by Tak...
Somehow, Thomas's psyche managed to float to the top, like a raft in the middle of a storm-tossed ocean. After a moment of adjustment, he persuaded himself that they were his memories. That it had been he, Thomas Gown, who'd done all those things. One single, continuous lifetime that had started as a peasant boy in the Borderlands of Garon and had eventually brought him here, standing on a small island with a young looking man, a beautiful demi shae and three fearsome monsters.
"Thanks, Matt," he whispered to himself, remembering how it had been the soldier, his one time travelling companion, who'd suggested this way of coping with the deluge of alien memories. He spent a moment wondering how his friend was getting on, back with his family, trying to adapt to life as a farmer, and then he turned to face Barl, his face set with determination.
"All right," he said. "You said you'd give us answers if we followed you here. Well here we are, and now you're going to tell us what it's all about. Why have I been getting all Tak's memories? Why do you need him back so badly?"
"To protect all this," replied the Gem Lord, turning his head to look out at the sun drenched landscape. "We need you to help us protect all this."
"What do you mean?" demanded Thomas. "Protect it from what? You mean these islands?"
"I mean everything," said Lord Ruby flatly. "The Realms in all their vast entirety. Tharia as well, and Kronos, and all the Worlds of the Sheaf. Veglia, home of the felisians. The ringed planet. Garus, Salemia and other worlds still waiting to be discovered. They're all going to be destroyed, Thomas, unless we can stop it, and you're the only one who can do it."