Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

civilizations lost and gone, because of her, and for a while her madness actually threatened to overwhelm her again. But this time Owen was there with her, to hold and comfort her.
    How can I be forgiven, for what I did, as the Terror? How can I ever forgive myself? Could we . . . put everything right again?
    Owen considered the possibility. Well, we’re in the past, as much as we’re anywhere. We could emerge back at the end of your trail, at the dawn of Humanity’s homeworld, and then travel on into our future, changing and healing each event as we came to it. We know the future isn’t set in stone. We’ve met alternate versions of yourself, from different timetracks. Their futures were just as valid as ours. We could undo everything the Terror did; but then our history would never happen. We would never happen. It wouldn’t be our time line anymore. And it might be better or it might be worse; we have no way of knowing what changes our interventions might bring about. We could, with the very best of intentions, make a real mess of things. The only certain thing, is that you and I would never meet.
    It might be worth it, Owen—to prevent the Terror, and its crimes.
    Yes, it might be, if we could be certain of that. But what’s to stop someone else going through a Madness Maze, and becoming something just as bad, or perhaps even worse than, the Terror?
    All right, smart arse, what do you think we should do?
    I think we should do nothing.
    What? Owen, you can’t be serious!
    Think about it, Hazel. At the end of the war against the Recreated, the baby in the Maze worked wonders, bringing dead worlds back to life. Why didn’t he bring back everyone who’d died in the war? Why not undo all the damage, all the wrongs?
    All right, I’ll bite. Why not?
    Because too many miracles would have gone beyond helping. It would have been meddling, interfering. People have to make their own mistakes, and live with them, if they’re ever to learn anything. The baby only put right what he’d done wrong, as the Darkvoid Device.
    All this time, and you’re still bloody lecturing me.
    All this time, and you’re still not listening. For all our power, Hazel, we’re not gods. We don’t have the knowledge or the experience to take on that kind of responsibility. We could make things much worse, try to fix them, and then make them really bad, and so on and so on . . . caught in an endless spiral of trying to put right our mistakes. We’re still . . . only human.
    Hold everything, Hazel said abruptly. Something’s happening. It’s the Terror. It’s . . . fighting back.
    I thought you were the Terror.
    No, I became the Terror, but the final entity evolved out of and around me. And all of those centuries operating as the Terror, exterminating other species and feeding on them, gave the Terror an identity in its own right. And it’s not taking at all kindly to my suddenly waking up and trying to control it.
    So . . . the Terror wasn’t you, after all?
    Well, yes and no. I’m the seed from which the Terror grew, but the final result created itself down the centuries, pushing its original creator deeper and deeper inside it, where you found and awakened me.
    So you’re not really responsible for all the deaths and destruction!
    Oh no, Owen. I’m responsible. The Terror is my madness, my loss and rage given form. It’s like I dreamed a nightmare, and the dream came true. And right now, it’s mad as hell that I’m stopping it from doing what it was intended to do. You may have reached me and shocked me sane again, but my madness is still going strong. And . . . I think it’s quite ready to destroy you and me, for getting in its way. I don’t think it needs me anymore.
    The stone corridors shook, the walls bowing in and out and the floor rising and falling like a swelling wave, as the endless scream of the Terror howled through all the passages at once. Joined together at the heart of the storm, Owen and Hazel fought to hold on to their sanity and their souls as madness raged around them, assaulting them from all sides. Hazel’s madness, born of sorrow and loss and rage, given shape and form and its own identity through countless centuries of exercising its own unlimited power. The Terror only existed to do terrible things, and threatened by a progenitor it no longer recognized, it fought back. The child god, devouring its parents. But for all its power, in the end Owen and Hazel were sane, and the Terror was not.