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For the last decade, maybe the last three, the web of futures has felt strained.
For the last year, it's been worse than that. Tug a strand and you're tugged along a different one; try to focus your attention on a thread and it shivers, wiggles, splinters. Every vision dissolves before too long into sand and noise and white light. Every thread through the darkness of more than negligible width has been grabbed, glued, cut, knotted, until the one thing that protects the future is that every possibility is spread out too finely to merit interference. It's a senseless, agonizing, ever-present haze of strain and uncertainty and confusion and everyone's so angry about it (except Nethys, who seems to have some other way, and except Iomedae, whose blazing conviction that this must be done streaks through every possible future in the same vivid color).
For the last week, there is something like agony when He reaches out to touch the future. Agony and the jolting, disorienting sensation of swimming through a million possible worlds, none of them attainable, none of them a thread it is possible to follow from here to there. Everyone is playing this game, now, and anything clear enough to see is clear enough for someone to sabotage, and something they're doing - He's not sure what, He doesn't think it's Him doing it - is straining not just all of the possible futures but the web of Future itself, the relentless logic by which tomorrow follows from today and the overarching march of history is not ruled by coincidences and butterflies flapping their wings but by decisions, made by people, for reasons that will hold from a hundred different angles -
- He wouldn't have guessed that that was a thing you could strain. But apparently you can. He considers, with the attention of a hundred human minds, of course, whether any of the implications touch on any of the crucial considerations here. He concludes it doesn't change anything. He expected that Foresight would be blurred by a dozen gods tearing at the future from a dozen different angles; he knew all along this would have to be overdetermined to succeed, that it'd have to depend on nothing that could change in the tapestry of possible futures. He will not get a better thing to bet on, and He will not get the chance to bet again, so He should put all of his chips down, here.
(He doesn't need Foresight anyway. He was human, and remembers more than most about how to interpret their actions, their words, their minds. The King of Cheliax is preparing to abdicate, has drawn up detailed documents to ensure the transition goes smoothly. There will be a festival; His people will gather in the streets, waiting for Him, wanting Him, and that will give Him the sudden expansion of attentional capacity and power needed to -)
For the last hour, the future leaves searing scars when He reaches out to touch it. It's no longer fiilled with noise; it's not filled with anything, really, a blank and terrifying vacuum. It is much much worse than having one of your major senses filled with uninterpretable noise; it's more like having one of your major senses filled with TORTURE. He feels it starting, though, feels His attentional capacity expanding and His power increasing and His senses expand to include His people, all of them -
- and He can at last See enough, and -
