Spoiler: Echo Only
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Echo found the beacon of the Astronomicon, though it was distant and hard to see, the Emperor's light struggling to pierce the darkness he found himself in. He was in a bubble of calm, the eye at the heart of a great storm, the Empyrean raging all around him, but unable to approach. There was something strange about the whole experience, something he had never encountered before. It felt ethereal, dreamlike, the normal ebb and flow of the warp overlayed onto something else. When the ship translated, he felt a shift, a lurch in his chest that caused his stomach to drop. He turned the ship towards the center of the eye, seeking the darkness at its heart...
and all at once, he saw everything. The threads of a thousand paths through the warp, through possibility, through time itself. The warp was filled with ghosts, ships and souls flickering in and out of his vision more quickly than he could track. The engines of the ship hummed, the deck vibrating beneath him. He felt it, and knew it was not real. The engine was producing possibilities, futures that might have come to pass, tracing back and forth through their paths and finding points of divergence to latch onto.
If he had succeeded at his first voyage, the thread would split, his fate diverging from the Absalom dynasty, and he would never have been here.
If Hannabel had visited Scintilla, and been captured by the Stalker, she would have come back changed when they rescued her, the eyes looking out from behind her mask no longer her own.
If Anika had turned off the ancient ice machine, awakening the Yu'Vath, there were a hundred branching paths all ending with the Manticore's Sting reduced to glittering shards in the void, the last hope of the dynasty snuffed out like a candle.
If, if, if...
It went on and on, thousands of timelines, millions, tearing into shreds and bleeding away into vapour. It threatened to overwhelm him. Yet now he had seen the pattern behind the chaos, the incombrehensibly vast weave of past and future. He understood the purpose that drove the minds responsible for constructing the Engine. He understood what it was capable of, and what it had been reduced to. He felt pressure building behind his eyes as the patterns seared themselves into his mind, the aetheric calculus that drove all of those thousand timelines. A skilled enough user would have been able to gather the strands, build them into a net, and dredge the river of time. To dial in a future, and physically explore the ramifications of decisions before they were made. Collapse the decision tree into a distinct realm.
Perhaps even do it in reverse. Change a decision in the past, change the vision of the future granted by the engine. The energy requirements of such a voyage would be enormous, and Echo knew that the builders of the Engine had never attempted it. They might have observed the past, but they had never gone there, had never turned the great gears of their contraption in reverse. To try now, when the device was damaged, was likely madness.
And yet. It had already done it once, hadn't it? The anomaly that had carried them back to the Astropathic tower before the generators went dead and the installation turned into a tomb, that had been a creation of the Engine. An accident, one born from operation beyond its design parameters, its use and corruption by the malevolent force that had settled at its heart and co-opted its servants. Yet still its creation. The energy was there, he could feel it, the collected psychic emanations of years upon years of stolen potential, building up in cyclopean wraithbone capacitation arrays buried beneath the surface of the world. Once, this had been a mere divination tool, but now... now it was something else.