Some called it the dream, others sorcery, a few the cosmos, still others could not find the wor

Shen, however, had had a name for it all along. Somewhat ironically, his upbringing in his comparitively strange and primitive shadow had given him the idea that the blood of Amber did not seem to often bother with. The Ni. The infinite set. The everything. Everything that could ever ever be. It was what he had been taught, and now it had shown another side of itself; another fragment of the tapestry had been gently blown into the light, albeit by a malignant wind.

Something that had been baffling Shen since his learning of Amber had been its incompleteness. Why were the places to which one could take the Pattern, center and creator of all order in the universe, limited? The spirit worlds, such as those to which the dead go, were some about which he had wondered. Where were Erisrakari and Deidre? Where was Cecily's father, and where had she been going when she had met him?

Over time, Shen had begun to hatch a theory. Amber and its shadows were infinite, but still only a subset of the Ni. He had imagined them in his head in a conical shape, with Amber at the apex, and its shadows spreading out around and below it, as if all cast from a point of bright light just above it, getting thicker and wider and darker on and on and on, until eventually leaving only the darkness of Chaos, and beyond that, the deeper emptiness of the Abyss. Within the cone of shadow were all of the worlds that his mother's blood, and now he, could wander, all blurred into each other in countless differential steps of possibility.

Outside the cone, however, there were more places. These places were not Chaos, yet also not shadows of Amber. They basked in the light of creation itself, beside the influence of Amber, independent, and therefore outside the realm of the Pattern.

As time went on, more questions had arisen, such as why there was only one Amber. Arden, and the other Golden Circle shadows about which he had heard tell, were supposedly the shadows closest to Amber, and, at least in his understanding of things, therefore the most similar. Presumably they could certainly be similar to Amber in all sorts of invisible ways, but is seemed odd that there were not shadows that looked materially almost exactly like Amber somehow crammed between.

For awhile, he had not let this concern him. He had taken it on faith that there was some explanation, some pattern to it all that he had yet to understand.

One expansion to his theory that had arisen from this, however, was that there were other Ambers, each slightly different, each with their own set of shadows over which they had influence. These he had envisioned as other apexes situated around that same higher light, each creating its own cone of shadow. Perhaps the cones overlapped as they widened, perhaps not. Perhaps, in some larger dimension, all of these Ambers were themselves shadows of something even more intrinsic, blurry copies of another core.

Shen had shared some of these ideas on a few occasions, but his companions, and rightfully so, were usually almost singly interested in handling the more direct matters requiring their attention. Shen had, for the most part, directed his efforts similarly, mostly out of necessity, but partially out of the continuous re-realization that philosophy can prove somewhat impotent if not balanced with some purposeful action. It was well understood, even in the lessons of the Rheari, that once one had come to accept the truth that all laws of logic, cause and effect were based solely on faith, one then proceeded to apply that faith and actually deal with the tangible tasks at hand. With that in mind, Shen had not given all that much thought to his model of radial cones and alternate universes.

...until now.

Waking up in another Amber into which Fletcher was marching an invading army of Chaosites, frustrating and honestly frightening as it was, had not really thrown Shen for much of a loop. Of course he now wondered what, or who, had manifested the power to "shadowshift" Cecily, Griffin and himself into this alternate Amber without their foresight or consent, but on the whole the idea behind what had happened had not really shaken his model of the universe much. In fact, it loaned some significant evidence to it, and despite it scaring the hell out of him, it was something of a relief. For being one of those many occurances that presents a new, rapidly advancing front of formidable questions, it actually pointed toward a few answers for a change.

Still, the consolation was small. There were more than enough inconsistencies to keep it all very definitely in doubt, such as the fact that Gerda, who, despite having had no experience visiting the alternate Amber, had somehow suffered the injury that her double had sustained there during the shift. Not to mention the fact that, according to a now-vanished Harmony, the Dream had been attacked, and the Dream King's rule over it usurped, which did not bode well for Amber.

Shen had tapped all of his resources: Harmony, Arissa, and the applications of his models all yielded nothing. There were no answers as to how to traverse the multiple worlds of "the Dream", or counter those who somehow seemed to control his and his companions' places in it. It seemed, as always, just one scene of handling the immediate crisis after another, and he could not help but feel that so doing would eventually play the group right into the hands of its enemies.

What seemed almost laughable was how little they had really gained since their lives back in Shadow, given a certain point of view. Here they were in Amber, having walked the Pattern, shifted shadow, used trump, and learned the ways of the universe, but they were still slave to those who had somehow gotten a view of the next level up. In the end, there was always the bigger picture, and despite how far they had come, they were still missing it, and that felt all too familiar.