The profound hypocrisy of the Concordance is the reason the Void Shadow Collective exists. The suppression of emotion doesn’t just make an emotion go away. It merely pushes it downward, past an invisible threshold. Like an iceberg in the ocean, more and more of what’s really there goes unseen and unacknowledged.
Sablestar hangs like a spider from the threads which form the Negamatrix - a secret mode of travel used by the Collective. Like the Concordance, she can travel through space thanks to strong emotional linkages. But to avoid detection, she and her fellows prefer the negative associations. The ones that linger, unspoken, unaddressed, that fester and grow and grow and grow, like a rhizome beneath the soil. Just as natural as the “positives” like love and compassion, of course.
Lately, she’s become aware that these linkages through space can also work through time - if someone else has traveled in time, Sablestar can follow them. She found one such, a truly potent node in the Negamatrix that has grown. It has branched off, replanted itself, and spread like kudzu across the emotional continuum.
She explored some of the branches once, and emerged to find herself emerging into outer space with Concord - that human Concordance agent! The fight was spectacular but risky, and she faced superior numbers. She was able to yank her enemies into a labyrinthine phantasm and landed on the other side of it, locking the dream-door behind her.
Her new surroundings had been pedestrian. A human home. A child asleep in front of a television, watching some kind of food preparation program. Sablestar had time. Why here? Why now? She’d examined the child’s mind and memories, and learned some very interesting things about Adam Amari, also known as Concord. Then she unwound her time transfer, returning to her own particular present in the cosmos.
Now she watches this “Jordan”, unseen in the physical world. The child has strong emotional bonds to two heroes - Concord, very much a nuisance to her personally, and Radiance, one of his allies. Could she simply kidnap the child, threaten her life, and try to compel Concord’s obedience and thus orchestrate his defeat thereby? Perhaps. But any Keynome wielder is inherently dangerous, and Sablestar is naturally cautious.
She thinks her current plan is better. She’s found other temporal linkages, followed them to times and places when Concord wasn’t around, laid down a foundation in the dreams of the child. Like eggs, they’ve only needed time to hatch.
And the woman who hangs from the emotional spiderweb, watching her creations ready to emerge, smiles to herself in proud delight.