The paradoxes continued thick and fast. Church was taken to the mysterious Otherworld, also known as the Far Lands, by Niamh, who would fall in love with him over time, and there he also encountered Tom in his younger days. In Niamh's court, Church befriended Jerzy, the Mocker, a surgically altered Fool who would play a large part in what was to come.

The magical Far Lands were timeless, and Church realised that he could while away his days there while centuries passed in the real world, and eventually return home when his own age rolled around again.

On occasional trips back to the real world, under Niamh's control, Church encountered many other Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. In Roman York in AD 306, he met the Dacian barbarian Decebalus, and the Roman Briton Aula Fabricia Candida, both of whom returned with him to the Far Lands when they discovered that Ryan Veitch was systematically killing off the line of champions. Over the centuries, Church rescued many others and brought them back to the Otherworld, where they formed an Army of Dragons in waiting.

The Great Powers continued to manipulate humans to their ends. The Void controlled many human leaders through the spiders, while gaining power over several gods from other pantheons in Earth's mythologies, amongst them the dual-faced Janus, god of doorways, and Loki, the Norse trickster god.

In Elizabethan times, Janus arranged the capture of many humans to be slaves in the Void's Fortress in the Far Lands. Amongst them were the New World colonists of Roanoke, including the young girl Virginia Dare, the first European to be born in the Americas.

Meanwhile, the Tuatha De Danaan continued their own manipulations. Dian Cecht and the gods of the Court of the Final Word were involved in a desperate attempt to probe the heart of Existence, not only to ensure their survival in the face of the Devourer of All Things, but also to prevent the Golden Ones from being supplanted by Fragile Creatures. In one of their experiments, they inserted a Caraprix inside Jerzy's head, to control him and use him against Church.