“Tell him he’s going to have to wait longer,” I cried.
She smiled at my outburst and opened her eyes again, focusing on my face. “I know what you’re thinking. You told me before. The world is just a dream. There’s no one waiting. But that’s not true. This is my dream too, and Dorian is waiting for me. Someday you and Penny will meet us there.”
“No,” I said, denying everything. “This isn’t fair. You can’t leave. Who’s going to keep Penny company when she comes? She’ll be lonely. Haven’t you thought about that?” I could hardly see Rose’s face anymore with all the tears in my eyes.
“I love you, Mort, but I’m tired. Let me sleep,” said Rose, letting her eyes drift closed once more.
She slept then, while I watched her, but she never woke again. It was hours before she drew her last breath. I cried the entire time, and when I knew she was gone I gave up my attempts to be quiet and screamed my sorrow at the walls.
As Rose had predicted, I survived her passing, though my food no longer had any taste to it. The world was grey, as though it had all turned to ash. I moved back to the old mountain cottage. It had been empty for a number of years, for after Matthew and Karen’s child finished coming of age they had moved out. They were still married, but saw each other only occasionally, for he was continually busy with his work, and Karen had developed a wide range of interests and contacts all over the world.
Soon after, Myra came to join me. She claimed to be lonely, but I knew it was because she was worried. She refused to let me mope too much, though she still failed to reawaken my joy for life. I started cooking again, something I hadn’t done much of since the years when Penny and I had raised our children there.
Mariana had been Queen for a number of years by then, putting to an end any doubts left regarding whether a woman could rule. At that point few of the people had ever lived under any monarch but a queen. Her skill at governance, along with the presence of the World Road, gradually led to Lothion holding sway over both Gododdin and Dunbar, and the empire she founded ushered in a golden age.
A few years after Myra came to live with me, Conall died, though he was still young for a wizard. Ever wild, he broke his neck while hunting. How he managed that when I had reminded him so many times to keep himself shielded at all times was a mystery to me. His death sent me into an even darker depression, until I think even Myra grew tired of dealing with me.
A decade later, when Irene lost George to yet another stupid accident, she decided to move in, and coincidentally, Myra moved out. She had her reasons, but they were lies. I was a burden, and it was Irene’s turn to shoulder it. I told Irene as much, which resulted in an argument of epic proportions. She was still dealing with her own grief, which made my self-pity particularly offensive.
We tore up a few trees during that fight and a few more during the ones that followed it, and strangely, I began to feel a little better each time. I didn’t fight with Rennie often. I was civilized most of the time, and she was as sweet as a lamb, the perfect daughter, but when she let her hair down, the wildlife usually decided it was time to migrate to another mountain for a while. Honestly, I enjoyed those fights, and the years between them. She was a lot like her mother.
Myra visited now and then, and I think she was surprised that Irene had somehow gotten me to smile again, when she had had such poor luck at it. I explained it to her by saying I’d had no choice. “After all, you don’t think her husband died of natural causes, do you?”
Myra told me in no uncertain terms that my joke was in very poor taste, but I was pretty sure her sense of humor had simply atrophied with old age.
Penny enjoyed seeing them as well, and as time went on, I got to hear a number of stories about her sudden visits when I was sleeping. Like Rose, they didn’t tell me about it for a long time, but Irene was stubborn, and she eventually told me the truth. I began to leave letters on my bedside table at night, and occasionally I found a reply, written with Penny’s distinctively terrible penmanship.
I took up gardening, raising roses and other flowers, and I started leaving fresh flowers with my letters, along with food and other treats. They were almost always left untouched, but every few months I would find that someone had eaten the food and there would be a new letter where mine had been. Those were bittersweet moments for me.
A few times I woke to discover an entire meal laid out, reminding me of the old days. It felt as though if I waited, she might walk in through the door, to chide me for letting the food grow cold. But of course, she didn’t. I enjoyed the meal and tried not to let my tears spoil it.
The decades passed by and the new empire of Lothion showed no signs of weakening. After all, its Queen was a wizard as well and would very likely be on the throne for a long time. Mariana was a political genius, with a mind that would have given Rose a close race. She had a conscience, which I attributed to her time with me when she was younger, yet she was also utterly ruthless when the need arose, which I figured had something to do with her father.
I knew it was a personal conceit, though. Ariadne had taught her daughter well, and Rose had helped to hone the Queen’s political acumen. But I liked to think I’d had some small part in her success.
In my second century, Matthew finally got lonely and decided to live with me. As before, Irene found an excuse to leave, confirming my suspicions. My children were taking turns making sure Dad didn’t get depressed and do something stupid. I was sad to see Irene go, and had my doubts about living with my son, but we got on like two happy bachelors.
There were no more fights, and while the house grew persistently dirtier, neither of us cared. On a few occasions I found signs that someone had been cleaning during the night and a letter from Penny confirmed that I had better do something about the state of affairs or suffer the consequences. I laughed it off, figuring I’d wait a few more days before doing some serious cleaning.
What could she do to me anyway?
I woke up the next morning in a bed covered with wet mud, along with another letter promising it would be poison ivy the next time. The empty bucket that had transported the mud sat in the middle of the room, a stark warning.
So, we got busy cleaning, and Matthew finally confessed that it had been Penny who had organized my caretakers since Rose’s death. She had actually sent them letters years before Rose died, and she had met each of them on various occasions. I probably should have felt betrayed, but I didn’t.
I went to my room and cried behind the safety of the privacy ward for over an hour.
My son and I worked hard, devising new enchantments that helped to usher in a new age of magic as great as the one that had come over twelve hundred years past. There were a lot more wizards now, though they were comparatively young.
Somewhere in my fourth century, Mariana was assassinated and the empire she had built began to fall apart. I steadfastly refused to participate in saving it, being rather disgusted with the animal that took her place. My children stayed out of it too, but a number of my grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren and so on died in the wars that followed.
The dragons I had given out became pieces in the game of power between nations. I should have seen that coming, but while Mariana had ruled it had never been an issue. Matthew and I hid the remaining eggs deep within the earth where I hoped they would never be found.
It was around then that I began to give serious thought to the fact that my children were going to die. They were starting to show their age, and I was still just as I had always been. The thought of losing them horrified me, reminding me once more what a curse my immortality had become.
I spent considerable time brooding over it, and I was determined not to see it happen, though at the same time I couldn’t bear to bring the world to an end. As messy as it was, it was full of people who deserved to live, and quite a few of them were my grandchildren of various generations.
My deal with the dreaming god had been clear. I could live as lon
g as I wished, but to escape I had to use the power hidden in the dark scar on my soul. Doing so would start the process all over again, causing me to accumulate power until my existence ripped his dream apart and I fell asleep to create a new one.
I wasn’t even five hundred years old yet and it was beginning to get unbearable, but I felt I owed it to the children of the world to give them a future. The dreamer was a coward, and in the words of a wise man I had once known, Fuck that. Chad would have been proud.
So, I devised a new plan. I created a stasis box to hold me, along with a few modifications at Matthew’s request. I would wait out the millennia, until everything that could possibly happen had happened. It was cheating, sure, but I didn’t give a damn.
We placed the box in a chamber built beneath Lynaralla’s roots. Matthew, Irene, and Myra each had a talisman that would not only release me, but would summon me to their sides when used. They were masterpieces of enchanting, something I couldn’t have imagined creating in my younger days, but we had advanced the craft considerably since then. I also included a timer in the box itself that would shut it off every hundred years, so I could check on the progress of the world myself.
I waited a while before using it, as every year my children begged me not to go, but eventually I could stand it no longer. We said our goodbyes and I laid down to rest.
They dragged me back repeatedly over the next century. A couple of times because of a genuine emergency, but usually just because they missed me. We would visit for a few weeks, and then I’d return to my slumber in stasis.
When the day came that I was summoned by a stranger, it caught me off guard. Almost a hundred years had passed, and my children were long gone. The feeling of despair and loneliness that came upon me then nearly overwhelmed me, and the hapless ruler who had inherited one of their talismans never realized how close he came to precipitating the end of everything.
I kept my emotions under control and helped him, then went back to my tiny home under the tree. Feeling bad for Lynaralla, I spent a few years talking to her, a conversation that seemed like days to her, then I put myself back to sleep. This time I changed the timer to run for a thousand years, realizing it had been a mistake to set it for only a hundred. I had no interest in seeing the world anymore.
I was summoned a dozen times in that period, and it got rather tiresome. By then I was a creature of legend, and often the holder of the talisman thought its purpose was only a myth. At some point most of the wizards had gotten themselves killed again and the world was once again in a dark age with little magic.
Thankfully, the talismans were lost in the long run, and the next person to bring me back was some sort of scholar who found one hidden in a tomb. Irritated, I didn’t feel very bad about scaring him half to death. A little miffed, I returned and changed the timer to an interval of five thousand years and hoped no one else would find a talisman. My goal was to wake up and find nothing worth continuing for, so I could put an end to it all.
No one interrupted me, a first, even though I had set my timer for the longest period yet. When I emerged, I found that the area around Lynaralla’s tree had become a desert. She still seemed healthy, probably because her roots went down so deep, she wasn’t reliant on the rain. We had another long conversation, and she shared some of what she had seen with me. I was disappointed to learn that civilization was doing just fine.
Returning to my box, I repeated the process several times. It was beginning to dawn on me that history might turn out to be much longer than I had imagined. After four cycles of five thousand years apiece, someone found one of my talismans again. This time it turned out to be some sort of weird demon worshipper.
While talking to him I learned that somewhere along the line someone had indeed created demons, or something nearly indistinguishable from such. The man who had called me thought I was an archdevil of some sort and was suffering under the delusion that he had bound me with whatever nonsensical incantation he had recited while activating the talisman.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt. It was possible he had a benign purpose. Maybe he was willing to endanger his imaginary afterlife to help someone in need. Sadly, that was not the case, and when we emerged from the cave he had summoned me to, I saw the body of the child he had sacrificed during his rituals. I wound up escorting him back to the cave and dropping the ceiling on his head. Humans could be so disappointing.
Another five thousand years and I received a shock. Lynaralla’s tree was gone, only the roots remained, dry and withered. Thirty thousand years was a long time, even for a She’Har elder. I grieved again, for she had been my last child, my only remaining companion.
I was truly alone now.
Turning off the timer, I returned to my stasis. There was no reason to wake again. I was done with it all.
Ages passed into eons, and eons became mere pebbles in the riverbed of time. Unknown to me, the world I had once lived upon burned, consumed by a sun that had grown red and swollen. Yet the husk of that world survived, becoming a cold, dark rock that persisted even after the sun itself burned out.
Unaware of anything, I floated down the empty river of eternity, until even matter itself began to die of old age, evaporating into nothing. The stasis box failed, and I emerged to find myself in a cold, dark void. There were no stars, no air, no light. My body died shortly thereafter, but even physical death wouldn’t release me.
Reaching inside myself, I found the darkness and light and brought them together. In that empty place, it took a long time to draw enough power from the dissipating universe to accomplish my goal, but I did it anyway. As I ascended to godhood once more, there came a point when I was close, but not yet asleep, and I was granted a final gift.
Perhaps I granted it to myself, it was hard to say, but in the place that wasn’t a place I found Penny looking back at me. “It took you long enough,” she said, giving me a smile.
“Are you really here?” I asked, stunned. It had been so long since I had seen her face, I wasn’t even certain anymore whether she was the same woman I had loved before. “Penny?”
She took my hand and led me into a green field, full of flowers. “Everyone’s waiting for us,” she said, giving me a quick kiss.
Turning to survey the place, I realized we were back in the valley where I had been born. It was a dream. It had to be. But I didn’t care. They were all there, all the people I had loved. Crying tears of joy, we ran to them.
I slept, and my dream began. The old universe vanished, falling apart as a new one emerged from the remnants.
Transcendence and Rebellion Page 43
