Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  “You’re here on Trass Kattra. In the past?”

  “Not just the past, Kali. The End Time. Even as I speak, the darkness is upon us, and were it not for this moment, I would already be dead.”

  Kali swallowed. “Who are you, Zharn?”

  “One who tried to help save our world. One of four.”

  “Four?” Kali repeated. “You mean like the Four four?”

  “Yes, that is what I mean. I was of the kattra of this time. And it was I who was chosen to come to the Thunderflux to relate the tale you need to hear.”

  “Okay,” Kali said cautiously. “I don’t seem to have anything else on at the moment.”

  “We share a singular heritage, Kali – and a singular foe. One that will be difficult to explain because its history is ages in the making. But it must be explained if you are to succeed in what you must do. It is a tale of growing knowledge, of constant adversity, and, until now, of failure. Steady yourself, for we are about to begin.”

  What? Kali thought. But then the dome in which she stood was suddenly a dome no more. Its walls vanished and she found herself adrift in a void, floating, and somehow knew she was in the centre of the strange expanse she had seen when she had risen above Twilight in the Tharnak. This ‘space’ was as immense as it had been then, her confines utterly gone, and she felt that if she began to travel in any direction, she might never reach its limits.

  There was only one difference: where within this void she had then been able to see Kerberos and Twilight’s distant sun, marred slightly by the body she now knew to be the Hel’ss, here there was nothing. Nothing in the void. Nothing at all.

  “My gods,” Kali breathed.

  “In the beginning,” said Zharn, “there was night. Worlds without light. Rocks without life.”

  Kali found herself stunned, backpaddling as she might in water to keep afloat, as a number of blindingly bright spheres appeared out of nowhere in the space all around her.

  “And then, the gods came.”

  The spheres hung about Kali at various distances – unimaginable distances – illuminating the void and the lifeless worlds she could now see scattered throughout it. Each was also far more than a sphere, Kali sensed, because from them all she could feel the same strange and powerful sentience emanating.

  “They came to this desolate corner of the universe,” Zharn continued. “To this dead space. They were the Pantheon.”

  Kali swallowed. “The Pantheon?”

  “Twelve entities – creatures, powers, gods – call them what you will. Kerberos, the Hel’ss, Faranoon, Chazra-Nay, Rehastt, along with eight others whose names we might never know, for they are long gone.”

  “Wait. Are you telling me one of these spheres is Kerberos?”

  “As Kerberos was, when it was young. Like the Hel’ss, it shone brightly, then. It had feasted well before it came – as had the Hel’ss, as had the others.”

  “Feasted?”

  She gasped and began to drift through the expanse before her – or was it that the expanse drifted about her? – she wasn’t sure. She found herself directly above the surface of one of the spheres as it rotated beneath her, massive and filling her vision completely. But it was what filled the sphere that drew Kali’s attention – a swirling sea – no, ocean, entire world – of writhing forms that resembled Bastian Redigor’s Pillar of Souls. But there was a difference – where then she had seen only human forms, the dead of Twilight, here she was looking at what could only be the dead of other worlds, a multitude of strange forms that both awed and disturbed her at the same time. Octopoid things and serpents that were leagues long, pyramidal creatures and creatures of jagged contours, gaseous entities, distinct from that in which they were trapped, and dark, flowing shapes, like liquid shadow. There was nothing familiar about them, and Kali realised she was looking at the souls of another universe.

  “Gorged is perhaps a better word,” Zharn said. “Gorged until there was nothing left in their old domain. And so they came, came in search of new life, so that they might feast again.”

  Kali looked at the planets around her. “But these are dead worlds.”

  “All worlds are dead,” Zharn said. “Until their gods come.”

  Kali watched as each of the spheres – each of the Pantheon – began to move to one of the worlds and take up position above it, hanging there as Kerberos hung above Twilight. Though she could somehow see them all, she knew that billions upon billions of miles must separate them.

  For as she continued to watch, the spheres that were the Pantheon infused their individual dead worlds with life, life that from her heavenly vantage point she could see begin to spread across the worlds as their respective civilisations grew. What kind of lifeforms thrived beneath her she didn’t know, but thousands upon thousands of years of their history must have passed before her eyes, and when it had, the process that each of the Pantheon had begun was, it seemed, done.

  Each sphere had lost its brilliance now, each of the Pantheon became a different hue, and as Kali observed a barely distinguishable thread connecting each sphere to its planet below, a thread which pulsed upwards constantly, she knew from what that hue had grown.

  The fact that she was witnessing each member of the Pantheon feeding on its planet’s souls was somehow forgotten as her eyes were drawn to the sphere with a familiar azure hue.

  To the planet from which it fed.

  “Oh gods. Is that Twilight?”

  “No, Kali. It is not. For there begins the next part of this tale.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Zharn paused. “This is what the Pantheon were, and had they remained so, these worlds, these civilisations, would have enjoyed millennia of existence before their gods moved on. With this there was nothing wrong, for that was the nature of things.”

  “Something changed?”

  “The Pantheon changed. They were ancient beings when they came here, and now they were more ancient still, and some of them chose their worlds unwisely and fed less well than others. Across the vastness of space some began to sense their more successful brethren, became jealous of their conquests, and instead of moving onto neutral worlds the weaker among them began to follow in the wake of the stronger. For a while they were allowed to bask in the essence of those they followed but the worlds available to the Pantheon were becoming fewer, too, their resources scarcer, so that, gradually, the Pantheon were drawn into conflict with each other. They began to draw souls not only from the planets they had created but from each other. They began to consume themselves…”

  Kali watched as one of the Pantheon – she didn’t know which – hung above a world whose surface glittered with the light of campfires, signifying life, if a primitive form. Then she became aware of another of its kind encroaching on its space from afar. The second of the Pantheon gradually began to move towards the first.

  “What am I seeing?” Kali said. “Is this the Hel’ss and Kerberos?”

  “No, Kali. You are seeing the merging of Faranoon and Chazra-Nay. Witness, Kali. Witness the end.”

  It might not have been the Hel’ss and Kerberos that Kali was observing, but the similarity to what was happening above Twilight right at that moment was clear. As the Hel’ss was nearing Kerberos, so too was Faranoon nearing Chazra-Nay. But in this case drawing close enough to touch. As Kali watched wide eyed, the edges of the massive, gaseous spheres came into contact and then, slowly, Faranoon began to eclipse Chazra-Nay. Chazra-Nay did not disappear, however, remaining visible inside the other, like a nucleus within a cell. At least for a while. Then, at first in pockets and then in great spreading clouds, the atmospheres of both bodies became increasingly disturbed, as if each raged with unimaginably large storms – but if they were storms, they were storms of souls, the meeting and conflict of the life force of each of the so-called deities. Seething and roiling ever more tumultuously, the surfaces of the spheres changed hue and composition again and again, sometimes so rapidly that they appeared to pulsate
in anger, and it was apparent that a great battle was being raged. Kali had no idea of the length of time that passed during this struggle but in the end Faranoon emerged the victor.

  The way that victory came would have made Kali stagger, had she something solid on which to do so. Because though Chazra-Nay vanished inside Faranoon, the size of Faranoon suddenly doubled, and as it did its hue changed and it enveloped the atmosphere of the world below.

  “This,” Kali gasped, “I’ve seen this. With Pim in Domdruggle’s Expanse. Kerberos was bigger, darker, more threatening. This is the End Time, isn’t it! This is the darkness!”

  “Wait, Kali,” Zharn countered.

  Faranoon was now enveloping the alien world like some giant membrane. Hanging there in space for what seemed an eternity, it seemed to be passing on a message to the cosmos. This world is mine. And then, from the surface of the alien world to the surface of Faranoon, countless strands of light began flow. Kali knew instantly what they were – souls – the souls of every living creature on the world being consumed all at once by the deity. She knew now why the elves and the dwarves had vanished so quickly from Twilight, seemingly unable to prevent their fate, because it took only a matter of minutes before the strands of light were fully absorbed into its biosphere and the world below was emptied of life. All across the surface of the world, the campfires went out.

  “That is the darkness,” Zharn said.

  Kali was momentarily speechless.

  “How many worlds have the Pantheon destroyed like this?”

  “Those it took to reduce their ranks. Faranoon was consumed by another as little as five thousand years later. Rehastt took two worlds before it was itself consumed by the Hel’ss. Ten worlds in all lost to their conflict until only two of the Pantheon – Kerberos and the Hel’ss – remained.”

  Kali hated to sound flippant about what she’d witnessed but it seemed relevant.

  “Kerberos didn’t seem to get the munchies.”

  Once more she was on the move, zooming through space towards the azure sphere and the world she had mistaken for Twilight. It was her longest journey yet.

  “No. Kerberos was the most distant of the Pantheon, here, on the very edge of this space. It had found a world whose own god it had subsumed and which satisfied its needs. Because of this and of the great distance between itself and its brethren, it took no further part in the affairs of the Pantheon.”

  “But Kerberos is above Twilight now, right? So something must have happened.”

  “The third part of our tale. Of the many races the Pantheon created, this was one of the few that developed the capacity for travel in space, and with it the means to escape Kerberos’ domination of their world. A band of refugees managed to leave the planet in search of a new home. What they did not know was that Kerberos, angered by their audacity, would decide to follow them. But what Kerberos, in turn, did not know, was that its passage across the vast void would bring it close to the realm of the Hel’ss.”

  Kali watched as the great azure orb that was Kerberos moved across space. There, perhaps billions of miles distant but close enough, it briefly eclipsed another orb, purple in colour, which also began to move. Very, very slowly, it began to close the gap between them.

  “The hunter,” said Zharn, “became the hunted.”

  The distance between the spheres was so great, Kali realised, that thousands of years could conceivably pass before the Hel’ss caught up with its prey, but this was nothing to the two deities, and she knew from experience that the end of the pursuit was inevitable.

  She found herself following Kerberos through space, then floating around its axis, where she gasped. Below her hung Twilight. At least she thought it was Twilight. Because there was something about it that was wrong.

  “The refugees from the dead world eventually led Kerberos to this world, your world,” Zharn explained, “where they mysteriously vanished. Despite this, Kerberos had no choice but to remain, for the journey here had left it weak.”

  “Twilight looks different,” Kali said. “But I can’t work out why.”

  “Yes, Twilight is different. Because there was a fundamental difference between this world and any other that Kerberos had seeded.”

  Kali began to swoop down into Twilight’s atmosphere, at first soaring high above the clouds and then punching through them. She flew above an unfamiliar landscape, across which figures raced. No, not raced – pursued each other. She stared as the predatory creatures – strange, green-skinned hulks and short, vicious, rat-like things – then engaged in battle.

  “Oh gods,” she said. “Twilight was already populated.”

  “Indeed it was. But Kerberos was angry that the fugitives he had pursued across space had once more escaped him, and he was also desperate. For the first time since arriving in this universe, Kerberos chose to transform an inhabited world.”

  “Transform?”

  “First it sent its dragons, creatures who appeared to magically create life but who, in fact, were assessing the make-up of the world, ready for disassembly. And when they had done their job, it sent the Great Flood to cleanse the world. The creatures who called it home – those your myths call orcs and goblins – were swept from their lands in the flood and became assimilated in the endless waters. A few survived – somehow – but they no longer belonged on this world.”

  “This ‘assimilation’ – it was what was happening in the swirlies? I mean the swirlpools off the island?”

  “Yes. The creation – or uncreation – of life.”

  Kali cringed. “I never thought I’d feel sorry for an orc or goblin.”

  “Their fate was perhaps merciful considering what happened next. Others eventually would come to live in the great ocean – the Chadassa, the Calma – but the landmasses which the orcs and goblins called home were about to be changed for ever.”

  “By what?”

  “By the more powerful form of the dragons. By the dra’gohn.”

  Kali sailed back into the skies until she was facing Kerberos. Shadows seemed to be building within its gaseous mass and, then, after a second, burst from the entity’s depths. Kali recoiled as these cloud-like things resolved themselves into creatures that were all too familiar. Somehow translucent and more ghostly here, perhaps, but the last time she had seen one of the same it had carried her to the edge of a space before disintegrating before her eyes.

  One single dra’gohn that was no more.

  But this time, there were hundreds of them.

  “The dra’gohn were sent to your world, as they are to every one of the Pantheon’s worlds, when the time is right. Spawned in the core of Kerberos, these creatures would make the land on which its people would grow, and on which they would live. The dra’gohn were beings that channelled the very stuff of the universe, of creation, and they were magnificent.”

  Kali swallowed as her perspective changed once more and she found herself back on the flooded world, standing on the summit of a mountain that appeared to be the only piece of land anywhere. Except it wasn’t land, because the mountain was made of glass. Then one of the dra’gohn flew directly at her. The massive creature filled her vision, its wings blotting out the sky, and then she was somehow scooped up and found herself riding on its back. The glass mountain was left far behind her and they flew above an endless expanse of water that spread from horizon to horizon. The sky darkened about her as other dra’gohn joined the one on which she rode, until they were once more present about her in their hundreds, and as one they began to angle down towards the sea.

  And then, they made the land.

  Kali found herself gasping for breath, so overwhelmed was she by what she saw. The mouth of each dra’gohn opened wide and each breathed, massive jets of red and yellow that intertwined and together looked like roaring fire. But this was not fire – this, as Zharn had said, was the stuff of creation itself. The dra’gohn were breathing threads.

  Below her, where the ocean had been, a strip of land began to
form, the water evaporating, transforming, solidifying gradually into a desert landscape, as the dra’gohn flew above. Kali twisted on her mount’s back and gasped again, for behind her a great ridge of rock rolled in the dra’gohn’s wake, a crease in that which was being made, nothing less than a mountain range separating the land that was fully formed from that still being breathed.

  The dra’gohn ceased breathing and turned, swooping back over the mountain range. Here, they peeled away from each other, some heading to the east, others to the west, and began to breathe again. The somewhat featureless land that they had created on their first pass began to be shaped more now, the weaving patterns of the dra’gohn in the sky creating the shape of a coastline, of river inlets, lakes and valleys and gorges and hills, and when at last they stopped breathing once more, Kali found herself looking not at a strip of land anymore but a landmass that was whole and complete.

  A landmass that was as familiar to her as the back of her hand.

  The peninsula.

  The location of all her adventures.

  Home.

  “My gods,” Kali said. “It’s all there. The World’s Ridge Mountains, the Sardenne, Vos, Pontaine. All there.”

  “Except of course,” Zharn pointed out, “they were not yet known by these names. For as yet there was no one to name them.”

  “The Old Races,” Kali said. “But that means that Kerberos was their god, because it created them!”

  “In a way, I suppose. But Kerberos’s motives were not those of a god, they were those of survival. Knowing how little time it had – relatively speaking, of course – before the Hel’ss reached Twilight, it made the decision that the battle for survival between itself and the Hel’ss could no longer continue as it had. They were the last of their kind and one of them needed to gain the advantage. To this end, it determined to create not one but two races to inhabit its new domain, gifting each with the potential to be more than just mere fodder but to actively assist it in the fight against its old enemy.”