The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  The sorcerer came to him one evening at sea. Darshan, serving on a freight boat hauling giant cedar timbers from the eastern forests back to the kingdom, dozed in a cord hammock slung between the prow and a shaggy log. Through half-lidded eyes, he stared ahead at the rinds of daylight in the west until sleep swelled in him and the raith uncurled.

  All at once, his body unfurled and he found himself rushing headlong through windy darkness and fuming leakages of light. A gold sphere swirled before him veiled in a misty flotage of sparks. His flight slowed, and he hung among the tiny pieces of light until he remembered this vision from hundreds of lifetimes back, from his one short interview with the sorcerer.

  The sun-round glare inside the starmist was Re, the god of his first learning. This was the creator immersed in his creation, each gempoint of the endless glittering a mind. The fulgurant light blazed with all being. And the drift of the sparks, stately as clouds, revealed the invisible spiral of time.

  A religious hush thrummed to a droneful music in Darshan’s bones. Here was deity! Here was the source of his own unreckonable fate. He knew that he had to keep his wits about him and remember everything of this great darkness fizzling with scattered light. This was the place that the sorcerer had called the raith.

  Smoldering hulks of color and brightness fumed against the utter black. These, he recognized as the gods with their gloaming abstract bodies. All he had to do was stare at them to feel who they were: the crimson smoke and slithering banners of War, the green simmering vibrations of Plants, the surging floral hues of Sex, the ruffling blue flow of River, endless gods arrayed in smoky radiance as far as he could see.

  All being burns! he marveled, drifting through the blaze, awed by the apparently random yet balanced pattern of the raith. Alongside the red feathered energy of War drizzled the violet realm of the dead. And above it all shone the blue depths of Peace.

  He descended into the gray flutter of the dead with the image of the sorcerer firmly in his mind. Many familiar faces rose toward him through the trickling light, the shivering shapes of all his many families, all the lovers and children who had lived ahead of him into death. They tangled like entrails, shifted like weather, speaking to him in hurt voices not their own. He recognized then the filthy face of the dead. They were melting into each other! They were dissolving and being reabsorbed into the swirl of tenuous light.

  Some of the dirty light drifted in a haze of limbs and faces toward the blue embers of Peace. Some smoked toward the red ranges of War. The rest dithered in human shapes.

  Darshan lifted away, soaring over the gray pastures of snaggled bodies. The sorcerer wasn’t among the dead. The sorcerer had belonged to the dark spaces and not the light. Just as he had said.

  Darshan expanded into the dark, and the gold sphere of Re in its aura of sparkling lives loomed into view. But now only the darkness enwombing the light seemed real. He flung himself into the emptiness.

  His eyes shattered, his atoms flew apart. He disappeared.

  But the wind of the emptiness whirled all his parts together and blew him back into alertness. Stunned, he hung in the raith-dark before the fiery mist of Re – and the words of the sorcerer returned to him: “You alone, alone as you have always been, will live the stillness – an enemy to the gods.”

  Darshan woke. He was still a young sailor on a cargo boat ladened with cedars sailing into the night. He was still a man with a thousand years of memories. But the memories were weightless in the expansive silence. The night sea would become a dawn landfall. The cedars, faithful to their doom, already lived as rafters and pillars on their way to the termite’s ravenous freedom or an enemy’s torch. And the cargo boat would find its way to the bottom of the sea and give its shape to a vale of kelp and polyps. And the young sailor would weary of the sea and be forgotten. And Darshan, too, would be forgotten, swept away in the great migrations of Asian tribes that swarmed across Europe and North Africa a millennium before Christ.

  He roamed among the different peoples, unseen, or seen in a peaceable light. The stillness threading through his eyes and pores and atom-gaps protected him: Its lack drew energy to him wherever he was, and the energy was health, ample food, treasures, and the fealty and love of others. Despite this abundance, he felt nothing for others. He felt nothing but serene emptiness. And when he did somehow fall in love with someone or a cause, the stillness vanished, and he was left hungering and at the mercy of others.

  Sometimes even that was good. Though he had exhausted every kind of living during his first thousand years in the river kingdom, he was occasionally nostalgic for passion. And he was still aging a year for every century. Hence, even he was aware of his mortality. Pain and peril, too, had their appetites for him. More of the gods’ dreaming.

  Darshan had never been seriously ill or injured. The stillness protected him. The mangling forces ignored him even when he was stupid with his passions.

  As a wanderer, he never thought much about his fate. Often, he surged into trances, swooping through the abysses of the raith, trembling with the malice and insane love of the gods until he could stand no more, and then plunging into utter black nothing.

  He cohabited with a dim awareness that he served some function for the stillness. The old sorcerer had spoken of grounding the stillness in time. But at the time that he had heard this, rational thought had not been one of the gods feeding off of him.

  Darshan lived his fate as a watcher, letting the ubiquitous nothing appear before him as anything at all. His personality changed with his name and place. For more than a century, he lived as a wealthy Phoenician purple manufacturer, hiring a complex of villages to harvest the banded dye-murex and create the most demanded colour in the world.

  After that, he dwelt alone on the barren, wind-cumbered coasts of the Orkneys for two centuries, living off nettles and fish, sleepy and holy in the amplitude of winter.

  Then, yearning company, he went south and wandered through Europe as a seer with the Celtic droves.

  At the time of the Buddha, he was a twenty-eight year-old warrior prince in Persia. Five centuries later, he wandered with the gypsies through the Balkans when Christ was in Jerusalem. Another four hundred years and he was among the gangs that toppled Rome.

  Once, he sailed with a Palestinian crew across the Atlantic and lived for several more centuries as a nomad in the jungles, deserts and grasslands of the western continents. He was at the crestpoint of the falcons dive, suspended in time almost wholly timeless.

  The nothing became well grounded in him. His very poise within the seething temporality grew steady enough that it created a pattern in the raith. Over his twenty-five centuries on earth, his power in the hidden reality had grown sufficient resonant to match the harmonies of the masters of stillness who had come before him.

  Wrapped in the skin of a jaguar, shivering on a mountain scarp in the Andes, his sacrifice fulfilled itself. The mind of the dark spaces entered him, and his surrender became total. Now, he was the Dark One. Made of light slowed down to matter like everyone else, he had given all of himself to nothing like no one else. Given? More like, taken. He had been chosen from among the rays of creation by the space that the rays cut. He had become the wound, the living nothing.

  Curious about the old world, he returned to Europe with the Norsemen who had been sent by their Christian king to Greenland to spread the gospel and whom a storm had carried west to Vinland. Europe in the High Middle Ages reminded him of the river valley kingdom where his power had begun. There, the temple of Amon-Re had competed with feudal lords for control of the domain. Here, the papacy served as the temple and the warlords remained the same, only the trappings had changed. Cathedrals instead of pyramids.

  He wandered nameless for a long time as the power within him continued making its connections between earth and raith. He was a tinker, a minstrel, a carnival clown. His raith dreams fell into darkness. He entered the space between the enmeshing archons, the interstice of being and non, between the s
tars and the buried – where the Dark One watched.

  When the dreams of the gold sphere in its mist of sparks began again, he was a Danish village’s latrine ditch keeper, mulching the sewage with forest debris for use in the fields. The Dark One’s thoughts began thinking him. Always before, there had been living and silence – the living given, thick with health and stamina, the silence bright with raith light and comfort. Now, there was something new.

  Thoughts began crystallizing out of the inner dark. He needed a wide space of time in which to simply sit and face the immensity of them; so, he went into the mountains and let his dreams lead him to gold. Afterward, he settled in Italy, where he established himself as a wealthy nobleman from the north.

  Sitting in his enclosed garden in Firenze, guarded from the outside world by courtyards and loggia, he opened himself to the clear music of thoughts emerging from the raith. The archons of precision and rational thought, simultaneously hampered and encouraged by the archon of war, had begun fusing into the complex of science.

  Initially, he did not see the point of it all. Advances in boat design increased his revenues as a merchant, but that wealth was offset by advances in weaponry, which intensified the civil wars and cost him several of his estates. Nonetheless, he remained open to the thought-shaping patterns that the Dark One was thinking.

  He was very good at being the stillness by this time. Everything floated through him: his body, his very awareness. The archons of protein synthesis and digestion, of ever-shifting emotions and thoughts, created him. The archons of wealth and poverty, power and impuissance, governed him. He was the battlefield of the gods.

  The most powerful of all the gods was the Dark One – the uncreated and uncreating. More than a destroyer or death and its dissolvings. Void.

  He began thinking about the Dark One. He wondered about its source and end, and who he was in that synapse, hemi-divine, living centuries as years, free of disease, protected from accidents and violence…

  Over time, before the profound and absolutely unalterable flow of generations, his memories and rationalities froze into constellations as coldly distant and immutable as the stars.

  Empires crossed Europe like shadows of the shifting stars. Science invented itself. By 1700, the Dark One had established a trading company in London, and he called himself Arthur Stilmanne. Privately, he funded research in every branch of science. A way was becoming clear. After aeons, a way was opening for the Dark One.

  The sorcerer returned among the black gulfs of the raith. Almost four thousand years after he had initiated Darshan as an embodiment of the nothing, the old man reappeared in a raith dream. His body loomed out of the astral dark bound in shroudings. That, Arthur knew from his years of symbol-gazing in the raith, meant his master’s limbs, his extension into the four dimensions, were restrained – he belonged to the void. But the sorcerers head was clear – his knowledge and intent were accessible. His bald head gleamed in the gray light like a backlit bacterium: His knowing shone radiantly, suffused with the living energy of the void.

  Arthur willed himself to touch the specter. Immediately, a voice came to him whose familiarity twitched in him like his own nerves: “Darshan, you have served the stillness well. The centuries have emptied you, and now you are full of your own power.” The sorcerers face pressed closer in the dream, gloomy with sleep, his stare an aching wakefulness. “Who are you?” the old visage asked.

  Arthur responded instantly, “The Dark One.”

  A breath slipped from the sorcerer’s gray lips, “It is so.” And his countenance slackened with stupor.

  After that encounter, Arthur’s mind turned in on itself. The constellations of his long-thinking connected, looping into the veins and arteries of a body of knowledge. He saw himself finally as a response to the dialectic of life. Others just like he was now had existed before, randomly selected organisms, each metaordered not by life but by an intelligence equal and opposite to life.

  Newton’s work on vector forces inspired him. He had been given a shape by emptiness so that he might bring all shapes back to emptiness. Guided by Leibniz’s exploration of the binary system of Asian philosophy, he began thinking of himself as a dot of ordered chaos in a world of chaotic order. His mission became clear. He and all the others who had preceded him had come to end existence. But how could that be?

  During the nineteenth century, Stillman Trading Company flourished, and he kept himself moving around the continent to obscure the fact that he was continually succeeding himself as his own son. Arthur Stillman VI, of Victoria’s Britain, poured vast sums into biological research, believing the insane rush of evolution could be ended by a virulent plague hostile to all forms of life. Not until Arthur Stillman VIII and the quantum research of the early twentieth century did he realize – with an authoritative irony – that the weapon he sought was not in the world but in the atoms of the world.

  Arthur learned more about himself and the nature of reality in the last forty years than he had in the previous four thousand. The means to exterminate life and end the four billion year-old torment had emerged on its own. Arthur had done nothing to anticipate or promote it.

  Reflecting on that, he came to see that he had never had any real influence in history. He was inert, like a stone time had swallowed. Eventually, time would void him. Inside the stone was a secret silence. Some Zen monks had alluded to it. But all others kept it hidden, even from themselves. He stayed close to that silence, and everything came to him.

  In the mid-twentieth century, death itself came to Arthur Stillman, approaching closer than ever before. Accidents stalked him. A milk bottle teetered off a window ledge nine stories above his head and smashed at his feet. Lightning punched through the roof of his house and blasted the reading lamp at his bedside. On the highway, a tire exploded and sent him hurtling helplessly off the road and into a forest, where his car erupted into a fireball the instant after he was hurled through the windshield. During his six week hospital stay, mix-ups in medication nearly killed him twice.

  Arthur understood that he had an enemy powerful enough to break the stillness that had protected him for several thousand years. Somewhere, lightworkers had begun working very hard indeed to destroy the Dark One. He knew why. Science had become his latest, most deadly weapon, and if the lightworkers did not stop him now, he would soon have the technology to destroy all of creation.

  “Science,” he became fond of saying as the doomful promise of the millennium approached yet again, “is heavy enough to bend every path toward it into circles. We’ll never understand it all, never reach the center of omniscience. But we’ve circled close enough to science, to objective knowledge, to realize that whatever we thought we knew about reality we can throw away. With science, the human spirit stands with the creator spirit in the grave of everything that came before, in the midden heap of religion and superstition, on the dunghill of all past cultures. Science reveals the truth of things as they always were, to the beginning and the end. Science creates with a beauty as ancient as we are new.”

  Arthur burned with a passion for science, because it explained to him his singularity and his origin. From biologists, who studied the DNA differences in mitochondria of people from across the world and who traced human lineage back to one female ancestress hundreds of thousands of years ago, he came to accept the importance of his uniqueness. As Eve had mothered the mutants who would evolve into war-frenzied humans, he would father the energies that would return them all to nothing.

  From physicists, who discovered that the four dimensions people experienced were actually projections of other compacted dimensions in a space smaller than 10-33 centimeter, he found the raith. The radii of curvature of all the dimensions except the familiar four of spacetime were smaller than atoms – in fact, smaller than the grain of spacetime itself. In that compact region, spacetime quantized, that is, space and time separated into realms of their own. That he knew had to be the raith, where omnipresent archons floated timel
essly and evolving beings extended into endless distances.

  Science even explained his existence. He had emerged as an epiphenomenon of a symmetry event: particles appeared spontaneously in the void all the time, leaking out of the vacuum, out of nothing, but always in pairs – electrons and positrons, negative and positive, existing separately for an interval, then annihilating each other. He was one of those particles, compelled into existence by the appearance of his opposite. The other was light itself, never still, energizing endless forms and activities.

  He was the Dark One, yearning for quiescent timelessness. Light was the many. He was the one. Light was life. He was death.

  To amplify his power in the raith, Stillman began creating power cells of human minds entrained to his will. He built a group-mind that he could control. There was no dearth of material. Authorized as a psychiatrist by the finest medical institutions in the United States, where he had effortlessly earned numerous degrees in medicine, psychopathology and neural chemistry, he used his multibillion dollar trust to found Stillman Psychiatric Hostels. The hostels were free of charge and open to anyone with a mental health problem, with or without insurance.

  By the mid-nineties, Arthur had a hostel in each state and dozens overseas, all of them packed. He hired the best qualified staff at competitive salaries, and many hundreds of people benefited. Hundreds of others were personally attended to by Arthur Stillman himself, who used drugs and hypnosis to open their psychic centers to his preternatural will. Once a subject had been treated by Arthur, that personality bonded to him in the raith. They appeared outwardly healed – but within, they belonged to the Dark One.

  When the accidents began, Arthur knew that he was closing in on the means to destroy creation. He knew that by using his powerful group mind to feed power to the archons of war and chaos in the raith, he had alerted lightworkers across time and space to the real threat of his presence.