INTERMISSION
* * *
Qvi nvnc it per iter tenebrioscvm
illvc vnde negant redire qvemqvam.
At vobis male sit malae tenebrae
orci qvae omnia bella devoratis
tam bellvm mihi passerem abstvlitis.
O factvm male! O miselle passer!
*
and around again forever whether he understood it or not. He was caressed by knee-high grasses that swayed against faint breezes and dulled the pain of his endless walking: his soles were worn nearly to the marrow of his feet yet still he walked onward with no knowledge. Suddenly, he thought, Where am I? and his whole consciousness then flared from that catalyst. How did I come to be here? The traveller searched for features in the wide expressionless plains around him, but he found only his own incorporeal curiosity borne upon the same swirling gusts that tugged upon his hooded cloak. There came over him a vague sensation of bewilderment and anxiety, but more insistent than that was a deep ineffable ache within him so subtle it was almost an unacknowledged yearning. He felt it in his core and in the ways the world filtered into his perception, and it was a great tiring burden that he bore beyond the veil of understanding. He felt he had been dragging this weight with him since before memory began. Whomever I may be, this heavy heart is unbearable. Perhaps I suffered a blow to the head? The traveller felt along his forehead and scalp for anything out of the ordinary, but found himself to be uninjured. He gazed cluelessly again across the plains stretching endlessly behind him, saw only the tall grasses undulating like waves. No answers were there, yet he knew no course but to resume travelling. His feet became walking once more, and he trode the plains until his awareness had almost again slipped back into subconsciousness. But as that obscured man crested a hillock, what he saw froze his fingertips and sank his insides as a very peculiar sort of deja-vu settled over him. I know this river. Yet how? Where even am I, and why can I not recall? He made his way towards the ominous flow, for it was the only thing in sight that resembled an answer.
The river was liquid midnight, slinking in lazy wrinkles and washing the dark beach with feeble surf. Some grass tufts still grew among the powdery sands of the beach, but it appeared as if nothing would grow too close to the cold dead water. As the traveller approached the shore he was overcome by the sensation of nearing a mirror, for a dark spot floated on the waters and reflected his own arrival. They approached each other. Is it a boat of some sort? As the two forms neared the divisive coastal rocks, it became clear that the dark spot was a indeed a vessel: a small rowboat propelled by a lonely oarsman. The traveller watched the ship with great curiosity come aground against the powdery sand. Have we met? He hides his guise, yet reminds me of a forgotten friend somehow. Where are the faces I have known? Where have I come from? The ferry-man within his rowboat was wrapped in a heavy black shawl, his skeletal eyes roaming the lapping shore until they settled upon the traveller.
Empty eyes flashing, the ferry-man said, “I can help you to cross the river.”
Across the river… it must be very wide, for the other bank is beyond my sight. What is on the further shore that I wish to see? Where am I needed? Where can I relieve my heartfelt burden? I may as well grow wiser to what lies upon that alien bank. “Yes,” said the traveller vaguely, stumbling over the word as he cleared his throat. As he stepped aboard the shoddy vessel, he reflexively roech into a buried pocket and discovered a silver coin. It bore a familiar face in profile on one side and a sheaf of wheat upon the tail. The ferry-man accepted it solemnly and knit his spindly fingers around the disc until it vanished into his voluminous sleeve. When the traveller had settled into the creaking wooden seat, they shoved off.
It seemed as if their vessel fell away from the rocky coast and that the river barely noticed as they drifted by and by across it making neither ripple nor splash. The grim ferry-man was quiet and contemplative as he rowed, and though the traveller possessed many questions and anxieties he was too uneasy to disturb the rhythm of the lone oar and the lapping little bits of water that delicately licked the sides of the boat. What a small ferry. This river is larger than first I thought, and the waves are growing rougher. How often does this ferry-man make his way across these tides? How long will my journey take? Though he was sure it had been mid-day at their departure the sky was now a strange sort of half-light with sun and moon both visible, albeit dim and phantasmal in form. There were strange glows that flickered in the black water below: creatures of otherworldly depths.
The ferry-man rowed through that river for ages, for epochs, for all the time that the earth had taken to form and for all the time it needed to crack and crumble back into void and many years more besides even that. Their raft on the river was a cup adrift in an ocean.
Until at last, a new thing began to be born on the horizon’s cusp. It was a dark amorphous shape that slouched from the water — perhaps forming for the first time or perhaps ageless and only approaching. A cold wind began to blow across the river. Very slowly their boat crept towards the silent island, their clothing whipped flimsily about by capricious zephyrs. The island seemed little more than a hill that crested the water, knotted with vines and vegetation. Their boat pulled silently up upon the cold beach and after a moment of stillness the ferry-man gestured that the ride was at an end.
The traveller nodded, peering curiously into the impenetrable depths of the ferry-man’s hood as he clomb from the boat with nary a word of thanks. The sand was damp with frigid water, and the traveller’s deep footprints pooled after they were abandoned by his soles. He noticed that feeling was beginning to return to his legs as he moved, and it was invigorating. He turned back to salute his silent companion as earnest gratitude swoll within him, yet the ferry had already passed out of sight.
Now what?
The beach held no more answers than had the plain contained, and as he trodge away from the callous surf he found himself funneled into a sandy-floored canyon by steep rocky cliffs. The vegetation of tha thick forest spilled down the cliffs, yett he could not find a way for to climb from the canyon to higher ground. What am I meant to find? I feel so familiar to myself, and yet so foreign, so immaterial… He followed the meandering fissure to the heart of the island where, accompanied by a fearful sinking deep in his stomach, he found what seemed to be a dead end. Nowhere to go? The rock curved all the way around, smooth and unclimbable.
The traveller stood still with his lids closed, taking full nervous breaths. There was a ridge in the rough rock wall, but he did not want to look behind it. What is this place? Where am I going? All I must do is look behind this ridge, yet wherefore am I afraid? Yet perhaps I am being foolish: all I must do is check behind this ridge. What he found when he painstakingly opened his eyes was at once far worse than coming across a dead-end on a strange abandoned island. He did not know why, but his stomach clenched and shriveled as he looked into the endless blackness of the cave that sank into the earth before him. Memories festered and threated to break forth into daylight, yet answers were always just beyond the traveller. Lacking a path was bad, yet somehow this path is worse no path. Why does the mouth of this cave strike me so? Why did I not wish to look upon it? What primal memories are clawing to control my mind? I am afraid of this cave, yea, and not only afraid of the dark therein. His heart was pulsing in his ears as he took in every detail of the entrance: a woven stone archway overrun with mosses and clover. He held no doubts that he had seen this threshold before, in some indistinct portion of his absent memory, or perhaps only in his dreams. He roech out his right hand as if to caress some of the hanging plants, but then thought better of it. Yet though he withdrew his arm swiftly — he knew that there could be no withdrawal for him. He could either stay here in the open and die of starvation or exposure, or of boredom, or else he could enter the looming underground passage and discover its terrible secrets. I understand where I must go, so why am I filled with unease? What is this anxiety that wracks me when I consider delving down into the dark? In the end it was a combination of anxiety and compulsion that won out over the instinct to loiter, and so his form was engulfed by all the night beneath the earth.
Many of the steps he took were in darkness, and they were long fearful footsteps. Every beat of his heart was a thunderclap. He could feel the air in the passageway becoming cooler as the slope brought him down and down, deeper under the earth and sea. The stone tunnel was filled with his shuffles and breaths, all echoing down its length like the pulsing patterns of light reflected off moving water. In what sort of situation do I find myself? he wondered again, the sightlessness prompting introspection. Strange this dread passage is, yet stranger still from me are my memories. The oddity of that waterbound ferry-man I remember well, but why not some image of the deeds of my life? My past? Suffered I a heavy blow that leaves me so impaired? Or perhaps there is some defect in my mind? Or else the rearing of contagion’s foul countenance. My salvation is a lonely possibilit: that my memory may reveal itself when I learn the reason for my fear of this underworld.Why else would I have come here? His breaths became shallower and his teeth ground against one another as he forced himself to continue onwards into peril. On and on, yet before long a pale light began to suggest itself. The source of the illumination, he discovered, were thin wispy mushrooms growing in clusters along the stone — and the deeper he trode the more abundant they became, illuminating the traveller’s surroundings until the light guid him down deeper.
In the glow of the mushrooms the strange traveller’s fear began to dissipate, and he walked with no fear until the way opened around him into a great cavern: stalactites hung as if the roof were dripping some viscous multicolored liquid and the cold subterranean air whistled lowly from distant unseen locales. But the place was alive. Plants covered nearly all the surfaces of rock: thick layers of grasses and moss carpeted the lower area of the hollow, and lichens and vines had cleverly clomb and snuck their way over any place where there was room for them.
The traveller stood upon a walkway that overlooked the inky impenetrable blackness below; a white stone archway bridging the pit. Where the walkway ended on the far side were the facades of buildings carved in the very walls of the cave. As he took it all in, he was stunned to motionlessness.
Most startlingly, he saw that either in small groups or individually there were actually people here who milled about, sat, or talked with one another, all naked or whimsically draped with pale robes. The traveller approached one man standing by himself who stared intensely into the spray of an underground waterfall spilling from one of the cavern’s far walls. This man was plump, light skinned, and the peak of his head was bald, but unruly strands of hair grew as a line of beard across his chin, wrapping up over his ears and around his crown.
Brazenly, the traveller said “Hail friend, can you tell me where we are?”
The robed man, seeming shaken from a trance as his eyes focussed, said “O. You are a newcomer? Welcome then, friend, to the Land of Laraiapea.”
“Indeed? Never have I heard of this place.”
“Hmm. Well I cannot know if that is true, or if it is not. Yet certainly a newcomer such as yourself has many questions. I am Enti. And we,” he swept his hand to indicate other shuffling men in robes, “are called the Lost. Though truly, I call us the Lost-in-Thought. And we have been pondering for as long as any of us can recall. For it is hard to know if something is true, or if it is not. What place is this, and who are we? Why do you not stay and ponder these deep concerns with us? There is no suffering in this place, but suffering you may well find if you journey on.”
But the traveller was puzzled. “What thoughts occupy you, Enti?”
“O now, things I have long forgot, mostly. It has been eons since answers came to me. Now naught arrives but more questions. Yet there is plenty of time to answer them all. Plenty of time.”
“Questions I have as well,” spoke the traveller, “but I should wish to see the rest of your strange land. Is this bridge safe to cross?”
“No, aimless one, it is not safe. Though the stone is sturdy and the way is simple, down that path lies the incredible peril of uncertainty… none of us know what lies down that path.”
The traveller bowed and thanked Enti, but thought A buffoon, paralyzed by his fear. And in sooth, they are the same fears that I feel. Yet I shall not be likewize paralyzed. There is strangeness in this place, but if I wish to endure I must face it instead of endlessly considering like these withered fools. And so he left behind Enti and all the Lost-in-Thought.
In his brief journey across the over-grown bridge, the traveller bore witness to the incredible flowers that bloomed before his very eyes. Each one ripened to its most colorful in a matter of seconds, yet withered away in similar time. As prismatic light shone on droplets of spray from the underground waterfall, over and over the flowers repeated their life-cycles and generations in time of no consequence to this knowledge-thirsty wanderer. By the time he traversed the pale rainbow bridge he had witnessed a thousand generations in bloom.
There was a low growl as he approached the great carved gateway at the end of the bridge. Beneath the gate was a grim black hound tied to a thick leather leash. The beast’s eyes focused sharply on the newcomer yet, though the dog certainly seemed aggressive and wary, he merely blunk at the traveller and did no more than menace. When the traveller left the shadow hound behind, he found himself at a twisted nexus of roads that lead in every direction. Not only ahead and to his sides, neither only a stair leading upwards and a ladder below — but at this crossroads he stood between paths leading off in seemingly infinite directions and was unable to wrap his mind around the sight. It was painful even, and he was forced to pull his hood low over his eyes.
So it was that the gravelly voice at his side spoke unseen. “A newcomer, clearly.” The voice was that of a deep leathery throat, close to the traveller’s ear. Pulling the cowl up a smidgen, he chanced a glance and found that if he focused his gaze he could prevent the paradoxical nexus from coming into view. He found that instead his gaze was fixed on the speaker: a mammoth chameleon, light green, who was perched on the wall and trailed his tail onto the marble floor. The chameleon wore a leather strap around his shoulders from which dangled a gleaming golden war-horn. “Follow your path,” said the lizard, “to meet the ruler of this place: the Lord of Laraiapea.”
“Do you know me?” asked the traveller.
“You have been here many times before,” said the chameleon turning to blue, “yet your identity is only to be decided by the Lord of Laraiapea. This way.” He uncurled his tail and used it to gesture down a stairway apart from the shifting mass of exits directly behind them. Praise be to my lucky stars that I have no need to travel through that abomination of passageways. O I hope the stars understand my need of them. So the traveller hurried down the indicated direction after a gracious bow to the Chameleon who watched with one bulbous eye.
At the bottom of the stair was a great door. He raised his hand to knock upon the polished wood, but a fraction of an instant before his fist-flesh struck the door it croke open of its own accord, and he was left startled into immobility for a few moments at the entrance. From the far walls and earthen ceiling of the room grew immense moss-covered roots that wrapped down and around a luxurious leathern armchair, engulfing it. Before the otherwise abandoned armchair was a fashionable mahogany writing-desk with quills and paper atop it — and other stranger implements that he did not know. The most notable artefact was a large golden scale that rocked back and forth the weights of a feather and a still-beating human heart. Alas! The traveller’s sympathies flashed unbidden across his mind. Such empathy I feel for that bloody organ before me! If I could not feel my own pulse inside, I would suppose that quivering heart to be mine own. A large unapparent object on the floor shifted lightly as if alive. Only then did the traveller notice that lying there was an entire crocodile, massive and thickly bandaged, asleep on the floor. The whole of its wrapped body curled around one leg of the writing-desk, shifting in sleep but little. With disbelief and confundidity the traveller saw that there were the glints of jewels, rubies and emeralds and all of the rest, tucked away and hidden beneath the crocodile’s bandages.
The newcomer shakily asked “Hello?” to the slumbering crocodile. “I have just arriven in your realm, and… I was told I should see the Lord of Laraiapea. Be you he?”
As he spoke, the roots behind the desk animated and began to shift. Flowers bloomed on them like those he had seen upon the bridge, and from an indiscernible location the roots sighed, saying, “Ah. Welcome and greetings, and welcome once more to my realm where you many times have come. This is the country for those who are lost.”
“I am only passing through,” said the traveller.
“Well am I aware of this and other things. All existence is a journey. And yet for the moment you are lost. You are astray from yourself; you have not even a name.”
The newcomer furrowed his brow. My name… I had one once, I am… but his mind was thick and circirtuous, and he found himself at a loss. The crocodile stirred in his sleep, gurgling threateningly and pawing at the air with one cruelly-clawed foot.
The tangling roots continued, “Lost you are, but I can help you to find you, and much joy will you have at this reunion. There is a place here in the Land of Laraiapea, down below; a land of trials. Though I cannot say what you may find in those lightless depths, it is there that you must travel if you wish for clarity.”
So it would seem that my disability is ignorance. What is it that I do not know? Was I ignorant before I came to exist? Do I even have an identity all my own? If there are answers to be found, perhaps their discovery shall end this fevered yearning in my breast. What have I done to come to be here? “I suppose,” said the traveller, “that I must brave your mysterious tunnels. How might I locate them?”
“You must return to the crossroads and question my champion, the chameleon. He knows the way. Yet first,” said the roots as flowers began to wilt, wither, and turn grey, “you must have a name. Without one, a person can barely be a person.” The traveller stood dismayed, feeling naked before this strange sovereign, but the roots shifted once more and all the flowers re-bloomed more brilliantly and colorful than before. “In my divinity here,” said the roots, “I know you well and also do I know that a man such as you can never truly die. And so it is that you shall be known as ‘Perennial,’ the enduring, the eternal and ever-present.” There was a stirring of all the plants of the room, and they brought forth an ivory-shafted polearm. Its head was wide and flat, consisting of a fearsomely elongated blade flanked on either side by lesser prongs, each curved slightly back to the shaft: it was a partisan.
As soon as his fingertips came into contact with the weapon, a bright impenetrable light burst forth from the no longer amnesiac traveller, but from the reborn spirit Perennial the deathless. No longer dressed in his world-weary traveller’s clothes he wore a white robe with golden trim and leathern sandals woven with vines. Upon his brow, the roots lay an ethereal laurel wreath from which he felt a great power emanate. Something about the wreath pricked his memory and made tempestuous the ocean of his mind, yet there was no understanding that he was able to dredge from his depths. Even so, being thus adorned made him feel mighty.
“Go now, Perennial,” said the Lord of Laraiapea, “and find what you can find of whatever it is that you may once have been. The last of gifts I can give to you is a warning: stifle your vanity. That is the sin for which you are suffering. Now go! Depart, Perennial, and may your stunted spirit flourish.” The roots slowly ceased their shifting about the chair and grew still once more, the flowers all closed their petals, and apart than the unintelligible sleep-talking of the mummified crocodile, the room was hush.
When the newly-christened Perennial had returned to the nexus of paths, the wall-hugging chameleon understood the change within him, and his pale yellow flesh flared to exuberant orange. The guardian lizard turned his crested head to one side, focussing a bulging eye on he who was reborn. “A blessed sight to see a man so changed. At last you’ve found a look that suits you well… and you have gained a name too, I suppose?”
Perennial re-introduced himself to the regal reptile, saying, “The lord of this realm found me, and blessed me in the light of his hope. If I am to quicken my rebirth, I must be pure and certain.”
The gruff leathern voice of the chameleon rumbled like rockfalls deep underground where insects tunnel. “Very well,” he said. “I shall show you the way, but heed me! You must take care in every step to not let overconfidence be your guide: that is how you failed the last time. The realm to which you journey is dark in many senses, and even I know not what you might discover therein.” The chameleon broke out in a pattern of curling white lines and turquoise splotches as he gestured with his tail towards a certain ladder within the impossible nexus, and that ladder descended into the challenge of subterranean unknowns.
* * *
Perennial grappled with the rungs of the rotted ladder as he clomb unsteadily down its length. The luminescence of the mushrooms above was enough to allow his descent, but it could do nothing to diminish the shroud hanging below that left him as ignorant of his imminent task’s nature as he was of his own. Even when he roech the terminus of the ladder and dropped onto the rocky earth he walked unknowingly, for all he found in the torturous silence was a seeming maze of jagged rocky tunnels and dismay. There was no light in these depths, and in its absence he felt the painful licking of hopelessness upon his heart once more. Yet in the quiet sorrow of this place his new identity called to him, and he set out through the ill settings and winding of the passageways with the unquenchable confidence of eternal life within him. I am in a place of darkness. It obscures my sight and numbs me to my surroundings. I walk forward: there is no where else to go. A great pressure is on my body, pushing in at me from all sides akin to being submerged, and the pressure collects about my heart and I feel in my chest the pain of its exertion — a building pounding like the pent up frustrations of my emotions knocking to be released from my ribcage. I hear only the sound of the beating as I walk on faster now with footsteps matching the life-measuring rhythm that pulls me through the sea of sightlessness. I spread my arms tentatively to feel about in the darkness, finding myself to be in a narrow corridor of solid stone. I am deep underground. My feet stumble over the multitude of small light-weight objects strewn loosely across the narrow floor. In places, the tunnel is so confining that I must squeeze myself through openings, sustaining many painful scrapings in the process.
For the second time today he found himself lost in his tumultuous thoughts, treading with unease through them and through the awe-inspiring mesonoxian depth of the lack of light around him. Some great forces played like tectonic plates in his worried mind and the subtle heart-aches of his traumatized conscience; his brain was heavy with their half-remembrances. If truly I am as verdant as claimed by the plant lord, does it follow that death’s scythe is as flimsy as gossamer? If I die in this place, will I be reborn? And if indeed I am an eternal force, then wherefore this woven misery at my breast — the rancor of this labyrinth is not cause for its whole, I know. If I concentrate, can I remember? I must think hard on this. What were days like, long ago? I recall some vivid flashes of sunshine, and uncertains faces… are these parents? Friends? Know I these faces? Perhaps there is no logic to reality and all I perceive is flawed. Where is the meaning in that? The answer seems to speak as meaningless as my memories. And, confounded stars, is there even any meaning in meaning? What is the meaning of any of this suffering?
Faint echoes of movement further down the tunnel drew him from his circular reverie. He knew intimately that these sounds signified a struggle, and a slow creeping anxiety began to engulf his hope and transform it into despair — just as a witch might devolve into something far more fearsome. The clashes of strife struck some memory in Perennial, and he saw behind his eyelids scenes of armor and swords, lances and saddles. What portent is there in such familiar sounds appearing before me in this sightless dark? Are they the fragmented answers that fit the jigsaw of my yearning? He slowly came to be aware that he was following a ghoulish ruddy light blooming subtley in the distance.
Creeping toward the growing glow and clamor he discovered the source: a knight in smoky armor valiantly defending himself against a giant cockroach. It was twice the mass of a man, dumbly grotesque, and it forced its noble prey to the ground just as Perennial approached. In the dim red glow, hairy insectoid arms and mandibles fidgeted in anticipation of the kill. The knight’s sword lay inches from his grasping gauntlet: a long two-handed flamberge that glent shades of obdurate obsidian. The hideous beast’s antennae groped twitchingly at his adversary’s visored helmet until, with a determined grunt, the brave knight punched out with all his force and crunched his armored fist loudly against the beetle. There was a tremendous insectile shriek as the roach was knocked back just far enough for the struggling knight to leap from its grasp. In observing these lightning-quick actions Perennial had been little more than stunned witness, yet now now his instinct compelled him forward through the last troubling bits of the subterranean tunnel to help this lone warrior who rippled the little memory that he possessed.
Though the white-robed seeker nimbly maneuvered, he was still far off when he saw the sable-and-umber knight regain his sword and rapidly approach the cockroach with evil intent. Stripes of silver arced across his sepentine blade in the red glow, and as the foul beast scuttled dark and grossly glossy towards the knight, his flamberge twisted and scythed out — impossibly fast — piercing the insect’s thorax. It shrieked louder than before and wriggled against the stone floor, pumping noxious black blood profusely, before it curled around itself in hungry death.
Such skill! thought Perennial. I once had a dream of knights, I think, and this man stirs its images within my brain. I wish now that I could have been a knight. This noble man was doubtless placed upon my path to lead me to the light I seek. That mysterious knight stood victorious above the bleeding beast for a moment before flicking the viscous slime from his wavy blade.
From the shadows, Perennial approached and greeted the victor. “Well met, brave and valorous knight. I have been sent from above to face a trial somewhere in these caves.” Up close, the traveller saw that it was the knight’s smoky armor that was the source of the ruddy ghoulish glow that frightened away the dark.
In a voice of stretching sinews beneath his shadowed helm, the knight replied, “Well met, traveler Perennial. I had hoped to encounter one such as you, for I am in need of someone’s aid in my task.” In the dim glow, his eyes glittered indistinctly behind his visor. “I am called Sir Marrowak,” he said, “and I am the knight of the Horseshoe-Crab, born of high blood. I have been sent to this place by my nature, with a mission to wipe out a vermin creature that is beneath my. Their race is a scourge upon this land, always appearing where they don’t belong — they threaten us with their presence. Yea, and you have seen now one of the very vermin of which I speak: this extinguished cockroach.”
Perrenial, though musing in an ocean of confusion, spake, “Perhaps this is to be my trial. This must be the wrong I am to right,” said he. “Tell me more of this insect race.”
Sable-and-umber Sir Marrowak’s breastplate bore ornamentations of human ribs suspended in the alloy over his own, and his helmet was spined like the exoskeleton of the very crustacean of his sigil. He motioned for Perennial to stand with him on opposite sides of the rocky passageway. Though the red glow was helpful in the area immediately around the Knight of the Horseshoe-Crab, the several feet of distance between them now had broken this effect on Perennial who stood once again in the darkness. Sir Marrowak wove his mailed fingers intricately in the air, and his red glow formed a bubble between them.
The seeming sorcerer said, “Now tell me, wanderer, which of these creatures would you rather be confined with?” To his-left-but-Perennial’s-right apore the apparition of an elongated thin and pale grey centipede with nightmarishly long twisting tentacles for legs, and Perennial shuddered at the morbid sight of it. On everyone’s other sides there apore the phantasm of an infant human child.
Perennial glanced back and forth between them as if this were the lamest of farces, and he hesitatingly asked, “…wherefore should I not choose the child?”
“Why, you ask? Sirrah, this infant has the capacity to injure you far more than that creeping squirming creature who frightens your sensibilities you. What is the worst doom he might spell for you? This insect, and nearly infinite other varieties of his kind are not venomous, and strive not to bite or attack anyone as threatening as a human creature. Know you not that man terrifies all beasts? Yea, and all do fear man more than man might suffer at their hands.”
Perennial supposed that this was true, but it did not change the fact that merely viewing the insect’s wriggling form connected circuits of disgust in unknown places within his brain which he was unable to rationalize his way beyond. And the baby was simply so playful with it’s huge wiw eyes and its disproportionately sized-for-its-wiw-body head. Sir Marrowak gestured once again with his fingers and the infant immediately became wroth: false fire’s light grew from behind her and she approached, crawling, gurgling, through the air. Perennial saw the change and grew wary of her approach, but when the huge centipede also lurched forward in tentative bursts of zig-zagged spasms Perennial grew resolute, running to the baby, scooping her up, and darting back away from the insect.
Both illusions immediately vanished into wisps of sulfur, and Sir Marrowak whispered direct into his ear, “There. Now, why does one choose as you have chosen? Our poor insect had no intent to harm you, yet the child was bent on your destruction.” Perennial stood up shakily from the floor of the tunnel and blunk while Sir Marrowak holp him up, grinning feverishly. “So then, Perennial of the Land of Laraiapea — and whomever of who-knows-where before that — will you travel with me to those misshapen Hivelands? O lost forgotten spirit, won’t commit to my task?”
And Perennial tentatively beginning to exude his own silver light responded, “Yea.”
So on they walked, miles onward, down the loamy burrow until they noticed a steady accumulation of stagnant spiderwebs. The soft stringy residue came to run all along the walls and ceiling, stretching down thickly to blanket the floor, and when it began to latch tendrils onto their extremities they knew that they were entering the Hivelands at long foreboding last. Lifelike shadows scuttled in the passage beyond the red glow. Once, they saw a human-sized cocoon plastered to the cave wall. Sir Marrowak gripped his serpentine flamberge close to his body, Perennial took tighter hold of his partisan, and they both crept on slowly through the thickening webbing and gloom.
The tunnel ballooned into a cavern full of sticky silk and the chittering of insects; severed spindly legs and fallen gossamer wings littered the chaotic floor. The Knight of the Horseshoe-Crab whispered, “Insect eyes can’t detect red light, so they won’t be instantly alerted to our presence. That’s why I enchanted my armor. But the beasts can see by darkness, so you must remain on your guard.” Perennial nodded sharply and furrowed his lauredled brow. “Furthermore insects have no ears so we may whisper between us, yet do not shout, for even the vibrations of sound-waves can be detected by these night-dwellers.”
In the dull crimson glow, Perennial saw the twisted bulbous bottoms of the buildings of the hive, all constructed from some off-white fluid that the insects must have excreted and sculpted themselves. Spiderwebs spanned the spaces between these structures. It was swelteringly hot here, and beads of sweat apore on the knight and the sage. They heard the ravenous cackling of crickets echoing in the air, and every so often a chorus of cicadas would join in the minimalist orchestra, but these were all blurred with the echoes of distance. So sudden has this quest turned grim. These lands are sick with the poison plague of nigh, it is as my companion has said, they must be eradicated with the coming of the light. Glad I am for this knight’s noble guidance, lost alone in labyrinths would spell my frightful end. It is good to trudge alongside a faithful companion after going so long alone. Perennial and the knight walked through the cracks and jagged nooks of the menacing colony, full of the twistings of insect abodes and faraway chirruping. Massive indistinct things shuffled just out of sight. Against his vined sandals Perennial felt the sandy grit of the ground: dry and crumbled stone sticky with ancient fibers, desiccated husks, and crumbling chitin. A deep buzz was heard in the distance of the cavern, but it was growing closer still. The air became the throaty rasp of insect wings closing in on their position.
After only a moment’s stunned hesitation, Sir Marrowak whispered, “Get down!” and leapt backwards into a nearby alley between two pockmarked hives — pulling the silver sage behind him by the nape of his white garment. His partisan clattered to the ground, and he cursed himself for it. The Horseshoe-Crab looked into his eyes and softly said, “Scouting mantises. We must stay perfectly still. Their eyes will notice us if we move. Be still now. So still.” So they both sat as motionless as they could, moving only by automatic and unintended reflexes of the human form. Then, there came the two mantises, their great shells shaped like heater shields and their praying arms the color of leaves decaying upon a forest-floor. They twittered, clicking, and they approached the invaders of the sickly realm.
Harshly, the silver sage whispered, “What should we do?!”
Sir Marrowak sat in the shadows at the rear of the two tall nests nearest them. His red light flashed across Perennial’s eyes, and the Horshoe-Crab grimaced, “You must kill them.” He thrust the fallen partisan into Perennial’s hands. The flying grotesqueries continued to approach, creaking and buzzing their entire procession. One look at their hideous guise and Perennial knew the thing that he must do. To bring the light that all the world desires, it follows that I must purify the blackness. My friend and I shall overcome the depressing night that inhabits all the world, and we’ll let the holy sun shine through. And yet… I am frightened! Who are these alien monstrosities that apparently deserve to die? His stomach clenched tightly in anticipation, and he gripped sweatily the handle of his weapon. Gazing upon the mantises in the darkness, with his sagely eyes he saw a change come over them. They seemed to lose their grim mantis faces and wore human ones — faces he could not place though they stung his memory. Both of the insects now wore a fleshy long-haired bearded face. He blunk furiously, trying to dispel the hallucination, and when the nearest mantis was in range fearful Perennial knew he had no choice but to violently skewer it on the screaming partisan. The faces all vanished, and dark bug blood coughed up a spray into the air. Perennial watched it all wide-eyed. The beast collapsed, but his companion continued to lurch forwards uncaring. A wavering swish to the left severed the front legs of the companion mantis, leaving his body crashing lopsided onto the ground. Thus did the Horseshoe-Crab Knight with his obsidian flamberge land a cruel coup-de-grace on the final helpless soul. The noxious smell of beetle butchery filled the stuffy air, causing Perennial to swoon slightly before catching himself. These lands are cursed, I feel it truly heavy on my brow. I have defeated these creatures of darkness, yet still I know that they were creatures. Who were those faces they wore? Methinks I recognized the faces, some distant prophets they seemed, yet that must have been but my own brain at work. The vile wreched mantises did block the pathway to my success, yet still did they suckle at the river of life. And now I have severed those waters from them. Is this an occasion to be pleased, as my guide expects of me? I have no doubts that I shall be called upon to perform this deed anew, and soon. What is there that I can do but follow Sir Marrowak? It’s too cruel to think that I must doubt my only friend. I have no recourse but to trust him.
The duo wandered on through the bizarre architecture created not for human ease and access, but for bug. Traversing the sticky labyrinth was nearly impossible, and the travelers were continuously forced to retrace their steps: all the creatures of the cavern possessed feet that clung on inclines too steep for human navigation.
“I have an idea,” whispered Sir Marrowak, leading them away from their current trajectory and far off to the right. They walked downhill, under a great thick cord of spiderweb running from the ground to the pinnacle of a great stalagmite beside them, and eventually arrove at a great trench in the rocky ground only barely visible in the travelers’ dim glow. The Horseshoe-Crab knelt there, at the very precipice. The drop was but several feet deep.
Perennial asked, “Why do we halt? What is our plan?” but Sir Marrowak silenced the silver sage with a gesture. So he walked over and sat down on the lip of the cliff with the Horshoe-Crab, waiting in the strange blanket of insect cacophany. Shadows shifted just out of sight, and unseen wings beat against the viscous air.
Before long, a new noise began to echo off down the trench and the humans both stood and looked to see a gigantic black beetle scuttling nearer and nearer. This behemoth shuffled along the bottom of the trench yet even still rose taller than either of the men. Perennial marveled at the work of the great beetle’s body: the midnight wing sheaths that formed the upper half of his abdomen, the frightening lurches of the individual legs as they barely succeeded in their perilous but ultimately successful goal to keep the entire insect in constant smooth motion, and of course the great triumphant horn that protruded proud from the front of the beast’s exoskeletonous helmet.
Sir Marrowak was not stunned in awe though, he commanded, “Grab hold!” and then he jumped — Perennial was forced to follow, leaping and flying through the air before clasping a seam of the beetle’s enormous shell.
“Can he not feel our weight upon his back?” asked Perennial.
But Sir Marrowak shook his head. “Insects have not the nerves that we do. This armor,” and he kicked against the beetle’s back, “is completely numb.”
“O,” said Perennial. And so they rode upon the clacking black behemoth and let it traverse the perilous Hivelands for them.
It was very subtle and only subliminally perceived but the noises of the unseen insects in the cavern, the chittering and screeching of a thousand unhappy souls, grew slowly in volume louder and more insistent, hungrier, as the knight and the sage drew nearer to the nest. The going was much simpler now as the great beast’s sticky footpads adhered themselves embracingly against the slants of the stone wall that had proved impossible for the intrepid humans. At times the slant was even too great for them to remain comfortably seated, and they lay on their stomachs to grip the seam of the beetle where its wings began, the beast of burden remaining as oblivious as ever.
But the raucous noise was beginning to unnerve the sojourners. Perennial shivered as he felt a chill run electrically up his spine from the malevolent music of the hive as they were drawn to its thrumming source. Coming into view at the center of the Hivelands was a massive nest of the same sticky fibers that bound this realm together: a towering cocoon where the insidious insects seemed to congregate.
It was at this, the moment of their imminent arrival, that the great beetle on whose back they rode decided to beat his great wingspan. He paused for a brief moment, during which the travelers looked at one another in concern. When the exoskeletonous wing covers snapped forward, Perennial and Sir Marrowak were launched like ballasts from a catapult, and the behemoth beetle glid off into the black, taking with him the harsh drone of his wings. Perennial fell hard onto the floor of the cavern, rolling many times and harrowingly bruising his body. The clang of Sir Marrowak’s armor rang loudly against the rocks and gravel, but then he was there lending a hand to Perennial, helping the silver sage to his feet.
The knight’s motioning gauntlet showed him the way as he brushed the dust from his white robe, and Sir Marrowak said, “Come Perennial. We have nearly roech their writhing nest. Let us end this whole sorry facade.” And they stumbled off towards the swirled form of the epicenter of the Hivelands.
Sneaking around the circumference of the woven cocoon before them, Sir Marrowak discovered a hole in its wall where large wriggling centipedes and swarms of little crawling insects stood guard. It looked, to Perennial, less like a door to victory and more like the foul gaping maw of some ancient demon, with haggard flesh and stinking lips. He clutched his partisan close to him with whitening knuckles. How it seems that now I shall encounter the culmination of my journey! When we slay those of the hive with our veracity, I and this knight shall taste the ebullient glow of victory… yet what have I learned? Born in my breast I find worry and doubt: how can this victory grant me any indication of the answers I seek? Have I in times forgotten had some great dealing with insect-kind that this informs? How will this battle serve mine own end? What was it the chameleon said? To guard myself against vanity? The silver sage sighed in the pit of despair. I cannot yet know the answers until the appointed time has passed; all I ponder now is idleness. Let Sir Marrowak and I champion the defeat of these creatures, and only then shall I inherit my full reward.
Sir Marrowak plunged through the cocoon’s opening sword-first, and Perennial was forced to follow swiftly lest he be left behind in dire loneliness. So, diving through the crack blindly, tripping on some moving thing and stumbling, Perennial entered the insect nest. It was so massive that at first the only thing he could do was look up and admire its organic construction, but all of it was swarming with cicadas and beetles and worms pulsing and buzzing, and his horror distracted him from the imminent bloodshed.
The gelatinous floor of the cocoon was also crowded with roiling swarms, some great enough to stand as tall as the humans. Sir Marrowak’s dread sword was naked and drawn, and he faced half of the room. Perennial stood back to back with him and hastily brandished his own weapon towards the other repugnant half, feeling the chill of his companion’s armor press into his plain robe. The armies of the insects, rank and twitching, tightened around Perennial and Sir Marrowak, some clicking their mandibles or waving their frontward appendages threateningly — but suddenly there was an unexpected
slip
as the red light shuffled and Perennial’s neck felt the cold edge of jagged metal. A serpentine blade was pressed so tightly to his exposed throat that he dare not speak, and his eyes were wide with disbelief; full of questions. The insects became immaterial.
Sir Marrowak spat vehemently upon the ground and snarled into Perennial’s ear, “O how unexpected and sudden the wheel may turn! Once you held your weapon upon those who loved you and now here you are, trapped in the graves of your victims. Betrayer! Why did you follow me, one called Perennial?” The flamberge backed from the silver sage’s neck by a fraction of an inch.
Gasping brokenly, Perennial coughed, “It was you! You taught me the insects were evil and wrong! And you turn on me now, when instead the eternal axel should have brought me victory and memory both? I ache; I yearn! What is to come of this? What sort of creature are you, Sir Marrowak?”
“I convinced you that the creatures were fearsome, sooth. That the sight of them brought displeasure to your eye, indeed that too is sooth. And though I hid it from your grasp, to end the life of another being is to step beyond the boundaries that guide actions — and that is three sooths I have just told.” The immaterial insects were changing, dancing around the duo, and their ghostly faces began to melt and morph. In the spectral maelstrom that surrounded them, the silver sage saw again that the spiders centipedes and worms all wore human faces crying out in silent torment. That grim Horseshoe-Crab continued, “Deep in the mind of man — in your mind, Perennial, though man you are no longer — in these silent seas of subconsciousness lie instincts of love and hate that evolved with man’s evolving brain. The dreaded insect is a fearsome beast to those who cannot sympathize with their purpose. Yet I said when we met that most insects are powerless against a human’s clever might. When you attacked those two hive-scouts, Perennial with your partisan, how fared you in battle? Was it as difficult as you had imagined it would be?”
Perennial swallowed against the Horseshoe-Crab’s blade as the human-faced insects swarmed against them, pressing thick, and he felt the chill of serpentine steel against the motion of his throat. “…I suppose that it was easier than expected,” he choked. “They did not fight back; when they were trapped without escape I was able to render them helpless. My forged weaponry dispatched them in short order and my knowledge guid my hand… those beasts truly lacked the mind of a man.”
“The insects you slew could neither sting nor bite, very probably of little harm to you, yet you harvested all the same by your scythe-like blade. I ask you once more, shady man of origin indistinct — betrayer! — why did you follow me in the tunnel?”
Perennial had begun to doubt, and was nearly consumed by his confusion. “…I… you… convinced me that the insects were my enemy? It was task given me by the Lord of Laraiapea!”
“Yea indeed, that trial you were determined to pass? Having placed your trust in me and my murderous ways you now fail. Perhaps you are Perennial, sir… or perhaps in sooth you are as ignoble as I.”
Slowly, there was an awakening within Perennial’s body. It was a budding consciousness: a way of living, remembering, and being. His heart grew heavy as a strange clarity took hold: all his illusions were becoming unstuck. He stutteringly remembered, My companions… I was on the road, was I not? And then I… His partisan fell from his grasp into nothingness as tears of realization stung his face.
And it was Sir Marrowak Marrowak with his jawbone decaying slack, skull moon white rising, tongue-in-his-ear whispering,
“Feel the fool, peasant-of-the-peacock?
You haven’t any rhymes I wasn’t born to rule.
What caused you to leap from your skin?
You were a knight who committed grievous sin.”
The familiar violet-and-azure standard was in Perennial’s hand now and he held his decapitated helmet in his other. He saw himself ephemerally clad in the dead plate of the newly awakened Knight of the Peacock. And with this awakening he was blown asunder by the rushing tide of memories so long repressed. Home. Squirehood. The Crusades. They liked me, liked my zeal. I was a good soldier for England in the Dark Age. Yet now the fallacies I lived are not so easily hidden: Perennial knows Sir Plumesprite for the buffoon I am. I remember returning from when I was bored at peace, and gruff years passed before we searched for a strange thing, something called the Wreath of Reincarnation. I well remember the faces of my friends… and yet, no. Not friends, mere companions they: I was mistrusted. No, I mistrusted them. Everything now is so clear. Why couldn’t I see it at the time? Did my own actions truly maintain that wall between them and myself? And what transpired next? Something important, I know that much… My deserved end I remember well: starving slowly, pinned beneath the corpse of my elephant and a great fallen tree. It was that elephant who felled it, he had been mad, bull-headed. I had driven him too strong, but why? I couldn’t hang on, not even for dear life, and that is how I met my slow end. Yet, why did I steal the beast…? And then Perennial remembered all. It was me. He saw Sir Plumesprite as he had been seen by others. The human-faced insects made sudden sense. I betrayed them. Troubled man I was, I let the heat of vanity’s storm slay the good that I knew I should protect. Alas! I beg for mercy and understanding from my creator: my own jealousy and confusion overturned my mortal life! I wish I had never remembered how I slew those noble prophets. My anger and hate has led to the sufferings of others, and mine own.
As the insectile ghosts of both Jesus Christs swarmed into Perennial, the fearsome figure of the decayed skeleton Marrowak rose burning into the air and ignited the nest, the Hivelands, and all eternity; everything that ever was was burning. The world was a world of fire, and Perennial was caught within its torrents and flaming passageways, bent and burping toxic smoke, and his skin scorched and heated excruciatingly across the ages and the Knight of the Peacock cried out as his very essence charred. His heart too burned, black and bleeding with the anguish of his trial. Tears flooded his vision — Sir Marrowak’s final image had shaken his faith in fairness and the deft betrayal weighed heavy in his heart. He felt the empty sinking of his stomach as he realized the anguish his companions must have felt. Their stunned faces wailed on and on in his mind. The last of his flesh was boiled away into nothing, leaving only smoking bones of violet-and-azure… and he discovered that the source of the universe’s unending conflagration was at his heart: the shame and remorse of his own betrayal against those that had trusted him. He felt anger and shame at the words he had mocked them with. He felt barbs for each life he had taken in the world of the sun, convinced in his time that he had acted in the right. He was in agony that he had let his feelings of duty overwhelm his beliefs — he had let his dignity overrule respectfulness — and in the discovery of the fire’s origin those flames cooled, licking tentatively a few more times before ceasing completely.
Sir Plumesprite’s bones fell into soft soil, buried in endless earth. And the bones became a part of the dirt. They were no one’s bones. He felt the thick compost growing over him as the years pushed the land about, eroding and scraping the surface of the lonely bones ever so slightly. There were small creatures of benevolence that crawled around, pushing into the bones, looking for food, there was the wet seeping of rainwater from elsewhere, and there were subtle pressings of stringy roots. The roots grew like a mother’s hands to caress her skeletal child, and that plant was the only object in the universe that could have been said to care for those old forgotten bones. Without words she said, “What you have done does not matter, for the happening was necessary and you are but the tool who performed the deed. You were but a cosmic actor, my love, and a part of the glowing invisible geometry of the universe. You are you, and you are all. Sleep now, my love.” And after a hundred years that plant withered and died. And the bones became too heavy and they broke from her dead roots, falling into void
faster and faster falling
the wind rushing by on all sides: a screaming whispering choral moaning,
sobbing,
howling…
And falling endlessly, timelessly, the bones eventually reassembled to their purposeful form and the ex-human Perennial was reborn sputtering in the sea of life: undulations of salty green waves massive and dangerously unsteady broke around him like the roar of a storm pressing down into dark nothingness for all time. He was drowning, his spirit had no sense of how to float and was about to vanish forever — when a hand shot into the water and pulled out the drowning soul, standing him coughing, dripping, and sputtering upon the otherworldly beach. The glass-green waves, now calm, caressed the sacred sands. Ghostly moons set in the aurora-painted sky, one moon for every mother.
And newly-formed Perennial stared at the figure opposite him, a barely perceptible shadow so black that night was only a spot of dirt on a silver spoon. Who has saved me from the roiling ocean? They looked at one another in silence before a chorus erupted from the man-shaped shadow. It was made of uncountable voices, some calm, some crying in anguish, some singing songs more beautiful than Sir Plumesprite had heard in his years of mortal life.
And with this entrancing voice the shadow said, “Greetings O knight, O reborn spirit of rebirth, O reconqueror of the trial, O trailblazer of the labyrinth. I greet you, wanderer-in-my-realm, for I am the Lord of Laraiapea again and I am Irkalla and I am Hades, and I am many other names besides those few. Now that you understand something of the charade of life and death, how have you enjoyed playing your role in the vast eternal drama of the Cycle?”
“…I have sown suffering, I have wept. Yet I tried as hard as I knew how.”
“Yea, and those are your words every time. Yet follow me now, you spirit, and dwell in this paradise of all realms. The only limit to your stay is boredom, as eventually every eternal soul becomes bored with the unlimited liberty that transcends what can be conceived of in the realm of mortals. When you have tasted your fill of infinity’s divine fruits, you may start out once again as a human in the land of possibilities, having learned from the experiences your soul regrets. You are you, Perennial, and you always have been.”
“…Are you God?” asked the silver sage through his ghostly tears.
“It’s true that I am divine in my own right,” Hades admitted, “for I am the dark twin of our creator. Though He-and-She formed me from necessity, I am aware of all the secrets He-and-She also knows, and why our creator brought this Cycle into being in the first of places. Yet come, banter of this kind is for mortals and not we eternal souls. Come with me now, your final footsteps, and I shall take you to join once more with our creator. God has missed you — and even though you forget, His-and-Her divine closeness is something for which your soul dearly yearns.” So it was that dutiful Hades led the spirit to my great golden gate there in the very rock of the beach.
Perennial glanced inside and saw a sight that made him smile, made all his sufferings worthwhile, and Hades asked if there was any final request before the last of the spirit’s ephemeral humanity was relinquished. And that silver sage removed the ghostly cycle of laurels from around his brow before facing the Lord of the Underworld. His mortal heart lurched, his spirit-eyes lit awake, and reborn Perennial replied, “…