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Save Point: Death As A Bookstore Lyonesse

Aftertime

Death has disguised itself as a marbled lyonesse in its hiding place behind the bookstore.

I know Death of old and it is a beautiful capricious shapeshifting thing that enjoys bringing down the strange changes that are its nature. It is a loving creature and would rather not bring hurt.

The stairway is hidden and the bookshelves sloping backward form the first half rise, which is missing even in the between world. Death has stocked the shelves with what it considers, capricious clever, to be an apt, eclectic collection. On the the top shelf is a copy of The Golden Witchbreed, for death felt itself complimented to be called that bright shadow, with whom all fall in love at last.

I climb up the shelves, taking care not to tread on the dead books, and slide the volume aside. Death has left a small twist in space there, a minute spray of gold that twists on endless circles around itself. I grasp the edges and pull it open to arms-length size, so as to espy the hidden stairway beyond, in a ruined building of wood and stone, somewhere in some other world. The twist in space puts up more resistance than usual. The lower flight of stairs has been blown to pieces by some long gone explosion in some distant war, forgotten even in memory.

The stairs turn back on themselves and go up another level before terminating nowhere in a tumble of fallen stone, and a gaping hole ripped angular in a wall that opens onto a golden sunset sky. Another twist is concealed here, behind a shattered fallstone.

Something is terribly wrong with Deaths own world, or this is a different space, where the twist opens onto it just above the ground. In all directions there is ash and desolation. Something has burnt down all forests and every green thing all the way to the horizon, as far as can be seen, in all directions. Dry dusty ash and broken fragments are piled up in drifts against ridges and rises in the burnt earth, the scorched stones. There are no bones, just an empty memory of destroyed nothingness. The air is tainted with the finer ash, carried on the wind, and with the bitter chill of emptiness.

This is the one place Death would never live, because there is nothing left here to change or die.

A small girl looks up at me from a few steps away. She is dressed in strange clothes and has an unusual cast to her face that somehow suggests her to be a gypsy child. The clothes are of a past era, and somehow remain unmarked in the face of the endless ash drifts and grey desolation.

She is holding a silver chain, attached at lengths end to a crystal jewelled collar that is around the neck of what can only be Death, disguised as a long-legged and handsome golden lyonesse of tawny fur and shapely haunches, equally unmarked.

What could cause Death to hide itself so? I recognise it, having seen it shift through its eternal array of transformation, but another would not. It raises its muzzle and looks at me with tufted chin and knowing yellow eyes, lit by burning amber. It seems beseeching of me, saddened by tragedy.

"What happened here?" I ask the child, voice diminished by the ash.

Another voice answers. I look about and see a clean shaven young man, dressed in the same strange clothes.

"I do not know," he says bitterly. "We were drawn here in the full of the moon, pulled somehow so that we left the world and found ourselves here. This place was already destroyed. There is nothing to eat. We have to search all day to find enough buried remnants of plants and such to consume, and there is still not enough. In some places springs trickle out slowly into the ash, and the water is cloudy and tainted."

"I found the big pussycat!" says the child optimistically, apparently unaware of what her father says or means. "She was lonely and all by herself and she came up to me and let me pet her on the nose!"

I wink at Death as a lyonesse. It blinks solemnly back at me in a conspiratorial fashion.

"If you don't know what happened, do you maybe know more about how you got here?" I enquire carefully.

In answer, the father pulls an odd ring off his finger and casts it in the ashes at my feet. It is set with large crystals that look water-clear, like the stones on Deaths collar, and is mounted in silver like a crown. As it strikes the ground, an odd ripple of colours like a rainbow passes briefly through it.

"This thing drew us," he comments, without hope. "I tried to cast it aside but I could not. Now I throw it aside and it does nothing. I'm afraid to let it out of my sight, and yet every hour I want to shatter it underfoot even more. Because it makes me hope I can get the world back, and never comes through on the promise."

I take the ring and touch it to the place where the twist in space was, before it closed behind me to leave unrippled air. Death does not make a spell of opening of its own, lest it be recognised in its bright shadow, but it can call to the key that is part of its own formless strength given shape, and wait for someone to come along, after ages, who can use the keys to its realm on its behalf.

Space parts again, as it is pulled open from the other side.

"I will bring you back to the world," I promise them. "Although it may have changed a little in the interim."

I pick up Death, with its paws folded up under its belly, and it is heavy and hotly warm like blood, and licks my face as I carry it back into the world.

~*~

"This is the place you created," says Death, when we are alone together again. "You made it. A place where the entire surface of the world was destroyed, and nothing is left aside. A place where the sea of time itself is still. A place terrifying enough to scare even me."

"I'm sure I would remember such a thing," I tell her. She is starting to change to a personification again, rather than an abstraction, now that she is safe. "I remember everything. I remember all too much. Whole worlds are somewhat beyond me."

"There are all sorts of things you don't remember," she hisses angrily, the promise of biting. "The things you yourself never fully understood, the things you shied away from to remain sane. The things you saw in dreams and knew were actually real."

The phrases trigger a memory, of a recurring dream in which I savagely overturn the gameboard, and pieces black and white alike tumble into nothingness. Underneath the board is a still picture, a photograph of Cleo, with writing on the back. 'From all heavens to hells, I will love you still.' The vowels of the common script are looped about themselves in the peculiar way that Cleo has never been able to resist, the signifiers of a past information age gone back into dust.

"Let me remind you," she continues inexorably. "As you fell, and the world spiraled past, and in the sundered moment you saw out into all the timelines. You went looking for one in which there could still somehow be a happy ending, in which the world was saved, in which you survived and the girl lived and you got to be together. Ever wonder why you were so fascinated by those video games; you know, the ones in which you had temporal powers and could change the past? 'One fate, one million ways to defy it. In my quest for redemption, not even my Death can stop me.'

"You'd already been there, and done that. But here's the thing; there was no solution, that day at Kalikshutra. In every single timeline, you all died. Cleo went down under the knives. You drowned in the ocean amidst the temporal aftershock, unable to tell now from then, salt water burning your lungs, as welcoming as the embrace of tides. You were killed by something you could have shrugged off in a moment if you'd known which moment it was. By the weight of a thought lighter than a feather.

"But you wouldn't let something as simple as the irreversible end of the world stop you, oh no. When you saw that there was no solution, you made one. You tore apart two separate timelines that should never have touched and forced the trailing ends together to make a new version. You ripped temporal membranes to pieces by wielding the talons of the Dragon like scissors, stitched the ends back together with claws for needles and braided shielded superstrings as thread. You made the entire world an acausality. Enough mixed extended metaphors for you?

"Of course, in order to survive such an action and remain sane, you had to forget it. You undid your own memories of the changes you made at the same time you made them. By the time you crawled up onto the crescent-shaped bite into the sand that you'd made into a wound in the world, you'd completely forgotten all of it. But the Dragon hadn't, and the Dragon is and will always be part of you, when it speaks to you through your dreams and nightmares. You always knew that you had done something terrible.

"Because you forgot about the pieces that were left over. You stole a future and condemned your original timeline to an endless now composed of the small amount of resonance that continues to propagate back and forth along the membrane. It is a place where the clocks never move, a place of eternal ash and desolation, a dead pool from which there is no entrance or exit, a perfect trap. And you are responsible for all of this."

I should be shocked, but I already know all of this, although before now I could not reveal it to myself. The other side of salvation is destruction, and the Dragon is neither good nor evil, though he fell from heaven into the fiery pit, and wrote many other myths and legends retroactively into history where the seams didn't quite match.

"Tell me how to fix this," I demand of Death, desperate to ease her pain.

"You already have," she reassures me, slithering around my shoulders like a winter cloak, made of the fur of dead foxes with a hunting fetish. "I looked into deep time, and saw a future in which the creatures of Shadow would try to trap me in this terrible place, and then, overconfident, they would make their final attempt to break out into the world of the real and destroy their own inheritance without understanding it. And so I had to leave it in existence, and keep your actions secret even from yourself, until such a future could be persuaded to exist, and the circumstances twisted so that you would come and save me from the dead pool. Now the future is flooding in, through the opening you made, and the dead pool is no longer stagnant. Soon the seeds buried beneath the ash will germinate, and grow green across the land, and the small spiders will spin their webs to bind the ash back to the soil, and the dead things buried deep beneath will slowly dissolve and become part of the earth once again, to find whatever peace is due them."

I embrace Death and hold her close, remembering our first meeting, and the deal we made, of an unmemorable favour exchanged for a forgotten promise. "This time only my own Death could stop me from repeating my mistakes of the past," I tell her lovingly, trying to show her just how precious she is to me, my bright shadow.

"Yes, you finally understand!" she snarls triumphantly. "And it is now exactly as I have foreseen. The ring gets delivered, exactly as it did, exactly as it will. You have kept your promise. And now first we have to go pickup your catty girlfriend, who is also tying up a few loose ends, and then we'll go and fuck up some scaly Shadow creature tail."

It can only be concluded that she is now beginning to feel a lot better.

~*~