It is said that the planets at the edges of the universe are old, being the first made; so old that time does strange things there, looping upon itself at times, reversing at other times, standing still for moments or eons in certain places. Bubbles and eddies form in the current of time and entire solar systems are sucked down and swallowed whole.
There is a city, Louis Town it was called, in a younger age, when it stood high upon the cliffs above the sea. Louiston, they called it later, after the king whose name they had invoked had passed out of human memory and the city foundations had settled, the hills shaved down by time and man, the rubble used to fill the bays, forming land upon which to build anew. The Drowned City is what they called it in the years after the Calamities, when the continents shifted and the polar ice caps melted and the sea rose up to claim the low places.
The people of Louiston, scurrying about in their busy lives, up and down their busy streets paid little attention to the rising flood, barely aware of their peril as the water washed about their knees. They were puzzled by the watery effects in their daily lives but did nothing except to invent waterproof paper and ink that would not run or bleed.
The children, being the shortest, drowned first. Their parents barely allowed them that brief moment of panic and struggle as the water closed over their little heads for the last time, tugging them impatiently along by the hand and admonishing them not to dawdle.
As the tallest of the citizens of Louiston sank beneath the waves, a contented sigh rose up out of the hearts of all the other recently undead. At long last, the city would have peace, undisturbed by the frenetic struggles of the living. The busy pace of life beneath the waves did not cease but rather settled into a more sedate pace, more in suiting with the step of the sleepwalking denizens. And thus it remained, unchanging in its endless sleep, while generation after generation were born, lived and died, up above them, on the dry land.
The living, in the manner of all living, forgot, and in the forgetting, built a new city upon the bones of the old.
***
In the Ending Times, as the universe grew cold and the stars grew dim, a Wanderer stepped through the Star Portal housed within the Temple of Time, high upon a solitary hill above the city now called Lewsten. The ancient priests blinked the dust out of their eyes and after the initial shock and confusion, led him down into the city to the King’s Fortress and handed him over to the royal Seneschal.
The Seneschal considered throwing the travel stained stranger into one of the darkest cells in the dungeon, but the Wanderer pulled a Portal Key from his pocket and reminded him of the dire consequences of ignoring such a symbol of power and the obvious worthiness of its bearer. The Seneschal, after consulting the ancient Book of Rules, escorted the Wanderer to the most luxurious of suites and ordered the staff to see to his every need.
He dined that night at the High Table, sitting at the elbow of the King, bending the royal ear with tales of such wonder they were hardly believable as anything but fancy. The Wanderer liked the King and his ethereally beautiful Queen and thought he might count them as friends someday. But every night after that found him down in the lower city drinking in the pubs and dinning at the rustic bistros, spending all his time talking to the locals and listening to their stories. With every story, the Wanderer grew more and more troubled. An illness stalked the hearts of these people, something even his prodigious skills at wielding Wisdom and Truth could not cure.
It was on one of these evenings, at a time of the night that was closer to dawn than dusk, that the Wanderer stumbled out of a smoke filled pub called The Bottle Fly, a ramshackle establishment situated in the damp lower edges of the city, in a section of town called the Loos. He shook the effects of too much spirits out of his head, looked about at a landscape bathed in moonlight, and reconsidered his plans of finding a warm bed. Instead, he wandered down to the water’s edge.
A low wall kept the unwary from falling off the edge of the quay into the water below. Beyond, as far as the eye could see, the upper edges of ramparts and bell towers rose out of the water, testifying to fact that the modern city had been built upon the bones of ancient drowned ruins.
The Wanderer shook back his elegant sleeves and pulled the makings of a smoke from the pouch on his expensive belt, all the while watching the water as it lapped quietly against the time worn stonework. A puzzled frown creased the smooth skin of his brow. The water did not move naturally. Things….shifted…just under the surface. Shadows danced there, against the logic of moonlight and the beams of light from the streetlights. Curious, the Wanderer pulled a coin from his pocket and, leaning out over the water, dropped it into the inky depths.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I was you,” commented a young voice.
The Wanderer tossed back the long fall of his ebony hair and looked around for the source of the voice. A small form could be seen in the moonlight, perched high up on the top of a pylon.
“Why not?” asked the Wanderer, staring up at the boy.
“Nothing good ever came of disturbing the sleepers,” the boy explained sagely.
“Sleepers?”
“The people in the water.”
The Wanderer looked back at the oily heave of the sea.
“There are people living in the ruins?” he asked, smiling at the boy’s whimsy.
“Oh, I don’t know about the ‘living’ part,” the boy said, leaping off the pylon and landing on the top of the wall with the agility of an acrobat. “but there are people down there, that be for certain.”
The ragged boy walked with nonchalant grace along the top of the wall towards the elegant man dressed in silks and fine leather. The Wanderer eyed him sceptically and then turned back to study of the water. He leaned out once again and stared down at the spot where he had dropped the coin. Was it real or merely the power of suggestion, that he thought he saw the face of a woman, a gold crown in the palm of her hand, staring up in puzzlement at the surface of the water?
He leaped back, away from the wall, an expletive dying unspoken on his lips.
“Told ya,” grinned the boy, squatting on his heels to study the Wanderer.
The Wanderer stared back at the boy, trying to swallow the nausea that threatened to overwhelm him.
“How is this possible? Have your geneticists created a new species of fish in some gruesome parody of human?”
“Don’t know nothing about genetist. They be the undead. They walk around down there ’cause nobody bothered telling ‘em they be dead and they seem to be too stupid to figure it out on their own.”
“Why has no one done anything about this?” the Wanderer asked indignantly.
“What can be done? Only the dead can talk to the dead. Are you volunteering? I gotta warn you. The minute you put your head under water, the dream will take you and you will forget your reason for coming. Then the undead will pull you down and convince you that breathing water is normal.”
The Wanderer turned and stared back up the slope towards the King’s castle, studying the sleeping city.
“This explains so much. The dreams of the undead taint the living, here. You have lived too long at the verge of such damnation, and the infinite shadow of the undying has sucked your minds down into a mindless and empty quagmire.”
“Yeah. Well, don’t know nothing about quagmire. But I do know they call to you, those drowned people. They catch at your brain as you come in and out of dreams and the weak and the sick cannot resist them. Suicide by drowning is the number one killer in this place, so their numbers are always growing.”
“I must tell the King,” the Wanderer said, stepping away from the water’s edge.
“He knows. All his children have taken the long walk down from the castle and now live in the heart of the drowned city. The Queen will follow them soon enough. She haunts this very spot, some nights.”
“No,” breathed the Wanderer in horror, thinking of the fragile Queen in all her porcelain beauty. “The King loves her to distraction. Surely, she would not.”
“Can’t be helped. Not all the love in the world can make up for the promise of taking all the pain away,” the little boy said with a pragmatic shrug.
The Wanderer pulled something out of his pocket and rubbed its crystalline surface, a worried frown on his brow.
“What if I could change things?” he asked almost to himself.
The boy’s face look on an intent look. He leapt down to the pavement and came to stare at the thing in the elegant man’s hands.
“Who are you, to be judge, jury and executioner?” the boy asked, staring challengingly up into the tall man’s face. “Who are you to change what the gods could not?”
“What do you know of gods, boy?” the man snorted, shaking his head.
“I know that ten thousand years of prayers have gone unanswered in this place. I figure the gods do not care or worse yet, they do not exist.”
The Wanderer smiled.
“Oh, there are gods,” he said softly, “You just need to look in the mirror to see them. Are you not the master of your own journey? Wielder of all the power you are brave enough to master? Every act of will alters the nature of creation. Is that not godlike? The problem is not that there are no gods. The problem is that there are too many gods. Gods canceling each other out, unmaking the makings before the paint has had a chance to dry.”
“Just so,” the boy said, shrugging away the philosophy, “I will ask it again. Who are you, that your will can cancel out the will of an entire planet?”
“I?” the Wanderer said, smiling sadly, “I am Nothing. Which makes me much more clever than any god. Watch. I shall show you.”
The Wanderer took the Portal Key that he had been holding in his hands and pressed it against his chest. Nothing happened for a few moments and then the Portal Key began to glow. The glow spread up the Wanderer’s arms. It burned brightly against his chest. A look half way between agony and bliss froze upon the Wanderer’s face as he lifted his eyes to the night sky and screamed. The light consumed the Wanderer’s body, turning it into light and fire as the Key burrowed its way into the center of the glowing figure. There was a flash.
The little boy shielded his eyes from the momentary glare. When he looked back, the Wanderer was gone. Instead, a shimmering doorway hung suspended over the stones of the quay, a doorway into Chaos. The boy stared into its depths but his mind refused to translate what they eyes saw. A wet sound behind him made the boy pivot. A woman, more water than flesh, pulled herself over the wall and tottered hesitantly towards the doorway. Her soggy clothes whipped about in a wind that seemed to exist only for her, a wind that pulled her towards the doorway and sucked her in. More of the undead followed, to be whipped away, one by one, into the winds of the portal.
The boy retreated to the top of his pylon to watch as the sea emptied itself of its contents. The people of the town were drawn as well, waking out of a dead sleep to wander in their nightclothes towards a sound beyond hearing, to stand about on the edges of the pier, watching the procession of the dead. Some seemed to feel the wind, others not. Some wept at the sight of a long dead loved one being sucked into oblivion. Some sighed in wonder at the magic of the doorway’s existence. Some ventured to its edge and walked through.
The King and Queen came, finally, to stand amidst their subjects. The boy smiled and leapt down to the stones, crossing the pier to meet them.
“Momma,” the boy said, holding up his arms.
The Queen looked down in wonder at the little boy whose ragged clothes, once fine and elegant, whipped in the invisible wind. She bent down to catch up her youngest son but the King pulled her away.
“Let me go, my love,” she said to him. “It serves the world no good purpose to have me bleed my grief into the hearts of those who love me. Let me go. Grant me peace.”
The King wept as he let her go and the last of his sons led his mother through the Portal and disappeared forever. He watched until he could see no more. He watched until it seemed that the invisible wind had died. He watched as the doorway collapsed in upon itself and the Portal Key fell to the stones with a soft metallic thunk.
Then he picked up the Key and turning, trudged wearily back up the hill to the castle, wondering, in the part of his mind that was not filled with grief, at what sort of a being had walked through his kingdom, and opened a portal into infinite time.
The king stopped short at the foot of the grand staircase that led to the massive doors of his castle. Sitting on the top step was the Wanderer. The king considered the man for a moment and then trudged heavily up the steps to him.
“You dropped something,” the king said, holding out the Key. He dropped the sacred artifact into the Wanderer’s hand, careful not to touch him. “It is my greatest wish that the sun will not find you in my kingdom at the end of the day nor ever again.”
The king stepped carefully around the tall, elegant man and continued on. The Wanderer bowed his head and waited. When it became apparent that the queen would not be returning, he wept at his loss.
Sunset found him standing before the Star Portal in the Temple of Time.
“Where will you go next?” asked the ancient priest as the Portal began to shimmer into life.
“I am Nothing. I go where the Universe takes me,” said the Wanderer through his tears.
“Yes?” commented the priest. “Then I am sorry for you.”
“Why? Am I not more powerful than a god?” the Wanderer said bitterly.
“Perhaps. But who can love Nothing?” asked the priest.
The words stopped the tall man in mid stride and made him turn and look into the innocence of the old man’s face.
“Who, indeed?” said the Wanderer.
He might have said more, but the energy of the Star Portal turned him to light and whisked him away.
