Sleeper

Cær Droi was a lump, as indifferent as a barrow.

The subterranean maze that would have kept secret its breach had been compromised by decay. Past the deep door he found a dingy grotto; squatting around a dreggy sump were three of her children, the remains of so many others made a carpet of fecal debris.

Such a miserable tableau primed his vindication. This is not life! With his hands he snuffed the limpid zombies, and left them in a litter like so much squalid chattel.

Down a narrow stair he violated her adytum. She and her Husband lay on the cold earth, sunken into a comatose stupor of anoesis, barely zoetic. The result of an eternal boredom.

Still, he was cautious to approach. Power does not wither, though it sleeps. At her neck he felt her blood's evanescent crawl.

Against her lips he applied one drop from his phial.

Exile

In his third life he had been the judge of Hestern. An architect of a new world, scrounging from the midden of the old.

With him, ten-thousand refugees of a murdered world raked through the muck of their toppled race and grew a soaring junk fortress; her uneven walls a regurgitation of failed defenses, towers borrowed from the ruins of Mousk and Cait and Ys, their spindly buttresses a cobble of obsidian and offal.

They called her Elesarp, the Lady's carrion.

Her ten-thousand immigrants were a stew of anomie; they danced and alloyed around coal-fires, bought and sold pieces of their deathless bodies. They could still imagine time, but it was inconspicuous, liminal. The cycles unpredictable and overlapping. All the yesterdays became a muddled before-since. All the tomorrows, a singular later-again.

Their counterfeit revelry flattened into stultified ambivalence. Many surrendered to a hope of final, total sensory deprivation, immuring themselves beneath the streets. A thing was discovered exhuming them, feeding on their memories and splicing their bodies onto its own; a grotesque likeness of Elesarp herself.

A silt of dross accumulated, putrefied, and kindled. Transient fire roamed the citadel, and some fled to the windblown wastes. They hid themselves in cærs, and with some art they had discovered, crafted automatons to keep as companions.

Second Life

In his second life, he had been the wretch of Hyuri. How dire those days before the last day!

He could not clearly educe all the places and things he had seen; their details were obscured by a muslin of woe. He knew that there had been an inimitable organic density to the world; a depth of visibility inconceivable to the children of the cærs.

Now... now-since, all that remained of the planet's surface was a caliginous barren.

Compulsively, he had already begun to walk. He stopped. Where to seek Cær Droi? Whatever muscle in him that sensed cardinal direction was long flaccid. Away to his left was a dull copper twinkle. He had used that to navigate the sandveldt, once. He figured his cosine on the invisible spiral centering on that point of light. As he walked he thought:

So the Elesarp still burns.

Husband

In his first life he had been a soldier of Iylum. Gods of bosk and sacellum were the enemies of the state, and purged to the last. Iylum's justifications for deicide seemed to him, now-since, ambiguous. How many lives after that one? Impossible to frame in the antique concept of years. How true his memory? Impossible to frame in a culture of memory as cyclic and evolving.

But the hetman and the other children knew none of this. Now-since he was Husband of Cær Brae.

The children were drinking salt-lambic by the Torfire when he found them, and bade the hetman:

"Allmother sends a gift of poison to her sister of Cær Droi. I go to bear it to her and her children."

The hetman did not know a Husband could leave and enter the tour, but didn't ask or say.

"We children dream for Allmother while we wait. Will you by later-again?"

"Later-again," he lied, as it was the Husband's holy duty to lie.

"Allmother smiles for none of your dreams," he did not tell the hetman, for it was also the Husband's must to keep Allmother's secrets. Her sleep had lapsed into acedia, and so too had her sister's thought the Husband, so he would go and find out.

And because the children of Cær Brae and their witch-dam were anathema to him, after he walked the tour he sealed it shut. Then for a very long-again stood on the gelid sandveldt transfixed by stars.

No More

We had no more forests, so we built our cities out of stone and iron. We had no more wars, so instead of walls we set mazes. And in time, we could no more remember the others of us.

We had no more dreams, so we invented them out of dance and song. We had no more day, so instead of wood we burned coal. And in time, we could no more remember the stars.

We had no more children, so we shaped them out of clay and dust. We had no more gods, so we told our children that we were them. And in time, we could no more remember the truth.