journey was long. You must now be comforted.”
She clapped her hands, for what reason he did not know, and turned to the great mirror. “This the Glass of Eternity,” she said. “It will show you the past, the present, and sometimes the future.”
The chamber door swung open, and a hulking guard dragged in two slaves by chains attached to neck-collars. They were two girls, young and pretty, naked and shaved bald from head to foot. The guard grunted behind his fanged mask, and Ianthe waved him away. As the door closed, the two slaves huddled together on the chamber’s woven rug. They made no attempt to escape or cry out. They quivered with fear, and Gammir’s lust began to rise. No, his thirst. But there was no longer any difference. He licked his lips.
Ianthe ignored the cowering girls. “Grandson,” she spoke from beside the dark mirror, “what do you know of the world’s history? Did your northern tutors teach you any truth?”
“I know of the Age of Serpents,” he told her. “The birth of the Uduru, the Time of Flame, and the Five Tribes.”
She laughed dismissively. “As I thought… You know nothing. This continent is far older than the six kingdoms that claim it,” she said. “Older than you can imagine.” She gestured tSheeight='0emo the mirror, turned her eyes upon it, and the light in the glass swam. It became a vision, moving and living inside the oval frame, like a scene outside a window.
A primal landscape of volcanoes, flame, and raging oceans took shape in the glass. Vast beasts, terrible and alien, lumbered across the steaming rocks. Blazing stars hung above the primeval world, far more than he had seen in any modern sky. Dark things moved in the starry void, sinking to earth, colossal and formless, gleaming with eyes of fire.
The creatures from the void took on terrestrial shapes… They became colossal obsidian gods, and lesser beings worshipped them – walked gladly into their open maws, built idols to honor them. Fantastic cities grew like fungus about their towering temples. The creatures who walked those twisting streets and gave tributes of blood and flesh were not human, but some distant ancestor of man. Apish, brutal, and filthy, they nevertheless built a crude civilization, carving it from the hot stones of the earth. Volcanoes roared and sank their cities beneath floods of magma, and the green ocean washed in to fog the world with steam.
The beings of darkness strode through the gaseous atmosphere, raising up the crawling, shuffling life-forms they found into new and more bizarre civilizations. Impossible architectures sprouted mould-like from the primordial swamps. Again the temples of the dark gods rose into the sweltering sky, and a red sun slowly burned away the continental marshes. Again the shaggy ancestors of humanity came into the vision, making war on the city-builders with stone and spear, ultimately claiming their domains. Then the pre-humans warred upon each other, and the dark gods watched in amusement, feeding on them now and then like great reptiles on tiny insects.
The sub-human empires fell, and the dark gods reveled in the tumult of the unstable earth. Millennia passed, and the pattern repeated itself. New races came and built their temples and cities… they fell, conquered by other races, or devoured by the whims of the dark ones… only to spring up again in some other corner of the continent.
The void-born ones walked upon the world, wrapped in the celestial glory of their immensity. They began to take the forms of terrible beings, or beings of great beauty, playing always their cruel games with the lesser forms of life… fostering empires, then watching as they crumbled. They moved like the shadows of mountains across burgeoning forests. They raised or sank island kingdoms for their pleasure.
These patterns played out again and again on the surface of the mirror. Gammir forgot himself and the chamber in which he sat. He saw the ancient beings, the terrible gods of death and war, the blood-hungry deities of a hundred nations, the endless wars of tribe against tribe, city against city, the genocides, the slaveries, the annihilations and rebirths of a thousand peoples, all leading toward the birth of humanity and its own proud kingdoms. The patterns swirled, repeating, unchangeable. The dark gods laughed, and reveled, and toyed with empires.
Until they grew bored…
Some of the dark ones took to the void, losing themselves among the stars. Others dwindled to mere shadows, and took on the forms of lesser beings – men and women who ruled over the tiny kingdoms of earth. Still others faded into distant worlds, stretching their bulk into unseen dimensions, while some merely slumbered, sinkiumben ng into the bones of the earth and becoming one with its stones, winds, and waters.
Yet a few of the dark ones who had fallen into fleshly shapes… remembered. They remembered the caress of the void, the taste of blood spilled on their altars, the divine power that was once theirs. They could never regain their lost forms. They were diminished… absorbed into the world they had toyed with for long eons.
Yet they remembered, and they drew to themselves the remnants of the great powers that once were their birthright. They saw into the stars and moaned the loss of their brothers and sisters. They belonged now to this singular world and its never-ending patterns of birth and death, night and day, creation and destruction, rising and falling through the centuries. Time itself had conquered their divinity.
Among the empires of men they were called sorcerer.
Or sorceress.
The mirror grew cloudy again, and Gammir blinked. The vision was gone. His head spun, and Ianthe sat herself upon the desk before him. She caressed his cheek like a favorite sculpture.
“We are of the Old Breed, you and I,” she said, and he understood. “There is much that is forgotten and will remain so… yet there is still much to learn. We will play the games of conquest. We will spread blood and fire, for this world is ours.”
He smiled, and she kissed his lips.
She turned away and pulled him by the hand toward the cowering girl-slaves. They would not meet his eyes or hers. Fear consumed them. His thirst raged.
“Now we drink royal wine,” she said.
With a single finger, she slit the throats of both girls.
They drank deeply from the writhing bodies, drawing upon every last drop of precious fluid. Potent with the tang of youth.
They arose from the limp forms, dripping red and satisfied, and Ianthe laughed.
She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen… or will ever see .
He licked the bloody residue from her chin, like a young hound feeding from its mother.
She held him then in silence. The world faded into oblivion.
“My sweet boy,” she said. “My sweet Gammir.”
The panther Miku lapped at the red pool beneath the dead slaves.
A subtle movement in the close air of the chamber, or perhaps a faint sound, caused Ianthe to let him go. She turned to stare at the Glass of Eternity.
A new image floated in the mirror. On a tall throne of ebony and crystal sat a man robed in darkness. A strand of blood-bright rubies hung across his chest, and a long mane of slate-gray hair swept back from his high forehead. A crown of gold and sapphire sat stappbed rangely upon his tight-fleshed skull, as if it did not belong there. His eyes gleamed, colorless fires in their deep sockets, and his fingers were long-nailed talons. He stared through the mirror, directly at the blood-drenched grandmother and grandson. His face was cruel and stone-like, but he smiled.
“Ianthe,” his voice echoed across the chamber. The sound of bones grinding. “You enjoy yourself too much…”
The Empress returned his smile and licked the remaining gore from her lips.
“Gammir has returned,” she said to the mirror. “As I said he would.”
The mirror-King’s eyes pierced Gammir through the mirror. “Never did I doubt it. All that which was lost shall be regained in time.”
“Gammir,” said Ianthe, her hand on his shoulder, “meet the Great Elhathym… Ruler of Yaskatha long before it held that name, and now returned to claim his birthright – just as you have this day. You shall be great allies.”
Gammir stared at Elhathym through the pane of enchanted glass.
“Hail, Prince of Khyrei,” said the sorcerer.
“Hail, King of Yaskatha,” said Gammir, a single red droplet falling from his chin.
He knew instantly that he hated this man, and would always hate him.
Ianthe laughed and kissed his bloody cheek.
