chest. He remembered the breathing exercises the priest had taught him, and his chest rose and fell to the rhythm of Bestion’s words. The room became uncomfortably warm and the smoke of the incense stifling, but still Silus drew it deep into his lungs, even as his body fought against him.
He blinked and Bestion was no longer before him. He thought that he saw the priest moving through the mist that had obliterated the boundaries of the room. Other things roamed there, too, some of them not entirely human. Though they drew close, they never fully revealed themselves. Like Bestion, they were chanting, adding to the litany with guttural, alien sounds.
Something brushed Silus’s forehead very lightly, but even this gentlest of touches was enough to send him tumbling into darkness. For a moment he panicked, thinking that the priest had severed his hold on his body only to send him into the eternal night of death. When the light of stars began to pierce the darkness, however, he relaxed.
Below Silus now turned the dry, dead world from which he had been sent. Even without moving, he knew what hung above him; he could sense its call. He reached out and found himself deep within the clouds of Kerberos. He’d gladly stay here forever, abandoning his body for the embrace of the god. Silus was surprised to find that this thought caused him no guilt, and it was this realisation that made him aware of the dangers he faced here. He had to focus, and so he asked the question that had been on his mind ever since they had come to the settlement.
“Who is Illiun? Where do his people come from?”
The azure clouds surrounding him darkened, the rumble of thunder preceding a flicker of lightning.
Again Silus travelled without moving. He found himself hanging before a new world: a blue-green planet. For a moment he thought that it was Twilight itself, but it couldn’t be. Vast continents dominated the globe, bejewelled with the lights of hundreds of cities. A small grey moon orbited the planet, and here, too, he could see the lights of civilisation. He watched, astonished, as ships rose and fell between the planet and its satellite.
When Kerberos spoke, its voice seemed to come from within himself.
Twilight is not the only world that hangs in the eternal void; there are others, worlds long dead, the discarded toys of youthful deities. The planet that turns before you now is one such world. With this creation, I thought that I had finally realised the full potential of my power. Millennia before your time, Silus, a faithful people thrived here, dedicating their lives to the advancement of their own kind, all the while worshipping the being that had given them life.
Silus’s perspective shifted and now he was looking down on a huge, shining city at the centre of which, like a needle thrusting into the heavens, stood an impossibly slim tower.
My churches were architectural marvels, the likes of which have not been seen on any world since. Here there was no theological dissonance, no separate creeds or offshoot cults to stir up conflict amongst the populace; when the hymns were sung and the prayers chanted, it was with one voice, and to one god.
Inside the tower, in a church bathed in the light of a hundred stained-glass windows, priests wearing robes of myriad colours administered to the largest congregation Silus had ever seen.
Not one man, woman or child was without faith. The sermons and prayers of the priesthood drew the people closer to me. Each new church and cathedral erected in my name drew the faithful’s eyes heavenward to gaze in wonder as I slowly turned above them. I welcomed their adoration, but I should have known when to keep them at a distance. For in being drawn closer to a god, does not humankind find the desire to be more like gods themselves?
As you can see, Silus, this civilisation was far in advance of your own. Instead of magic, they had technology. They discovered the way to the stars, though their disappointment was great when they found that the cold stretches of space open to them were without life. Their cities spanned whole continents and not one person wanted for anything.
But the spirit of humankind is to always strive for better, and this they did, and in so doing they committed a blasphemy so great that it would lead to their destruction.
Silus fell through the city, tumbling so far that he thought he would pass right through the planet’s core. Instead, he came to rest hanging over another city, this one easily as big as the metropolis above it, though here, far beneath the ground, there were none of the usual sounds of life. When Silus looked more closely, he saw that no vehicles or people moved on the city’s thoroughfares; it was as though the place was deserted.
Not deserted, Silus, merely waiting for its citizens to be born.
Within these buildings they slept, cradled in artificial wombs, dreaming in amniotic slumber. In striving to be closer to their god, the people of the world that I had created claimed a right that only a deity should wield; the right to create life. This world’s scientists were the midwives to a new race, engineered to be the servants of their creators. Artificial men and women emerged from the womb fully grown, ready to serve their masters. Though this disturbed me greatly, I did not intervene. I had given my creations free will and I had learned hard lessons — across many worlds created and destroyed — of the perils of taking that away, once given.
Silus was inside one of the buildings now, in a hall that seemed to stretch on forever. Within were ranked an endless succession of smooth round objects, like huge pearls. There was a muggy heat coming from them that reminded him of the cow-sheds during calving on his uncle’s farm. He watched in astonishment, and horror, as the perfectly smooth surface of each pearl began to wrinkle and split; fully formed adult humans pulled themselves out of the slime in which they were immersed, and stepped forth.
The children of my creations were, like their parents, utterly brilliant. Their minds were incisive and focused. Yet still they were willing to serve, using their gifts for the betterment of the world to which they had been born.
Silus watched as the artificial humans integrated themselves into the civilisation above. So like their creators were they, so convincingly human, that soon it was impossible to distinguish between those of natural birth and those who were the product of science.
Their integration into society was seamless. However, in one area this new race was very different to their creators; they were godless. They soon came to reason that as they themselves had not been created by a deity, then what use was there for such a thing? They observed none of the rituals and ceremonies of the faithful, although, for a time, they tolerated the religion of their masters. But unlike the minds that had created them, they were evolving. Soon their intellects were beyond those of their creators, and the servants quickly became the masters. So dependent on their artificial people had my children become that they did not realise that they had been usurped, happy, as they were, for their every need to be administered to, all the while sinking into comfortable complacency. The artificial race came to control every aspect of their lives.
Then came the first blasphemous act of this new race. Religion was banned and the churches and cathedrals — any place of worship, no matter how small — were shut down. Such beliefs were backward, the artificial race argued, and did nothing to advance the cause of humankind; spirituality was the reserve of the superstitious and the frightened. That these beliefs be entirely eradicated over time, a programme of enforced sterilisation of those who stubbornly held to their faith was put into practice. This, finally, shook my people out of their slumber, though not before the majority of them had succumbed to this tyranny. Those who had avoided the needles of the doctors took up arms, only to be brutally put down. They knew nothing of war, but their creations learned the art quickly. Once the populace had been subdued, seeing that their actions would not be universally embraced, the artificial race decided to drop the facade of progressive rationality entirely.
I had given my people free will. I had decided not to interfere in the world that I had created, and which they had shaped. I had tried a rule of absolute power before, on other worlds, and it had led to a people who only praised me because they were afraid. But when the artificial race triggered a terrible weapon, destroying an area much larger even than the peninsula you call home, Silus, the wrath of old returned.
Silus was hanging above the planet once more and he shuddered in horror as flames took a whole continent in their grip and turned it into wasteland in less than the blink of an eye.
I was too late to intervene. My people were eradicated. My beautiful world, which had been created and populated entirely by my will, was ruined, now ruled over by an alien race that paid me no heed. Only when I rained down fire, unleashing a destructive force more powerful than their own, only then did they truly hear me, and for a moment some of them actually believed.
In my rage, however, I had missed something.
Silus’s perspective shifted again, pulling him away from the inferno raging below, the continents sinking into seas of lava before being obscured entirely by globe-spanning clouds of smoke. Now he was staring past the burning world into space, and for a moment he didn’t realise what it was that he was supposed to be seeing. But
