“That’s stupid,” said Aurora.
“Maybe. But a lot of smart people buy into it. When I was nine, I was studying literature under a monk named Brother Brown. One day we took a break from reading stories and he asked me to write one. I composed a tale about a knight named Lord Brilliant. Brother Brown kept asking me for details of my character, and my imagination was more than eager to supply them. I remember that when my story began Lord Brilliant was twenty, which seemed rather old to me at the time. I remember his hair was the color of golden wheat. He was strong enough that he could carry his horse across a dangerous bridge. His parent’s names were, um... Honor and Faith, if memory serves. Oh, and his favorite food was snails in mustard sauce.”
“I can’t believe that would be anyone’s favorite food,” said Aurora.
I shrugged. “I’d heard that rich people ate such things. At the monastery we mostly ate barley and salt cod. Anyway, in my adventure, Brilliant undertook a ten-year quest to hunt down... uh... hmm.”
“Hunt down what?”
“Uh... don’t be offended, but he hunted down ogres. I was just a kid. I didn’t know any personally at the time.”
Aurora shrugged. “We tell our children that humans use ogre bones to flavor their soup. Don’t worry about it.”
“Anyway, my point is, my twenty-year-old knight undertook a ten-year quest. So when I was asked by Brother Brown how old he was at the end of the tale, I said he was thirty. But my teacher pointed out that I had created Lord Brilliant only that morning. He was little more than a few hours old. But, he possessed properties, such as parents, that indicated a much longer existence. Brother Brown explained that our world could also appear to be much older through the same principals. To this day, I really haven’t thought of a good argument to challenge this.”
Aurora shook her head. “By that logic, the world might only be a year old. Even one minute old. Nothing really existed before we started this conversation. There’d be no way of ever knowing the truth.”
“Truth isn’t as solid for me as it once was,” I said. “The way Zetetic’s magic worked... it was like he was creating new realities by the second. I saw it with my own eyes. Who am I to judge what’s real and what’s unreal?”
Aurora sighed. “Humans are so weak-minded. Your kind confuses philosophy for fact. How is it you came to rule most of the known world?”
“We don’t make our weapons out of ice, for one thing. It gives us a little more range.”
She rolled her eyes. “We’re off-topic. Let’s get back to Glorious. Do you ever wonder why the Vanished Kingdom is three thousand years old? Why you don’t find traces of something older?”
“Sometimes. Was there a civilization before the Vanished Kingdom?”
“No,” said Aurora, somewhat emphatically. “There was nothing older than three thousand years. The world existed before then, but we can never know for how long, since three thousand years ago marks the invention of time. Before then, there were no fixed days or years.”
“That makes no sense whatsoever.”
“It’s a human failing that you wish for the world to make sense. You’d rather embrace a sensible lie than an absurd truth. Time was the invention of Glorious. It was his whole reason for merging his spirit with the sun.”
“You’re losing me,” I said.
“Before three thousand years ago, the sun was a wild thing. It followed no set course across the sky. Sometimes it raced across the heavens, other times it loped at a leisurely pace, pausing to nap at the apex of its climb. Some days it rose in the east, other days in the west or north or south. Nor did it always journey across the vault of heaven toward the opposing horizon. Some days, it would lazily roll back down the sky to finish where it had started.”
“If there were days, then there was time,” I said, having instantly spotted the gaping hole in her logic.
“But now, a day is a fixed measurement. The sun passes through the sky on a schedule. Its path is so steady, we can divide days into hours, minutes and seconds, or lump them together into months or years. Has it never struck you as odd that the sky has an agenda? It’s self-evident, from the regular procession of moon phases, eclipses, and other celestial phenomena, that there is some guiding intelligence imposing order upon them. Glorious is that intelligence.”
“I know that in the Vanished Kingdom, Glorious was revered as a god. The ruins are rife with big disks representing the sun.”
“With good reason. Glorious made civilization possible. Before he merged with the sun, agriculture couldn’t take hold. Of course, this wasn’t Glorious’ goal when he fixed the sun into a specific course. He had no idea he was creating the conditions needed for humans to thrive.”
“Then why did he do it?”
“Who knows? Perhaps you can ask him yourself. Look ahead.”
I did so, and saw what she was referring to. The black sea beneath us was lightening, taking on hues of pale blue, tinted with pastel pinks. The ice floes beneath us grew ever thinner, until at last there were no stars to be seen. We flew on, and at length the ocean grew still and took on the perfect azure of a calm tropical lagoon. Far in the distance, like a vast white pearl too dazzling to look upon directly, was the sun, floating calmly amid the blue.
Aurora raised her beefy arm to shield her eyes as we grew closer. She said, “It’s funny that, in telling of the invention of time, I’ve so lost track of it. Here’s the short answer to your original question: Glorious’ body was destroyed when he merged with the sun. You know that Hush loved Glorious, and was willing to betray Greatshadow to mate with him. But Glorious spurned Hush; he was too fixed on his plan to merge his soul with the sun to waste his energies on such a thing as love. Hush, in her anger, attacked him, striking a mortal blow just as he was merging with the sun. Her blow killed his reptilian body, but this proved a boon, since it liberated the spirit of Glorious to freely merge with the sun. Hush threw herself at the sun in her rage, but succeeded only in gouging a large crater. The rubble from this blow fell to earth.”
“The glorystones,” I said.
“Exactly. And, as the glorystones rained down like fire, they caught Greatshadow’s attention. At the time, he was merely an ordinary dragon who specialized in elemental flame magic, and he was curious about this new source of heavenly radiance. He flew to investigate, and found Hush standing over the body of Glorious. She confessed that she had offered herself to Glorious and been rejected. Greatshadow’s rage at this revelation was the final push needed to fuse his soul with the elemental flames he’d mastered, marking his birth as the primal dragon of fire. As Hush realized she’d lost both Glorious and Greatshadow, her heart shattered, and the chill wind that rushed into the void pushed her across the elemental barrier to become the primal dragon of cold.”
“So, if his body is already dead, all that’s left of Glorious is his soul,” I said.
“Yes. He is, in some ways, the most vulnerable of the primal dragons. We must warn him. If he dies, the sun will no longer be guided by his intelligence. It will once more meander through the sky unpredictably, meaning the end of world as we know it.”
“Purity has a different idea. She thinks the sun will be extinguished. But it’s hard to think that the Church would be going along with this plan if they thought that was right. They must think things will pretty much stay the same.”
Aurora fell quiet as she thought this over. Finally, she said, “What will follow the death of Glorious is an open question. Let’s hope we never learn the answer.”
And on we flew.
Have you ever approached a bonfire on a dark beach? From a distance, the fire is bright white at its core, while everything around is draped in black shadows. Yet when you are directly beside the fire, the shadows don’t seem as stark, and it’s possible to gaze into the flames and see the individual logs burning, a hundred glowing hues of yellow and red and white mixed with streaks of dark black soot.
So it proved to be with the sun. The yellow white pearl floating half-submerged in the still blue water could now be gazed upon directly. The pearl was enormous, large enough that the entire Isle of Fire could have been contained within it. If the sun was a giant pearl, here in the Great Sea Above, I couldn’t help but wonder if, somewhere in the mythology of the ogres, there was a legend of a giant oyster.
Beneath the pearl’s translucent surface, I could see the draconic spirit form of Glorious, curled into a tight ball. His snout was tucked beneath a wing, and his long tail was coiled around his entire form. He dwarfed any of the primal dragons I’d yet witnessed. Abyss had been large enough to swallow a fleet of ships; Glorious was large enough that he could have swallowed Abyss like a grain of corn.
His eyes opened as we approached.
“You’re the ones I’ve waited for,” he said, in a surprisingly gentle whisper. There was something curiously familiar about his voice as well. Then I realized it was my own voice. Glorious was speaking directly in my thoughts.
I assume Aurora received the same message. She grunted a command and Slor Tonn slid to a hovering halt. Aurora dropped to her knees and bowed on the whale’s broad back. Since I was clinging to her neck, this left me staring right at the sun.
“We’re sorry to disturb your slumber, O Glorious!” Aurora cried. “We recognize that we’ve not cleansed ourselves with the proper rituals. We ask that you –”
“There’s no need for these formalities,” Glorious said, shifting his face within the pearl to look upon us more directly, with eyes as large as the Commonground bay. “Do you think me ignorant of earthly plots? You’ve come to murder me, to release my soul to oblivion.”
“No!” said Aurora. “Hush and her minions await your return to the northern reaches of the Great Sea Above. It is they who wish you harm. We’ve come to warn you. But... you already know of this plot?”
“The Church of the Book is not so clever as they believe,” said Glorious. “They shun the use of candles and torches, since they fear that Greatshadow may gaze out of the tiniest flame. But they light their most private sanctums with glorystones. My soul fills all solar material, even these remote fragments. I’m witness to the church’s every scheme.”
“Then you know that the Church has produced a Writ of Judgment that can destroy you,” I said.
“Yes. And I’ve heard their tedious debates as they convinced themselves this will not matter. They believe the sun will continue its current path through pure momentum. They shall have the chance to learn the truth, I suppose. Even without the scroll, I cannot survive an encounter with the Jagged Heart. Its hateful bitterness will poison my soul, and I will, at last, find welcome relief in oblivion.”
“You welcome this fate?” Aurora asked, confused.
“For three thousand years, I’ve guided the sun across the skies in a never-changing path, utterly alone in my journeys. When I began my task, I was driven by pure intellectual hunger: was it possible to impose order upon a chaotic world? I believed it was, and I believed I was the only being who had the intellect and strength of will to force such a change. When I first traveled to these abstract realms, I welcomed my solitude. The material world is violent and cacophonous. I could barely hear my own thoughts. I dreamed of a better place, a domain of peace, order, and silence, where I might at last organize my thoughts and realize the true potential of my mind.”
Peace, order, and silence. I wonder if Glorious knew how much his personal agenda overlapped with Purity’s dream?
“When I first merged my soul with the sun, all was blissful,” Glorious said. “I invented days, which gave birth to years, then to centuries. I was free at last to sequentially organize my thoughts and memories. From my vantage point above the world, I saw the changes my works had made possible. Mankind embraced time, measuring it out with sundials and hourglasses, with calendars and clocks. They sang my praises and carved my image from stone, the better to worship me.”
He sounded wistful as he relayed his story, though perhaps ‘sounded’ isn’t the correct word for a message conveyed through telepathy. Still, I was certain Glorious held the memory of this time to be bittersweet. What followed, however, was only bitter.
“My brethren dragons, alas, were slower to see the advantages of time. They were wiped out by the explosive growth of human civilization, slowly fading from history, until only the primal dragons remained. Then I watched even the primal dragons succumb, losing their intelligence and identities to the elemental forces they commanded, until only a handful of my kind endures. Alas, the survivors are the dragons who despise and resent me most. Never in all of existence has any creature ever been as alone as I am.”
“But you aren’t alone,” I said. “If you can see through the glorystones, you’re connected with the world! You must experience the lives of thousands each day.”
“It is so. And, long ago, this was good. The first men to create agriculture worshipped the sun. They sang my praises and offered me sacrifices. While I no longer needed to eat, my pride fed upon their deeds. I felt... loved.”
“Men still love you,” I said.
“No,” said Glorious. “Men now take me for granted, at best. Today, most men bemoan my great gift, time. They curse the relentless pulse of seconds, they rail against my ceaseless crawl across the vault of the heavens, and treat the years as something I steal from them rather than as a gift given freely.”
“People are fickle,” I said. “That’s hardly a reason to want to die. Give them another thousand years and they’ll be back to worshipping you again.”