The Ardoon King Read online

  Chapter 7: The Sillum

  The man once known as the Sillum had been trapped in the Nothingness forever and never. In the reality of this world, it had been several hundred years since his aborted bid to bring his god to Tiwanaku. But to him, no time had passed. He merely traversed from one reality to another instantly, and from the perspective of the Nothingness, all existed at once, and never existed.

  He lumbered naked from the temple and took in his first breath, smelling and tasting the salt air. The stone pavement underfoot was wet and spattered with seaweed and dying sea life. Water poured into the abyss around him from the top of the black stone spire that impaled the starry sky. He saw that the temple was an island without shores. Where the massive, slick stones stopped, there were steep ledges that dropped into the rolling pitch.

  “Hello, Sillum,” said the figure standing in front of him. It was an ancient man who wore odd clothing and an odder hat. His yellowed and brown teeth were rotting and he had flaps on his neck. “My name is Douglas Carter.”

  The stranger motioned toward a similarly ancient woman, who had no hair. Her eyes were as white and milky as those of a dead fish. He said, “This is my companion, Eleanor Dembrowski.”

  The names were very curious to the Sillum, who frowned. He looked at the tumultuous ocean around him, at the black temple above him, at the frantically flapping fish and scurrying crabs around his feet. “Where am I?” he asked in broken voice.

  “You, sir, are in middle of the Pacific Ocean, on an island that wasn’t here five minutes ago, and won’t be here five minutes from now.”

  The woman, whom the Sillum had assessed as ‘hag,’ croaked, “The stars are right again, Sillum. You failed in Tiwanaku and our god was most displeased. He was so displeased that he almost destroyed your reality – your now, your past, and your future. You were almost undone.”

  The hag coughed and black vile poured from her mouth onto her chin. She smacked her lips as if enjoying the aftertaste of the ooze and said, “You would be uncreated even now, but for a wart that has prevented our god from conquering this reality and pulling it back into the blackness.”

  “Wart?”

  “His majesty’s enemy, Sillum. The wart of sentience. Despite the cataclysms that have befallen this world, it remains plagued with sentience! Self-aware creatures. Creatures capable of thought. Creatures who dare to hear the tree that falls in the forest. Creatures who collapse the wave-function by continuing to look under the box.”

  The old man next to the hag laughed and one of his crumbling teeth fell out. Jabbing at the air with one hand, he said jovially, “You must remove the cat from the box, old man. All must be limbo. All must be nothing.”

  The woman said in a more sedate tone, “The mindless servants of the master are rapidly squeezing the sentience from this reality and it would have been only a matter of time before they purified it, were it not for an anomaly in what you know as the ‘New World.”

  “An anomaly,” repeated the Sillum.

  The man in the odd hat said, “Sentient beings have captured the tool the master gave you to destroy this place. They are unknowingly using it against us. They have the Empyrean Glossa, the language of the gods. It is being spoken by those who should not have it. Read. Comprehended. Consequently, even as sentience is being purged from other parts of their reality, in that one place, the place where the Empyrean exists, sentience is expanding.

  “It is an abomination to our lord. A blasphemy! The blasphemers are beginning to comprehend things that only the gods should know. Given enough time, they will anchor the ‘now’ to the past, and once that anchor is set, their reality will be very difficult to undo. It will become self-sustaining.”

  “Then I shall destroy these creatures,” said the Sillum, indignant despite his lack of comprehension.

  The woman said, “Yes, you shall. Do that, Sillum, and you will be granted the mercy of utter destruction. Fail, and you will suffer the eternal agony of being uncreated.”

  “You do not wish to be uncreated,” said the old man, pulling off one of his own ears and inspecting it. “It is an unimaginable horror for an aware being.”

  Because this warning was expressed in Empyrean, the Sillum understood the immensity of the horror being described. He fell to his knees, his new heart almost exploding in his still spongy, yellow chest. “I won’t fail,” he wailed as tears of blood fell from his eyes. “I won’t fail again, I swear.”

  “I warn you,” said the hag, “your window of opportunity is narrow. You must act quickly.”

  Lifting his ghoulish head and parting his purple lips, the Sillum rasped, “Tell me what I must do.”