AU - Mors Perii

[Xedanis]

My thanks to the lovely Cia for her input and help with literally fleshing out this idea and making it readable. <3

Shas’riga - Stone Singer, master artisan and protector of artifacts. Member of the Atlantean ruling council.

Lors’riga - Life Singer, master healer and guardian of the bones of the dead. Senior member of the Atlantean ruling council.

Riga Council - The ruling council of Atlantis [later disbanded under the Blood Tyrant, Silvas] Made up of the masters of each Atlantean discipline. Consisted of the Shi’o [senior] and Jhu’o [junior] council.

Les’Krisa - The “Body of Remembrance”; A state of induced hallucination practiced by certain Atlantean scholars - mainly accomplished and veteran historians - wherein an event with significant gravitas can be reconstructed and witnessed using the memories of people - and objects - that witnessed it firsthand. Exceedingly difficult and draining to master.

Y’au ri anase fă - a vulgar expression in Atlantean; roughly - and mildly - translated, “bite me.”

Sh’ikura - Student or apprentice.

[Xedanis]

1
AARDVARK AND 10TH

We do not court the whispers of the dead, Shas’riga.

Their words echoed in his skull, millenia after their voices had died away. He tried to push them aside as he made his way through the city streets. Travelling incognito was a strange gift for him; bedecked as he was in his voluminous robes, the balding priest’s tattooed skin alone should have been enough to attract unwanted attention.

Their song is not for the living.

And yet he drifted between the scant bodies of the pedestrian throng that seemed ever present in this benighted town; as unheeded and unseen as a gust of wind.

Aardvark and 10th now. Blocks away from his destination, his quarry, and the true test of his obfuscating protective measures.

To yield to the pleas of the dead and gone is to invite timeless mania into your mind. Turn from this path. Your parents are dead. Let them stay dead.

The old lecture, again, ringing loud in his ears. Distracting him.

This time would be different. This time was not the same. He had never believed that there was a life after death. The dead did not pass into eternity; they did not find peace in some mythic realm, to watch the living for all of time.

They died. They ceased.

The old argument played back and forth in his mind as he passed out of the rat’s maze of alleyways that was the city proper, and paused on the edge of a wooded clutch of bushes and trees that shielded his final destination from the casual observer.

Aardvark and First: D’dary Manor.

He cast a glance to either side of him. Not a soul in sight. Before him loomed the gates, closed tight against the outside world. He reached out a palm, eyes gently closed. There were of course the usual array of unseen defenses about the place; he had encountered their ilk before.

We do not court the whispers of the dead.
Let them stay dead.

The tattooed skin of his bald head glinted in the moonlight and he simply passed through the gates, not through shadow or teleportation, but simply stepping through them like they were not there. He paused again on the other side of the threshold, casting a wry glance to the gatehouse with its one lone light and its several guardians.
They stared at the gates. At him.

He raised an eyebrow, but his panic was quelled quickly; they did not look at him, but through him.

Good. The shroud had worked. All they saw was the creaking gate, inviolate and closed against the night.

What you seek is sacrilege.

“It can be done,” he said aloud as he ghosted his way down the beaten path, heading for the manor proper.

It can be done, but it must not be done.

His hand lighted on the grand building’s massive main doors; reality blinked, and he was thousands of years into the past.

“You speak irrelevancies, Enkil,” he argued. He looked down at his own hands. The tattooed runes were still present, though starker, newer. Yes, this was the past. A memory came to warn him from his path.

The whispers of the dead chiding him against listening to the whispers of the dead.

Hypocrisy.

He played out the old argument as though it were fresh and unwritten.

“I seek to undo that which should never have been done,” he argued. “My parents did not deserve to die. My father had much left to teach me. I am not ready to take his place.”

“Your father is dead! YOU are Shas’riga now!” Enkil’s voice was thunder. The voice of an Elder schooling a student…

No. More than that. A parent admonishing a child. And his next words were already embedded in the tattooed priest’s mind before they emerged from his superior’s mouth: “A child’s fear of the unknown is no just cause for meddling where even the wisest, most deluded of your forebears dared not tread!”

Enkil descended from the dais he had stood upon, his gold-edged robes the mirror of the tattooed priest’s own, though far more embellished with runic script, as befit his senior station. The tattooed priest felt the insipid cold of fear and guilt begin to creep up his spine. He had watched Enkil’s eyes become as stormy as his imperative words.

“I am Lors’riga,” Enkil admonished. “You are Shas’riga.” He sought to cow his younger colleague now with rank and formality. The Lors’riga, the Life Singer, had ever been senior to the Shas’riga - the Stone Singer - in the city’s ruling council.

The tattooed priest took a step back from the dais, even as Enkil commanded him. “Remember your place.”

Beneath you, the tattooed priest thought, despite himself. Watching his own thoughts through the lens of memory made the unvoiced thought even more spiteful and immature. He became aware now that he was watching his younger self; even here, in this recollection rendered hazy by time and nostalgic longing, Enkil’s face was severe and would brook no opposition.

“Do not meddle with those passed into memory. Allow them their peace.”

“I cannot,” said the tattooed priest. “For they were not allowed to die in peace. They should not be dead at all.”

Enkil’s voice grew weary, then. He rubbed his tired eyes with his thumb and forefinger, a gesture that humanized him too much; the white, poured-granite walls of the chamber in which the two priests stood darkened a note along with Enkil’s thoughts. “Then you walk this path alone,” he scowled. “And may your blood carry the punishment for it,” he added. “Atlantis will not condone your actions, and I will not bless them.”

“Blessings are irrelevant,” the tattooed priest found himself saying as he turned from Enkil’s dais and made his way from the room. “The dead do not speak, they do not watch, and they do not linger. They are useless in death, wrongfully slain. I will correct that.”

“Then you are a fool!” Enkil’s voice called after the tattooed priest, causing him to stop on the threshold of the large antechamber. The light that spilled into the wide dome intensified with the imperative of the Life Singer’s words.

The tattooed priest turned again, as Enkil’s haughty form glided toward him, away from the dais. The sonorous echo of his words followed him, only fading when the elder priest dropped his voice to a whisper.

“Your parents were unjustly slain,” he conceded. “We were fools, all of us, to stand against the Crimson Lord’s will, and your father knew that. He tried to direct all of Silvas’ hate onto himself, to spare you and your mother from his judgement.” His voice was conspiratorial now, barely a whisper. Enkil was fully aware of the dangers of speaking against Atlantis’ tyrannical, self-appointed “king”; the tattooed priest preferred a different word for their ruler. Demon.

Hilarious choice of word, considering his oft-touted disbelief of an afterlife.

“This road will lead you only to more pain and more regrets,” Enkil warned. “Have I taught you nothing of what lies beyond the veil?”

“Nothing lies beyond the veil,” the tattooed priest quoted spitefully, “but the dead.”

“You have no idea how right, and how wrong, you are…”

The memory faded as the tattooed, bald priest’s hand lay on the elegantly-wrought metal handle of the door at Aardvark and First. But not before he heard Enkil utter his name.

“... Corvun.”

He hesitated. The memory was completely gone now, leaving him in solitude with only the whispering wind for company.

How long had he been seeing visions of his homeland like that? How long had Atlantis’ ghost been plaguing him? That was millenia ago, all of it. In a time not recognised by the laughably-named “modern” world.

Yet that memory in particular haunted him, as it had since he had first decided on his course of action, weeks before, prior to his feverish preparation and all the invasive, invisible investigation he had completed.

Perhaps it was the similarity of circumstance that brought that memory to the fore. Death had stolen his parents from him; Silvas and his barbaric minions had been only the tool. Death had stolen his father and all the knowledge that should have been passed down to him; Death had robbed this city of this life too.

It was different, he told himself. His parents were killed by an assassin’s hand, in an execution that made no sense and had even less consequence beyond rendering him an orphan. Silvas had remained King; Atlantis had remained underfoot; nothing had changed then.

Tonight’s quarry, though. Tonight’s quarry had been laid low by an altogether more insidious killer than even the most sadistic assassin: a killer that was not even sentient or aware of its lust for souls: disease. An unfair and unmotivated murderer, one that simply existed; without rhyme or reason.

It came, it gripped, it consumed. It stole her away. Claimed by death, and not a single soul - mortal or immortal - in this city had been able to do anything about it. Death once again claimed whoever it wanted, hoarding her away with its past prizes. With his parents.

Not this time. He would rectify that sin, this time.

Corvun reassured himself of the righteousness of his decision, dismissed the old dusty recollection with a weary sigh, and twisted the handle, entering the manor unannounced and still unseen.

[Xedanis]

II

D ‘ D A R Y M A N O R

He hadn’t witnessed her final moments. Truthfully, he had not witnessed much of her life at all; she had always been a figure he was distantly aware of, the sound of a foghorn driving back the mist from an ocean, only heard from miles inland, where one can see the sea itself only as a stripe of azure murk on the edge of the horizon.

He had not once seen her face, not once spoken to her, not once touched her skin or known her pain. He knew enough of those she loved and those she kept; and here, now, he was watching her final moments through their recollections, their imprints upon the room, the anguish and hope they had left behind.

Memory was a curious thing, easily manipulated and reused, if one had the knowledge and discipline to do so, even if there was no one else to give recollection, or the events themselves were dim and nearly lost to the sands of time.

At the precise moment he currently intruded upon, Corvun knew there had been no one present save his quarry. He watched her, unseen as he had been on his way to the Manor, witnessing through the memories that clung to this room as a pall of remembered pain and despair. The despair, he knew, came from those that would clamor into this place after this moment; the looming threat of their anguish and denial was a bittersweet tang hanging in the stagnant air, adding a note of shocking flavor to the otherwise musky and depressing room.

He tore his thoughts from the smells of the past and future, gazing instead at the one who sat upon the bed before him as though she had been born into it and forgotten to rise since that day.

She speaks with ghosts, he realized. Phantoms of memory haloed her as cherubim about the anguished head of Christ in Gethsemane. Corvun’s lip peeled up a fraction at that sentiment; the rebellious smirk of amusement all he could muster in his present state, bound as he was between existence and nonexistence.

The effort of maintaining the Les’Krisa - what the dead priests of Atlantis called the Body of Remembrance - was monumental. The discipline was itself a dramatic rarity of arcane ritual, incongruous amidst the secular, stoic science of Atlantis. That alone made it a daunting and significantly draining task to perform; the fact that Corvun himself had no formal training in the art beyond his own muddled experiments, half-formed memories and recovered tomes of his fallen homeland rendered the act near impossible. It took all of the Atlantean’s considerable focus to maintain the illusion he had woven for his own benefit; scrounging emotional imprints, stealing offerings of sorrow and grief and tearing tormented memories and long dead souls from the room in which he stood, binding them to his will and thereby reconstructing the moment he wished to observe.

Even amongst the savants of his homeland, where Knowledge was exalted above all things, what he did now was profane. Unclean. Sinful. A perversion of something sacred.

Corvun did not care.

“We were human once, weren’t we?” Her voice was tragic. She spoke to the specters that haunted her shoulders; parents of remembered triumphs - remembered peace - come to see her to the quiet rest of the grave. Corvun watched her speak to her spectral guardians, stare at her own withered, clawed hands. He watched her breathe with labored breaths that betrayed the cancer’s imminent victory as it burned through her body, while the infinite burden of pain and thrust-upon leadership claimed its dominance over her mind.

She was a tortured, spent spirit.

He did not need his Atlantean arts to see that.

Yet, for all the theater that played before him as he observed her degeneration, her final end, in his seditious shawl of impenetrable darkness as a thief stalks his quarry in the night, one thought remained with him. One, scholarly dilemma that even Corvun had to admit was pedantic in the extreme.

This was a creature elevated to walk amongst the immortals. Given the blood of immortality, a salve to save any wound, heal any ill… and yet despite what some mortals would have called a miracle, the Cancer that ate at her bones and flesh had continued unabated. Death had longed for this one. And not even its own curse of immortal coil could override that lust for this prize.

That was the reason Corvun stole his witness of these last few moments of her life. He wanted to know why death coveted this soul above so many others; why this one, wretched Russian, this one lowly, sickly creature, this paragon of respect, fear and self-loathing?

What had death to gain from her?

She lifted her gaze to the ghost on her right. A face you recognise; one that has since returned from the grave. But clearly she remembered him as he was when they knew each other. The shadow outweighing the man who cast it.

“Does it hurt?” She asks. “...Dying?”

Corvun was not a being given to emotional outburst, and even the most dire pleas would find a stone wall of rigid scholarly analysis should they come to him. Yet this one simple question…. Tugged at him and his reason. She jerked in sudden agony; the moment was fast approaching. Corvun could nearly see the outstretched Hri’aka stabbing violently into her heart, unhinging her soul and rendering it buoyant; it would not be long now.

“Like falling asleep, sweetheart,” said the ghost.

Corvun raised an eyebrow.

Dimly, he recalled another battle with death, fought in another place. His old enemy, with the sword Corvun had forged, emerging from his blackened remains and the old ghosts of history to run the Last Atlantean through. Silvas had cackled, laughed as the insane tyrant he truly was, victorious and ascendant in his victory over the priest who had laid him low.

Silvernus, the weapon Corvun fashioned to end the God’s tyranny, had pierced his own heart and lungs, severed his own spine, destroyed his chest, and robbed him of his own soul while his body withered as a dead grape on the vine.

It had not been like sleeping at all.

Why would the ghost describe it so?

Memories slammed into his mind through his lowered guard, drawing a cursed grimace from the priest as he fought to regain control. The one he watched became dizzy, euphoric with the memories Corvun soon realized belonged to her.

-nd then there's Kiia's origami on your desks' drawer and the scent of Andre's cigarettes permeating the air and Liander's hand in your hand and Gaz; Gaz in the evening with sad eyes and Dahlia's lopsided smile and Ezra's bark of warning and the expectant, contagious electricity of the war room and Rena grinning up at you with pride in her eyes and - and even Ophelia, her mouth on your cheek and her weight on your lap and her hair - beautiful. She's beautiful. It's so simple, and it's startling to remember-

Corvun gritted his teeth against the onslaught, fighting to separate the crazed insanity of her mind from his own structured, rigourous thoughts. Faces he did not now flew through his perceptions with the awful, cloying stench of familiarity, leaving ghosts of experiences he had never had in their wake. He clamped his eyes shut as though it would stem the tide of whispers and tears assaulting him. He struggled to rationalize what was happening, completely unattuned as he was to the savage chaos of a dying woman’s thoughts unleashed in all their tragic fury.

Amidst the blinding clamor of his tormented mind, Corvun managed to wrench his gaze upright once again. He had not realized that the force of the unwitting barrage had made him cower away as though struck by a blistering wind.

What he saw defied his reason; as an Atlantean, he did not believe in ferrymen, valkyr or messengers of the dead.

Yet it was Death itself who stood before him.

The tableau of remembered pain Corvun had crafted froze, bound as if by ice before the grim reaper’s touch. The hood of his new adversary was the equal of Corvun’s own, etched with ruined, dust-cawled runes and pitted with tears and wear that could only have come from the grave.

“Death…” Corvun whispered. But no, it was more than that. He realized he had not said the word in disbelief, but in recognition. The thunderous revelation blasted all thoughts of memory from his mind as he gazed upon his new adversary even as the faceless specter’s scythe slammed into the ground; Death drew a bony hand over its own cowl and peeled the rotted shawl away from its bone-white emaciated face, and it was then that Corvun realized the runes etched about the reaper's deathshroud were Atlantean in nature, runes of warding and long life.

Corvun’s jaw dropped in shock. “Enkil?!”

“Shas’riga,” said Enkil Lors’riga. “I told you not to suffer the whispers of the dead.”

[Xedanis]

III
D ‘ D A R Y M A N O R

“I do not recall hypocrisy being amongst the virtues of the Life Singer,” Corvun commented as the memory-crafted illusion he had wrought faded around him. It was very much a feeling of awakening; the jarring sense of reality reasserting itself was akin to coming suddenly to the surface after swimming deep underwater. Corvun maintained a neutral expression, even as the burning bitterness of righteous vindication took hold in his belly, and the weight of the Les’Krisa lifted from his mind like a boulder turned into cloud.

Swathed and haughty in the guise of the Grim Reaper, Enkil made no visible expression at all. Even without his hood covering his flesh, the once-artisan of Life seemed to blur in and out of existence, as though yearning to fade from Life with Corvun’s terminated death-dream. His ancient, mottled robes whispered as he glided along the ground towawrd his adversary, feet either silent or not deigning to touch the ground at all.

Corvun observed Enkil’s deathly movements and took in the full force of his ethereal, incorporeal presence. He observed the silence his adversary gave in answer to his observation about Enkil’s own hypocrisy, the old Life priest’s words about whispers of the dead ringing in his mind.

He was unimpressed. Unimpressed with the words that lingered thousands of years later, unimpressed with Enkil’s theatrics and self-important aura of staged indifference. These were all fronts, Corvun knew; such feats of fancy and illusion had been mere parlor games in the prime of Atlantis-That-Was, “magic tricks” as the naively-termed “modern” man’s world would call them; performed by the marginally clever to amuse and perplex the gullibly-ignorant.

He was unmoved as Enkil approached him and hovered, the powerful musk of indifference and apparent jaded lack of cares doing nothing to sway Corvun’s resolve. Enkil leered forward towards Corvun’s face, his own flickering and fading in and out of resolution as a mote of smoke in a heat haze. His expression was condescending stone, carved into a dismissive, blank face of judgement at the younger Atlantean’s barb.

“Y’au ri anase fă,” Enkil remarked, using the old language, a language Corvun had not heard in aeons. Evidently he was as unimpressed with Corvun’s accusation as Corvn was with his theatrics. “You may not judge me, Shas’riga.”

Covun felt a passing jolt of anger at Enkil’s low, spiteful tone. To an untrained ear it was a monotone drawl, but Atlantean speech was a patient and precise thing, easily dismissed as a droning string of meaningless words to the uninitiated. Each sentence was laden with obvious and hidden meanings; Corvun seized upon Enkil’s own veiled barb with easy grace.

“You see yourself as a judge now?” Corvun asked, face indifferent. He tried to keep his voice clear of venom, knowing the senior artisan would seize upon it with the same old lecture about folly, ignorance and youth.

Hypocrisy upon hypocrisy. Corvun would not grant him that chance. He readied himself to speak, staring into Enkil’s cold, cataracted eyes. The Life Singer was a shadow of his former self; old, congealed blood froze in his veins, the details of his wasted, flaking skin rendered stark and pale in the dim light of the room - light which Enkil himself seemed to spew into the room like gouts of mist.

The Singer-turned-Reaper ground away from Corvun on a silent eddy, a stone carving made animate by its own sorrow for being rendered from rock. Enkil gave Corvun no reaction, instead turning back toward the bed, perfectly kept and now devoid of bodies or decoration.

This had been the focal point of the Les’Krisa Corvun had fashioned. Like the foundation stone on which a building would rest, this one innocuous piece of furniture had not been where Corvun’s quarry had spent her final deathly moments, but it was the point in space and time where the greatest burden had been placed by those mourning her loss.

Corvun watched Enkil drift to the bedside, saw his bleached pale hands leer out from the folds of his tattered sleeves. The movement was slower and more deliberate than the reaper’s normal, already-glacial pace; Corvun opened his mouth to speak but the drawling curl of Enkil’s rasping voice overrode his own.

“I will not allow you to proceed,” Enkil warned. “The honored dead must stay dead.”

“Have you seen the chaos left in her wake?” Corvun retorted. “This city tears itself apart in a mad rush to fill the void left in her absence.”

Enkil let out a grinding squeal of a noise. It took Corvun a moment to realize… it was laughter.

“You speak irrelevancies,” the reaper parodied. His bony hand traced the fabric of the bed still, ignorant of the irritation building in the younger Atlantean’s voice.

“I seek to undo that which should not have come to pass,” Corvun said flatly, and the parallels with the old argument, thousands of years ago, were not lost upon him. Here again was the same exact scenario replaying before his very eyes; and here, just as before, Enkil sought to bar his progress.

Corvun tried to restrain the venom in his words. “She is needed. She must be res-.”

“You speak irrelevancies,” Enkil repeated. “Irrelevancies, and falsehoods.”

Corvun clenched and unclenched a fist. Forever, since the fall of Atlantis-That-Was, he had committed himself to an existence free of emotion, of cold thought and stoic remembrance. He was the chronicler of aeons. His writings encompassed the sum of all human history. He had stood, impassive, as the world had plunged into global war. He had witnessed, unmoved, the fall of Rome and of the Twin Towers with equal detachment.

He had seen rage and grief and terror and anguish, famine and excess and decadence and defeat, all of this without being moved to tears or to destruction. Unshakably resolute, gathering facts and committing them all to an impartial account of years. The effort had been a work of centuries in the making, and throughout all of it, he maintained a neutral, stone-hard observance.

Yet, after six minutes of admonishment from this ghost of his own past, the Atlantean priest was once again a hot-blooded, impatient sh’ikura, enduring another lecture from his master. His superior. His teacher.

“You stopped me once,” Corvun said with a low gravitas that carried a warning no creature would miss. “You stopped me, because I allowed it. I allowed your words and your fear to dictate my path, and the result was an imperfect blade, and the destruction of our home. I will not allow you to stop me a-”

“Irrelevancies, falsehoods, and ego,” Enkil interrupted with all of the control and emotionless gaunt attitude that Corvun’s speech had lost. He did not look back to the younger Atlantean, as though he was either dismissing Corvun’s impassioned words or not hearing them to begin with. The interruption made the younger priest’s blood run hot; Corvun stifled the fire with a stubborn effort of will.

“Why do you insist on standing in my path?” Corvun demanded, walking up to the spectral form of Enkil as though he were simply another man and not an evident apparition of deathly power. He levelled his gaze with the malnourished, dead features of his old teacher. “What does she mean to you?”

“You speak irrelevancies,” Enkil responded.

Corvun shook his head, but he did not break his eye contact with the reaper. “No, I do not. When you stopped me in Atlantis, it was for a reason. You wanted for me to mourn, to move on, to grow into an adult. You wanted me to let my parents die and from the experience, become fully mature, and take my place on the council. But what of this one? What significance is she to you? What lesson is there to teach me about a being who I did not even know? Do you even know her name?”
Enkil remained silent for a long time. Finally, he spoke.

“You will not bring her back to this cursed existence. You will not raise the dead.”

“Answer the question!” Corvun near-yelled at his cowled adversary. “Tell me her name!”

Enkil hovered over a syllable, the sound forming in his throat, his lips parting and forming the letter, awaiting only the breath to give it voice.

He did not give it voice. The reaper’s gaze returned to its stone-neutral indifference. Corvun saw this simple decision as a sign of surrender, a signal that he had won; and so he pressed the issue further.

“Tifereth. Her name was - is - Tifereth.”

Enkil turned, a halo of ice and mist beginning to crawl up his bony limbs. He floated again, an inch from the ground, seeking to distance himself from Corvun’s maddened rhetoric.

“She will walk again, and she will walk without disease or the fear of death,” Corvun admonished. “And she will do so by my hand.”

“No,” Enkil commanded, raising a bony fist. “She will not.”

Corvun realized that the signs of defeat were in fact distractions while his adversary gathered whatever powers he had gained. The younger atlantean could only open his mouth to speak before the world vanished around him, along with the fading echo of Enkil’s last words.

She is mine.

[Xedanis]

IV
A T L A N T I S

Atlantean steel does not break.

Thousands of years can go by; the rage of nature and artifice alike can hurl themselves against its pure, silver form; the fires of forges and suns alike cannot melt its cold edge, and the frozen wastes of polar ice and space cannot do anything to soften its mathematically perfect geometry.

Forging an unbreakable blade had been the first challenge Corvun faced on reaching ascension; the precarious and awkward phase of a young man’s life that outsiders would call “adolescence” or “puberty.” For Atlanteans, these years of inept, staggered immaturity and coltish, ignoble arrogance were more of a mental process than physical. Though Atlanteans aged and developed into their prime as normal humans did, no Atlantean ever had to deal with the clunking landslide of humiliation that humans still endure to this day; the confusion and horror of a voice that spiralled in pitch as a richter scale before an earthquake, the self-conscious hell that was having to go shopping for your first bra with a male parent - who was equally uncomfortable - or the sudden, jilted realization that members of the opposite sex were not, in fact, “icky” and so forth.

For Atlanteans, physical maturity was a steady, gradual lowering of voice. Adolescence was an accelerated process; their adult lives began quicker, their minds free from the awkward transition of physical maturity that, among the other races of the world, would last months and steal precious time from other pursuits.

This was just as well, for one of the most important, most quintessential things about Atlantis and its artifices, was endurance.

Atlantean steel did not break. So, therefore, the artisan crafting it could not break. They must be possessed of a mind without distraction, a mind unencumbered by raging chemical secretions and awkward social missteps.

But, not every Atlantean was immune to the chemicals and hormones that still raced through their bodies. Even a mind as strong as an Atlantean mind was still vulnerable to the stresses of so radical a shift in physical form in so short a time. Quite often, this overwhelming change led to difficulty maintaining one’s scholarly mind; and Corvun had been one of those that suffered from this malady.

His first thirteen attempts to forge Atlantean steel by his father’s side had, therefore, met with humiliating failure.

But at long last, the fourteenth blade had held strong. It had remained unbroken, and outlived Atlantis itself. Silvernus. Corvun’s greatest artifice, and single most violent regret.

He found himself on the ground, facing the sword’s incumbent scabbard; the burned, hollowed flesh of the Tyrant King, Silvas. Corvun stared upward at the ashen husk, blinking away tears of… what? Tears?

He rubbed a palm over his face, clearing his eyes, and it was then that he realized that this was impossible. He rolled over onto his stomach, the cold solidity of the ground beneath him giving lie to his internal declaration. He pushed his weight up off the ground and regained his feet, brushing flecks of imaginary dust off his robes. Without the patina of age and rot that had begun to clung to him, the runes on his robe’s trim glittered in liquid silver beneath the great Barrier that held the ocean’s wrath at bay above him.

Only… it should not have held the ocean’s wrath at bay. In fact, the entirety of where he stood now should have been nothing more than a sunken, flooded memory. Atlantis had been destroyed twice in its unhappy existence; the first was by his own hand, with the fourteenth sword he had forged, which he plunged into the husk standing before him, causing it to burn to a hollowed crisp and drag his home beneath the waves as it went beneath in death. The second had come when his old nemesis had somehow resurrected himself and -

“You remember false time,” came a grinding voice from behind him. Corvun turned away from the rotted remains of Silvas’ splintered, charcoaled form. Around him, the sepulchral majesty of the Aevum loomed, and the speaker’s voice yet echoed around the tattooed Stone Singer’s bald head as it glinted with the reflected light of glowing stones still hovering about the tomb of his home, lost fireflies too witless and stunned to escape their jar.

Corvun cast his gaze up, away from the central dais on which he had found himself.

“Enkil,” he decided, recognising the pantomime robes that his former teacher had swathed himself in, his desperate costume, his false identity that had been intended to scare Corvun, and failed.

“Silence your ego, Shas’riga. It betrays you.”

Corvun shook his head to clear his mind. He cursed the elder Atlantean’s mind-reading, and stuffed the part of his psyche that longed to pierce and stab at Enkil’s apparent hypocrisy down, deep into the hidden corners of his mind. As he did so, he felt his scholar’s detachment, his curiosity and control reassert themselves.

“What do you mean, false time?”

Enkil floated down the dusted stairs, disturbing not a single mote. Corvun braced himself for the icy aura that surrounded his old teacher, the inescapable sense of impending doom that he only just now realized had surrounded the other Priest in D’Dary manor.

The aura that had broken his concentration and sent his Les’krisa to an abrupt, icy end.

But it did not come.

Enkil passed Corvun as a cloud across the sun. All that Corvun perceived of that deathly aura was a passing breeze. It wasn’t until he opened his eyes that Corvun realized he had closed them; the same was true for his defensive posture, arms held up to guard his face. And did he detect a shiver in his bones? Was that the cold? Or was it…

“Fear,” Enkil said the word with the same fervence as the dead husk he was now inspecting. Silvas’ rotted, charcoal remains gaped eyelessly into the void, ignorant of the erstwhile reaper’s inspection.

Enkil’s manner became more animate as his robed limb reached up to the hole in the old Tyrant’s chest. Corvun stared at the movement, believing that the elder’s robe might fall back and reveal skeletal fingers devoid of flesh; defiantly, Enkil’s clothing did not move.

He ignored Corvun’s question as he peered at the other Atlantean, his face once again wholly shrouded by the shadow of his voluminous hood.

“Where is the sword,” Enkil breathed. Even his questions carried the rattle of the dead.

Corvun looked at him, quizically.

“Why does it matter?”

Enkil did not move from his unearthly stare. “Where is the sword,” he repeated.

“Why do you want it?” Corvun asked. “That weapon brings only ruin. Do you mean to bring ruin?”

“You speak irrelevancies.”

“No,” Corvun retorted, “I do not.” He took a bold step forward. Enkil still stood on the dais; the raised platform made him a head taller than his former student. Despite this, Corvun was defiant, and gazed directly into the blackness of Enkil’s cowl, where he decided the other’s eyes should rest.

“First you seek to stop me from restoring Tifereth to life, now you wish for a weapon that can end worlds. Why. Why is that?”

Enkil did not answer. He matched Corvun’s stare. Corvun, unperturbed, went on.

“Why do you want these things? Why hoard a dead woman’s soul? Why seek the apocaly-”

Corvun stopped short when he realized he had answered his own question.

“You mean to end her City.”

Enkil did not answer.

“That is what this is about, is it not? You mean to end her City, consign all of it to dust. You wish to inflict Atlantis’ doom on an innocent domain.”

Enkil did not move. “You speak irrelevancies.”

“I do not think I do, Enkil. I do not think I do.”

Corvun turned away from the Dais, and made for the stairs that led up between the Aevum’s tiered seats toward its exit. As he took one sure-footed stride after another, his voice carried back to the Reaper’s ears.

“I sought to restore her to spite Time and Death for witholding my parents from me. But now that I know your intent… that you seek to bring cataclysm and genocide, and her remaining dead, somehow, is vital to your plans... “

He paused as he looked to the top of the stairs. Enkil barred his path.

Corvun let out a triumphant, vindicated grin.

“I will not rest until your will is undone.”

Enkil’s voice carried just a hint of desperation. .Or had Corvun imagined it?

“Death cannot be undone.”

No, he had not imagined it.

“We shall see.”

[Neuk]

V
O N I L I A T H
THE WORLD BETWEEN WORLDS

“Wake.”

The command was not what she had been expecting. She resisted it, with all her being, instinctively, defiantly, powerfully.

“Fuck off,” the words escaped her before she could stop them. Not that she would have stopped them; the command had intruded upon the dream. It was a good dream, a peaceful dream.

In this… non-world, dreams were the closest to reality one could really get. Of course, she had no idea that she was even here. To her, this was Heaven. Or Hell. Or something else. She didn’t pay much attention to where she was. Her hand was shielding a small, hand-carved candle as its guttering flame tried defiantly to light up the cold room in which she was sitting. That candle, its desperate battle to remain alive, and the smell of Shchi in the large metal pot on her little oven range’s lone hob were all that constituted her existence - or non-existence - at this moment.

Everything else could piss off and rot.

“Wake,” the voice insisted again. Disembodied, floating free of any source, a simple and insistent order permeating the non-existent brain matter inside her non-existent skull. “Fuck off,” she responded anew. Her hand cupped the tiny candle delicately, protectively, as though the voice she knew existed only in her mind were a threat to the little flame’s survival, threatening to snuff out the tiny light before it could even really exist.

The voice fell silent.

For just a moment.

“This is wrong,” it declared. “This is not your life. This is not your memory. This is an error. An irrelevancy. Go back further.”

Tifereth finally blew out an exasperated blast of air.

“Idi nakhuy s chuzhoy zagrobnoy zhizn'yu,” she found herself saying.

She immediately stopped. That language hadn’t passed her lips since…

“I gave you this afterlife,” the voice growled. “I will interfere with it however I please.”

The words were spiteful, but the emotion that envenomed such spite, made it real and biting, was completely absent. Without that gasoline to make the fire real, it was nothing but a shitty little scrap of cloth trying to look like fire over a couple of LED lights.

Tifereth laughed off the damn thing.

In response, the world collapsed into a violent fury of bloody terror and searing flesh. All around her, the walls collapsed. They were replaced with crags and jagged spikes of red, burning rock. What she suspected the heart of a volcano may have resembled.

Tifereth was still laughing.

“Go back,” the voice loomed. Its volume hadn’t changed; it was still perfectly clear, undrowned by the cacophony of flame and force around her.

Her candle still burned. Defiantly. Just as she did.

“Go back. Remember.”

Tifereth kept laughing.

The walls gave way, in fits and starts. Like a projector with a quickly dying bulb. They were there, then flickering, then not there, then back again. She caught the fleeting impression of stale, smooth white rock.

No. Not rock. Stone. Deliberately placed stone, not the natural coarse formation of rock. This stone was too smooth, too… poured to be a natural formation.

Another glimmer. Another glance. Another glimpse. White flashed to red flashed to grey flashed to black flashed to red flashed to gold-

“Good…” the voice seemed to approve.

The projection, hallucination, whatever the fuck it was supposed to be, disappeared. Simply ‘clicked’ off.

Tifereth was in the middle of a circular, impossibly perfect dome of poured white stone. The floor was inlaid with concentric circles of poured, shining gold, platinum, and a million other shining, glimmering metals she couldn’t identify.

She finally stopped laughing. Not because of the otherworldliness of this place. Not because she didn’t recognise it. Far from it. She knew it intimately.

Yet she had never once seen it in her life.

That was what scared her.

She looked up.The candle she had been cradling remained in her hand, a talisman of the life she had left behind. She felt cold floor against her bare feet.

She had a body.

She had not realized it. Not until now. The candle was real and her hands were real and the floor was real and her feet were real and this place was … was…

“Atlantis.”

The voice again.

“Your home.”

What?

“Your real home.”

Tifereth looked about the insanely clean and impossibly smooth walls of the dome in which she stood. She wanted to speak. She wanted to say something, to deny this, to decry it.

She couldn’t.

It was too real.

Too much like…

“Home?”

[Neuk]

VI
P O R T L U N A
THE ARBORETUM - RELIQUARY

I know what you thought. The moment you bore witness to my return to Atlantis-that-was, the fruit of Enkil's endeavors to keep me from interfering with his goals.

When did he send me? How far back? What year? What Atlantean year?

I cannot answer you.

Not easily.

Time does not translate well.

I lose count of the number of times I have attempted to reconcile what this world - your world - conceives of as the passage of time, with my own understanding of that long-winded taskmaster. It is impossible. One may as well encourage a crumbling, venerable old mountain to rise from its roots and burst into enthusiastic song. To explain the detailed operation of a nuclear reactor to the primordial inventor of humanity’s wheel. Which, incidentally, was not invented at all, but happened upon entirely by accident.

Perhaps however, Humanity's greatest "accident" will aid me, however. Permit me to explain to you, if you will indulge me, using the time-worn method of allegory, how my understanding differs from yours.

It is a simple exercise of imagination. You may easily be able to “picture” the circumstance, the incredibly lucky and ultimately completely unintentional invention of a simple tool that would drive humanity to the “heights” of technology it possesses today. Imagine, the golem-like stupidity of the ape-man, wielding his rock above his head in his crude hands. Imagine him bringing it down upon his enemy of that moment.

What made that other proto-human his enemy? Nothing more complex than the rock-wielder’s desperate hunger and the convenience of his enemy’s presence while he held the rock. Luck. Chance. Fortune. Accident. Fate.

These are all words that describe one thing. Which word fits depends upon how well it fits with your understanding. It is the same with time.

I digress. Back to our analogy.

Imagine that ape-man, who does not care for time or words. He knows only his hunger, the rock in his hands, and the fragility of his enemy’s cranium. He brings the rock down upon his compatriot’s skull. You may be able to picture the visceral explosion of brain matter and impacted, splintered bone. You may see the rock falling from the craterous wound, its fatal work done as it tumbles into thin air.

Ignore the picture of the blood and brains. Ignore the flesh and the sick, squelching choke of a creature whose brain is suddenly unable to command his body to breathe. This is the obvious; this is what your senses force you to see. Stay with the rock. See the rock. Follow it as it falls away from the dead ape-man’s skull. Try, if you will, to put that man out of your mind altogether. Picture instead the damage the corpse has wrought upon the rock itself. See it breaking, splintering along its length, its hard, near-square, slabbish form losing chunks of grey porous matter to leave, in their scattering wake, a roughly round shape.

As you picture that round shape, it hits the floor. It rolls down the rocky crag the pair were stood upon. Thus, the first wheel trundles and bounces down a craggy, mossy knoll, tumbling forth unheralded along the wildgrass of prehistoric Earth, where it comes to a halt a few feet away from its genesis, and falls on its side with a dull thump.


I am not one normally given to telling "tall tales." I applaud you, if you were able to stay with that allegorical wheel; I will give you bonus credit - I believe that is the term - for realizing that I did not just describe the invention of the wheel, at least, not the "Real" version.

In that tale, our ape man was bluntly satisfied with his enemy’s death, concerned only with what he understood as “now”, and promptly set to eating the remains wholesale and raw. He did not call it a wheel. He did not even call it a rock. He didn't perceive anything outside of his meal. Certainly not his place in the grand tapestry of Time.

That is your reason, then. It is why I cannot easily answer you. Time does not translate well from Atlantean observation of it to the modern human’s understanding of it because you are limited by the blunt specifics of your limited lifespan. I am not.

Please forgive me if I sound condescending. I am not trying to be. I am merely trying to show you that you simply understand - and are limited by - the capacities and restrictions of your own time, and your own short lifespan. Just as I am. You are not unlike the wheel's true - Mesopotamian - inventors, when compared to myself, or any other Atlantean.

They made pottery. I made cities of liquid granite. They were the shoot breaking the soil; I was - I am - the towering old tree.

It is the same with Time.

Ask anyone among the common mass of humanity how the Wheel was invented; they will concoct a fantasy akin to the one I fashioned for you here. Ask me to explain how Atlantis measured time, and how long I have walked this world, or - more pertinent to this moment - what point in Atlantis' history I was sent back to by Enkil’s withering touch, and I cannot easily “spin such a yarn.” Not due to my lack of imagination - though, as I have said, I am not given often to flights of fancy. Rather, because I witness time in too different a fashion.

How did Atlantis measure Time? How did we understand it?

The truth, in as simple and understandable terms as I can muster, is that we did not.

Days were of no consequence. Neither were months or years. Dates were merely fruit and nothing more. We no more paid attention to the rising and setting of the Sun - other than those of us who studied our position within the stars - than we did to our own breathing. It was only when the sun stopped rising that we noticed its absence.

We concerned ourselves with ourselves. Seasons, epochs, aeons, these words had no meaning. We counted our generations, searched for new knowledge. The Riga kept our traditions and we, in turn, kept to our families.

Thus, in as poor a translation as Time allows, you have your answer.

When did Enkil send me?

To my family.