Woolgathering

by Christina Hambleton

  ***

  There was a blackness enveloping the land, a yawning void reaching out with darkest tendrils to efface what had felt like years of effort. Various and sundry, spectacular creatures were swallowed; rivers of magic were sucked dry. Tiny cottages of fay and faerie, villages of screaming women and children, powerless heroes and wearied villains— the void was indiscriminate.

  There was one who could have saved them. Yet their father, in the midst of the ruin, shed not a tear. Not even when the stars and their angels were snuffed out, their flame expired, and they were the dearest of his children. Indeed, he did not weep for any of it— felt nothing at all. The man was numb with the same, all-consuming gloom that devoured his world. He was empty, and the existence of anything save his very being was an eyesore.

  At least he knew there was a rhyme, a reason to his creation. A master hand wiser, larger than his own that had plucked and spun him from the grand tapestry of life— or so he hoped. Lying in the eternal, formless deep, he stared at the pen and journal in his feeble grasp, then he willed those, too, to disappear. It seemed that he was the only being, the only truth in all the universe, but that had held true from the very beginning, from the moment he'd let himself dream that he could start a world all his own.

  What a fool he was. There was nothing. He had nothing.

  He wanted to go home.

  Did he have a home, though? Or was it a memory he'd fabricated, here in this timeless existence he led? Hundreds of years had passed, according to the generations of heroes he'd sired, and yet he felt it had been a much shorter time, an eternity. What would inventing thirty years of life before his lonely cultivation of this void be for his subconscious? He'd raised giants. He'd felled tyrant and king alike. And yet, what senselessness there was to it all. Year after year he felt less sympathy for his children, left them to themselves and their pernicious ways for longer and longer. There was no progress.

  In the history of the world he remembered man had built bridges and ships to the heavens, they'd divined meaning from the thread of space and time. But not his failed creations. Without a push from him, a hint, they might never move, might as well seal themselves in a cryonic time chamber.

  How futile. How meaningless.

  He would go mad like this, he knew. Already he'd begun to doubt the only certainties that had sustained him for this long— that there had to be a way out, that surely someone would join him here, in his world. As in someone indigenous this dimension, or his dimension, or any dimension outside his imagination. So long he'd waited, trying to entertain himself by breathing life into his musings. And all for naught. He ached from the cold, the loneliness of his unassailable power. He wanted to end it. He was too scared to.

  What if he failed, after all? What if enough of that fibre of reason in him remained to keep him from his own destruction? Suicide had been possible, even before his new-found authority, but he had become a demigod, and could such a monstrosity die? Hell, if even that was lost to him, then what did he have? And if death came, would he be denied an afterlife? Now that he'd watched himself sweep his world into nothingness the thought of enduring a similar fate made him sick.

  No. He couldn't die; not like this. There were still the memories, invented or no, of that world. The one where people hurt you and helped you, where life had meaning. Such precious meaning... and to think he'd left it all behind.

  "You are fortunate," said a voice as it surveyed the void, the yet nubile devastation, "That gods are not as eager to destroy as humans."

  Eyes widening, the man jolted to his feet. "C— Charon?" he breathed, praying to God this was real, that it wasn't a manifestation of the deep yearning inside of him.

  The pale spectre grinned. "I hadn't expected that you would be so glad to see me, Icarus."

  Icarus threw himself at the apparition, seizing its collar with wild eyes. "Please— I'm done!" he cried frantically, terrified that this chance would elude him. "I'm begging you: take me home! I can't take this, I—"

  Charon's grin softened a tad at its corners. "It has only been seven days. You would abandon this place so quickly?"

  "It's only been—?! Never mind—yes!" the man choked, sobbing now for relief. His wide, tearing eyes had all the ambiguous joy and resentment of a child once abandoned, yet the former sentiment was prevailing. It was hard not to succumb to it, when moments before he'd had naught but despair for company. Now, even if it was just a ghost, a ferryman— even that was proof of something!

  "Yes, please!" he cried with renewed fervor. "Take me home! I'll do anything! I— everything is wrong. I'm not a God. I want to go home! I—!"

  Charon frowned. "I'm afraid that's not quite possible."

  He might have twisted a dagger through Icarus's heart. The man's spirit sunk from his breast back to the low, hellish pit of his stomach, his shoulders sagging with its weight. He might have staggered from the blow, but he had been too expectant, too fearful that it would fall, and he was left only with agony.

  "Don't say that again," he begged in a small voice. "Don't... say it... Damn it!" He seized Charon by the shoulders now, a fierce and wounded beast. "Why did you do this to me?!! You knew what would happen, didn't you?! How could you even have—?!" A sob robbed him of his anger all at once and he slumped onto the spectre's shoulders, heaving tears and pounding the immaterial breast. "Why?!!"

  Charon patted his back. "I only said," he spoke, refusing to answer the man's questions, "That it wasn't quite possible." That inscrutable grin, the cruel tear of a knife through his features, returned. "I have a feeling someone will be joining you very soon."

  Icarus looked up at him, and he really was angry. "You mean you wish to drag another into this hell?! Is that supposed to comfort me?! The exchange of my life for another?!"

  "She," Charon murmured, slipping away to turn and shrug his shoulders, "Chose to come here, just as you did."

  "A... woman," Icarus seemed only to take the news harder. "Back then you didn't warn me— not about this place. Did you warn her?"

  "I warned both of you," the spirit spoke patiently, as though to a child. "That you didn't listen was no concern of mine. And it will take more than her coming here to free you, I'm afraid."

  The man's fists clenched, his jaw tight. "What will it take, then?"

  Charon turned, and materialized so quickly in Icarus's face that he stumbled and fell in the darkness, only to find the spirit looming over him.

  "Your will is too feeble to leave of your own accord. You must convince her, too, to accompany you."

  "That will be no problem," the man assured him acrimoniously. "A few days here is enough to make anyone long to go."

  "Ah, but she is terribly stubborn, my dear Icarus," Charon murmured, almost pityingly beneath his unerring grin. "It would not surprise me if you had to win her trust twice over before she so much as began to listen to your philosophical musings, your reason. And there is a limit to how long before the two of you become a part of this dimension. You cannot taste idly of worlds and expect to emerge in all in one piece."

  The fear had returned to Icarus's blue eyes as the words, Charon's silky voice, trickled under his skin, into his blood, through his veins. Sweat dampened his clammy skin, and when next he spoke his voice was hoarse.

  "How long do I have?" he whispered, and Charon's pupiless eyes narrowed with satisfaction.

  "A week," he declared, his face inches from that of the trembling man. "You have one week, Icarus."

  II. By the Artist’s Hand