Beneath Ceaseless Skies #150
Page 9
“I know his name, and I know now what has become of him.”
They waited. The house suddenly felt like my own. The rest of them—even the emperor—were only guests here.
So many books yet to be read.
“He was called home after the Sky Wars, “ I told them, “but he had foreseen the god’s coming. He slept, so as to remain out of reach.”
The emperor paled slightly at mention of the god. I remembered the stories they told of the emperor summoned over the mountains to play the role of justice when they executed Septimus, the only of the Sixteen they had been able to take alive.
“One cannot kill a god. But the wizard fell to face it. Not to defeat it. Not to destroy it. To let it absorb him, as it was absorbing the stream of time, the sentience of its priests, the flow of jellies across the sky. To conquer through submission, and by so doing shape its motions and its nature from within.”
The wizard’s ring felt warm on my finger. A breeze played at the back of my neck.
“I know the wizard’s name. You are Theodorus, as was your father before you and his before him. The wizard was Theodulus,” I said. “As am I.”
The emperor’s stunned silence was vast, and in it I heard submission.
The clock chimed, the wind laughed at my ear, and the wizard’s house—home now—hung high and stately over the emperor’s plains.
Copyright © 2014 Stephen Case
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
Stephen Case is currently completing a dissertation on nineteenth-century stellar astronomy at the University of Notre Dame. His fiction has appeared previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and most recently in Lore and the Sword and Laser anthology and is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction. He lives with his wife, four kids, and three chickens in Kankakee, Illinois. Find him on the internet at www.stephenrcase.com.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
COVER ART
“Kaybor Gate,” by Alex Ries
Alex Ries is a Melbourne- based illustrator and concept artist. His artworks have been featured by publishers including Clarkesworld Magazine, Pearson Education Canada, and the Discovery Channel. He worked with THQ’s Bluetongue Entertainment studio and contributed to four published titles. His studies in diverse visual media such as painting, 3D visualization, and film, coupled with an interest in biology and real-world technology, have fostered an artistic style that can not only accurately illustrate life from the real world but fictional life as well. View his work at www.alexries.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1046
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.