The Tankar Dawn

by Walt Popester

  He turned to look at the high mirror. It was embedded in a mighty column of mayem, and of colossal walls that stretched as far as the eye could see and delimited the place. The monolith disappeared into the mist, curving and converging somewhere further down the road. That in my dreams was made of Manegarm. What the Ktisis is this? A portal, a hollow column? Why was the melted mayem inside it?

  The mirror appeared red now—or maybe just on that side—yet nothing had changed in the reflection of Konkra. The god of Emptiness observed him, standing still in that nightmare.

  A paradox. He took a step. I’m not afraid. I’m no longer afraid of you.

  Both advanced and the reflection of the god became small, reaching Dagger’s height. The boy held out his right hand toward himself, and Konkra held out his left one. They touched the mirror and felt nothing but a perfect equilibrium of attraction and repulsion. Konkra pushed with his claw and then his paw, to which Dagger opposed an equal, opposite force.

  There’s no way to turn back. I’m stuck in here forever.

  Beyond the reflection he saw her too, alone in the world he had left. Kugar burst in tears and hammered her fists on the surface, generating a shock wave that made her fall to the ground.

  She can’t get in here, Dagger realized. She’s mortal, and this is a hell tail made for a god. Tail made for…me.

  He saw her get up and draw near. She brought her fingers to her mouth and then to him, although she couldn’t see him. She said something, and Dag read her lips: I will love you forever. Kugar clutched her clothes, moved some steps back, and fled.

  “No!” Dagger threw himself against the insurmountable barrier in front of him, but Konkra opposed his own pain.

  He turned around. The last road to walk was in front of him. He saw again the silvery capillaries. They kept snaking back, inviting him to follow them to the truth.

  Forgive us. He thought about Kugar’s last words. She didn’t say forgive me. Was she referring to Baikal? Evoken…Warren?! Who was the ghost at her side as she pushed me here? He raised his head and saw two moons; one red, the other green, like the shades of everything around him. This place is not real. I’m not here.

  He drew Solitude, but only the remains of a broken coffered dome emerged from the tree crowns. Circumspect, he looked around, walking in the grass high to his belly and touching the ears of the wild wheat.

  The muddy, broken terrain now rose, now descended among the towering trunks and the dense undergrowth. He circumvented the colossal bust of a goddess, her turgid stone breasts caressed by the roots of the oaks which grew above.

  Further on, in the forest that had overtaken the ruins, the marble slabs of the old floor appeared, and the basin of an octagonal fountain. It was made up of a maze of canals, with a split sphere in the center. He recognized it immediately; he had seen it when he wore the Armor and met Khalifa in the crab. This maze symbolizes the power, I think, the hard way to get to it, and keep it.

  “I know this place,” he whispered as if the horrible jackal god was listening. “I’ve already seen it. This was the inner courtyard of your temple, the place where the two halves come to connect. The Theater of Pain, the Black Chamber, and…” The vegetation closed on the path. Dagger cut the leaves with his sword.

  At the end of the journey through the worlds, the Twilight Hall appeared.

  It’s not stuff you see every day, he thought. Beyond an immense stone arch, in perspective over time and space, the interior of the palace was projected in its ancient splendor. Before the threshold the columns lay broken on the ground, covered with vegetation; beyond it they stood proud, supporting a ceiling as unreachable as the sky of which it took the place. Before that extreme boundary, the ancient soot traced the profile of flames forever extinct, while a little beyond the torches lit from below those Gorgor faces whom time had now erased the connotations. The thickest darkness hid in their closed lips, deep in their orbits, exalting the copper green of their skin and the scarlet lips.

  Soon he realized that the stone arch was nothing more than the perfect section of the walls of the building. Outside, they were flanked by two graveled alleys. Dagger froze when he saw two children playing a little further, crouched to the ground. They saw him too and ran to meet him, but when they crossed the threshold nothing remained of them but old, gray bones claimed by the roots.

  As in many other occasions of his and others’ life, the border was intangible in front of him and yet so terribly present.

  “This place is not on the level of real things, but beyond the mirror. In the depths of your memory.” He looked ahead. “Yet someone infiltrated it, right? Someone has contaminated and adapted it to his new home.”

  Konkra didn’t answer. Or maybe he did; a sharp noise crossed the forest and reached Dagger, stone against stone. For a moment he felt like the whole place was trying to tell him something.

  He walked toward the gap in time and space which separated the past glory from the decadence around him. There, beyond the threshold, the dream.

  The dream is real, as long as we are. Dagger stopped when the tall grass disappeared to give way to a paved marble floor. He looked up. Three columns of mayem, like the one he had crossed to get there, spurted faraway in the forest and rose to the sky. They joined on the keystone placed in a straight line above him, on the threshold between the present and the past. Only a stump hanging in the void survived of the column behind him.

  One part could have been used by Ktisis to create the Hammer, right? He expected an answer from himself, which didn’t come. Why did you break it? Why did you break this Gate?

  He watched in wonder the marvelous structure, his foot suspended above the doorway to a new past. When he landed it, he felt like passing from light to dark and smiled spontaneously. His eyes adjusted as he advanced with caution, until, in the midst of a wide obscurity at the far end of the colonnade, a white spot appeared—a throne, and a white figure sitting on it.

  He recognized him instantly: Khalifa seemed similar to how Dagger had seen him partly depicted in the Sixth Chapel. His immaculate tunic covered his whole body and ended with a hood, dropped on his face to leave only his chin and unmistakable beard uncovered. He held his hands firm on the armrests and his feet resting on the single step.

  Behind the throne, the crab. Hanoi was covered in full by copper plates, apart from the eyes as green as emeralds. The closed claws were lying at the sides of the throne, guarding and protecting the Gorgor sovereign. On his carapace, statues and high reliefs talked about stories of which only time kept memory.

  An iridescent sail-shaped apse was behind them—an immense and curved wall whose paint had to contain mother-of-pearl crushed inside.

  Two channels collected the water running along the walls of green marble, flowing placidly between the walls and the columns. Dagger turned around to follow their course. Once they reached the limit of that vision, or division, of reality, only two anonymous ditches remained of them. He watched for a long time the forest stretching beyond the arch.

  “You can go back whenever you want, don’t worry,” said the voice at the bottom of the colonnade. “Of course…not so far back. Crossing the mirror, you entered a paradox that doesn’t belong to this world.”

  Dag turned to Khalifa, walking slowly forward. “Where are we?”

  “In my shelter,” the Gorgor replied. “My house on the tree, that corner of the Creation which belongs to me and me alone. I locked all the world out of here.”

  “You should teach me how to do that.” Dagger brushed a column and followed one of his thousand veins. “Araya’s library on the five oaks, the infinite dark towers of the dark lords. In every monster or genius hides a never-grown child who just wants to isolate himself from the world. Maybe even in…” He turned around, as if there was someone watching him.

  Khalifa slightly leaned forward. “What is it? Someone is finally remembering?”

  Dagger looked at the Gorgor again. “This was mine, once. I fled, didn’t
I?” Only now did he notice a small hole on Khalifa’s white tunic, at the height of his belly.

  Khalifa nodded. “For you, this whole world is nothing but a tree house. A little bigger, maybe, but only a shelter from…bigger horrors. Sometimes you remember them, don’t you?”

  Dag took two quick steps. “Yes, but there’s a light!” He paused. “A light that seems to drive them out.”

  “Shhh,” the dark, candid lord interrupted him. “Slowly, now. Easy.”

  Dagger noticed a green bud emerging from a split in the floor which had not been there a moment ago.

  “This has always been your mistake, like all the boys,” Khalifa continued. “As soon as you see your goal, you start running to reach it. But you run fast, too fast, until you hit it and break it in a thousand pieces.”

  As he approached, Dag noticed that the tear on Khalifa’s dress was widening. “Sometimes I’d really like to know who I’m talking to, whether you or the damn crab.”

  “Welcome to the world of those who deal with you.” Khalifa smiled under his hood. “Who are they really talking to? What are the memories they want to handle, yours or those of a god?”

  It’s not just his vest…Dagger realized. Looking around as he walked forward, he saw the floor split and a Gorgor face lose part of its nose. A root climbed a column. A fragment of starry sky appeared where the roof was no longer whole.

  “I was the first mortal to set foot in the temple,” Khalifa finally revealed. “If you’re smart as you think, you’ve already understood it.”

  “The bed of the river…”

  Khalifa nodded, as an old wrinkled shoulder appeared from his torn robe. “Once the river followed a different course, then…something happened. A dream has been turned to a deep nightmare.”

  Dagger stumbled on a root, the first to cross his path to Hanoi. The crab was losing one at a time the foils which covered him, as his eyes seemed to slowly extinguish.

  That was the last confirmation, if he really needed it: I’m walking in time.

  For the first time, Khalifa’s eyes reached him through a hole in the hood—wonderful Gorgor hazel eyes.

  The copper leaves had almost disappeared from the crab now, and the stone faces lost their color. Twelve columns per side, erected in the lianas hanging from the ceiling, marched into the last darkness.

  The apse was no longer shining with the iridescent tint, replaced by the anonymous gray of a wall where the marks of the chisel were visible.

  Khalifa seemed to be the only point around which the whole nightmare orbited.

  That, and the infinite white ramifications streaking around him.

  “You shouldn’t have woken me from the deep sleep in which Angra had induced me,” the sovereign continued. “You shouldn’t have woken Hanoi up. The hunger of an anti-god is ancient, just like that of the Beast who’s walking the same path looking for you.” Now the hood on his face was worn out and, after a few steps, it completely disappeared.

  Just like the crab.

  Dagger stopped. “Hanoi is not here,” he said. For a moment he feared that he wouldn’t hear any answer and that Khalifa would also disappear, leaving him alone in that nightmare with no escape.

  “Oh, somehow he’s here with us.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “This Gate is not completely broken, yet.” Among the white ramifications, the Gorgor looked up to the majestic pyramid of mayem. Through the ruined ceiling, he looked at it with a desire which touched a sense of belonging. “A greater Inherjer, remember? This pyramid is one of the three Gates between the dimensions, the only visible part of the metal bowels that hide in Candehel-mas and make it the center of the Creation. This is the beginning of the long road.” Khalifa looked down at him.

  “Hanoi told me to—”

  “I know.” The Gorgor’s lips distended into a sinister smile. “You had to look for the place where you came to this world for the first time, and you thought it was the temple. But you’re not Ktisis. You’re Dagger, a human. Aren’t you giving all yourself to keep up this illusion? And Dagger has come to this world in another place.”

  “The Fortress…”

  Khalifa applauded once. Then once again. “The Gate at the end of the world is in Golconda, is the framework itself of that perfect mountain. The place where Angra extracted Skyrgal’s soul from his body had to have something special, don’t you think?” He laughed heartily. “It was the game of Hanoi, to put yourself in front of a mirror as he did with all of us, playing with your nature. Because the end of the road is always its beginning, it’s the form of the world that leads to this—traveling on and on, the farthest point you can reach from home is home itself.”

  “Nice phrase,” Dagger said, his eyes staring into space. “Let me write it down.”

  “Things happen, don’t take it so bad. You were caught between two fires, and you ran to the one lit a thousand miles away in the desert to drive you far from the stage where the final act will take place. Baomani brought Erin to the one Gate where it’s still possible to summon the Beast in her womb.”

  “Erin…”

  “And in her nightmare she’s still waiting for her hero, but you sleep faraway, in the arms of an unattainable dream—to believe yourself different from what you are.” The Apostate became serious.

  “A trap.”

  “If this were really a trap, it would be one in which you threw yourself spontaneously. You just don’t remember, my boy.”

  That sentence didn’t leave Dagger indifferent. He slashed his field of vision; right left, left right. “Who told you where the temple was? Who told you to fight Skyrgal?”

  Khalifa’s painful laugh sounded like one of the off-key notes played by Baikal at the top of his tower.

  “How the Ktisis did you bring Hanoi here?!” The green silence absorbed Dagger’s cry.

  Khalifa stopped laughing. He slowly shook his head. “The real question is, How did you bring Hanoi here, Ktisis?”

  Dagger shivered. “I?”

  “You don’t remember, Konkra. You can’t remember,” the Gorgor on the throne revealed. “It was your only possible revenge against Skyrgal, who had exiled you in the hammer. I was your hand when you were still locked up in there. Mine is the first shadow you projected in this world after a long, long time. I was the Holy Father of the Sanctuary, remember? The only man in the world who could get in touch with you.”

  “The contact with the god has horribly burned whoever has…”

  Khalifa shooed those words with a simple gesture of his hand. “Humans never follow the procedures. When they’ll be able to build a city like Adramelech, and not those jumbles of recycled ruins, then they will teach us how to talk to a god.” He looked up at the pyramid again, as if it were an undeniable spectacle. He swayed his head, dazed by some kind of delight, and found again something to laugh in it—an inner laugh, of a creature now belonging to who knew what world. “The duality of your nature is the greatest mystery. As god, you’ve been the origin of this same plan which, as human, you’re trying to thwart. But open your ears and listen well, because what you’ll hear is nothing but the truth. There’s no hand held out in the dark, when it comes to the dark that you have created.”

  Dagger dropped down on his knees, crushed by too big a truth.

  “What was your plan, before you were born?” Khalifa’s voice overtook everything. “Why did Ktisis use my rebellion against the gods? Was there something you wanted to find again in this temple, or erase? At the end of this desert of doubts and torments, try to believe even for a moment that the Disciples are your true allies. That your nemesis is right, and that Megatherion is the only definitive solution to…”

  Dagger looked up.

  “…a bigger problem.” Khalifa’s light smile disappeared, along with the light in his eyes. “The darkness at the beginning of the world. The shadows that Skyrgal remembered, and projected in his Gorgor sons when he decided to punish them. A deep horror connects us to the womb
of what doesn’t exist. It’s the cosmic funeral, the snake that penetrates the bosom of the emptiness and constitutes the framework of Creation, the same you used to escape on Candehel-mas.”

  Dagger was on the verge of tears, all his pain flowed into the hand holding Solitude, stuck to the ground. “Escape. From where?”

  Khalifa bent his head. “There’s only one way to remember. Now you can, if you want.”

  Dag levered on the sword and stood up. “Mumakil told me that—”

  “Mumakil didn’t tell you the whole truth.”

  “Is there somebody who did?”

  “Yes. Somebody did.”

  Know yourself, Dagger thought, looking away.

  “Truth is a little thing in the end,” Khalifa continued. “So frail, nothing more than a glimmer at the end of a long, fetid, and dark tunnel. Your memories. That’s what everybody wants from you.”

  From there, Dag saw the thin filaments tied to the body of Khalifa. They came from somewhere behind the Gorgor.

  “I am the parasite of my pet,” the Gorgor revealed. “You have realized that, by now. He and I have lived together long enough to become one, this is why I could get in here.”

  Dagger watched the appendages climbing the legs of the throne to disappear under the torn clothes. “I want to remember.” He heard his own words as if a stranger had spoken them. They’re sincere. They’re really mine. Only then did he realize that he had been looking for that faint truth since his journey had begun.

  The apostate sovereign was right. That was not a trap, not one in which he hadn’t always desired to end up.

  “The revelation,” Khalifa said. “We’d sacrifice everything on that frail altar. Everything that makes us happy, even our children. I know. I saw.”

  “How can I achieve it?” Dagger finally asked.

  “You reached the part of your memory that was in the Armor, when you crossed the first arch on the way to knowledge.”

  “And what about the rest? The part hidden in that dagger is out of our reach!”

  Khalifa smiled again, a horrible Gorgor smile. “You’re leaving out a detail.” A viscid appendage appeared out of the lurid gray rags and covered the short distance separating it from Dagger, resting like a long claw on his sternum. “There’s one you always carry with you. It hunted you down all this nightmare long and it’s the main one, the most important. The nucleus of his memories.”