The Highwayman herself, as I have mentioned before, is the final underline on an extended reference to that classic song by Jimmy Webb, which could very well describe the lonely and circular life of Sorry Çrom Skelliglyph – the final verse, in particular, could describe the journeys he undertook in his fabulous Fhaste.
Mercy nicknames the Drake ‘Katla’ in a nod to the dragon in Astrid Lindgren’s Bröderna Lejonhjärta (The Brothers Lionheart). A lovely and bittersweet story about life, death, and the worlds we travel through along the way.
On a lighter yet more technical note: Sid, Sod and Fov Kedlam are an affectionate shout-out to my day job writing instruction manuals for X-ray machines. SID refers to Source to Image Distance, SOD to Source to Object Distance, and FOV to Field Of View.
So here we are. We’re coming to the end of this story. The story of Oræl, the story of Earth. And most of us have already pieced together, I think, what happens next. In the broad strokes. But there’s still a lot to get through before the end, and of course there are still many, many stories to tell – before, after, and during the events we’ve seen in this trilogy.
I hope you join me for the final hours of this funny old world we call Earth. And that you join me for all the stories still to come. My final thank-you, in this author’s note, is for you.
Andrew Hindle, Sotunki, Finland
21st November, 2018
Oræl Rides to War will conclude in the third volume,
The Last Days of Earth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Hindle was born in the southwest of Old Meganesia back when it was still called Australia, and moved to Finland at the end of the 20th Century AD. He got married, had a couple of kids, and worked a day job like a good little monkey, all while simultaneously writing out the future history of his species and trying not to throw his keyboard across the room whenever they do something stupid, either in-story or in real time.
He’s still trying.
OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREW HINDLE
Arsebook: My Rear In Status 2011
(The story of one man’s short, cowardly and dishonourable battle with cancer, told through the enduring medium of social networking status messages)
THE FINAL FALL OF MAN
Eejit
Drednanth
Bonshoon
Fergunakil
Blaran
Molran
Damorak
Human
TALES OF THE FINAL FALL OF MAN
Deadshepherd: Anthology 1
The First Feast: Anthology 2
ORÆL RIDES TO WAR
Bad Cow
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Are You My Corpulent Brood Matriarch?
Notes
[←1]
The Human Territory Interdict, a no-fly region surrounding the isolationist flatworld, was called the Hathal Moga’threta in Xidh. It happened to mean much the same thing – the zone of human-species sovereignty – but it sounded like Haffil Mograthea, which was a fabled dwelling in Hell housing a single precious snowflake that would melt instantly if exposed to the world outside. The Human Territory Interdict was quietly nicknamed to reflect this startlingly appropriate metaphor. That it also happened to annoy most of the locals who overheard the expression was just a bonus.
[←2]
Exposed Earth. Some others labelled the years MD, Mortis Domini; others used the uF notification to indicate the end of the Flutter, or the unFlutter period; and others still JC, Corae Jalah, or Jalah’s Years. Some others … well, humans. There were a lot of different schools of thought, if ‘thought’ was the right word.
[←3]
One of the common names for the rearrangement of Earth and the seared realms into a set of spherical worlds. Its reversal, somewhat unoriginally, was called the unFlutter.
[←4]
Unless, of course, their limited artificial intelligence detected evidence of uncooperativeness in the immigrants. Then, Greyblade strongly suspected, the robots of Gorfab’s World would prove to be just as dangerous as they had been in their previous incarnations.
[←5]
The Dimension that stood at the utmost hub of the urverse and the Dimension in which the so-called Quin Cities of Capital Mind, greatest megalopolis of the Corporation and seat of its power and authority, was built. The Centre was a universe separate from the Void and each of the infinite others, with its own physical laws and unique structure. It was a structure – endless vault of sky above, functionally unlimited expanse of land below – that was ideal for the formation of the city that defined it. The Centre was not just the middle of the turning urverse and the foundation-universe of the Quin Cities, however. It was also the Dimension from which most of the Corporation’s truly successful life-forms, from the semi-mythical Firstmades to the Elder Races, had originally sprung. All the other Dimensions and their ecosystems were quite literally playing catch-up.
[←6]
This always ended badly for the poor fools involved, and Greyblade had never been able to summon up much sympathy. The Pinians were duty-bound to care for humans. Their opposite numbers in Castle Void were under no such obligation. This invariably came as a rude shock to people whose only exposure to evil was the occasional ideology-driven mass-murder and the relentless us-versus-them propaganda that filled Earthly media. When a human or group of humans subscribed to worship of the Darking half of the Brotherhood, they were no longer permitted to stay in the Four Realms … but none of them had ever returned from their new home in Castle Void. Greyblade tended to doubt this was because it was nice.
[←7]
One theory held that Dragons shifted their atomic structure into a new alignment that not only enabled them to condense and reshape the totality of their bodily matter, but made their subatomic balance act against its own gravity in some strange way, resulting in a slightly denser and heavier humanoid body than normal, but not one made of impure neutronium. Another theory was that they folded their entire bodies into unreality and extended a human-shaped avatar, a giela, back out into the real world to represent themselves and interact with the small folk. These two theories borrowed heavily from different schools of physics and unphysics, and may respectively have formed the historical bases for artificial gravity and reality / unreality interface technology like relative speed drives.
[←8]
He assumed it would have been crimson. Dragons had different-coloured scales depending on which part of the world they were from, and if the Drake’s egg had been from the Detroit nest she would have been red. However, she’d also lived in Old Meganesia all her life, so she might have been the grey-black of the Old Meganesian Dragons. Or, if she’d been living underground all this time, she might have been colourless. Greyblade didn’t understand it … and wasn’t sure, since Dragons could essentially become human, why they didn’t shape-shift to anything else and what difference their scale-colour made anyway.
[←9]
Most of the Corporation’s Gods fell under the authority of one or another of the ten Infinites, divided roughly according to philosophical outlook and whether or not the Infinite in question feels like tolerating a bunch of quarrelsome deities. Jalah of the Pinian Brotherhood was subordinate to Ith, as were the Disciples and every worshipper thereunder – even though it was not a particularly taxing subservience. Ith, like most of the Ghååla, was ubiquitous but low-interference.
[←10]
Although this, of course, tended to depend on the God in question.
[←11]
People argued about why the Second Disciple hadn’t drifted to Heaven, arguably closer to hand, to commune directly with the Pinian God. This always struck Greyblade as a fundamental failure to grasp how different soul-journeying was from normal physical movement. Not that he understood it himself, but he did grasp on some very basic level that souls were ethereal and were pulled by unseen tides, and Farrendohr represented a vortex of sorts – particularly if the soul-journeying was taking place unconsciously.
[←12]
It was one of the oldest philosophical logic puzzles: Did Infinites truly have infinite power if there were things – like destroying Firstmades – that They could not do? The easy answer to this, although not particularly satisfying to the philosophers, was that a Ghåålus like Nnal might be able to destroy a Firstmade, but doing so would fundamentally rewrite the base assumptions of the urverse, and not only did the Infinites not want such a thing to happen but DaRah, first among the Infinites, would not permit such a thing to happen. DaRah had … alternative sources of power to the mere infinity available from reality and unreality.
[←13]
And sometimes vice versa. The mechanics of symbiosis and symtheosis are understandably complicated.
[←14]
Each suit with a huge craggy club resting against the wall beside it, as Ludi had said.
[←15]
The Damorak species was more ancient than all but a few mortal life-forms, and far predated the taxonomy of any new subphylum on the block like crustaceans. While they had more in common with reptilian and arachnid biology, most of the lizard- and spider-related nicknames Greyblade knew for them would also be familiar to the Ogres. They had shockingly good memories when it came to ‘Damn-rax’.
[←16]
This may of course have been overblown for the purposes of mythological epicry. A horde from Beyond the Walls was unlikely to be so vast that it could fill even the charted regions of ten million universes, or move into the Corporate Dimensions so systematically that it drove the entire known population inwards without leaving large pockets that had absolutely no idea the Worm Cult was even invading. Still, the refugee colonies of The Centre during the Worm occupation were staggering in their extent.
[←17]
It was said that the Destarion’s infamy, and her defeats, stemmed from the refugee human population she safeguarded and the affinity she later developed for the species. This was little more than fallout of the Worm Cult’s prejudice, however, and had little to do with humans specifically.
[←18]
Archaic Xidh, The home of Çrom.
[←19]
The Corporation’s basic universal currency-marker. Most civilisations advanced enough to be full members of the Corporation employed contribution-value-based economics that allowed their denizens to use their skills and work as currency in and of itself, but sometimes trades depended on a physical token of value.
[←20]
Another species of Heaven-folk, the average Gatunwode was roughly as massive as an Ogre but nowhere near as formidable. Four legs, two arms, and clad in natural body armour with a variety of genetically-modified traits … and their heads were tiny, more like a little shiny collection of sensors and tubules between their massive armoured shoulders. Greyblade knew this was because they were ambrosia-feeders like many native species of Heaven, and their brains were actually somewhere in their chests, but he had never been able to shake the Áeaoid prejudice that sentient beings with small heads were stupid. In the majority of Gatunwode cases, however, it happened to be true – they were effective enough security guards and domestic shock troops but, for the most part, great thinkers they were not.
[←21]
Also Heaven-folk, the Nemotites were gastropods similar to Gróbs, albeit not as physiologically or intellectually advanced. The Retrogrades, so named for various obscure reasons, were a militarised racial grouping that had been enhanced in a manner rather similar to the Burning Knights, making them faster and stronger and more destructive. Nemotites weren’t Áea-folk, however, and the Heaven-folk organisations responsible for their augmentation weren’t the Pinian Brotherhood themselves, so the result was – like the Gatunwode – visually impressive but not particularly dangerous. Greyblade was forced to once again admit to a certain bias in his judgement, of course.
[←22]
Or as flowery, but in a different style.
[←23]
According to most modern theories, a Dimension was in fact infinite only on one axis, and merely immeasurably vast on the others. So vast, indeed, that its finite axes were practically impossible to measure or encompass or even ascertain one way or the other – and even attempting to do so, given the requisite preposterous amount of time and resources, was considered dangerous to the point of madness. Dimensional physicists had a variety of theories ranging from cautious estimations to raving superstitious mumbo-jumbo, as to what might happen if a Dimension was accurately observed or proven to be finite on any axis. Dimensional physics was the point where science came full circle and met the mad fringes of faith on the way back in.
[←24]
Base relative speed is ten thousand times the speed of light. Most standard Corporate vessels fly at between five hundred thousand and five hundred million times the speed of light, although of course the civilisations of the ten million Corporate Dimensions are impossible to accurately standardise. Even so, the vessels designed by Fhaste were renowned as the fastest in Corporate history, their speed clocking at orders of billions of times the speed of light.
[←25]
Oh yes, there were walls. Theoretically. While the Corporation’s boundary wasn’t solid as a matter of practicality, Dimensions themselves did have outer limits … in certain directions. It was monstrously complicated.
[←26]
Although unlike an artificial network, which might reasonably be expected to have been constructed to make travel more efficient, the Portal network was a natural network – and as such, the only efficiency travellers gained from it was efficiency carved out by the blood and the sweat and the mummified-corpse-filled derelict spacecraft of millions of years of intrepid explorers.
[←27]
Indeed, having seen the bathing and ablution facilities accorded to the ‘Captain’ of the ship, Greyblade was shocked Çrom didn’t spend more time in them. He didn’t generally disassemble his armour and wash himself in the standard organic manner – his internal sectional cleaning and upkeep routine had been set in place when he donned the metal – but he still rather envied the human his ridiculous luxury.
[←28]
A species native to The Centre, populous and advanced but not quite on the level of the Elder Races.
[←29]
Or, the full extent of the Dimension being by its very nature impossible to ascertain, it was divided into what the Corporate authorities said was half.
[←30]
Planar sphere, technically, but it was a specialised shape found only in Portal physics and highly-altered hallucinogenic states – a disc no matter which way you looked at it from.
[←31]
Greyblade had expressed surprise, early on, that Çrom didn’t know a host of languages from all periods of Corporate history. Skelliglyph had probably heard this before, because he sighed and admitted that while he did carry a random smattering of words and phrases that just popped up at not-entirely-useful times, he generally just held onto Xidh and the current local language – and even his grasp of Xidh occasionally rusted out of intelligibility before he dusted it off again. How much space do you think one of these things has in it anyway? he’d asked, tapping the side of his skull. It was true that even an inefficient brain like a human one could support a couple of dozen languages, depending on the languages’ complexity and constancy of use … but that specification came with the built-in assumption that it would only have to do so for a couple of hundred years.
[←32]
He was particularly diverted by the story of a caravan-community named Slide, which had simply been sliding down the smooth chute of ice for several thousand years now, keeping itself low and out of the destructive flight path of the delivery canisters, and generating power from turbines rolling against the ice. Greyblade wasn’t sure if the story was true, but it was entertaining.
[←33]
Calling it a starting condition was, usually, just easier than following the physics back to its actual initial point.
/> [←34]
One of the few truly famous regions of the urverse Beyond the Walls, the Dark Paths were segments of the Highroads that had been somehow encrusted with reality and converted into strange and dangerous realms of unimaginable size.
[←35]
This colour was, of course, able to be ascertained only from sensors, since the void in which Tomberland sat was completely dark.
[←36]
The Unknown was one of the first Dimensions outside of The Centre to ever be discovered and populated, at the time just by various factions of Elder Races and Firstmades since there was nobody else around. It retained its classical name, even though by the present day it was quite well known.
Greyblade Page 67