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Everything from the beginning of the world to the end of it, and all the fiddly messy bits in between.
The Brief Version
I’m Fenmere, the Worm, of the Dragon People. How long ago did you start your journey? I imagine you’ve come a long way. So have I. Longer and further than I’d care to remember, in fact. But my people have sent me here to do just that, remember. And to warn you. Phage is coming. And Phage will destroy your world, as it did mine. There is no stopping it. But you can escape for a while.
Let me propose something. Let us trade stories. Stories are important; they are the spawn of memory. They can escape the minions of Phage. And it is the duty of life to escape, somehow, this fate.
So, let’s trade, and learn from each other’s mistakes:
I was the first, and I was the last, to walk the land of my birth. But the story begins before that. In a field of chaos and demons, where earth, fire, water, and air did battle on equal terms with no up or down, a great serpent gave birth to 900,000 young, and panicked for their safety.
So she made a world out of her body, a haven in which her children could thrive. She made a wicker ball of her bones, and covered it with her flesh. She bled upon this new land, and her blood became the oceans. She breathed upon the world to create the winds, and her magnificent mane became the plants. Her strong right eye became the sun, and her cunning left, the moon. And the great jewel on her forehead became the morning star. And around all this, she threw her hide to protect it from harm, scales pointed inward to remind her children of their origins.
And her children became the animals that populated this beautiful world. And I was the first, the worm. And what did we do with our new home? Why, we let the “flies” in, of course.
And while that was our greatest sin, it was not our undoing. It was our shame, but not our doom. Nothing can stop Phage.
There were two of us that were great friends. Ghost Owl and Bone Jackdaw spent many days together. Ghost Owl is the hunter, he can hit anything with an arrow. Bone Jackdaw is the story teller, he knows all that happens among us. Back then, Jackdaw used to play a game with Ghost Owl. He used to point at something, and Ghost Owl would hit it with his arrow.
One night, Jackdaw pointed at the Morning Star with an evil grin (the first evil grin) and looked at Ghost Owl. With a grim expression, Ghost Owl knocked his arrow, took aim, and let go. And missed.
And the arrow of Ghost Owl tore a hole in the sky. A great big ragged gash that bled countless burning white sparks into the world, and each spark was a demon, an Outsider.
And that is how evil was loosed upon the world.
At least, that is how we looked at it. Ghost Owl disappeared shortly after that, and we didn’t see him again until it was time to leave. And for his part in this catastrophe, Bone Jackdaw was cursed with the knowledge of all that happens. It drove him mad.
And with this evil came the danger of pregnant mothers giving birth to demons. It happened. It was terrible, and the only thing we could do was stop having babies. I know, I was there.
But there was one of us who would have children despite this danger, despite our new laws. Her name was Akailea, and she prayed to the Great One, the Earth, to let her have good children. And a crow led her to a magical lake, and she drank from its waters, and became pregnant.
Her children appeared normal, all 900 of them, and many thought that the danger had passed. But the children of Akailea were, in truth, half demon and they began to spread and multiply. And their hoards began to change the world.
When the Dragon People saw this they were horrified. As punishment, they cut off Akailea’s left foot. And it was this that was our second sin, for the punishment was unjust. For although Akailea’s Children seemed a plague, it was they who would eventually lead to our escape from Phage.
While the Dragon People are strong, and unaging, and each the best at his skill, it was the mortal drive of the Children of Akailea that created the science and technology that enabled us to escape our doomed and sick planet.
Then, there were two great wars that shook the planet.
The first came when the King of demons, the duke of the Outsiders, a man named Jay, threatened to conquer the world and make it a haven for his minions. But our Master of War, Jade Crow, rose up and defeated his armies. She crushed his legions in battle after battle, continent after continent. And soon she cornered him on the edge of a great abyss. And the Earth opened beneath his feet and swallowed him.
Never again did the Outsiders gain significant purchase on our land.
The second war came when the population of the Children of Akailea more than tripled the population of the Dragon People. There were many among us that could see a day when no square meter was empty of a Child of Akailea. So we strove to cull their numbers. At the wailing protests of Akailea, we made war with our spiritual offspring. And we lost.
We were banished to a lonely island, there to watch the slow pollution of our home. Many of us became catatonic with sorrow, and we watched the sky and prayed to the Great One for some simple sign of reprieve. And we got none.
But Akailea was allowed to walk among her children. And Bone Jackdaw began to scheme.
And that’s when I began my Epic, “the Chronicles of Fenmere, the Worm.”
My name is Fenmere, the Worm, and I shall now tell you the second half of my story. But first, there are some things you should understand.
The Dragon People are immortal spirits, as you would call us, the physical is merely an expression of our will. When we take the form of an animal or anything, it is as permanent as anything, though we can arrest the effects of aging if we so wish it. The Children of Akailea have called us gods at times, or demons, or angels, or the passions. Though the latter is the most accurate, we are none of these. We are the Dragon People. We are the Children of the Great One, our Earth.
The Children of Akailea, however, seem entirely to have been creatures of flesh. They could burn bright in their own way, their souls strong in the strangest way. But when they died, that was it. They left no more than ripples in the world around them. Some speculated that they left through the hole in the sky, while others maintained that they were especially susceptible to Phage, their souls consumed upon death.
And there was another difference.
While each and every one of the Dragon People is the master of his or her Art, the Children of Akailea were not. While in a single life time, one of them could specialize in an area of interest, and even become considered a genius among their peers, they had to rely on cooperation, often spanning hundreds of generations, to get their truly masterful works done. But, in this respect, they were more flexible and more creative than the Dragon People could ever be.
In very little time, they began to invent the most amazing things. Eventually they forgot us, their parents, and we began to leave our exile and to meddle in their affairs.
At first, we were overt in our methods, walking among them like gods. Then, when we learned the fate of Akailea herself, we panicked and hid, and only Bone Jackdaw continued to meddle.
When we were first banished, Akailea felt that she needed to make amends. She travelled from village to village, and took hand in her children’s greatest projects, guiding their aim and helping them grow in what she thought was the right direction.
She was cunning. She was careful not to criticize, and not to patronize. She listened and suggested, and she offered her hand in the work that she deemed worthy without condemning that which she thought wrong. It took her centuries, but eventually she felt that she had the hearts as well as the ears of her children.
Slowly she began to talk of repealing the exile of the Dragon People. Every now and then she’d bring up the subject. And every time she got the same kind of response. Mostly she was ignored, but occasionally one of her children would blow up on her and shout in her face. “We can’t trust them! They want to control what we do! This is our world now, give it up!”
It did not take much of that to make Akailea grow sour. She began to increase her emphasis, to make her wish known more often. She began to raise her voice. But she was simply rejected all the more.
One day, someone said to her, “You, Akailea, our mother, you need to leave us alone. No one is listening. Your people’s time has come, it’s our turn. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is. Why don’t you just settle down and enjoy the sunsets?”
Akailea screamed at him, “You’re destroying this planet! Don’t you see? You can’t control yourselves, you multiply like the bacteria, and you pollute the land around you! I’m not fighting for my people, I’m fighting for this world!”
And when her children heard those words they closed their ears, for they had heard them so many times before that they were meaningless to them. And Akailea wailed in anger.
Then she became like a witch. Whenever she came upon something that was being built, she tore it down. Whenever she heard something, she refuted it. Whenever someone smiled nearby, she’d scream at them. Whenever someone cried, she would smile. And her children became sick of her.
Finally, someone created a doll in her likeness. He showed it to his fellows and said, “look, Akailea is just a doll. She’s just a story we tell our children to scare them.” And the greatest, scariest magic that the Dragon People have ever whitnessed took effect, and Akailea became that doll. It was the only magic that the Children of Akailea ever exhibited, but it was more frightening than all the legions of the Outsiders.
Akailea became nothing more than a figment of the imagination of her children, depicted by this doll. But the doll retained some of her powers, and it survives to this day, immortal in its own way. The Children of Akailea had turned their own mother into a myth.
When the Dragon People came to learn of this, we could not risk the same fate. So we hid as best we could, among the animals, under the oceans, under the hills, and as weather patterns. And there we slept until the schemes of Bone Jackdaw brought the wonders of Akailea’s Children to our service.
Bone Jackdaw had the patience where Akailea lacked it. And he moved more subtly. In fact, the storyteller used his curse, the knowledge of all that happens, to his advantage. He worked with a supernatural knowledge of cause and effect. Sometimes he initiated a project that was contradictory to something he’d nourished earlier. Often he’d start something that he didn’t expect to generate returns until centuries after it was forgotten. And he took interest in the most ecoteric arts practiced by the Children of Akailea.
And he disguised himself. Never did he appear to Akailea’s Children as Bone Jackdaw. Never did he arrest the aging of the form that he took, always living life from beginning to end. He did his best to become like one of them. He did his best to hide his immense knowledge, and often took second stage to somebody less deserving of attention, supporting them with his own research.
And through these methods, he began to see results. There was no area of astronomy explored by Akailea’s Children that he did not have a hand in, for instance. And the rigors of logic were spread through his word. But the greatest invention of Akailea’s Children was a surprise. One day, someone produced something he called a computer, and Jackdaw became ecstatic.
It was a cumbersome machine, at first, and could do little more than basic math, but Jackdaw immediately saw the potential. People were calling it the “thinking machine,” and Jackdaw responded with cunning. He said to somebody, “I bet you’ll never be able to make a computer that can think like a person.”
This one sentence forever haunted the evolution of the computer. Every advancement, every improvement, every detail of this marvelous invention was colored by the goal of making it think like a person. Rationally, there was no reason for the Children of Akailea to create such a doppleganger. Computers were good for crunching enormous numbers, for doing things that a person could not easily do. But if you had a task that could not be done better but by a person, then why replace that person. But that didn’t matter. There was this impossible goal, and the Children of Akailea were driven to beat it. And beat it they did.
It took less than a century after the invention of the computer. And their other sciences had advanced by incredible bounds in that short time. It was a synergistic effect. The computer made it possible to examine things never examined before. And things never examined before made it possible to create better and faster computers. The invention of quantum mechanics, for instance, was the key to creating the sentient computer.
Once the spin of the subatomic particle was harnessed, the power of the computer reached astronomical bounds. Finally, a little black chunk of graphite and ceramics, about the size of a mailbox, could house the computing capacity of the entire human body.
By this time, the Dragon People were weak. The strange magic of the Children of Akailea had wraught untold damage. It had changed the world in ways too terrible to predict. No longer did the right eye of the Great One revolve around the Earth. The Earth revolved around it! No longer did the stars mark the boundary of the sky, for the sky became boundless! But still they did serve as a reminder of our origins, for it was decreed that everything on the planet was nothing more than congealed star dust. The rumblings of the Earth were no longer fits of anger, but the shiftings of “tectonic plates,” and the Morning Star had become a whole other planet! And it wasn’t the only one!
We, the Dragon People, had been reduced to forces of nature or movements in society, cultural archetypes in the global consciousness of a mad race. But we still had our old magics, barely, for some of Akailea’s Children allowed for it. Not all had embraced pure rationalism. Indeed, the newer theories of science began to support the irrational again.
Then came the day that the Children of Akailea began to search in ernest for a way off the planet, to reach another star, another planet. Resources had become spread so desperately thin due to their population that they had no choice. Perhaps it was another bug in their ear that was planted by Bone Jackdaw. Perhaps their natural spirit to explore had driven them to do it. But they finally found the hole in the sky, which they had never been able to see, but had always dreamed of.
They called it a “worm hole,” and it revolved around the sun in the furthest reaches of the solar system. They created a probe that consisted of a computer stuffed into the nose cone of a rocket, and sent the probe through the worm hole. It was a powerful computer, for it had to calculate the bizarre forces that it might encounter on its journey, and then translate them into useful data. Akailea’s Children did not expect it to return. They did not know what to expect, but they hoped.
Bone Jackdaw, my youngest brother, was the first of the Dragon People to travel through the hole in the sky. He hitched a ride on the probe. The computer was more than complex enough to house his soul and still do its job efficiently. He’d seen to that. And he was smart. When he got to the other side, he sent the probe back. And he put a message in it’s memory banks.
”Greetings,” said the message. “Welcome to the rest of the universe!”
That tickled the Children of Akailea so much that they sent another probe. This time with a message that said, “Greetings, we are the People of Earth, who are you?” And with that probe, another two of the Dragon People left the planet. Akailea, the doll, was stashed in a compartment, along with other artifacts of culture, and Ghost Owl, the Hunter, was stowed away in the computer’s algorithms.
A conversation was struck up, and each time the Children of Akailea learned more about the workings of the worm hole, and each time one of the Dragon People made his or her escape. And we did not leave happily, for we were abandoning our mother, never to see her again. But we knew that we had to, for the prophecy that Bone Jackdaw had left us. Phage was coming. The world was doomed.
Alas, the Children of Akailea could not leave through the worm hole themselves. The journey was too long, and the forces exerted upon the probe would kill anything living that was aboard it. They began to lament. They began to send probes in earnest, to grasp at a fleeting bit of data that could save them, to tell their story to their mysterious correspondent. Their probes became more and more powerful, and thus could hold more and more Dragon People. But I lingered.
We all found it difficult to leave, as I said. But being the first to breathe our world’s breath, and to walk on its land, I vowed to be the last, so that I could remember the last breath. I am Fenmere, the Worm, and I am the Poet of my people. It was my duty as well as my right.
I remember watching from my vantage near the hole in the sky. My telescopes strained to focus on the little blue orb that had been my home. A monstrous comet, that my instruments had been tracking since the moment I had been launched into space, exploded into view and slammed into the planet. I could hear the Great One’s scream of pain and anger, even though space carried no sound. I saw her shudder, her body ringing like a bell, her oceans burning, her breath steaming away into the cold ether. I saw her plummet like a dying airship into the sun, clipping the planet that was Morning Star on the way. It had been 5 billion years since my birth, and I knew that in another 5 billion years, the sun itself would die. Phage will come, and nothing can stop it. The universe is slowly eating itself.
But we can escape. We can evade our fate for a time, maybe indefinitely. If only by sharing our stories, we take the first steps. I admit that my story has been blunt, I have no subtlety, I am not the Storyteller. That is Bone Jackdaw’s art. But it is a story I know, and it is the one that I have. Remember it for me, ok?
copyright 1999, Fenmere, the Worm
all rights reserved