The guardians had stood in equilateral position in the library, their marble cloaks unmoving under eons of dust. Their eyes peered up to the heavens and their arms out to the sides maintaining the balance of the forces that were contained within the books.
Each row was responsible for a different facet of life, an element here, a time period there. Each shelf held further detail, the water of the sea, the thousand years of history between two certain dates, and then upon the shelves were the next level of detail, each book responsible for something specific. The ocean of Andalys, the thousand years of one particular region on one particular continent, with the neighbouring region’s book placed right next to it.
The library blurred the lines between physical and non-physical realms of course, some part of it held true to reality, some other parts existing outside of physical space so it could ever expand as new details were constantly written into the tomes and shelves. Every couple of eons or so, a new library section appeared as it reacted to shifts in the universe, at which point the guardians shuffled their feet or the angle of their hands in their everlasting position as gatekeepers of reality.
***
Jace breathed out, the spell finally reaching its climax. This is it. Finally, the word that calls me; eternity. He braced as the waves of pain seared through his body, touching places inside him that he never even knew had pain receptors. But he stilled himself in a lotus pose on the monastery floor, his decades of monk-magician training had prepared him well. Suddenly he felt gravity pulling at him from all directions.
The feel of the stone surface he was sat on appeared on his arms, then his forehead, then somehow both underneath his chin and inside his knees.
Then it all stopped. The floor was under his crossed legs and gravity casually pulled naturally down once more. He opened his eyes. Success!
The ethereal edges of the ever-plants from the stories swayed gently in the astral winds in front of him, his eyes not quite able to focus on their edges. The entirety of existence shimmered in a sort of glowing fuzz. He’d made it, the eternal gardens of Shylǔn.
He stood and wobbled slightly; his body still reeled from the journey. Finding his feet he eventually walked barefoot through the gardens, his blue robes beginning to glow in the same way as the gardens. He tried to touch some of the water of a pool, and it felt dry like sand, and slipped through his fingers rippling and glimmering like diamonds.
Eventually he saw the towering Guardians staring upwards, looming far above the tops of the shelves he could just make out.
He felt a strange tugging sensation, as though they were not just stone watchers, but… kindred spirits? After a lifetime of sorcery acquisition, he could sense the raw power emanating from them. Legend said they could eviscerate anything with a single blink, and now he could feel it in them. No turning back now, he thought as fear tickled down his spine. He presently came upon floors and shelves extending for what seemed like miles, all made of marble, all still shimmering and glowing. Fortunately, the guardians never moved, their eyes fixated on the star-speckled ceiling above them.
An age passed as he tried to climb up and down the rows reading each section title to decode the patterns of shelves, until finally he surrendered his logic to his intuition, and followed countless footsteps without thinking. Shortly thereafter, he found the section, then the shelf, then the book he was looking for. He stood before it, its ominous dark title smiling enticingly back at him, and he pulled it from the shelf. It came loose with a crack. The guardians’ focus shifted, the four of them no longer locked together, and they began looking through the rows of shelves, hastily appearing between each one.
Jace raced as fast as his feet would take him, now feeling like a mouse hunted by four giant lions. Back through the gardens, back past the pools. The Guardian’s eyes were on him. SHWOOM! A beam of pure light incinerated the path where he’d been a moment before. He urged himself onwards. SHWOOM! Another. SHWOOM! SHWOOM! That one hit. Excruciation. Luckily some instinct had guided him to dive slightly to the right, and only his ear had melted off, and even though he was trained to manage pain this was dizzying, the entire feeling of existence swam before his very eyes, but he could just see the portal from the ritual. With his mind he focussed on nothing else. Get to the portal. Get to the Portal. He poured forth. SHWOOM! He dived over a hole in reality that appeared before him as the light beam began tearing at the ground in front of him, the Guardians were almost on top of him. With a crack he leaped and dived snatching at the portal hovering in the air like an opaque glass hexagon with his free arm, and the book tucked safely in his robes held with his other.
He landed back in the temple safely with the book. He lay back, exhausted but triumphant. His journey was nearly complete; the hard part was over.
But the pain from his missing ear exploded in agony, blood pouring from the remains. He took a moment to silence the pain, clutched his robe sleeve to the side of his head to stem the bleeding and jogged through the temple, finally reaching his chambers near the top. He lay down the book, took up the lotus pose for chanting and opened it, dizziness forcing its way forward. He stilled his mind once again, forcing himself to wrest control of his thoughts and feelings. Stillness like the candle flame. Eventually he somehow found the right page.
The chant was for the releasing of life after death, and Jace would become master of both, becoming eternal. The words on the page seemed to whisper to him, not in a language he recognised, but in a voice that felt eerily familiar. A chill ran down his spine as he shook off a gut-wrenching idea. No time for nonsense. He felt into the words, absorbing them with his magic, allowing he and they to intertwine, and as he began to levitate in a trance-like state, a low oscillating vocal hum escaped his throat and chest as the words used him as a vehicle to enunciate themselves. They wanted to be chanted. A neon violet mist suddenly swirled up around him form a large orb of magical energy, and Jace could see the mana flows all around him, each thread representing a tiny different element of the forces of life and death. He reached out and touched one, still sat cross-legged, but now a metre or so off the ground. He felt the power imbue him, and the orb suddenly burst out of existence with a small pop, and he fell to the floor, unconscious.
When he arose, the colours of the world were dimmed, and his senses were lowered, sounds and sights were somehow muffled, except where his attention was, they were sharpened. He imagined this might be what a wolf feels like, focussing on its prey while oblivious to all else. He walked to the Ritual caves, where an assortment of urns of varying sizes and adornment styles held the ashes of generations of monk wizards. He selected one at random and focused several of the strands he’d absorbed into the urn.
The ground shook slightly and a siren of scraping and crackling flames filled the crypt, and after a few seconds the urn burst open, revealing a nude man covered in a sinewy dust layer like cobwebs of dried blood.
He looked at Jace briefly but collapsed to the floor screaming in pain, a low guttural howl like a mother finding their child stillborn, then he stopped and returned to a pile of dust. Jace moved from urn to urn, weaving strands of life and death in growing desperation. The spell failed repeatedly, revived monks collapsing into dust, their screams echoing through the crypt. He stayed focussed on his task, oblivious to the groaning of the earth and the cracks spreading through the stone floor and walls around him.
At last, one monk stood, eyes open, a flicker of life behind the vacant stare. Jace’s heart pounded with triumph. Before he could speak, the walls cracked open completely, blinding green light bursting forth. A Guardian’s gaze bore down on him a wave of nausea hitting as reality splintered around them.
The figure was looking right at him, the ethereal fuzzy edges gone, now replaced by something… sour… broken…chaotic. Jace looked around him, shards of rock and marble that were once the floors and walls of the monastery now floated, spinning casually as if their abandonment of regulated reality was sitting in the shade watching the world go by. Everything else was nearly blinding green light.
The guardian now stood on a small lump of marble relatively close to him, and he looked down and discovered, with a jolting shock, that his own feet were squarely placed on another haphazard lump of ground floating in the nothing, and the tops of his legs were not even attached to his body. The guardian merely looked at him and a tear of stone fell from its eye. It raised a finger and pointed at him. He looked so unbelievably familiar. Kill me. To save reality. All is lost if you do not. Kill me.
Jace could barely think, his mind awash with anguish and struggle. He raised his hand, which somehow floated through the void in front of him, its fingers individual blobs floating in roughly a hand position, and unattached at each bone joint.
He knew he’d have to kill the guardian, somehow that was what made sense. But why… His hand could become a hand again! That was it! He summoned the energy strands from within himself, the uttering of the spell he’d learned so many decades before.
Some part of him uttered a variation of it though, maybe it was these new strands he’d just learned from… where was it again? SHWOOM!The Guardian shattered into a billion shards of marble, and the universe popped out of existence.
After an eternity, half memories slowly clicked into place. The pain was gone, but so was everything else. No noise, no distant hum, no distortion of the senses. The roiling stomach ache was gone, replaced with, well, nothing.
Jace opened his eyes, and found himself standing tall with the other Library Guardians, linked with them, the flows of magic between them now visible to him.
He looked and saw the world below, and above as well, somehow everywhere all at once. But most of all, he saw the marble of the library, the glowing tomes now a delightful joy emanating from them. He could feel that the book of life and death had returned to its rightful place. Ah, it all made sense now. That Guardian was me! The universe always resets, falls back into place like the tomes on their shelves…
Yes, brother, came the thoughts of the Guardian to his right, its eyes fixed upwards. Eternal.
Next time, thought Jace, as he turned his eyes inexorably upwards. Next time I won’t kill the previous me-Guardian, I’ll let reality be ripped apart, then I’ll begin it again as master of life and death.
Brother, memory is not eternal, said his new sibling. That was your plan last time. And the time before that. This was how you organised the fail-safe into the book in the first place.
Would You Like to See YOUR Writing Here?
Join Nanjing Inkwell, a group of friendly, supportive people who are interested in writing creatively, whether it is fiction / prose, life writing, memoir, poetry or whatever your pen feels inspired to put down. Working together to build our writing skills through discussion and writing games, you can also have your writing reviewed, if you’d like. Meetings are weekly near the centre of the city. Find out more via WeChat ID: its_what_you_make_it
