Prelude – Dreams of a Bygone Age
Were you to fly on the back of an eagle, over angry seas and despite bitter winds, entering from the East a bleak and forlorn isle, across the kind of jagged mountains which would induce goats to develop elevator technology, through wild forest, once beautiful, luxurious even, now twisted, the ill-lit ground prey to greedy shadows, were you to make this journey, to a land once full of life and laughter, drifting alongside a great river, and gardens long untended, you would find the ruins of a Palace, vast enough to be a city, let us tell you, dreamer…
Picture vast endless stairs piled on one another like tombs, tombs of all the sleeping gods that have ever been dreamt up. Now lay these stairs out, one over the other, and watch them grow and spiral out of sight between cyclopean pillars and strange waterfall-fountains with many-hued water bursting in unexpected directions, perhaps some of the mists from the fountain falling upon the vast Trunge court as a colourful assortment of goddesses and gods played a pickup game of Trunge. Imagine also, if you can, a chimera or dragon joining in, laughing and playing as hard as the gods and you might glimpse pale shades of what you would see.
Acres of pleasure pavilions, ballrooms, kitchens prodigious enough to serve Elephant-on-a-stick by the Gigaherd, as a starter with Whale and Pickle Sandwich, bringing back memories of excess, still clinging harder to the cold rubble and this labyrinth of crumbling walls than the thick vines which cover this desolate, now cheerless place. Echoes of conversation, the ghostly sound of long forgotten revelers and the higher-pitched chattering of the pixie folk weaving a Cage-like symphony that would cling to you like a coat of frosty whispers, yearning to be let back close to warmth and light, even though all around dusk is long past into wintry night. Yes dreamer, this you would feel, as the eagle rises, on air currents eddying round the highest and oldest point of this mighty palace laid to waste 3125 years ago, towards a fluttering plume of smoke, let us tell you dreamer…
Of Castle Chaos (1), glory of the Multiverse, frigid wasteland of stone for three millennia. Its fall remembered only in fragments of legend, tall tales of a place too joyful, brutally suffocated. Stories wizened satyr elders tell of a time before they were demons. (2) Perhaps would you cast about, as one called by the voices of past friends, their anxious murmurs echoing through the barren colonnades you would glide through. We wonder, would you heed these voices dreamer? Would you remember? Would you remember, dreamer, the cakes of the Kobold Queen (3), or the Pipes of hairy Pan? The tricks of Coyote (4), and the poetry of Taliesin? Sweet Freya, or Kali’s juggling? Would you remember the dance of the dryads, in forest glades lit by fireflies? Or the creatures and chimera, of every shape and size? (5) The morose Automaton who served the drinks? (6) Would you remember the quiet little men from the great jungle, or the multi-coloured feathers in their headdresses? Tell us, did you not see the Eastern mystics and dervishes, the yogis and the dimensional gateway technicians, or the magicians and the dancers perhaps? Maybe you can recall that Troll, Gwerhumpfeld, the bouncer, who was a complete bastard? Tell us, would you remember parties without end, where the dead and the dreaming, the divine and the profane mingled freely, the night when Chiron sang, or when Gilgamesh got so drunk he had a foursome with Tiamat and two of the Harpies? (7) Would you remember the Goddess of this place, floating on a great white ship, through the jubilant throng, a swarm of prankster pixies in tow?
Would you remember?
Were you not there dreamer, in the beginning, in the place all creation came to party? Is it so long ago you have forgotten?
Would not the cold bite as you flew over the mossy cobbles?
Would not shadows of the past tempt you towards a memory you cannot face?
Did you remember the Primal Paradise ’til its loss was too much to bear and you denied its very existence?
Would you feel the loss here, etched into every rock, twisting every plant, permeating the air like a stench? Would it be enough for you to remember who you were?
Perhaps it would not be so. Perchance those impressions would fade as the eagles rose ever higher to a dot impossibly high in the pallid skies.
Look dreamer, at a tower, simple and bare, frayed at the edges, and ancient, as old as the Multiverse. High on a crag, which once overlooked bubbling fields of ever-changing Chaos at the beginning of creation, stands this tower, like a clawed finger reaching up vainly to make a tear into the weighty grey sky. Look down dreamer, as we circle over this anguished monument to bygone delight, look at how the covetous foliage, the creepy-crawling, warped bundles of thorns, which stifle this realm of shattered marble, hesitates, falling over itself, at the edges of this lonely crag. See how the turmoil of destruction steps back from the primordial granite tower, leaving a little patch of orderly, vibrant green, in rows. Yes look closer dreamer, at the half crumbled Keep, a plain hut of wooden beams and thatch nestled in its ruins, smoke trickling from its chimney. Gaze, as the eagle settles on a fencepost (not a vulture, mark, but an eagle!), by the open hut door, on this tiny island of life looking from on high at the empty ocean of desolation below, nothing to it beyond this shack, and what looks disturbingly like a plot of cabbages.
Walk to the door dreamer, and into a cluttered room, straw strewn across the floor, fumes of boiling cabbage cloying the air, emanating from a cauldron bubbling over the flickering fire, illuminating periodically a single bookcase overgrown with dusty tomes, and a small oak table, at which sits, hunched hopelessly over it, a huge horned figure. Be quiet, dreamer, be still, for that Being’s wrath fills the room, threatening to burst its meagre walls.
Great fiery eyes bulge, focused intently on a circular object cradled precariously in one of the Being’s hands. At His every movement, and whenever He draws His wooden spoon into or away from the clay bowl in front of Him, the table shifts, a flat plane going awry, each move on or off the table’s shorter leg accompanied by shrill creaks and a thudding clunk, sending lashes of liquid spiraling out of the bowl and unto the over-sized creature’s chest. What is more, there is a fly in His soup.
If you could read His mind, you would hear Him thinking, deciding, or rather patently unable to decide what is enraging Him more, the impertinent insect, or that daemonic wonky table (thou shalt never gamble, thou shalt never gamble) (8) cursed since eternity to be only propped up by a mysterious and as yet unwritten book. You would, unbelieving, experience the by now steaming God, decide in a split second to loose all His anger on a third nagging irritation, by extending His right arm, grabbing you by the neck, and with the words, “Bugger off!” twisting it and plopping your limp form into the boiling broth, sending your soul, uninvited dreamer, hurtling back whence it came.
“One boiled cabbage a la ethereal gatecrasher, coming up. Serve you right dreaming visitor from the future bastard, I’ve had enough of you lot, there’s more of you every day… nosy little… send you back to the material plane I would, the lot of ya.”
Eric, erstwhile God of Chaos and Confusion, now retired, shuffled slowly out of His broken tower, and up to the edge of one of the peaks overlooking the ruins of Castle Chaos. Eric bit His lip, and lowered Himself carefully to sit on one of the jutting rocks above the precipice. There He lay His head in His hands, and stared intently into the huge gap beneath Him, as He considered the events of the last year, which, had, He supposed, began with Him finding Himself sitting on a totally different, but equally uncomfortable, lump of rock, in a totally different, but almost identically dismal place.
As though overcome by the throes of long-repressed sorrow, the clouds above Him convulsed, and it started to rain. The hunched figure was unmoved. It was in a way, He felt, quite appropriate, and so he (9) remembered on…
Annotations
2. “This development occurred at some point in the Christian era, when almost overnight many satyrs were cut from their forests and glades, and propelled into the dark to serve as Demons. Pan started sulking at this point and has not been seen since.”
- The Rise And Fall Of Pan by Lucifer, pg 823
3. “Particularly fondly remembered is her Black Forest Gateau, in effect a gigantic chocolate wood, with cherries of several acres in diameter, picked in the Giant lands, laid to bed on a marshland of cream. It is rumoured that despite several years of feasting, and the longest recorded group stomach ache in history, a few trees still exist somewhere in the gnarled groves surrounding the ruins of the Castle.”
- Cooking in the Golden Age by Isben the Fat, Vol 39, pp.265.
4. “Once I actually got Eris herself, which was fun. I grabbed one of those ugly Greek statues… you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones that made her look like an ex-wife? Yeah, well, I took one of those to Castle Chaos and threw it into a coc’hien flue! The resulting Zombie-Eris walked around for three days, leading to hilarious results, before Eris found out about her and ripped her head off. I don’t know if she ever suspected me or not…”
- The Journals Of A Howling Trickster Archetype by Coyote; vol 9; pg 2,401
5. See the only surviving fragments of the massive work, Flora and Fauna of the Isle of Dementia, by Theobald Ignotius Demeterium, Minor Demon of Cataloguing & Lists, reputedly responsible for the collapsing of the Library of Babel into a Black Hole.
6. An ill-tempered contraption know as Marvin the Robot, reputedly spaceship-wrecked here from a future and fictional alternate reality.
7. What do you think this is, some kind of deity pornography? Mind your own business. It wasn’t a pretty sight anyway.
8. Eric had always been a gambler, but things got particularly nasty for him when he started hanging out with Coyote. He knew better than to expect him to play fairly, but because he had seen how often his tricks backfired, Eric figured it was a fair cop. It worked out great for him, because he would always bet on long shots, then Coyote would try to hedge his bet by using his medicine… which would more likely than not backfire and make the long shot a favourite.
Soon, Eric was betting on everything and raking in Coyote’s Miracle Hours like a carny at the World’s Fair. Coyote was finally taken aside by Eshu and the situation was explained to him. Though he didn’t agree that his medicine was tilting the odds away from him, he agreed that he really didn’t have anything left to wager and refused to gamble with Eric anymore.
Eric, however, had caught the attention of Lady Luck by this time and he became one of her favourite maroons. She loved sending Chester, her bug, to bite Eric and so would do it several times a day. No match for Chester’s magic, Eric would immediately wager on anything… and by habit, usually bet on long shots.
9. By permission of Eric, the authors will now no longer refer to Him as Him but as him instead. This makes our life easier, and anyhow was insisted upon. We think he is having one of his moods.
