The First Eternity

I stand in a hallway that has no end. The walls on either side have been carved into rows of shelves stretching higher and farther than I could ever comprehend, each home to a single stone coffin. Beneath my spectral feet lays a floor of stone, each tile engraved with intricate glyphs to form a blooming pattern, one that seems to reach out for the darkness in the distance and thus draws my gaze to that precipice between what I can see and what I cannot. To the shawled figure draped in its half-light, ever striding away. He will not turn around.

I follow the Indifferent One for a time, as I have almost every morning for the past fourteen years. More coffins come into view as we walk, and though they seem identical to those we leave behind, I remind myself that what lies within could not be more different. All house bones, yes, but the spirits within each have their own story to tell. Perhaps I look now upon a soldier who bled out with the haft of a spear jutting from his throat, and beneath him an adulterer, struck down in murderous frenzy by a scorned lover - a hundred thousand journeys have ended here, and I am sworn to do as my God does: See them all, acknowledge them all, but pass no judgement.

Many men try to find their way here. I hear them in bars some nights, trading slurred, boisterous tales of the endless hallway and its uncountable sepulchres filled with all the coins we take with us to the grave. They make plans to tunnel down, rob as many as they see fit and return to the surface rich beyond their wildest dreams. The Indifferent One would not begrudge them. I suspect they know that.

Still, these men are wrong. There is wealth here, yes, but you will not find it in the coffins; they house only sun-bleached bones and souls at rest. There is treasure here, but it is not copper or bronze; it is silence and stillness. Only the Indifferent One moves. Only his steps are heard.

Someday, I suppose, they will find that out.

“Daghan!” The world around me spins as the reverie shatters, but a hand seizes me by the shoulders before I pitch forward onto the temple floor. The sun-darkened face of Gimil comes into focus, looking up at me with urgency in his eyes. “You lost track of time in there. People are here to grieve.”

I nod my thanks to the sweeper, and as I emerge on the balcony overlooking my temple, I take a moment to bask in its majesty. My life’s work lays bare in this construction, a grand limestone replica of the world beyond the veil. Its walls – cast now in the light of innumerable hanging oil lanterns – bear those painstakingly gouged shelves in the same rigid mosaic, and though I could not make the hall truly infinite, colossal bronze mirrors at either end serve to impress upon my visitors its immensity. Two hundred townsfolk stand now upon its floor, and still each looks to me as a beetle in a market square. Two hundred journeys have brought them here – each inflicting different wounds.

Something is wrong. The hall feels quieter than usual, the usual hubbub of conversation and boisterous laughter muted somehow. I scan the crowd for a moment, stopping upon the dirt-smeared face of the woodcutter – Awil is not often around, spending most days in his logging cabin three days’ journey to the south. His booming voice and grand gesticulations should be filling the temple now, exchanged pleasantries and traded tales echoing from every wall. But today he hides his gaze from me, casting his eyes firmly to the ground and keeping his limbs slack and inert. And then I notice the stranger stood beside him – a tall, broad-shouldered man clad in white and gold, with a comforting hand placed on Awil’s shoulder. For just a moment, I don’t recognise him.

I wheel back to Gimil, my words a harsh whisper. “Why is the Emperor here?”

Gimil meets my gaze, speaking firmly though not unkindly. “For the same reason as the others. Something troubles him, and he comes here in search of solace. He wishes to grieve.” The sweeper nods to the hanging censer behind me, a metallic egg engraved with a series of abstract, billowing shapes. He has already filled the upper chamber with datura petals, and a fire roars in the copper brazier beside it. Gimil’s meaning is clear; it is time to begin.

With a heavy, smoke-filled breath, I pick up a burning twig from the bowl, marvelling at the flickering light as I do. Fire, I once told Gimil, is a gateway, a twine rope that tethers together the Three Worlds. In the Land Before it is absolute, a miasmic flurry of noise and fury that no mortal man could bear even to look upon; a chaos sealed within us by the Firewalker Chaon, or whichever of the Elder Gods was in truth our creator. The soul of man is fire, and even in the Land Beyond it smoulders on, in every one of those lamps and braziers that bring light to the halls of the dead.

When this world ends, it is said that it will happen by our hand. Someday, we will find ourselves unable to contain all that lies within us, and fire will break free from each of our shells, blanket every village, scorch every landscape and boil every ocean in seconds. What then will happen to my beloved hallway? Will the Indifferent One himself be consumed, as every soul surges in to find a home at once?

I raise the twig and place its flame in the censer, and sweet, sunset-red smoke begins to trickle out in wisps. It will take an hour for the Fumes of Revelation to fill the room, and an hour more for the last of the townsfolk to finish their communions. I glance back at Gimil, and he nods – the gateway has been opened just a crack, and thus my duty is fulfilled. I will now leave the temple, as I have every week for the last nine years. I’m not ready to see Tahni again. I’m not sure I ever will be.

The townsfolk know this, and as I reach the temple floor the crowd parts, creating a wide corridor through which I can walk. As I pass they each acknowledge me with a nod or sad smile, a silent thank-you or I’m-sorry. Only one man has not moved.

Emperor Uqqa.

My insides churn as I draw to a halt and his narrow eyes pierce me. The most terrifying thing about Uqqa was never his physical stature or his coldly logical mind, but the aura of stillness that seems to ensnare all in his presence. The emperor does not move a muscle, and as he stares into me I cannot help but feel like a mouse caught in the cold regard of a snake. I’m being dared to challenge him – but if I do, he will be upon me like lightning, his jaws closed in an instant.

Yet for all this, I remind myself, Uqqa is not an evil man. His very presence strikes fear into our hearts, yes, but it does so only because it must. Because if another found the courage to rise against him, there would be war, and the Indifferent One’s halls would once more overflow with fire and blood. For all that he may grate upon us, Uqqa is the emperor we need.

When an eternity has passed, after I have finally squirmed long enough to satisfy him, Uqqa breaks the silence. “Priest Daghan,” he declares in his lilting southerly voice. “Await me outside. You and I have much to discuss.”

I hope he does not see the blood leave my face as I struggle out a response. I hope he does not see me pitch forward as I emerge into the blinding sunlight outside, then fall to my knees upon the scorching white sand. Emperor Uqqa wants to speak with me. And that can only mean one thing.

There will be a Sentencing today.

——————————————————————————————————————

The sky hangs above us like a cloudless monolith, its lone eye casting a searing white gaze upon the wooden dais below. The townsfolk – half a thousand now, once again arrayed en masse below me – shield their eyes, unable to meet the First World face to face. I wonder if a God is peering through that gateway now, how pitiable this little congregation must look and how vast the desert beyond.

Awil stands to my left. His head is bowed low, the expression on his face vacant, and an occasional tear runs down his cheek before it’s lost in his beard. It was he who built this platform, and he must have observed a hundred of these horrible ceremonies from beneath it – did he wonder, from time to time, whether a day like this would come? Stood atop his own creation, mere hours after his worst nightmare came to pass?

I look away. It is not right for me to probe like this, to guess at the thoughts of a man so tortured. Awil’s grief is his own, and he deserves to be left to it.

To my right stands Uqqa, his sceptre tapping the wood frantically as he waits for the crowd’s murmuring to die down. Beyond him are two palace guards, clad head to toe in shining bronze armour with swords sheathed dutifully at their sides. The last man on the dais kneels between them, hands bound behind his back, forced into position by the clamp of a heavy boot on his thigh. He’s in pain.

I study the prisoner’s face. I do recognise him beneath all the bruises and blisters, though he is not a local; he would come by occasionally to sell his silks at the market, and I’ve even seen him at Grieving once or twice. I’d never thought him an evil man – but his expression now betrays nothing, a mask of determined, likely calculated, neutrality. How one can wear that face in a time like this, I do not know.

A sharp crack sounds. The Emperor has finally lost patience and driven his sceptre against the ground, in one motion silencing the town’s last thrums of conversation. “Men and women of Tell Maar” – his voice booms out across the sands – “days like this are never easy. It is a fell thing to gather in such a time, an accursed lot to be brought together in our hundreds not to laugh or celebrate, but because something terrible has happened.”

I gaze at the Emperor’s face as he speaks, and the compassion in his eyes almost moves me to tears – it hurts to say these words, hurts him to the very core. A crueller man in his position might lock his heart away, shield his mind from such primeval pains - but Uqqa refuses. He will share Awil’s grief in its entirety, and only once he truly understands what has been done will he see himself fit to deliver justice. We do not deserve a ruler like him.

“The prisoner will not be named,” he continues, “for by his deeds he has made of himself something monstrous, forsaken humanity itself in his cruelty. I will speak of his crime once and not again – so that you understand the wound he has made. So that justice might be dispensed, and so we might begin to heal.”

A heavy breath. “Two women have suffered greatly. A mother lies dead, and her daughter might never wake. Burned alive, by his hand, in their own home.”

The crowd erupts. A fever of rage and fury sweeps through every one of them – curses are screamed, promises of torture and death and far, far worse. Awil cries out in agony, his body racked by the sobs. But the prisoner’s face remains steadfast, yielding nothing to the ire and vitriol of so, so many. Even as I lay a hand on Awil’s shoulder, a shudder runs through me.

Forsaken humanity itself.

Uqqa gives them time. He lets fury reign for as long as it has to, then brings silence down with another crack of the sceptre. His next words are low and measured.

“All are equal in death. So we are often reminded by the good priest Daghan, the steady hand and loving voice that guides us through times like these. On this day, and so many other days like it, the sentiment is… testing. To know that this man will go to the Hall like any other, to know that he will find his rest among the innocent, his coffin looked upon no differently than any of ours – it is a truth almost too bright, too painful to look upon. But that is why we are here. What we cannot expect in death, we must give in life.”

The Emperor turns to me, and what he draws from beneath his cloak sickens me. A ceremonial whip, adorned from thong to hitch with barbs of glass. A weapon crafted with purest hatred, designed to rip and tear the skin of the victim it’s turned upon. An instrument of justice.

Uqqa’s eyes are filled with sympathy, his voice deeply apologetic. He knows he asks me to do something vile, something that will stain my soul and haunt my dreams for so many nights to come. He knows I will do it, and that I will not protest – for it is my duty to help us grieve. All are equal in the Halls of Death. It falls to me to make that bearable.

“You will keep this man alive for three dawns. As the sun rises on each day, you will flay the skin from his bones. You will quench the air with his screams and the earth with his blood, until the sands are red and his flesh grey, but no matter what, you will not let him die. Only once he has suffered thus, when he has known the same terror and agony he inflicted on his victims, can he finally make passage to the World Beyond. Am I understood?”

The townsfolk cheer.

Awil looks on.

I take the whip.

The Emperor’s words have not quite sunk in when it happens. From the corner of my eye I see the prisoner stand up, draw out a hand somehow freed from his bonds. Before either guard can react he’s pulled sword from sheath, then in one fluid motion raised the blade to his neck. A white-toothed, sardonic grin breaks out across his scarred face as he looks out over the crowd, and it’s with derisive laughter that he plunges it into his throat, snuffs his own life before the body’s even hit the ground.

For a moment, silence.

Then the crowd erupts again, this time with a fury more unchained, more primal than I’ve ever seen before. Screams tear from throats until all breath is spent, nails rip at the dais’ base until fingers are stubbed and bloody. So many look to me, their eyes all silently pleading for an answer. But what can I tell them? The man will find rest. Justice has failed, and reality is an inferno staring us in the face.

His name was Iddin.

The townsfolk weep, and in each voice and tear I hear a thousand accusations, for I have failed to give them what I have always promised. Uqqa’s face is ashen, and for the first time ever I see upon him the expression of a man truly lost. Even the sun must be roaring out in pain, its misery and helplessness lost somewhere in the miles of sky above us. Only one man can fix this.

I turn to Awil and grab him by the arm, force his wild gaze away from the murderer’s corpse. He opens his mouth to speak but I don’t let him, cutting him off with a voice as resolute as I can manage. “Friend Awil, hear me now. By all the years I have passed in service to the Indifferent One and all the years I have left, by all the love I have felt and all the grief it has brought me, I promise you one thing: I will make this right. I will make it all right.”

——————————————————————————————————————

The months after Tahni passed were cruel, and I can recall mercifully little of them. What I do remember is a haze of smoke, of days spent weeping and priestly duties neglected for weeks at a time. I could not bring myself to look upon the Hall; that my beloved would never return from here, that one of these coffins now contained her bones and that I would never know which, was a truth too bright to bear. I burned datura petals in our home, spent night after night pleading her spirit to come back to me, to let me caress her hair and hear her voice one more time. Once or twice, I did glimpse her face in the swirling fumes – but no sound came forth when she opened her lips, and the moment I reached out to touch she would disperse back into nothing.

Only the Indifferent One moves. Only His steps are heard.

I did return once, in my most shameful moment. I entered the Hall blind with fury, because how dare my God remain indifferent in the face of all my pain? What kind of a man could bring himself to take someone so young, to strike down such a pure and wonderful soul mere months into her adulthood? Why had he taunted her for so long, forced her into years of bedridden misery, only to snatch hope away when recovery was beginning to look possible? Where was the justice?

So I screamed it all out, and I lashed wildly at the walls until my hands found loose stone, and with all the strength I could muster I pulled until it detached. The crash thundered through the hallway, its echo so impossibly loud it seemed to continue forever – and it was only then that I realised with horror what I’d done, stared in disbelief at the shattered coffin at my feet.

A soul’s eternal home. Destroyed in a selfish tantrum.

There was silence.

Petrified, I looked up.

The Indifferent One had turned.

His stare was enough to still my resolve and wither my every defiance. In that moment he turned me from raging beast back to a whimpering child, awaiting the punishment I knew I deserved. The Indifferent One had trusted me – he’d let me into his home, believing I would uphold my duties as his priest and gaze upon the dead with the same unjudging eyes he did. He’d tasked me with guarding the world’s most sacred truth. And I’d betrayed him.

I woke from the trance with a start, and didn’t return to the Hall for months. When I did, the Indifferent One ignored me.

——————————————————————————————————————

This time, things will be different.

I take in a long breath of the crypt’s dusty air, swallow my fear and prepare to do what I must. From every shadowed corner, from the dark spaces upon each shelf, Iddin’s dying grin mocks me. The bastard’s in here somewhere, and he knows I could spend a hundred lifetimes seeking him out without ever coming close.

As my hands once again close around the nearest coffin, I voice a long prayer of apology, beg whoever is inside to forgive me. I will not hide from the horror of the act I’m about to commit, nor understate its severity: Iddin is not buried here, and by doing this I am denying someone – perhaps a soul as pure as innocent as Tahni’s – a place in the afterlife. Treating them as nothing more than a lamb upon the altar, an unwitting sacrifice to further my own ends. But what other choice have I been left?

I pull.

The cavern’s walls seem to shake, the very stone screaming as it’s rended apart, clattering down in a million pieces at my feet. But my eyes are elsewhere, locked squarely on the cloaked figure standing in the darkness ahead.

Once again, the Indifferent One turns around.

The silence has barely fallen before it is broken once again by that rhythm I know so well, the tap-tap-tap of his feet against the stone tiling matched by the hammering of my heart. It's no wonder I was so scared – the Indifferent One’s flesh seems to morph even as I look upon him, in each moment shifting through a thousand different faces. His every expression affixes me with the same hollow eyes.

I meet my God’s gaze.

For seconds we stare at one another, and I’m jolted by the realisation that this is happening, that my desperate gambit might actually succeed. Get away, every spark within me screams, but I silence them all, force my voice to return. “I have come,” I say through gritted teeth, “to make a request.”

“To get my attention, you tear into my home.” His voice lilts differently on every syllable such that I cannot make out any singular accent, nor even whether it belongs to woman or man. Again I feel I’m about to shrivel under his scrutiny, but once more I fight it off. And this time, it’s far easier.

“It was the only way you’d listen.”

“True enough.” To my surprise, the Indifferent One laughs – the sound is bizarre and unearthly, but I hear no malice in it. His eyes are still empty and his expression unreadable, but I know now something I had always suspected; the God I serve is a kind one.

“I have come here on behalf of my people,” I continue, my voice getting steadier with each word. “Days ago, the soul of a wicked man slipped our clutches, escaped the justice it was to face and found refuge here. I seek a merchant named Iddin.”

The Indifferent One nods. “You would have me punish him. Afflict him with the pain he avoided in life.”

“Yes.”

Of course, Iddin was not the only criminal to elude us – many did their heinous deed then simply vanished, never to be heard of again. They’d cowered away, lived out entire lives in fear that we’d someday find them, and they’d face the retribution they deserved. Some had doubtless left the Empire entirely, spent what days remained to them in exile, tormented by the knowledge that they’d never see their loved ones again. But this was different. They’d all escaped justice. Iddin had pissed on the very notion.

“For how long?”

I clench my fist, imagining Iddin’s face upon the Indifferent One’s. That horrible glint-toothed grin. That mocking, triumphant cackle.

“Forever.”

For a while, the Indifferent One looks into my eyes. I meet him levelly, so he understands that I will not be swayed here. That I am here not for myself, or for Awil, or for any one of the hundreds who were denied their justice in the past. No. I am here for my world.

“And this would help your people. So much that it was worth you coming here, breaking your faith’s every taboo to ask me for it personally.”

“Without this, we are lost.”

“Then it shall be done.” And before I can answer the Indifferent One begins to stride away, and that familiar tapping once again echoes down the endless hall.

——————————————————————————————————————

A cool breeze sweeps over the gathered townsfolk, and little billows of sand tug playfully at the foot of my cloak. Laughter surrounds me as the crowd parts, clearing my path to the wooden dais – Emperor Uqqa would be glad, I think, that his funeral is a time of joy and not misery. There was a time for reflection and mourning – to my knowledge, the first Grieving attended by every man and woman in town - but that has passed, and we gaze now towards a bright future. That Uqqa chose Tell Maar as his resting place honours me beyond words.

I pause for a moment as I pass a set of three graves, read the names inscribed upon each wooden stake. Awil was buried here three years ago, though in truth he had been dead more than a decade. No soul could survive what his went through – no, the woodcutter had not lived a day since he lost his wife, then returned home two days later to find his child hanging by the neck. Sweet young Erissa.

Would that you had lived to see the justice we delivered. For your wounds, and your mother’s.

I continue to the dais, ascending the stairway to where Uqqa the Younger awaits. From his effortlessly confident gait to the deep humanity shining in his eyes, everything about him reminds me of his father. Before I can greet him, Uqqa lays a hand on me.

“Judge Daghan. Know that no matter the verdict you deliver today, I will not seek to punish you. My father spoke highly of you, and held unerring respect for your dedication and faith. I’m sure that would hold true here, as well – whatever your decision.”

I nod, raising a hand to silence the crowd.

“Emperor Uqqa,” I begin, loud enough that all the gathered masses can hear me, “was a ruler we did not deserve. How often do we come across a man like him, with both the compassion to understand his subjects’ struggles and the capability to make things right? Uqqa blessed us all, and it is only right that I bless him in turn: He will be rewarded handsomely in the Halls Beyond.”

The townsfolk cheer. Uqqa the Younger beams at me, and I return his warm smile. This is indeed a day for celebration.

——————————————————————————————————————

Some time later, after I’ve tired of the adulation and merrymaking and begun the long trek back to my temple, I hear a snatch of conversation. A boy and a girl, no older than thirteen.

“I’ve heard,” ventures the girl, her voice full with the cautious wonderment of a child sharing secrets, “that if you go north, and keep going for weeks and weeks, you’ll find a city without a god of death. Dying there is like sleeping, only… forever.”

The boy bares his teeth. “In a place like that,” he spits, words harsh and accusing, “how can there be justice?”