Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

IV

You must be exquisitely careful with a spell for traveling through time.

You think you understand that before you fuck it up, but you don’t.

Not the way you understand afterward.

Anthar-Kaladon, Lord of the Bleeding Gems, Arch-Thaumaturge, Defiler and Deliverer of Thrax, could have been more precise with his incantation. Heavenly bodies rotate on their axes and move through space as they move through time. There are equations to deal with this, but Anthar-Kaladon admits to some impatience (indeed, a certain moderate impatience is often concomitant with brilliance). Rather than a triumphant appearance under the bright gleam of the moon in the proper year for his intended ritual, he materialized in the middle of a stone wall some three hundred feet down, in one of the annexes of this minor dungeon complex he built twenty or thirty centuries ago.

Now, that would have been the final line in the biography of most wizards, but Anthar-Kaladon, nobody’s gods-damned clown, had already traded in the tired squish-squish of his mortal frame for cold, elegant mineralization. For a creature of undying stone, the act of teleporting face-first into his own architecture, while frustrating, was not quite a permanent setback.

He hasn’t been able to move, but he hasn’t been entirely inert-while complex sorcery is out of the question, Anthar-Kaladon has been able to intone a simple teleportation spell at about half of one-millionth of his usual speed, his voice a whisper so low, it is entirely lost in the sounds of the settling earth. Every few years, he completes an intonation and teleports a few feet up, invariably embedding himself in a new section of wall or floor, but after so many years and so many castings he’s almost made it, surely. Possibly this might even be the last time, and then ...

Something flits across his awareness. A sensation of life and movement overhead, separated from his outstretched fingers by just a few inches of stone. The feeling vanishes, unsurprising. His immortal form is antithetical to life. Nothing with a beating heart can long tolerate his proximity. Still, this is exciting. Inches! Inches between him and the creature above! Oh, let it be this time. This time for sure!