Infinity Wanderers 6: Infinity Wanderers

INFINITY WANDERERS

#6

EDITED BY GREY WOLF

Infinity Wanderers issue 6

Edited by Grey Wolf

Cover Art by Robin Stacey

Fiction, Poetry and Artwork: Copyright remains with original authors

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author or from the publisher (as applicable).

INFINITY WANDERERS

ISSUE 6

CONTENTS

A Dream in Ruins - - - Matt Kusluski

Urban Warfare: Mogadishu - - - L. G. Parker

One Place Study - - - 2 Juniper: The Changing Garden

Carl’s Return - - - Matthew Spence

Alea Abiecerat: Part 4 - - - Haley Receveur

On The Island of Cyprus - - - Ali Ashhar

An Ode To Kings of Tomorrow - - - Matthew Toddington

Alternate History Poems - - - D. J. Tyrer ~

Travel Feature - - - Paris Diary 1983

Sculpted - - - Victoria Male

Gloriana or The Fall of British America - - - Grey Wolf

Poetry - - - C. Collingwood

Siderodromophobia - - - Robert Feinstein

Great Britain: First on the Moon - - - B. B. Olshin

Richard Gough Aubrey (1718-1759) - - - Jon N. Davies

The 36th Sun Monitor - - - P. M. Baird

Remember Remember - - - Susan Dean

Lord, Save Us From Ourselves - - - M. L. Williams

The Smiling Tiger: Part 3 - - - Rusty Gladdish

Glory - - - D. J. Tyrer

Poems from Sophia’s Wisdom - - - Elder Gideon

Renaissance Court Aliens - - - Janis Butler Holm ~

Small Causes 5: Lost Victories - - - L. G. Parker

Book Feature: LadySmith - - - Ty Spencer Vossler

ADVERTS AND PROMOTIONS

DEDICATED TO

The person in the Rover

Who didn’t run me over

When I was a child and careless

Riding upon my bicycle

Butterflies

Can be found

In acts that did not happen

As well as ones

That did

A Dream in Ruins

Matt Kusluski

The man had no name and neither had he any names for anything in the world, for humanity had surrendered the gift of language long ago. He walked through a dim forest of pines while the sun set beneath the horizon. Wearing a deerskin tunic, he held a hide satchel holding foraged berries and small rodents.

The people remaining lived solitary lives. This forest man had lived in relative solitude since his first decade of life, before he left his mother. He did not know she was his mother on any level beyond the instinctual and so left her not yet out of childhood, as a fledgeling bird flies from the nest. He had met several others of his kind later, but always briefly, and rarely on good terms.

It was late and the weary wanderer sought a place to lay his head. Sleep’s silken caress beckoned him. He trudged onward towards a strange outcropping in the distance, a ruined stone wall bearing a single window, with piles of rubble - the remains of the other walls of the structure - forming a small clearing within the wood. Very few such places remained of the time when humans held dominion. The traveler did not know the wall had once been built by beings such as himself.

He walked around it, inspecting the crumbling masonry and the patchy moss that grew between its cracks like veins of some great beast barely visible beneath its skin. He peered through the window and saw something he had not seen when walking on the other side.

Seven white-robed figures stood in a circle just beyond the aperture, their hands raised in prayer and their lips moving in intonation. The man then witnessed something he did not understand. The tongues of the seven emitted strange utterances, which the traveler had never heard from human mouths, but only as whispers on the wind or voices in the empty darkness. In any case, the meaning of their vocalizations were incomprehensible to him; the very idea that they might have meaning did not cross his mind.

At the sight of other humans, the wanderer slinked stealthily like a timid mouse. These seven figures seemed unlike other humans he had seen however, and a combination of curiosity and poor judgment came upon him. He stepped around the wall to approach them but found them gone. Circling to the other side where he had been, he still could no longer see them. Even after climbing through the window, the seven figures were nowhere to be found. After a day’s journey, weariness set into his bones. Unable to wait longer to rest, he leaned against the wall, shutting his eyes, allowing sleep to overtake him.

He dreamt vividly that night. Blanketed from the outside world by the veil of his dreaming mind, he felt the cold embrace of stone as though he were enveloped body and soul by the wall behind him. As it engulfed him, from another wall he was reborn into a forest not of trees but other walls of stone. He saw more people than he had ever seen in one place. Unbidden, the knowledge came to his mind that this was how humanity used to live and that he stood within one of their ancient cities, surrounded by high temple walls. Everyone therein could speak the same tongues the traveler heard from the wind and mist. Most peculiarly, he now understood their speech.

The forest man was a disembodied presence until his vision centered on three passersby cloaked in roughspun burlap. He was pulled into the mind of the child among the three, becoming an unwilling passenger inside another’s head. The person he occupied was only a boy, yet within the shadows of his mind he saw the deviousness of vultures, jackals, and humans. The boy's name was Enoch and the two others were his mother and father, Marelda and Tharis. Caged within the child’s consciousness, the forest man observed Marelda and Tharis were charlatans, selling magnificent counterfeit relics to the unsuspecting faithful. Within their satchels sat sacrificial obsidian blades a tenth their supposed age, finger bones from beggars rather than saints, and idols of the Seven-Faced Prince or the Mother of Lightning made from cheap alloys rather than silver. Enoch was the face of supposed innocence whose presence assured the buyer that his parents’ intentions were honest.

When Enoch could, he snuck down back alleys to St. Belridaal's Square, surrounded by towering row houses and littered with the remnants of ashes and refuse dumped from windows above. The puppeteer, an old man with glassy eyes that seemed to stare beyond this world, performed his shows there. A tiny box standing six feet tall and two feet wide was his theater but within he made all manner of marionettes dance on strings so thin and fragile they could scarcely be seen. Monarch, priest, peasant, thief, artisan, servant, or slave; all danced to the puppeteer's whims, enrapturing young Enoch's mind with dreams of life beyond the streets. He felt he knew the lives of castle-dwellers, prosperous merchants, rural serfs, and wild hunters alike, though he himself had never ventured more than a mile from his parents’ room at the ramshackle Greywall inn. How Enoch envied that puppet master, the man who pulled all the strings.

He must be king of all the world, Enoch thought, to make all others dance to his whims. In those days, the puppet master was his god and Enoch offered all of what little he had. When his parents grifts were profitable, and they sent him to buy himself a small meat pie or other treat, he'd sooner starve himself and offer all the coin they gave him at the puppet master's basket, beside the holy altar where his divine hand made the little wooden people dance so majestically.

The forest man saw Enoch age before his eyes. As he grew, the gnawing maw of hunger hollowed his cheeks, and the ever present sight of ashen stone dulled his eyes. He became a young man and saw his parents carried early into the cold arms of Death. Leaving him nothing but a few remaining forgeries, he floundered in an empty sea. Despite the overcrowding of Amarinn, Enoch was alone. He inherited little of his parents’ charisma and for this he desired influence even more desperately, for that was the only way he knew how to live. Returning to St. Belridaal’s Square, he approached the puppeteer in the evening after his show had ended and his audience had returned to their homes.

Please, my lord, make me your apprentice, Enoch begged. The old man had begun to roll his tiny theater down the back alleys, but turned to face Enoch.

The power you hold over the fates of kings and peasants alike, I implore you to teach me, said Enoch, giving a small bow.

I’m merely an entertainer, nothing more said the puppeteer, and continued on his way. Enoch followed the old man to a narrow rowhouse of rotting wood, where several families lived and the puppet master had not even a room, only a place beside the fire to lie down, struggling to warm his weary bones. Enoch felt sudden pity for the man he once worshiped and took his leave.

He had not the charm to survive as a beggar, nor the daring to become a thief. Frequently wandering the narrow streets of Amarinn lost in thought, his bodily hungers grew dull with the waxing of his solitude. He had learned from his upbringing the power and trust people placed in matters of religion. His worship of the puppet master having ended, a void grew in Enoch’s soul. He knew he must find a new deity to replace his false one. Though never pious except before the puppeteer’s stage, he sought to join the priesthood.

A year after his parents’ death, Enoch pushed aside the heavy iron doors of the Temple of the Omniscient. He knelt before the three oracles, their faces masked in gold, as they placed a silken veil atop his head, and bound him in chains of silver, circling around him thrice widdershins. For a day and a night they observed all manner of omens concerning him, deliberating on what they had seen. He initially took their lengthy consideration to be a sign in his favor, yet on their return, one of the three priestesses told Enoch The strands of fate have not bound you to become a priest. If you wish to serve The Gods, you must set out to prove your devotion.

He interpreted this quite personally, that his parents' blasphemies had brought him divine disfavor. So Enoch wandered for years as a pilgrim, venturing from one holy site to the next. Still he suffered the same solitude: a wandering pilgrim was often blamed for plagues and other calamities. He made his coin through begging, renouncing his parents’ ways. Any remnants of his coin he gave as offerings at the temples and wayshrines along his path. He lived in greater misery than his family once had, but told himself this was only temporary.

By day and night he wandered from shrine to shrine flagellating himself while chanting the praises of the gods, stopping at each to pierce his tongue with thorns and kiss the foot of every idol with small offerings of blood. He came upon a dusty crossroads in the steppe where a wayshrine of The Omniscient stood, a single great eye of stained glass raised atop a stone plinth, ornately carved with runes whose meanings he could not begin to guess. Wincing at the pain of his self-inflicted lashings, he begged The Omniscient for a sign of divine favor. Enoch knelt and wept until he collapsed and awoke a day later, cursing the gods that he must live like this, starving and delirious as he was. Before that day was over, however, he begged their forgiveness, screaming his penitence to the heavens.

A cycle of indignation and repentance followed, until after several years he came to stand atop Mount Garenod. Through the stinging snow he slogged, until he reached the summit. On his hands and knees he ascended that sacred peak, where the Gods dwelled, where prophets had been made. Blinded by midday radiance reflected off the fallen snow, Enoch crawled among the bases of the soaring monoliths, the sacred vessels of the gods. Crowning Mount Garenod and soaring hundreds of feet into the air, these columns of stone, inlaid with silver runes, were the most magnificent sight Enoch had beheld. Yet no revelations came to him, no signs that all for which he searched had existed, within or without, all along. At the summit of that axis-mundi, Enoch of Amarinn decided there were no gods.

Descending in disappointment, Enoch knew he was a fool. The power of religion came not from gods but from priests and prophets, he thought. Should he follow the path the oracles had set him on, he would wait forever for the influence and purpose he craved. He resolved to fabricate his own deity. Despite having taken the road back towards Amarinn, he remained in the forest beyond the city-state’s borders, having found a ruined chapel wherein he made his home. Several cracks in the vaulted ceiling filtered scant sunlight from above the forest canopy - the woods beyond the windows were too dimly lit to brighten Enoch’s lodgings. It must have been a temple of the Omniscient once, as engravings of eyes still adorned much of the masonry and upon the altar was an ornate but completely blank book. Enoch had once been told to believe these tomes told secrets only to the Omniscient’s chosen faithful. Now he would use it as a vessel for his own religion. He spent his days writing the Book of the Forgotten, the holy text of a god of his own creation. It was a god of outcasts such as he, the apotheosis of lost souls, an end to loneliness. By night, he slept upon its altar.

He wrote of how the gods banished The Forgotten, the creator of souls, from the world, sealing it away beyond the far corners of existence. He prophesied of The Forgotten’s return, when the souls of all humanity would be joined together as one, freeing them all from the burden of individuality. A long line of prophets he invented, culminating with himself, each chosen by the whispers of The Forgotten beneath a new moon. He credited these prophets of his god with such deeds as establishing Amarinn itself, though in actuality he knew nothing of the city’s history. So he had written, only the prophets would know when the time had come for The Forgotten’s return to the world.

After months spent scrawling the Book of the Forgotten in his own blood, Enoch took it with him and made his way to Amarinn. He wore a white robe and cloak he had taken off the corpse of a frozen pilgrim at Mount Garenod, and with it, his beard, and his unkempt mane of hair, he looked the part of prophet.

A guard at the city gates questioned him What brings you to Amarinn, wanderer?

I serve The Forgotten and come to spread the faith. Your city is sacred to my god, yet your people have long forgotten its worship, said Enoch, still unaccustomed to speaking with such authority as he had made for himself. The guards had not heard of his god and so he told