by Curtis Craddock
A vignette from the Hollow world
Gunther found the Archivist of All in a solarium at the top of a half-mile high spire in the very center of the Clockwork Citadel, which was only barely in the top ten strangest places he’d encountered in the Hollow World. The archivist looked like a very large jellyfish, or maybe a squid, with a round bit on top and lots of tentacle things below and a fringe of eyes around the middle.
Gunther didn’t hold the archivist’s appearance against it. Everything was strange here and there was no guarantee that the being before him had even started out as a floating cephalopod-ish thing. After all, Gunther hadn’t started his life as a burly blue lizard-bear who carried winter in his eyes. He’d been a service technician for a municipal water company until the Hollow World sucked him in, and then he’d been a lost little new-kin until the Hollow World claimed him and made him the lizard-bear he was today.
“You have a question,” stated the Archivist in a voice that sounded underwater even though they weren’t.
“Correct,” Gunther confirmed. He hadn’t actually made a request, but why else would anyone come here, pushing through dark woods invested with spider zombies, scaling impassable mountain ranges inhabited by two-headed harpies, and so on except to ask a question?
“You want to know how it all began,” the Archivist bubbled. “How the Hollow World came to be.”
“Yes,” Gunther replied. That was a considerably more insightful guess, but then again the archivist did have a reputation for knowing everything. People pestering it with questions all the time was why it made its citadel so hard to find.
“Why do you want to know?” asked the archivist. It floated about the solarium, a round room with shelves on all the walls holding countless sheets of wafer thin polychromatic crystals. “You are Gunther the fell-handed, Champion of the Golden City, Sire of a Thousand Young—”
“Don’t remind me,” Gunther grunted. When the Lady of the Many Waters had taken him as her mate, he hadn’t realized just how many eggs she was going to lay.
“So why do you want to know?”
Gunther found it somehow hard to explain. “I’ve been in this world for some time, and I’ve been all over the place, for the Burning Wood, to the Caves of Kang, to the Land of the Dead, and I’ve seen many wondrous things, but everything here came from somewhere else once, some place where talking mushrooms were normal, or where the people had warp drive or something. And most of the people here were born here. They’re the descendants of people like me and they spread out and built their own civilizations and if they remember that past at all it’s sort of dim legend. So I got to thinking, what was here before anyone was here. Someone had to build this place, but nobody seems to know, but it seems like the sort of thing someone ought to find out. I mean, if this is some sort of machine, what’s it produce and for whom.”
“So you want to know the history before there was history,” the archivist said, “before there was anyone here to write it down.”
“Yes,” Gunther said.
“No such time exists,” the Archivist said. “My records go back a hundred thousand years, but that is only because the passage of time gives any sort of record a half life. It’s nearly certain there are older records yet to be discovered. In fact, the oldest histories we have speak of even more ancient periods of which we have no record at all.”
“But it can’t go back forever,” Gunter said, throwing up his thick hands in a gesture of disbelief. “It has to have had a start.”
“Why does it have to have begun?” the Archivist said. “When we look into the future we do not anticipate an end. Without an end, a beginning would be pointless.”
Gunther looked up through the crystal roof of the solarium to the small red sun that always stood directly overhead, the point at the exact center of the spherical cavity that was the Hollow World. A cavity in stone, stone that went on forever as far as any one could tell. Had all of this been here forever?
He said, “If this place ever starts to make sense to me, I will know I have gone mad.”
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