Phlinn Arol and Gashanatantra had joined us. “Are all the options quite as draconian as you made them out just now?” said Gashanatantra.
“Well...” I said. “Maybe not. If we could analyze a sample of the goo from the lab, maybe there’s some feature we could target directly. No miracles, you understand, but could be something to try short of full scale scorched earth.”
“If it’s all the same to you,” stated Shaa, “personally speaking I would rather not be the proximate cause of death to thousands and eradication of races. My medical training, you understand.”
I sighed. “Oh, all right.” For all my efforts to get the world to move on past me, to wash my hands of this and all messes, I could already see myself getting dragged back in, the miasma of past transgressions notwithstanding. “Come back here and let’s see what we can set up.”
EPILOGUE
So, anyway, that's the part I saw, or had some level of direct involvement with. I don’t pretend to be the last word on the matter. If you’re interested in what happened you’ll have no shortage of folks chewing over it for years, down to the least person present at the Stadium of State for the Knitting or brushed by the Scapula’s burst of magic, and after anyone who has any claim to personal connection has gone by the wayside there’ll be the historians to contend with... but what’s new? Talking about current events is always tricky. No matter how much lip service you give to the ideal of objectivity, if you’ve been there or had some stake - whether personal or philosophical or whatever - you’re automatically shading the facts; the more you think you’re not, the more so the first listener you’re twisting the evidence on is you.
Still, there’s something to be said for setting out reminiscences while things are fresh, not to mention the consideration that it’s traditional. Of course, there’s not exactly a mass market these days for memoirs, although I could probably aggravate quite a number of people I know by having highlights distributed on those wall-sized broadsheet things, or even commissioning criers to do public declamations in the squares. But when those historians start sharpening their fangs, it’s primary sources they like to chew through first. So here I am.
I’ve been using the modern-day vernacular for my narration, rather than one of those stuffy old scholars’ cants that sounded like vernacular when I was growing up but are extinct as the platypus now. I wouldn’t turn up my nose at the prospect of wide readership, but even if this tome’s only destination is a back shelf in the Archives there’s no point in shoving more stumbling-blocks under its feet than it’s apt to encounter anyway. The potential audience might be reduced somewhat if it was necessary to learn a defunct language before you could start on the first page, a language with few native speakers and no teachers or texts to boot.
The downside of writing so it could actually be read, however, has been coping with criticism as I’ve plowed through the pages. Hopefully I’ll get this little codicil down before Shaa shows up again. He’s appointed himself Guardian of Internal Logic and Skeptic-at-Large, and has been spending far too much time skulking behind my shoulder as I’ve slogged through the tale. Not that he hasn’t been a help in places, and at least someone’s been interested enough to hang around, and he has been a seemingly objective correspondent for material I wasn’t actually present to witness myself (although I’ve been careful to crosscheck him against the monitoring data downloaded to the Archives before Arznaak crashed the system to hell-and-gone, apparently for good).
Still, Shaa’s been a fairly severe editor, too, and even if I locked the door on him I’d know he’d be sitting outside it nagging the air. I hadn’t wanted an editor, but with his way of undermining confidence through the drawn-out silence or the disapproving droop in the corner of his lip or the disappointed “hmph!”, he’d wormed his way into my psyche so badly I could hear him carping even when he wasn’t around. I know what he’d say about this epilogue - if he gets hold of it it’ll be the void for it for sure - but I figure if going on at such length about all these shenanigans wasn’t indulgence enough, a little farewell capper wouldn’t be out of place. And after all, the heaviest labor Shaa’s had is reading - I’ve been the one doing the legwork.
Not that anyone’s just had time to lean back and tinker with memoirs. Even without activating the retroviruses magic is still in general collapse. I’ll give Shaa’s brother this; when he launches a blight there were no half-measures concerned. As far away as there’s been communication, reports are still coming in of infectious transfigurations and goo-melts, targeted weapons and countermeasures notwithstanding. A status quo of strife and struggle appears unavoidable.
Not that the players seem to have learned much, either. Max is still out there scheming and planning, back to the trough after his own recent tribulations, and if anyone knows when he and Leen are going to decide what they’re doing about each other it sure isn’t me. Maybe we’re all too far gone to change our ways. Like I said before, I’ll leave it to others more removed to say what really happened.
I thought of dating this thing Year One of the Twilight of the Gods, but that was far too pretentious and overbearing even for me, much less the editorial eye of the mighty Shaa. I’d been there; it had been clear that a random walk of steps from many independent feet and no little dose of fate or blind chance, depending on your turn of phrase, had led here; it would be left to those teeth-sharpening historians to put things in order and fight over the meaning of events and figure out after we were all gone what we were really all about. So, finally, all I could do was stab toward honesty, whatever its limitations, and sign these -
The Memoirs of Byron, with Interpolations in Divers Voices, of Recent Events of Interest
- and then I stood up from the keyboard and went out to get back to my life.