He could talk to the bracelet!
The terror disappeared as if it never existed, replaced by awe. Soon, a strange language whispered in his head. Apparently, the bracelet was trying to talk by activating his hearing neurons, but the sounds made no sense. They sounded something like, “Ifikia e uosa dunae etsu!”
“Any chance you speak Antyran?” Gill asked aloud.
Something changed because after several more dissonant attempts, he saw images.
“Here we go again,” he said with a sigh, exasperated.
However, as new shadows began to take shape in his vision, he noticed a change. The memories were not his!
He was looking at a large, red-orange blob, which seemed to be alive and moving! As the image gradually gained in clarity, Gill realized it was an unknown species: a tall being with eerily white skin and hypnotic yellow eyes placed in sockets a bit larger than them, clothed in a red-orange suit. It had a broad face with pronounced brow ridges, lowered cheekbones, and a mouth bounded by pale, thin lips. Scores of vertical furrows wrinkled its face, a few even reaching the upper lip. Some white hairs grew on its skull, sparser than the ones on the beard and just as small.
The creature was in a room that strikingly resembled the inside of a spaceship, its walls being forged from a golden metal. Gill could see several other beings similar to the first one, off to its left, squirming around in their red-orange spacesuits—visibly agitated. The gods all appeared tall and dignified. They looked a lot like soldiers and wore golden bracelets on their forearms. A martial smell permeated the air.
Gill became convinced that he was looking at the beginning of the end of the old Antyran world—the godly invasion, which happened 1,250 years ago! The Book of Creation Inrumiral told the story of the cruel Baitar Raman, the one who unified all the ancestral warring kingdoms of Antyra under his sarpan15 and whose cruelty managed the notable performance of awaking Zhan from the sleep he had been in since the beginning of the universe, drained of vigor after giving birth to the world.
He recalled a quote from Inrumiral 2.6: Zhan’s second awaking:
Without delay, they burned and melted everything: the caves and the temples of the fake prophets, the fortresses, the glacier towns, the catacombs of perdition. For seven days and seven nights, a great fire purified the Antyrans so estranged from His Kyi! Raman’s capital became a handful of ashes, and the same happened to the other big cities of the world. Those who escaped with their puny lives were taught how to follow Zhan’s way and build magnificent pyramid temples—all through the voice of their first true prophet, Baila the First.”
It was true that watching them through the eyes of a modern Antyran—and an accomplished archivist on top of that—he couldn’t silence the thorn of heresy that itched him to think of things that shouldn’t be thought of, to see that the gods were nothing more than mortal beings similar to Antyrans. And above all, he couldn’t quell his suspicion that much more lay hidden beyond the firewall than Zhan’s godly realm.
He turned his head to take in the whole room but noticed, annoyed, that he had moved his own head in the nest while the bracelet’s vision remained fixed on the same spot. Look to the left, he requested, with no result. Then he saw one of his hands: it was alien! The bracelet memorized the images received by the eyes of its wearer!
A wall unexpectedly morphed into a huge display, and the beings gathered near it in solemn silence. Great sorrow could be read on their alien faces—and particularly so in their hypnotic eyes. They’re angry they have to punish us, he concluded, as it was written in the book of Creation.
“Amba etsu ni kipota! No hawez kuffa pano ni hajo!” a creature mourned in its babbled language.
And then came the first surprise: he understood the god’s saying! He actually understood its meaning, even though the language wasn’t Antyran! How could the bracelet learn Antyran so quickly?
The second surprise was what the god actually said: “Our home is lost! And we can’t die along with it!”
Gill had the feeling that his reasoning was rotten, that something didn’t add up. The creatures didn’t seem poised to launch an invasion of Antyra because something serious was about to happen in front of their eyes, something that had nothing to do with Raman’s punishment.
“Our world is attacked!” shouted the creature entwined in his kyi.
On the display wall, a planet slowly rose into view: the gods’ homeworld. “I see it for the last time,” whispered his alter ego.
The planet didn’t resemble any of the Antyran worlds. A reddish sun—at dusk from their point of view—was shining over a mostly desert world. It had beautiful tall mountains, shallow seas, and a few gigantic plateaus, rising more than six miles above the desert floor. The plateaus were surrounded by deep valleys invaded by green, lush vegetation.
Even though the god had already moved his worried eyes from the green valleys to check the menacing depths of space from where the attack was about to come, it took a while for Gill to notice that there was no firewall around the world. In fact, there was nothing there but a pitch-black immensity. Or maybe there was something? At first, he thought that his eyes were playing tricks on him, but then he became sure he saw a glimmer of light. A small, white light glittered on the firmament of darkness. Then he saw one more, and another one, and another one. When the god turned his head further away from the twilight, Gill couldn’t stop an exclamation of surprise: “On Zhan’s eye!” Scores of lights—thousands or even millions—flickered in the black abyss. Could they be the windows of the diamond castles in the sky, the homes of the gods, as the ancient legends often described them?
The god looked again at his homeworld—this time toward the planet’s dawn—when another star rose above the curvature. A world with two stars! Why not? Suddenly, the possibility that the countless lights in the sky were stars just like Antyra (albeit seen from a much greater distance) didn’t seem so absurd to him. What could be absurd after today’s morning?
The gods watched the planet beneath, and the thought that they would never see it again overwhelmed them. Gill felt the suffering of the bracelet wearer in the most empathetic way and found it hard not to feel shattered himself. His neurons hosted two kyis now: one awestruck by the things discovered, the other witnessing a terribly tragic event. The gods were living the end of their world!
The first creature he had seen—apparently their leader—broke the silence, shouting an order in the alien language. Everyone on the ship started to run. In that moment, the vision became blurry again, as if the bracelet had problems streaming it.
The next images flickered wildly. They were too blurry for Gill to discern anything. Each time the image lost clarity, the bracelet compensated with a horrible brackish metallic taste.
Suddenly, they were in the middle of a huge space battle. He was again in the command room of the gods’ spaceship, and the walls, floor, and ceiling disappeared, turning into huge displays on which he could watch, unhindered, the blackness of the surrounding space. And not only that—because an incredible spaceship was standing in front of their vessel, a monster as big as a large city. But if its size amazed him, the way it moved was even more unbelievable; it was able to instantly jump distances greater than its whole length!
In other scraps of images, Gill could tell that the gods were angry and fighting. They, too, moved very fast—sometimes so fast he found it impossible to follow them.