Trigger Warning

‘I shall treat you much better in the future,’ said his father. ‘I swear it.’ He walked to the casement, pulled off the cloth. There was no light to be seen through it, nothing inside the wooden casing but a deep and formless blackness.

‘Perhaps the world has entirely ended,’ said Farfal, ‘and now there is nothing but nothing.’

‘Only a handful of seconds have passed there since we came through it,’ his father told him. ‘That is the nature of time. It flows faster when it is younger and the course is narrower: at the end of all things time has spread and slowed, like oil spilled on a still pond.’

Then he removed the sluggish spell-creature he had placed on the casement as a lock, and he pushed against the inner casing, which opened slowly. A chill wind came through it which made Farfal shiver. ‘You send us to our deaths, Father,’ he said.

‘We all go to our deaths,’ said his father. ‘And yet, here you are, a million years before your birth, still alive. Truly we are all composed of miracles. Now, son, here is a bag, which, as you will soon discover, has been imbued with Swann’s Imbuement of Remarkable Capacity, and will hold all that you place inside it, regardless of weight or mass or volume. When we get there, you must take as many stones as you can and place them in the bag. I myself will run up the hill to the nets and check them for treasures – or for things that would be regarded as treasures if I were to bring them back to the now and the here.’

‘Do I go first?’ asked Farfal, clutching the bag.

‘Of course.’

‘It’s so cold.’

In reply his father prodded him in the back with a hard finger. Farfal clambered, grumbling, through the casement, and his father followed.

‘This is too bad,’ said Farfal. They walked out of the cottage at the end of time and Farfal bent to pick up pebbles. He placed the first in the bag, where it glinted greenly. He picked up another. The sky was dark but it seemed as if something filled the sky, something without shape.

There was a flash of something not unlike lightning, and in it he could see his father hauling in nets from the trees at the top of the hill.

A crackling. The nets flamed and were gone. Balthasar ran down the hill gracelessly and breathlessly. He pointed at the sky. ‘It is Nothing!’ he said. ‘Nothing has swallowed the hilltop! Nothing has taken over!’

There was a powerful wind then, and Farfal watched his father crackle, and then raise into the air, and then vanish. He backed away from the Nothing, a darkness within the darkness with tiny lightnings playing at its edges, and then he turned and ran, into the house, to the door into the second room. But he did not go through into the second room. He stood there in the doorway, and then turned back to the Dying Earth. Farfal the Unfortunate watched as the Nothing took the outer walls and the distant hills and the skies, and then he watched, unblinking, as Nothing swallowed the cold sun, watched until there was nothing left but a dark formlessness that pulled at him, as if restless to be done with it all.

Only then did Farfal walk into the inner room in the cottage, into his father’s inner sanctum a million years before.

A bang on the outer door.

‘Balthasar?’ It was the voice from the courtyard. ‘I gave you the day you begged for, wretch. Now give me my thirty stones. Give me my stones or I shall be as good as my word – your sons will be taken off-world, to labour in the Bdellium Mines of Telb, and the women shall be set to work as musicians in the pleasure palace of Luthius Limn, where they will have the honour of making sweet music while I, Luthius Limn, dance and sing and make passionate and athletic love to my catamites. I shall not waste breath in describing the fate I would have in store for your servants. Your spell of hiding is futile, for see, I have found this room with relative ease. Now, give me my thirty stones before I open the door and render down your obese frame for cooking fat and throw your bones to the dogs and the deodands.’

Farfal trembled with fear. Time, he thought. I need Time. He made his voice as deep as he could, and he called out, ‘One moment, Luthius Limn. I am engaged in a complex magical operation to purge your stones of their negative energies. If I am disturbed in this, the consequences will be catastrophic.’

Farfal glanced around the room. The only window was too small to permit him to climb out, while the room’s only door had Luthius Limn on the other side of it. ‘Unfortunate indeed,’ he sighed. Then he took the bag his father had given to him and swept into it all the trinkets, oddments, and gewgaws he could reach, still taking care not to touch the green flute with his bare flesh. They vanished into the bag, which weighed no more and seemed no more full than it had ever done.

He stared at the casement in the centre of the room. The only way out, and it led to Nothing, to the end of everything.