Under the Green Sun of Slormor by Bertil Falk	Table of Contents Chapter 3 Part 1 Part 2 appear in this issue.
Chapter 3: The City of the Water Lily Pond part 3 of 3

Then I felt the touch. Something wanted me to do something. Something wanted me to touch the green moon painted on the glass wall of the cage. I realized that this was dangerous and I fought back. Successfully!

I felt the touch withdraw from my mind. My willpower was strong, and the sensation disappeared. I sensed a kind of triumph.

Then I realized I had been duped. To my horror, I saw Parvrin walking towards the cage like a zombie. I plunged forward to stop her, but I was too late: she had already touched the green moon. At the same moment I caught hold of her, tearing her away from the wall of the cage, the fiery red dragon monster came to life.

The three heads spat corrosive flames from its six nostrils, each bigger than the nostrils of a horse. The six eyes of the three faces glistened with desire. The dragon flapped its wings. The three mouths cried out sounds, roars, grunts, words.

I felt Time, which had been kept outside this cage of Timelessness, flowing back into the cage like air filling a vacuum. The cage was dissolving like water.

“Free, free at last,” the scream resounded between the green brick walls. The purple haze lifted and disappeared. A rumbling sound, which seemed to come from below, from above, from all sides, was growing like the roar of an earthquake.

Skurkran was flying above us towards the gateway, where he touched down and disappeared into the city.

All around us walls and ceilings shook. Sarcophagi began to fall. The enormous sepulchre was on the verge of collapse. Parvrin looked petrified. I lifted her in my arms and rushed towards the gateway. Behind us, the ceiling fell; in front of us the graves shattered; coffins opened and split; the corpses of ancient dragon rulers rolled across the floor, which opened and swallowed them.

I was sobbing with despair and running recklessly. Parvrin was trembling in my arms. A huge slab of the ceiling collapsed ahead of us. I made a desperate leap and landed on top of the fallen stone. I continued running, and suddenly we were outside this cathedral of death. The whole earth was shaking; the square before us was rippling in waves; and the wall of the pond was cracked. The water flowed out into the square and into the streets.

I put Parvrin down. She clung to me. I was weeping. The huge mausoleum had caved in: the walls and ceiling had collapsed. Parvrin was weeping, too. A haze of dust and mortar surrounded what had once been the last resting place of the rulers of Slormor.

What have we done? I thought. What am I doing here? Why did I lure poor, innocent Parvrin into joining me for this selfish journey to reach the enchanted stone, lift it up, and put it back on its pedestal — the only way for me to get away from this world and return to my own. Why had I not accepted my fate and stayed in ruin of the old library?

I sobbed. And yet I was alive; my first grandchild had just been baptized and perhaps given one of my names. Was I crying because I did not belong here? But could that justify my exploiting an innocent girl for my own purposes?

Innocent? How innocent is Parvrin? How much of a child is this precocious girl?

“Unless someone releases him,” Parvrin says. “And I released him. It’s my fault. It means...”

“What?”

“That the road to the land of the Invaders is open. I have that feeling.”

She stopped clinging to me and instead held my hand.

“What’s your name?” she asked. “You’ve never told me your name? Why not?”

How could I explain it to her? My originator never gave me any name in his manuscripts. A critic, for want of anything better, had called me “The Nameless One.”

“I’m nameless,” I said.

“Nameless. What a beautiful name,” Parvrin replied.

We walked away from the city. We turned around and saw it shrinking into a tired ruin on a dried sea shore in a landscape that had long ago ceased to exist.

The great, parched darkness had been reduced to a gray silence. We pitched camp under the protection of the wreck of a man-of-war galleon with thirteen oarlocks on each side.

In the direction in which we had been walking, an ascent loomed. I took it for the old seabed rising to end in the ceiling above us.

Parvrin told me the saga of the city of purple by the water lily pond. It once had been peopled by all the species, races and generations in the world, who lived in harmony under the aegis of the black dragon rulers. Of proud shapes and dazzling beauties, of brilliant musicians and singers, of sensitive sculptors and the craftsmanship of artists, of sagas and sagas of dreams of sagas.

Why had the Invaders touched us inside the huge house of death and caused Parvrin to turn Skurkran loose? They who had once imprisoned the feared father-murderer inside the cage.

“It was not the Invaders,” Parvrin explained. “It was Skurkran himself who touched us with his will power when we got near enough. I could not withstand it, but you were able to resist!”

I was not at all sure she was right. I think that Skurkran attacked me the easier to attend to Parvrin while I was distracted.

“What happened in those days to the people who lived in the city?” I repeated the question Parvrin had never answered.

Parvrin was quiet. Her precocious face had a dreamlike expression.

What was she thinking?

At last she said, “The people of the city were of all the kinds there were, and they came from all the different places of Slormor. People who had visions they wanted to realize went there. It was a city of opportunity. And in the city they lived in peace.

“But there were political differences. Chaos broke out when Skurkran murdered his grandfather. The Invaders had always been on Rurkan’s side against the party of his grandson Skurkran. They reacted instantly and violently and put all their collective effort into changing everything.

“They succeeded in literally driving Skurkran into a corner in the huge sepulchre and confining him in the timeless cage I opened when I couldn’t resist his willpower. After that, the Invaders left the city.”

So that was why it was empty. I wondered how long ago all this happened. Judging from the dried-up ocean, it must have been thousands, perhaps ten thousands of years ago or even hundreds of thousands years ago. Parvrin did not have the answer. She only knew that it had been wasawasa, very, very, very long ago.

Far away, we discerned a ruddy glare, which seemed to approach us. Fascinated, we saw the red spot growing and turn into a red haze. And inside that haze was Skurkran. It was the six nostrils of his three heads that projected the red haze, which enclosed the murderer of a grandfather.

Skurkran got closer and closer. His wing-beats emanating from the giant bat-like wings set the air in motion. The vibrations caused winds that probably not had been felt in this cave-like underworld for thousands of years.

We sought shelter under the galley wreck, but Skurkran did not pay any attention to us. He had probably not even noticed us as he moved above us with heavy wing-strokes and disappeared in the direction of the spot where we had fallen onto the dry seabed. There, Skurkran would be able to get to the surface of Slormor.

We had probably not seen the last of him, but I could guess the despair he would experience when finding that he was the last survivor of his race now that all his kinsmen were extinct.

With the flight of the red dragon before my eyes, I let my bed take care of me. I thought of Parvrin. She was so eloquent — too eloquent for a girl. I just wondered. I wonder. I...

With a carving-knife. Carving-knife is of course the fashionable thing right now. ‘He did hurt her, Dad. But I will serve my sentence and never murder again.’

And the blizzard rages and separates father and son in a ferocious mist. I grope for the boy, but he is gone and cannot be reached. I am myself gone and cannot be reached.

I am aware of a helpless connection between the orchid-cultivated rainforests and the disconsolate seabed. Is it my son who rides on one of the shoulders of Skurkran? A murderer carried by another murderer. I grope for a foothold, a handhold, a hold in life. O generation of dreams.

It was totally quiet when I woke up. Parvrin was asleep. The Sony Ericsson was hanging like a talisman around her neck. Her serious child’s face was reflecting other dreams. She smiled in her sleep, and her smile encouraged me.

And as I watched her sleep, I realized that there was no reason for me to regret the loss of my own world. It was here and now: I had a mission to fulfill. Maybe I was Slormor’s savior...No, savior was too strong a word, but perhaps I was nevertheless a rescuer in this bad, dreamlike world. Not that I believed in prophecies except that they may set themselves in motion by the force of their clarity when they osmotically permeate a time, a world, an existence. But anyhow...

When Parvrin woke up, I served her water and black bread. We had a long trek ahead of us. Skurkran must not take over. He had done enough wrong.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2007 by Bertil Falk