Chapter IX:
The Trial of Theodysus
The Trial
'Who are you?' the old man asked with a gentle expression upon his face. He looked fatherly, like a man who was asking a child about the nature of his games. 'What do they call you, child?'
'I am called Theodysus,' the prophet answered.
'Names are such silly things. They stand for men but say nothing about them,' the old man said with a laugh. 'Who are you? Are you he who was prophesied in the beginning? Are you the one that would bring comfort and peace to the raging world? Are you the speaker of the Hidden Wisdom?'
'I am,' Theodysus answered simply.
'Who are you?' the old man repeated, as if the prophet had said nothing. 'Are you Adapann? The prophets said that it would be Adapann himself who would come.'
'I am Adapann, then,' Theodysus answered. 'But yet I am not. Change is nothing if that which alters remains not within that which it becomes. So I am my father, and in him I perished long ago, but in me he yet lives, and speaks, and has come to you to speak the Hidden Wisdom.'
'What of the other prophecies?' the old man asked. 'You were to be an Essene of the Essenes. You were to destroy Bel Albor and make its towers into dens for sharks and fish.'
'Many things have been said about me, shall I answer for all of them? I am not of the Essenes, but yet I am what they are meant to be - devoted to the Hidden Wisdom - devoted to the Truth. If they, according to their bloodlines, abandoned what was their root, are they still to be accounted Essenes, who are not Essenes? They carry the blood of the ancient Seers in their veins, but I carry their spirit in my breast. Judge for yourself whether or not I am of the Essenes.'
The old man shrugged and continued his investigation, saying, 'But what of all the prophecies? If they speak that which seems contrary to what you have become, what am I to think?'
'No man, whether he is a prophet or a man of ordinary birth, has ever seen or heard that which he did not see or hear. If they speak otherwise, or if they speak what they see and hear to ears that misunderstand, none of this changes the truth. They heard and saw aright, but if you thought something different, then you have not understood them. The truth only speaks the truth, and the truth is everything and everything is the truth. All things, therefore, speak of me, for nothing moves or speaks of itself, but all things speak through the Hidden Name.'
'The prophecies said that you would slay the three beasts. But the elves have slain two of them. All that remains for you to try yourself against is the Fire Bird.' He said this with a look of haughtiness that would have made Lord Pelas look as meek as a lamb.
'I have made myself my father Adapann, whose flesh I am; so also, then, have I, being Adapann, made myself Pelas and his brother, and Dalele as well. The dwarves also I have become, and in them have I slain the others. For you know well enough that there is one was the father of those in Kharku and Bel Albor alike. Yea, I am he also, and he is me.'
'You truly have come to speak for the Hidden Name? Otherwise I would call you a madman,' the old man said with a hint of doubtfulness. 'But how shall you, a man of peace with a knife fit only to cut potatoes, slay the Fire Bird?'
'I have not come to slay the Fire Bird,' Theodysus said. 'I have come to slay the Great Dragon.'
For an instant all the terror and strength of the three great beasts seemed to gleam forth from within the old man's eyes. The bulk of the ocean, the strength of the earth and the wisdom of the air seemed to fill him like heat fills a flame.
'And how,' the old man asked, his voice filled with menace, 'will you make an end of him?'
'One little word shall fell him,' Theodysus answered.
The Unmaking of the Dragon
'Do you not understand who you are speaking to?' the old man asked with mockery in his voice. 'Do you know who I am?'
'You are the Dragon Thaeton,' Theodysus said calmly. 'But yet I do not know you.'
'It is said that He who rules all, knows all,' Thaeton replied, 'yet you say you do not know me, even while you speak my name?'
'Names are such silly things,' Theodysus replied with a satisfied grin.
'If you know who I am,' Thaeton said, 'then you know also that within my hands has been placed all power - power to destroy, to build up, to feed and to starve. All this power is within my hands.'
'You have power indeed,' Theodysus admitted, 'but Power is nothing.
'A man on a journey, coming to a crossroads, is said to have the power to choose to go left or to choose to go right. But he will go one way or the other. Wherein, then, is the power? If he has power to go left, but goes right, wherein does one say that he has power to go left? It is possible, men say, but they do not know what they speak of.
'From watching a man, at one time, go left and, again at another time, go right, men say he could do both. But wherein does that mean he has the might to do what he doesn't do? You have taught men to stretch out beyond their knowledge – and you yourself are the chief of the ignorant.
'You have all power in your hands, oh Dragon,' Theodysus said passionately, 'You are possibility, oh Dragon. But both are nothing. You are the enemy of the Hidden Name, but the Hidden Name, being that which is complete, has no enemies.'
'What is the Hidden Name?' Thaeton hissed with frustration.
'The Hidden Name is Truth,' Theodysus said.
Thaeton then shook his head with anger, 'If this is so, then curse the Eternal King for making it so!'
'Wherein do you curse?' Theodysus asked compassionately. 'Wherein do you grumble against the Eternal King?'
'For he ought, then, to have made a better world, if this one is so filled with deceptions.'
'There is nothing but the truth,' Theodysus concluded, 'and there can be no world that does not share in it. How then do you wish for another except through blindness?'
'I curse him still!' Thaeton shouted, his rage threatening to burst forth at any moment into flames and thunder. 'It is not I, the forever hated Dragon who is guilty of every sin - it is he who made me thus, and he who made all things who is the wicked one. He is the cause of everything!'
'You say he ought to have made a better world,' Theodysus answered, 'but you do not speak of what there is, but of what you wish there to be, and you wish it not for nothing, but because it pleases you. But is the world for the Dragon, or for the Dragon's king?
'Would you ask of these stones that they begin to weave clothing from the mud of the earth?' Theodysus asked, his voice growing firmer as he went on speaking. 'Would you ask the rain to sing a melody upon harp strings? To ask what cannot be done is to ask an absurdity. It is the false thought of better worlds alone that allows men to rail against the Eternal King, saying he ought to do this or should do that. Believing your doctrines about what is possible, men grow angry at what has been made. Such men, and you their father and teacher, speak nonsense, not understanding anything.
'If he could not make the world better than this, sick land of the dying and dead,' the Dragon retorted, 'then he should not have made it at all.'
'But then you must say also, Thaeton,' the prophet answered, 'that it would be possible for what is to not be; and there can be nothing more absurd in all thought than that. It was this lie that you told to Athann and his wife, when in the ancient world you brought mankind under your dominion. For you led them to think that their own desires represented to them veritable possibilities – you showed them a path to better worlds such as you dream of, but neither you nor they have ever perceived such worlds.'
'Without me,' the Dragon snorted, 'there could be no world.'
'Is this your last protest?' Theodysus asked. He shut his eyes and shook his head. 'Without the Hidden Name there is nothing, for the hidden name is truth, which is in everything and without which nothing could have Being. There will always be men, not understanding the truth, who will be led astray by your lies and your temptations. It is true that if there is a world, so also will there be a Dragon. But
when the truth is understood, you, whose doctrine is but an illusion, will vanish away. You are Power, Thaeton,' Theodysus ended. 'But power is nothing. There is, therefore, nothing for men to judge or condemn, but only something for them to be. There is nothing but the Truth.'
The old man, to Candor's wonderstruck eyes, seemed to almost to glow for all his rage. The air bent around him as if he himself were a fiery forge. 'All is well then,' he hissed in a serpentine voice. 'All that the good God has made it just well and good. So be it. Then you will not mind at all if I, according to this doctrine, destroy both you and your people.'
Theodysus paused for a time, and shut his eyes, his head slowly nodding. 'Even if you inflict upon me such pain that I must cry out a curse against him, it cannot alter the truth. Even if my frame is so weak that your fury can drive from it all sense and reason, and with it all knowledge of the truth, yet the truth remains unsullied and untouched.'
Smoke rose from Thaeton, and for a brief moment Candor could scarcely tell whether he beheld the figure of a man or the frame of a monstrous beast.
'You and I are of one substance,' Theodysus said. 'Whatever you do to me, and whatever you take from the world, you cannot rob he who is in both of us anymore than a man becomes a thief for passing his gold from his left hand to his right. Slay me if you must, then. Your evil is mine, and my suffering is your punishment. For there is no I and you. There is only the Truth.'
At that instant the old man stretched out and leaped into the air, becoming once again the monstrous Fire Bird. Like lightning he flew across the sky and like a falling star he crashed down to the ground.
Theodysus raised his hand, palm upward as if you catch a drop of rain, and the two met. One mightier than the earth, one of but mortal frame – but all time seemed to freeze, and to Candor's eyes it looked as though the entire world drained into Theodysus' hand.
For an instant the prophet stood like a living flame, and in the next moment he was gone.
Candor lost all sense, and for a long while he knew nothing at all. When at last he opened his eyes he could see no sign of Theodysus. The Fire Bird, however, lay upon the ground a smoldering ruin, its flames burning quickly away until nothing was left but the bare earth upon which it had descended.
Looking up, Candor saw a bright and beautiful new star, shining almost as brightly as the sun for a moment before taking its place among the starry host as well.
'Theodysus?' he asked in confusion, not knowing that he had just given the star its name.
He walked out to the place where the two had spoken and knelt upon the ground in confusion and amazement.
Silence ruled the Far North.
The Lord of the Stars
This moment, when a Black Adder named Candor Proud knelt in the dirt staring at a star so brilliant that it put the sun to shame, the Nihlion were born. The origin of the name by which they came to be known I will reveal in due course, but this is the moment they themselves mark as the first moment of their faith. The words he heard rushed through his mind, battling and correcting everything he had hitherto been led to believe. Every mistake of the Lapulians was revealed to him in a torrent as he considered the implications of what he had just seen.
And having seen it he could not doubt the truth of what he had heard; nor did he think he could doubt it if he had merely heard the doctrines of Theodysus. For Theodysus had come to do only one thing, to speak one word: Truth. And by that word he had overturned thousands of years of Lapulian philosophical wandering.
Everything the Tower did was aimed at one goal: The survival of mankind. It did not seem to occur to them that there might be something even worth sacrificing life for. But when everything is rooted in time, and in the fleeting moments and impending world to come, there is nothing more important. But time itself, he could see now, was but a word – and a part of a Truth that, being in all times, remains unmolested by alternation.
The Lapulians had rejected the gods for many reasons, and most of them were sound reasons. But while sages and wise men debated about the moment of creation, a time that stood beyond any and all experience, this man had shown him that the moment of creation is every moment – for the world is not merely an expanse, but it is also a beginning and an end.
'No man will ever find God at the first moment of the world,' Candor thought. 'All that the passing away and coming to be of things can reveal is that, if there has been a change, and a state has come to be which was not before, another state must have preceded it.' This means, as Xanthur had taught the people of Sunlan, that the cause of the world is the world itself in its first moment.
But a cause and effect contradict one another, and can only represent change insofar as they bear the same name and are united by a word. For it is the nature of names to unite that which is contradictory.
An infant and the man he becomes are not the same, but they are the same in name. That alone endures. It is not the child, who changes in nearly every regard, that extends into adulthood, it is the name given to the child – the name that surrounds and envelopes the contraries.
The world of yore and the world of today is one world in name, not in themselves, for though everything changes, only the name endures - the substance of all things is the name thereof, and the truth is that name which unites all that there is. The Eternal God is not present at the beginning of things, he is present in every change and every motion and in every object.
'Do not fear death,' Candor thought frantically to himself, 'for passing away is an illusion. Rather fear living without hope, which is a living death. If you know the truth, then you know the Eternal God, and nothing, not time or distance, can take that from you. Be, and do not worry about surviving, for everything stands before the Eternal God, who, being the Truth itself, cannot change. Death is the end of the body, but every moment lived before the Eternal God is as if it were written in stone.'
'And every moment,' Candor shuddered at the thought, 'lived without him was lost as if it were burned with fire in the pit of Abban Don - and burned therein forever.'
'Do not fear death,' Candor said aloud, 'rather fear the ignorance that blinds you from the truth.'
The Lapulians had long mocked the legends and stories of the gods. But the God of Theodysus was Truth itself, which, if it be not real, destroys all knowledge. For it would be as if to say that Truth is false, and so all things are false and everything that is real is not real. Candor shook his head, amazed to find such thoughts originating within his own frame.
The Lapulians deny the gods because they, represented in the fables of mankind, are said to have bodies, which when investigated are nowhere to be found. But even bodies, as they move and resist one another, have their movement and their resistance only insofar as the body before its movement and the body after it has moved, though they contradict one another, are united by the Name. Thus even bodies and the very stones of the Magic Tower itself have their being only in the Hidden Name.
Candor fell to the ground and grasped at the dirt with his hands, 'I am less real than he!' he exclaimed in horror and wonder at once.
Many things passed through his mind as he knelt upon the ground where Theodysus and the Dragon had stood. Suddenly he understood what the Star Seer had meant when he said that Theodysus would be the destruction of Lapulia, but its salvation also. The Magic Tower, taking itself to be the savior of mankind's future, could never understand how the Tower could fall yet Lapulia be saved. But it was not their lives or their Tower that needed saving, but their understanding. For they lived every day bound to the lies of the Dragon, which would live on in the breasts of those who believe them until time itself comes to an end. In that moment a great desire entered into his heart, to bring the news of Theodysus to his homeland, but he knew that it would not be well received, nor did he think he could come within a hundred leagues of Lapulia without being taken or slain.
After he considered this, others began to emerge from their hid?
?ing places. The people gathered around him to see if they could learn what had happened. Before he knew it he was surrounded by a great crowd of people, several of whom he realized were garbed in the armor of the god-hunters. His instinct was to call for the others to take or slay them, but when he saw the wonder in their eyes he realized that they, like him, had been broken, and were ready to be remade.
'The world is broken,' Candor said after they had stared at him for some time. 'Not by the might and power of the Dragon, as your stories have said, but by his lies. There is only one thing that can oppose the Truth - and that is a lie. But a lie is nothing, as it is not the truth. We must fight every moment for our souls, not to free our bodies from the elves, or to save our people for ages to come, but to save our hearts and minds from the illusions of Thaeton, who we have seen unmade this day. Do not forget what Theodysus has done for us all this day. Look to the heavens, and behold the reward of those who do not surrender to the enemy of Truth.'
The people looked up at the sky, and all their faces were illumined by the light of Theodysus, and they marveled at its brightness in that day. Never since that time has the Lord of the Stars shone so strongly, and men say that never again will it shine so bright. Others, however, say that it will shine once again when the hour of the world's end has come.
Yulin, the youth who had first confronted Candor and Nonix when they entered Theodysus' camp, came forward then with his sword drawn and held aloft. 'I have a sword!' he said. 'Let us cleanse the land of evil, and bring the words of Theodysus to the world. Let us drive the Dragon's lies from Bel Albor!'
'No,' Candor said, marveling at the change that had come over him, and how thoroughly defeated were his old thoughts. 'It is not against men, but for them that we must fight. And we have no quarrel with the tyrants of Bel Albor, neither with Agonas or with his brother Pelas. Our quarrel is with the children of the Dragon - the lies that yet dwell in every breast. Lift up your sword and kill, Yulin!' Candor said with a strong voice, 'but you cannot pierce a lie with a blade of iron or steel. Only with the sword that is a word - one little word shall be our weapon.'
'What is that word?' the voice of Nonix rang out, rising above the crowd.
Candor looked and saw the old man making his way through the crowd toward him, his hand upon the hilt of his sword and his eyes upon the Black Adder with suspicion.
'That word is the word of Theodysus: The word is Truth.'
The Burning of the Book
That night a great many fires were lit, for a cold wind blew through the Vale of Athann and many of the followers of Theodysus had lost their tents when the Fire Bird had burned to ashes. Candor spent the whole day recounting what he had seen until every man and woman had heard him. When night fell he called the people around him and told them of his mission.
'Every man has his own path to tread, according to the desires of his heart. My path was a dark one; I was a Black Adder of Lapulia, a nation about which few of you have heard. It is a city of fear and suspicion, where men cling desperately to the hope that, somehow, they will find a way to make mankind live forever. But more important than a long life, and more important than survival is the truth. For what is life to a foolish man but a great folly? How can a foolish man be satisfied? For he wants what he does not understand, and does not understand how to get it. But the wise man will desire knowledge, and, finding it, will be filled therewith.
'I have killed many men, and committed many crimes. But what is this to the Eternal King, who knew all things from the beginning? Have I resisted him? Have I broken that which he has wrought? No, the only breaking with the truth is through lies, and it is that which must be changed, not our past or our future - our knowledge must be changed. And let it be changed forevermore.
'So let it be known among you, and taught, as it was taught by Theodysus himself, that the good man lives by knowledge, and not by his good deeds. This will seem a dangerous doctrine to many - to those who think that they will somehow bring justice to the world by their own hands. We must be a people that forgives every wrong; for we do not seek what men call 'right' and 'good', but only the Truth, which has naught to do with men and their goals, but which alone is the true good. Our path is not kingdoms and thrones, but truth.'
Candor then lifted his spell book above his head so that everyone could see it. 'This,' he explained, 'holds all the secrets of my people. It is a book filled with ways to slay and kill men, and with the means to make one powerful. With the power of this book I slew hundreds of the god-hunters, before the Dragon descended upon the Vale of Athann. With this book we might overthrow Pelas and his brother, and make the world of Bel Albor safe for an age, and perhaps in time challenge the Magic Tower itself. Indeed, it has been prophesied that my kin will destroy Lapulia.'
The people watched him with amazement, and some of them very clearly thought that he meant to do just that. Some of the younger men put their hands upon their swords as if they were prepared to march against Alwan and Sunlan that very moment.
Standing nearby in the firelight he saw Nonix, standing with a cautious but approving look on his face, and behind him he saw Leai, watching him through her dark eyes with patience and understanding.
With a flick of his wrist and a moment of anxious doubtfulness, Candor dropped the spell book into the fire, and watched as its pages slowly curled and burned. He looked at his hands - the hands that had slain friend and foe alike - and tears streamed from his eyes. He remembered what Loyal had said to him, and now, knowing the doctrines of Theodysus, he knew that he had spoken the truth.
'I forgive you,' he had said.
'Now I must teach all men to forgive,' Candor said, both to himself and to the people watching him.
'Our path is not to greatness, such as the elves and mortal men see it. Our path is truth. And our power is in forgiveness.'
End of Book IV
Book V:
Noro The Hero