The Sibyliad

The Pseudologue

The Sibyliad is my unfinished epic and is composed of several short books. You’ve inspired me both to share and to finish this work. This pseudologue consists of one pre-chapter.

When I read the prelude to

Larry Hogue

’s Ship of Fools, it reminded me of this, as did

Bill Hiatt

’s mythology-based stories, especially The Menippus series, but maybe it was

Tom Schecter

’s Shieldbreaker Saga and

Stefan Baciu

's The Cosmonaut that finally infected me with the desire to share.

The rules of wisdom tell us not to write a prelude or prologue, so this is a pseudologue, a pseudo logos, a false word—or, should we look to Christian tradition—a false god.

---

This story is part of Literary Salon issue #2.

The Sibyliad

The Pseudologue

A rock streaked with molten fissures lit the circle of land on which he-who-had-been-secretary-to-the-emperor stood. On that tiny island with just that rock and a dead tree, they were alone, Daphnis and Herophile, and Daphnis felt small next to her broad back and shoulders.

His voice broke the silence. “How long have we been here?”

Herophile gave no answer.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“The beginning,” she said. “When I lost the last of my humanity, this is what I found.”

Having run out of questions, he offered what comfort he could. Such was the comfort of company, whether or not one knew what one was talking about. He cleared his throat, announcing the profundity to come. “We’ll regain our strength soon enough.”

“Soon is a matter of perspective,” she said.

She’d brushed off his efforts, and that was more discomforting than he cared to admit. “Is there anything we can do?”

“Nothing to be done.” She stood close to the heat and light of the rock.

He redirected his gaze to where the red light reflected off black waters. “What’s out there?”

“The dark.”

“I can see that.”

“Then you didn’t need to ask.”

He pinched his nose. “My head hurts. If I have no body, why do I feel pain?”

“You’ve seen too much to ask such questions.”

He sat beneath the tree, as if seeking shade from a non-existent sun. “If you didn’t make this place, maybe this is real.”

“What reality would you suppose?” she asked.

“It’s not bad enough to be Tartarus.”

“The gods help us if this is Paradise,” she said.

“How so?”

“If this is the best there is,” she said, “may the gods have mercy on us all.”

“If this were Paradise, there would be hope.”

“With this? What hope do you see with this?” she asked.

“That something better is coming.”

“And if this is Tartarus?” she asked.

“Fear of something worse,” he said.

“And if it’s Hades? Should we be content?”

“Content?” he asked. “With this?”

“If nothing better is coming and nothing worse, how else should we feel?” she asked.

“Absolutely hopeless, maudlin, and forlorn.” He squinted into the dark, as if he might see the lights of cities upon a distant and mediocre shore. “Maybe this is Hades.”

“We’ll regain our strength soon enough,” she said.

“Didn’t I say that? I thought I’d said that. We must have been here longer than I imagined.”

“That’s always a possibility.”

“Nothing seems possible here. That’s the point, that there is no point. Everything is. Nothing changes.”

“Things were different once.”

“How long have we been here? Is there time in this place?”

“Time is change,” she said.

“There is no time here.”

“We’ve changed,” she said. “We’ve moved. We’ve spoken. Heat has radiated off the rock. Shadows have danced upon the tree.”

“Maybe it has a little time, less than usual, the dregs of a sundial beneath a moonbeam.”

“That makes sense,” she said.

“How much longer do you think we’ll be?”

“A little time more.”

“That could be forever,” he said.

“Maybe it has been. Maybe it will be.”

Silence filled the empty space.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“No. You?”

“No.”

“That’s something,” she said.

“Is it? What is it?”

“Something,” she said.

“I could eat, though,” he said.

“I honestly don’t remember how.”

“No capacity. No need,” he said.

“Any desire?”

“Not so much,” he said.

“Me, neither.”

“We won’t starve?” he asked.

She stared past him. “Something strikes me odd about the tree.”

“What? Now? Why? The tree hasn’t changed,” he said.

“In form, perhaps, but in my understanding, it has transformed.”

“How so? It’s grown no taller nor grown any leaves. It is as it has always been.”

“It’s not a tree,” she said.

“Not a tree? It’s neither a bush nor a house. It’s neither a dog nor a man. It’s not snow, and it’s not rain. We can run through the list of all things it’s not, and all that would remain is a tree.”

“That’s true,” she said.

“So you admit it’s a tree?”

She shook her head.

“We have determined that all things that describe that-which-is-not-a-tree don’t describe the object in question,” he said. “It is the nature of a name to exclude all things something is not. That’s its function. This is a tree.”

“Look again,” she said. “These are the roots of a tree.”

“The roots?”

“The roots.”

“Then where is the tree?”

She pointed below them.

“Underground?” he asked.

“Perhaps the tree to which these roots belong is bathing in the light of the Florentine sun.”

“And if we dig around its base, we’ll find the surface?”

“Perhaps,” she said.

He looked at the tree, his feet, and then back again. “And we’re hanging like bats?”

“Must be.”

He pushed himself into a crouch and leaped into the air. His feet lifted several inches and then fell back again. “There. That’s disproved.”

“You’ve disproved nothing.”

“If these were roots dangling from some cavern ceiling, we’d fall to the floor.” He pointed above his head. “That way.”

“You know where to find Florence on a globe?”

“I do.”

“It’s all sideways. Every Florentine should slide until he hits a mountain. Up and down mean nothing except to say ‘to the ground’ and ‘away from the ground’.” She pointed down. “That’s to the ground.”

“Not to the ground, to the center of the earth.”

“Maybe the tree grows at the very center of the earth,” she said, “and here its roots extend as a connection between us and the underworld.”

“So if we dig at its base, we’ll find our way to Hades?”

“Perhaps,” she said.

He sat against the tree and closed his eyes. “Either way, doesn’t matter. I don’t possess the energy.”

#

The space around them remained dark, with the exception of the molten light the reflected on the surface of the dark water. Daphnis had lost himself in its patterns when Herophile’s words roused him from his thoughtless trance.

“Do you love Alessandra?” she asked.

He blinked and stirred, and for a moment he recognized that words had been spoken. Seconds later, still, his mind calculated their meaning.

Before he could answer, she continued. “Don’t answer. That would be meaningless. Let me begin again.”

“Agreed,” he said.

She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She shut her mouth again, frowned, and said, “This is difficult.”

“You wish to ask questions which polite society does not permit.”

“Centuries have passed since I was a member of polite society,” she said.

“Habits,” he said. “Perhaps, I can help?”

“I would be grateful.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He shut his mouth again, and then laughed.

“You see?” she asked.

“Clearly,” he said.

“Did you love the circumstances of her life?” she asked.

“Poorly. Maybe not even that. I wouldn’t dare call it love.”

“I see things in people, and then there’s us,” she said. “I think I’ve seen you very clearly.”

He shrugged.

“You don’t think so?” she asked.

“The answer is that I failed her. I was selfish.”

She gave a little grunt of approval.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It’s a much more interesting answer than insisting you loved her. For a few moments, we walked the streets of Florence, you and I. That’s something I thought I’d never experience again, and I rather hated the idea of losing it because you were in love.”

“Selfishness is a better reason?”

“There is no good reason,” she said, “but guilt is workable. There are reparations to be made and obligations to be fulfilled.”

“Obligations to be fulfilled.” He tapped the black water with his foot, expecting ripples that would change the patterns of the light. It changed nothing.

“Perhaps, in time, you’ll move on,” she continued, and he felt the sorrow in her voice, felt it as if it were his own. “Until then, there’s no need to hurry things.”

“Perhaps,” he said.

She nodded, once, as if the matter had been settled, and he said nothing to correct her.

#

The patterns of fluctuating brightness within the magma never changed. Even as the thought occurred to Daphnis, it seemed impossible, and he sat through three, long repetitions before he finally admitted it was true. Nothing here ever changed.

“Maybe the end has already come,” he said, “and we’ve missed it.”

“I doubt that’s even possible. Remember the strength of that one man’s death? Imagine thousands. We’d have felt it. We’d have ridden out of here on waves of power.”

“Is that how it’s always been for you?”

She shook her head.

He asked, “Are we sitting here waiting for people to die?”

“I suppose we are, but people die.”

Then, as if in answer, the taste of death rippled through him. He felt is as a resurrection within his bloodstream, which was nonsense. He had no blood, but he felt it nonetheless. It excited him in a way that shamed him, but as with other forbidden pleasures, the shame only heightened the excitement, giving it an ice-cold edge.

He turned to Herophile and saw his experience mirrored in her face. They stood and looked up into the darkness above the waters, eager for death’s call to show them a direction and give them wings. When they orientated themselves to the pattern of the waves, however, it came not from above, nor from the waters below. It came from the black earth at their feet and, in particular, from the earth at the base of the tree.

Waves of power rose up from the ground like a muted voice. Herophile’s wry smile told him she’d been right. He saw the humor and the knowledge expressed in the curve of the those lips and longed to become one with her once again, to be more than himself, to expand the boundaries of self until they encompassed her as well. Laughter bubbled out of him with a spontaneous innocence he hadn’t even known in youth, and with a dread hunger, they threw themselves to the ground and dug.

The ground came away in shattered chunks. The roots were part of a dead tree, and beyond the tree was darkness, a magmatic glow, and hints of stone. Through the hole, the power surged in unabated crests. Daphnis took Herophile’s hand and crawled through.

They stood at the base of the dead tree, at the base of stone cliffs, laced with veins of magma. Their island was larger on this side than below, but, instead of being surrounded by black water, here there was only darkness. Above them, the dim glow of the magma revealed writing in an unknown language.

The call of death became more emphatic, but they hesitated, startled by a familiarity, as if they knew the power pulsing through them. They rose up like a storm and on black winds raged through a cave in the cliff’s face. The cave turned upward into a cavern that opened to green valley, and they roared out into the valley, the bottom of a caldera, a steep bowl overflowing with life.

They turned skyward as a green-winged angel flew off in the distance, fire trailing from his sword. The caldera dwindled below them and a great peninsula stretched out toward a sea of islands on one side and a fog-banked coast on the other.

The source of power rested near, but for a moment, the flatland held their attention. They knew this place. A confusing wash of desire swept over them, but the pull of death won, and they dropped down to the grass beside a body that felt horribly familiar. They turned her over, and Alessandra’s blank stare gazed through them.

It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t right.

They trembled beneath the waves emanating from her. With a distant howl, a hellmouth sounded, and when it did so again, it was close and loud. They knelt by Alessandra’s side, unable to think or reason, feeling the call of her death above everything else and knowing that if they refused to drink from it, another would be there soon and would take her into its embrace.

They lifted their face to the sky and screamed until their body shuddered, and then, at last, they fell atop her and drank her in. A tunnel opened within them, stretching back through an endless black, but it followed a path they’d not expected. It pierced the skies above Florence and twisted its way through through the palace and deposited Alessandra onto the polished wood of a bedroom floor.

The tunnel collapsed, and they sat alone in the grass atop a hill overlooking paradise. Their thoughts went to Alessandra and the tunnel that took her home. Their thoughts went also to the underworld around them. Memories flickered past. They longed to stay, but they’d learned better. The energy of death dissipated quickly after a soul had made its journey.

They rose to their feet and trudged back into the caldera, climbing down rock faces and green slopes to the black mouth of the cavern. They walked silently through the cave and out onto the little strip of land at the base of the cliff and stood at the edge of the hole they’d dug at the base of the tree.

A tempest of sorrow rained in their chest. “We have energy remaining,” they said. “We could stay a little longer.”

Instead, they jumped into the hole, and Herophile and Daphnis tumbled out the other side, up from the ground at the base of the roots. They sat, side by side, staring at the magma-marbled boulder and the glow it cast upon the waters.

Daphnis wanted to say something encouraging, but there was nothing encouraging to say.

Herophile opened her mouth but then shut it again without speaking.

“I know,” Daphnis said.

“It’s so close,” Herophile said.

The darkness around them continued as before, unchanged.

#

Daphnis stared into the water, listened, and wondered if this was the truth of eternity, not logic and morality but the poetry of circumstance. He shut his eyes but found little difference in the view.

“We have a little strength left,” he said. “Can you show me Delphi?”

“It won’t last long. So we wait.”

She didn’t say what they were waiting for, but he understood. The next death in Florence would bring them out of their liquid state, and perhaps then, they could get a little closer to their jar.

Their jar. It seemed such a natural thought.

Then it came. Death. It rang like a church bell.

“Don’t lose control,” she said. “Remember our purpose.”

He stared at her without blinking. “Another hellmouth will get there first.”

“The jar matters more.”

“Without that power...”

“Feel the call surge through you,” she said.

“I can feel nothing else.”

“There’s power in the call,” she said. “We ride it back to the jar, and if another reaches the soul first, so be it.”

A starvation gnawed at his center, a hunger only death could fill, but her words made sense. He took a breath, steadied himself, and held onto a truth beyond desire. “So be it. First, the jar.”

She took his hand, and together, they dove into the water and emerged through the other side.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Coming in a few weeks:

The Sibyliad

Cycle One: Pluto’s Allegory of the Grave

Book One: The Hell Jar