Chapter Text
In the House of the Amber Sky, attendants will keep whispering. Mouths hidden behind hands. Eyes sliding toward the terrace, where you'll sit with your coffee, but you won't hear their whispers.
In the far future, the Youthful Naturalist will achieve his ambition. He will break the Chain and escape the thread that had been woven for him. He will go on to achieve so much more than you.
Your threads have been interwoven for longer than those of two people such as yourselves should have been. He, who is running from death, and you, who is running from life. Here in Irem your journey will have reached the final crossroad. He will live forever. He will lose himself and a new being will emerge in its place. As often as he needs to to escape his fate. And you will sit here, on the terrace of the House of the Amber Sky, overlooking the port underneath the Pillars.
You will sip your coffee, reminisce about the friend you will never see again. Reminisce about the bravery of breaking the Chain, and the consequence you will have never considered until now. If one breaks the Great Chain, they will emerge changed, yes. But they will emerge. They will persist. Continue. Once you have cried and confided in him. Then you will not even have tears any longer. His absence will be just another small chip, another piece missing, growing this vast cavern inside, leaving nothing but a faint echo.
The coffee swishing in your cup will mirror the colour of your inner world. Snowflakes will fall into the coffee and melt. Would they fall into you, they would turn into sleet.
You will watch the skin of your hand around the cup. It will still be your skin, stretching thin over bones and flesh. But if you were to close your eyes and look inside you, that hollow wouldn’t leave room for bones nor flesh any more. If you wouldn’t see your skin right now, you would conclude that it must be see-through, just a thin sheaf of papyrus wrapped around emptiness.
You will take a sip of the coffee and taste nothing, despite your senses being in best working order.
If you had the Naturalist’s daring, you would have scooped that hollow out of you, turned your innards into amber and sealed it tight. But just how his fate has followed him into every new shape he has invented himself as, so too would this hollowness follow you. It is linked to the very concept of you; an abscess that will grow again and again, and consume everything you threw at it to fill it with.
When he will have left, the Naturalist, for all his cunning, will not have been able to answer your question. The one question you have asked so many, and none ever could answer fully.
"To bring what is due," the parishioner at the Chapel of Light will answer. You will not be interested in that any longer.
"To coax out the last of this world’s secrets," F.F. Gebrandt will answer with a wink. You will feel nothing.
"To see this city thrive," August will answer. You will wish this city would turn to ash.
"To see what humanity can achieve," May will answer, while you will already have picked the lock to escape his prison once more.
"To see my child shine," Clara will answer. Her answer will twist your guts as you remember the brightest False-Star above, alone in a dark sky. So you will try to ignore her.
Despite how unsatisfying their answers will be, they will at least have given you one. The Naturalist, despite his desire upturning the very laws of anatomy and cartography, will never give you one.
‘Why do you want to go on?’
Back then, when the Dilmun Club first unveiled its true goal, you hoped to find it along the way. One would assume people in search for eternal life had an answer. But just as the Naturalist, they did not. So just like he did, you left them behind.
But now, you will have searched the answer for so long, and it will have drained your last resorts and more. In the end, this – your personal riddle – will have ended up here, in Irem, where they all will end up.
Whispers around you will arise and interrupt your thoughts. You will look up, follow the other attendants’ confused gazes. Through the petals and the snow, you will see what has caused the commotion: The shore will glow a dim violet, a thousand translucent bodies bobbing in the mirror-like waters.
The jellyfish will have found you again, despite there being no diving bell to guide them this time. You will stand up and finish your coffee in one go. You will know what to do.
x
When the forever-still waters of the Pillared Sea will make way to the Stormbones’ chopping waves, you will feel more at ease. Stagnation is the last thing you will need, yet the threads spun in Irem will persist.
You will have swum in many waters. You will have sunken into slow and silent waves as they lashed at the wooden walls of the old boat. You will have laid there for so long, staring into the black nothingness above, that the Boatman will have had to consider you had forgotten about your game. You will never have had. But speaking, willing your mouth to form something as simple as a chess-move will have been too overwhelming.
You will have laid at the shores of the Waswood, the waves of the river who’s name has been forgotten licking over your feet. You will have felt the grains of sand and the bleached roots underneath your back and will have wondered why those waves didn’t turn you into that very same sand.
You will have stood at the banks of the Far Shore, the air unbreathable from the screaming of a thousand trapped souls. You will have decided then and there that this is not the death you are seeking.
And so you will have returned, time and time again, to that familiar boat with that familiar smiling figure at its oar. On the chessboard, black will already be set up for you. After all, you will always play black.
But even those small glimpses of escape, that small reprieve from when life has gotten too much and you had cut too deep (exactly deep enough), will now be barred for you. After all, your decision in Irem will mean that the Boatman will have to stay on his boat for another eternity. He will not smile kindly upon you when he learns you’ve shooed his apprentice away.
So you will arrive here, at the last destination you will still have. The last door that will still be open for you.
Your silent companions, the jellies, will have long since left your ship, or their bodies will have frozen in the icy waters of the north. You will have long since passed Wither and Codex, but you have done so before. But this time when you reach the gate at the end of the world, you will no longer hesitate. You will jump onto the rickety pier, and watch your ship head straight towards a nearby reef. You will not need it any longer. Yet you will flinch as its bow will be ripped open and it slowly, with the lament of a dying whale, will join its brethren in the reef, growing the black mass of wood and metal further.
It won’t matter. Nothing will matter any more. If you had felt anything, it will be frozen and dead by now in that emptiness that has consumed you for as long as you can remember. That will consume you for as long as you exist. But this will stop now. Your thread will end here.
Before you stands a gate. Past it is eternal darkness. And you are finally at the end of your existence.