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Fair Semblances: An Allegorical Fantasy (Chapter 2)
By pitchford | September 1, 2008
What Mishael had realized, when he glanced at the portrait overhanging the entrance to the gameroom, was that the interstices between the wyrms’ writhing bodies were not at all random or accidental, as they at first seemed to be; but they were in fact carefully designed to form a map, showing a very tortuous, winding, labyrinthine way from the bottom of the picture, under which was the Divertisment, or in other words, the very soul of Fair Semblances, and leading into the field of green in which the High King stood triumphant. And what struck him more poignantly yet, as he stood there for some minutes staring at the picture, was the growing conviction that the map laid out in precise proportions those very causeways that he had wandered through the night before, when he was lost in the Impenetrable Thicket. The longer he looked, the more certain he became, until what he had at first thought to pass off as a mere hunch became a solid conviction, and not a merely theoretical conviction, but one of that kind which impels men’s actions, and always undergirds the great deeds and heroic acts of history. Of course, Mishael did not think of his sudden discovery in this way, as he continued to scrutinize the hidden map; he merely noticed something he had not seen before, was struck by it, and had an irresistible urge, having noticed it, to prove once and for all whether he were actually correct in his suspicion.
But is that not the way, after all, that the great feats of history are always begun? Men rarely, if ever, awake and say, “Today, I will perform an action from which will ensue an epic journey, a heroic struggle, and a mighty accomplishment”. No, the heroes in this world’s struggle, no matter how the later generations may portray them as superior creatures whom they would no doubt scarcely even recognize as themselves, if they were still here, are in reality just ordinary men doing the ordinary things that their convictions, which are as immovable as the truths they rest upon, demand. Who but the Many-Splendored, in whose hand all men live and move, would infer a great accomplishment from so ordinary an impulse to prove a hunch? But perhaps it is better that way: for if heroes really are only ordinary men, then would any of them have had the resolve, knowing ahead of time the vast consequences that should follow their ordinary actions, to do the great things they have done? Surely, the weight of the foreknowledge of so cosmic a struggle as the lives of simple men enter into at times can only be borne by Him who has designed and is accomplishing it all.
But however it was, and no matter what thoughts were on Mishael’s mind as he formulated his resolve, these are the simple facts of the story: after scrutinizing the portrait for some time, Mishael suddenly left the room, and returned a few minutes later with a borrowed inkwell and inscribing reed, which he used to trace out exactly the pattern of the wyrms’ slithering bodies; and then, on a sudden impulse, he also copied down exactly the old characters above the portrait, although no one in Fair Semblances, and perhaps not in all the world, as he supposed, could still understand the old characters. Then, placing the carefully folded paper in his knapsack, he left the building.
Several hours later, and in direct contradiction to the Grand Proprietor’s unambiguous directives, Mishael stood again at the far north-eastern corner of Fair Semblances, this time alone. He was clothed for a long journey, and had flung over his shoulder a knapsack packed with an assortment of necessary provisions, including flint and tinder, an extra pair of leathern bootsoles, with a needle and some tough, sinuous thread, water bottles of different shapes and sizes, and a great deal of that strange mixture of various grains and dried fruits and vegetables which mothers all over Fair Semblances mix with water to form a very nourishing, if somewhat tasteless mush, for the sustenance of their unenthusiastic children every day before school. In his hand was his copied serpentine map, at which he was looking intently.
He stood there for quite a long time, and seemed to be undecided after all; then, with something of a stoic sigh and a shrug of resignation, he stepped for the second time into the Impenetrable Thicket.
When Mishael entered the Thicket the second time, he felt the same sense of disorientation and evil that he had felt before, and he could smell the same putrid, death-bearing stench of Wyrmwood’s Breath; only this time, however, the feeling was not quite so overpowering, and he even discovered that, if he gazed intently on his scratched out map, and made a concentrated effort to follow the twisting causeways that the map marked out, the vertigo would leave him almost completely alone.
After what was probably a few hours, although it might have been a matter of days or minutes (Mishael was not sure what to think about that, and even much later went frequently back and forth between the opinion that he had been wandering in the Thicket for days, and that he had only been there for a few moments), he stepped through the far border of the Thicket, and looked around. If he was hoping to find the green field, and the High King with his Renascent Crown, he was sorely disappointed. It was nighttime, but the moon was full and shone brightly, and he could tell from its pale luminescence that he was in a very rocky place, rough and hilly, that had an almost metallic sheen as it reflected the soft light. Before him, he could barely make out a very lightly worn footpath of some sort, winding up the hillside. He hesitated for a moment, and almost turned back into the Thicket; but then his curiosity again got the better of him, and he began to trudge up the hill.
Mishael walked for a very long time, and was beginning to grow very tired, when he reached the top of the hill. The eastern horizon was already beginning to grow lighter, and, feeling it a good time to rest, he sat down for a moment, and decided that, as soon as he had watched the sun come fully into the sky, he would turn around to look back on the places he had traversed. When he did turn around, the sight astonished him. All around him was a world of vast and breathtaking proportions, simply stunning in its sheer immensity and unimaginably harsh and rugged magnificence. As far as he could see, there was very little vegetation, with the exception of a gnarled old tree here and there, and a few short, blasted clumps of sharp-edged and impertinent looking weeds. Stretching to the south, until the jagged horizon swallowed them up, was a series of imposing mountains, capped with icy glaciers. The mountains slowly tapered off to the west, and transitioned to what appeared to be windswept hills and plateaus, interrupted by jagged canyons and boulders; but as far away as they were, it was difficult to tell for sure. To the east, Mishael could see only more mountains, and on their northern slopes appeared to be a dark, brooding forest of somber evergreens, which stretched out of sight. Just between the southern edge of the forest and the northern slope of the mountains, far off in the distance, gleamed in the morning sunlight what must have been a lake, set like a sparkling jewel in a very rough and unlikely place. It was to this lake that the footpath appeared to lead.
What struck Mishael the most poignantly, after the initial shock of seeing so huge and harsh and inhospitable a world all around him, was the appearance that Fair Semblances had taken on far below, and directly to the west. What had always before seemed to be so big, almost illimitable, the entire world he had ever known for all his life until that point, now seemed small, almost pitifully small. It was set like an orb of green – and the thought suddenly struck him that it was a very disingenuous and deceptive green – in the midst of a hard, gray world. It might simply have been his sometimes too fruitful imagination, but he immediately thought that the hard edges of the mountain range to the south were laid out in just the shape of one of the twisting wyrms in the portrait, and glinted like scales; and if that were so, then Fair Semblances was positioned just where the wyrm’s piercing eye ought to be, and it even seemed to gleam, for a moment, with a deceptive evil, so that he imagined that it was looking at him, that it saw him clearly, and that soon it would shake its mountain-limbs into action, and devour him whole. He suddenly shuddered, and turned quickly away, stepping on a loose rock which shifted beneath his boot, and flung him to the ground, where he turned head-over-heels about three times before coming to rest on a narrow ledge overlooking an intimidating drop.
That loose rock and unexpected tumble saved Mishael’s life: for just when he fell, a sudden flash of searing, sulfuric flame scorched the hilltop where he had just been standing, and a wyrm – very real and black and hideous and far more terrifying than anything he had heard of in the old fairy tales, which he had never more than half-believed – was hurtling along just behind it, and was quite apparently its horrifying source. Seeing that his blazing ammunition had missed its intended victim, he let out a shrill scream of anger, and wheeling about in the sky, sped straight toward the ledge where Mishael was huddled, with nowhere to hide, and prepared to let loose a second, and this time certainly a lethal, igneous volley. Mishael, at first too petrified to move, at last regained the ability at least to close his eyes and scream, as he awaited the imminent death-dealing stroke.
It never came.
Just as suddenly as the wyrm had appeared in the sky, there appeared another creature, every bit as impressive, but radiant and beautiful instead of dark and forboding, who flung himself in a ferocious rage at the wyrm. So suddenly did he appear on the scene, and so lustrous and luminescent was his beautiful form, that it seemed as though a tremendous bolt of lightning had fallen from heaven, flooding the earth beneath with an unbearably bright light. There was a terrific collision, both creatures disappeared from sight for an instant, and then a moment later reappeared far above in the heavens, locked together in an epic struggle. The brilliant creature who had just arrived could have been nothing other than a phosphor, another fantastic being that Mishael had heard of in the old legends, but had never truly believed in.
But before we proceed with our tale, we must pause a moment, on the off chance that there is someone reading who does not know exactly what a phosphor is. The phosphors comprise that class of perpetuati which are directly opposed to, and always at enmity with the wyrms, who struggle against men’s souls. For men, of course, who in the old tongue are called the imagi, are the only perpetuati that are as yet undetermined in the Great Struggle; and therefore, they and their world form the great scene upon which the struggle is played out between the wyrms and the phosphors; and the phosphors consider it their greatest and most essential task ever to rescue men from the snares and attacks and venomous breathings of the wyrms, who do the will of Vrak. Phosphors are noted most especially for their brilliant luminescence, which can light up the entire world at midnight so that it becomes brighter than midday; and the wyrms hate their light, for it blinds and confuses them. In appearance, they are like great eagles, with magnificent wings, and feathered legs ending in huge, razor-sharp talons; but their upper bodies resemble a man’s, and they have arms like a man, and a man’s countenance, with which they blow upon the golden trumpets that each one has always hanging around his neck with which to summon aid in the time of need.
The phosphor who had come to Mishael’s aid in so timely a fashion was a mighty one indeed, but the wyrm was likewise exceedingly huge and fierce, so that the struggle went on for quite some time, until it finally took them so far from where Mishael remained, that the horizon swallowed them up, and he could no longer see them; but just before they were gone from his sight, he heard the clear, ringing tones of a trumpet, carried on the wind far across mountains.
For perhaps half a day, Mishael remained on that precarious ledge, too frightened to attempt the steep climb up to the ridge from which he had fallen. He would doze off from time to time, and then suddenly wake with a start, and imagine in his delirium that he was seeing all sorts of strange beasts and monsters, which, when he squinted, quite disappeared from sight, until at long last, he was not sure whether to believe he had even seen the wyrm and the phosphor, either, or whether he had even left Fair Semblances at all; and then, he would remember again the whole series of events that had brought him there, and wish he could just wake up at home, where everything was safe and normal and unexciting, and looking about him and seeing instead such a dreadful and intimidating world, he would sob uncontrollably, and wonder how long he would lie there before he starved to death.
It was just then, in the middle of one of his most piteous sobs, that he saw another creature, whom he at first supposed to be only one more character of his feverish imagination, riding a wildesteed in the valley far below him. Only this time, the character did not vanish away when he squinted. Instead, it looked up at him and cried out, “Hallooo!”.
Topics: Books, Fair Semblances |