The Fallen World

Kronos - Part 5

     The way Thomas’s mind worked was like this. His eyes would see things, his ears would hear things, and the facts thus gathered would pile up in a disorganised jumble in his head with new facts being added as they came along until they reached a kind of critical mass. When that happened, they would all suddenly sort themselves together in their proper way, like all the pieces of a jigsaw suddenly flying together to make the picture, and the truth would appear before him in all its magnificent glory leaving him stunned with surprise. That was what was happening now, and the wizard sank back into the old chair, making it creak alarmingly as it accepted weight for the first time in nearly a thousand years.

     “Tom?” asked Lirenna in concern, seeing him staring ahead like a man in a trance, his mouth hanging slackly open. “Tom, what’s wrong?” There was still no reply, and she looked over at Diana in alarm. “Di, I think there’s something wrong with Tom.”

     The cleric hurried over and stared into the wizard’s face, waving a hand in front of his eyes. Thomas came out of it with a sudden jolt, a look of alarm and wonder on his face as if he’d looked up to see all the Gods on their thrones staring down at him. “It’s the world!” he cried, grabbing Diana by the shoulders and pulling her down until he was shouting into her face. “It’s Tharia! It’s the world!”

     “Calm down, Tom!” interrupted Shaun, helping the cleric break his manic grip. “What in the name of hell are you talking about?”

     “That! Out there!” cried Thomas, pointing to the blue and white dome outside the window. “It’s Tharia, the world!”

     “He’s delirious,” said Matthew fearfully. “The lens must have been booby trapped. Poison or something.”

     “No, wait a minute,” said Jerry with dawning realisation as he, too, looked out the window at the huge dome, only half visible over the horizon. “He could be right, all the facts fit.”

     He glanced over at Lirenna, who stared back in renewed wonder. “The world itself,” she said softly, looking at it. “No wonder it’s so beautiful.”

     It was relatively easy for the three wizards to accept the fact that they were no longer on Tharia but looking at it from the surface of another, much smaller world. During their five years of education at Lexandria University, they’d grown quite accustomed to the concept of the plurality of worlds, and indeed the plurality of universes.

     The Winterwells, on the other hand, despite their travels and adventures all over the continent and all the strange and wonderful things they’d seen, were still basically medieval farmers at heart, for whom the world was the whole of creation and for whom the stars, planets, moons and comets were merely things that moved in the sky. The idea of being beyond the world, of being on a completely different world, was a totally alien concept to them, even to Diana who was quite happy to accept the fact that the Gods she worshipped lived in a completely different plane of existence. They stared at each other in bafflement, therefore, as the three wizards stared, awestruck, at Tharia, now and again sharing a glance with each other as if to reassure themselves that it was real, that they weren’t dreaming.

     “I don’t understand,” said Shaun after a moment, when it became apparent that they weren’t going to elaborate on their extraordinary claim. “What exactly are you saying?”

     “What we’re saying,” explained Thomas patiently, “is that that dome over there, that we’ve all been admiring so much, is nothing less than the planet Tharia itself.”

     “So where are we now?” asked Matthew in bewilderment.

     “On one of the moons, I should think,” replied the wizard. “Which one would you say, Jerry?”