«
Hearing
In drawing near the black-green cyclops, he had imagined many a development, but in no scenario had he expected to hear such a name.
It was as if a water-cooled machine-gun had appeared in an ancient oil painting, or a novelist's plot device in a research paper — utterly out of place, hard to believe.
A second later, Klein recalled the farcical business of the
Realising that the Angel King Amon — possessed of strength so vast it bordered on a «bug», and ever wearing a sneering grin — was uttering, in a relatively earnest and solemn manner, this single name, Klein found the impulse to laugh increasingly impossible to suppress; and he did not wish to suppress it.
Best laugh till Amon, in mortified rage, finishes me off then and there… For Amon to have turned out as He has, the Ancient Sun God's tutelage must surely bear a great share of the blame! Klein's mouth curved; he was ready, without reservation, to vent the laughter in his heart.
Just then another silver-white bolt of lightning split the sky, lit the dark, deep gorge, and showed Klein once more the great, sprawling, ash-white edifices upon its bottom.
Architecture utterly unlike that of the present day, of the Fourth Epoch, the Third, or even the Second.
Thump!
Klein's heart contracted in haste and then expanded again; the smile which had just been forming froze on his face.
Thump, thump!
Klein heard his own heartbeat, and one piece of common knowledge of the present world after another sprang up in his mind:
«There are twelve months in a year, three hundred and sixty-five days, with a leap year…
«Each day is twenty-four hours, each hour sixty minutes, each minute sixty seconds…
«It has been confirmed to be a planet…
«In the sky there is one, and only one, sun and one moon…»
Thump, thump, thump!
Klein's instinct strove to stop him from thinking further, but from the depths of his heart there rose, after all, a 'voice':
Could it be that there has never been any 'crossing-over' at all — that I have in truth been upon Earth all this time, only that I have hung too, too long Above the Grey Fog before that gate of light, and so I truly do not belong to this era…
As this thought took form, a great number of details which had escaped his notice burst, like a volcano, within his mind:
«To the farthest east of the Sonia Sea, before we entered the relic of the War of
«The general shape of the Northern and Southern Continents resembles closely that of North and South America; only that the great mass where the two come close has been wiped away by some force, forming the Rampant Sea with its complex, winding routes… and again,
«Across the Northern Continent the mountains and rivers have shifted, but the overall outlines can yet, with effort, be made out…
«By this reasoning… the homeland of the elves, the Western Continent, and the Eastern Continent on which 'the God-Forsaken Land' lies, may be set in correspondence with Chernobyl…
«Among the legends of treasure at sea there is a lost civilisation, called Nuinus, said to lie sunken somewhere in the Sea of Fog…
«The parents of the
«The two doubts I had before — why must the 'Origin Fortress' draw its 'travellers' from Earth, and why must each of those people belong to the very era I myself came from — both can now be explained too…»
In the span of two or three seconds, peal upon peal of thunder seemed to crash, one after another, within Klein's mind, so that his lips trembled lightly, as though he were straining to prevent the forming of a certain answer.
«But the moon of this world is crimson… the appearance of the starry sky too is somewhat unlike that of Earth… I am no astronomy enthusiast and cannot quite recall, but the Great Emperor took a potion of the 'Polymath' pathway, and had the starry sky truly been identical, he would have noticed it long since…» Opposing views arose in Klein's heart, like solid anchors keeping a ship in a storm from being blown out of harbour.
But the very next second Klein recalled two sayings.
One was a creepy prophecy he had once read upon the internet in his «previous life»:
«When the stars return to their places, chaos shall rise up from beneath the earth, and the Great Originator shall awaken.»
The other was:
«Beware the moon!»
This… that prophecy was not made up out of nothing? When the stars return to their places, then there is a change from before? Klein almost ignored Amon before him; even his body trembled lightly.
It took great effort for him to draw, within his heart, a single sigh:
Perhaps I have never left my homeland — and yet I shall never be able to return home…
Hardly had this comprehension and dawning come upon him when, before him, soundless and without trace, appeared that grey-white mist.
This time, he stood at once within that historic fragment which corresponded to the «Decayed Forest» — corresponding to the end of the First Epoch and the beginning of the Second.