Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time by Darrell Schweitzer

Author:Darrell Schweitzer [Schweitzer, Darrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, horror, wizards, clark ashton smith, sword and sorcery
ISBN: 9781434447074
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-01-16T23:00:00+00:00

THE STOLEN HEART

My story is about many things: about a queen who was nearly greater than the Goddess, and a maiden whose courage carried her out of the netherworld, back into the land of the living. It is about lost souls, too, thousands of them, wandering in darkness. But more than that, at its core, it is about my transformation, my redemption. It is about how I became a hero, albeit a substandard, unacceptable one. Yet a hero nonetheless.

Listen—

When my friend Kodos Vion was dying, I knew only helpless, hopeless despair, and in my self-pitying grief, I came to a place which isn’t on any Ai Hanlo street map, the Inn of Sorrows, called Korevanos, “the place of holy tears,” where once the Goddess herself wept and time and space were closed off around the place where her tears fell.

You cannot find Korevanos. You can only arrive there, as a stone sinking into a dark lake inevitably arrives at the bottom.

Thus, I arrived.

I must tell this story, all of it, even the parts which bring me hurt and shame.

I must tell it so that my transformation will be complete, and true.

Listen—

I don’t know where to begin, really. The events swirl and blend in my mind, like different colors of paint stirred in a pot.

* * * *

I ran from Kodos Vion’s bedside in terror. I remember that much. I lost myself in the maze of the city.

Then I came upon the corpse of an old man set on a bier in the middle of a street, braziers of perfumed oil sputtering around him. I let out a cry and covered my face, but I was as afraid to run away as to remain, and I approached with the utmost dread, somehow irrationally certain that this was my friend lying here, ready for his spirit to begin its long journey, though I knew him to be elsewhere, back at his house.

It was only a stranger, of course. Again I ran, weeping, then staggered, breathless, gasping, my throat hoarse. I didn’t know where I was or what I was going to do. I was behaving like a complete fool. My mind was all a tangle.

And that was when I found myself in Korevanos, the Inn of Sorrows.

* * * *

When Kodos Vion’s illness was upon him, a woman came to my door with the news. I followed her through the city, in the glare of the summer noon. Her dusty black robe flapped in the hot wind. Her veil streamed, so that she had to hold it in place with one hand.

All she had said to me was that Kodos Vion was dying.

I couldn’t believe it. No, he was eternal, like one of those immense bronze figures in the Garden of Statues. They might turn green with age, he a silvery white. But that was all. They would go on forever.

His house I found to be filled with such black-clad women, many of them known to me, the casual lovers of that lusty old scoundrel who could have been my grandfather.

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