Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [5]
In the dream, Elric led his beloved away from the throne chamber, past ornamental pools where his dragon brothers, the Phoorn, seemed imprisoned. Once, Flamefang, his closest dragon kin, rose from the coruscating liquid and addressed him.
“We are all slaves of Chaos now, dear lord. All slaves of this nightmare.” But he promised that when Elric and Cymoril wished to leave he would try to carry them on his back to safety. “Though this stuff which is not water, it corrodes us in such strange ways.”
Then Elric found himself in a great chamber filled by an enormous bed carved with obscene figures. Cymoril spoke to him in an unfamiliar language. Her lovemaking was that of a stranger. When he did understand her words, he scarcely understood their meaning. Her tongue was thick, as if she had forgotten the High Speech of Melnibone.
“He told me that Arioch had killed you, and eaten your sword.”
And when Elric looked up through the canopy of that strange bed, he saw eyes he recognized. They were the mocking, triumphant, sardonic eyes of Arioch himself.
They lay together in that bridal chamber. Some might have considered it ostentatious. Some might have found it terrifying. Elric hardly saw the carvings and the decorations for he was filled with complex premonitions.
“We shall be married, now you are returned to Melnibone,” said Cymoril.
And on those words, always, Elric would awake, wondering in panic if he should not return at once to Melnibone, break his word, and reclaim his throne. He feared that his actions had already produced cosmic reverberations of unprecedented significance. But circumstances led him in other directions. Try as he might, he could not find the way home. And eventually he reconciled himself to the fact that his destiny lay elsewhere, that there were things he must do, things he must learn, before he could ever return.
In his wakeful moments, when his sense of reality was restored, he told himself that only by mingling with the people of the Young Kingdoms would he learn what he needed. But as is often the case when the powerful design to learn the secrets of the powerless, his condescension was resented, his company rejected. Like so many before and after him, he discovered what a distance his power put between himself and those he envied.
Envy comprised much of what he felt for people he regarded as less complicated souls, leading simpler lives than his own and carrying less complex burdens. Elric was too young, too self-involved, to realize that only to him were those problems less complex, and that those he envied actually envied him his power, which, from their particular perspective, would if possessed by them entirely simplify and improve their lives.
Beyond the walls of Elric's particular plane, the Lords of the Higher Worlds continued to plot and plan not only Elric's fate but that of his people, their friends and enemies. The machinations of those called “gods” would lead Elric to explore some of the other worlds of the multiverse, falling into the power of legendary Agak and Gagak, encountering the dead Melnibonean earl Saxif D'Aan, and learning still more of his people's past: Of the mysterious blind captain who steered the ship of fate: And, most important, of the Eternal Champion, of whom he was an avatar.
Other avatars he would meet were called Corum, Erekose, Hawk-moon, champions whom some knew as the Three Who Are One, before his joining them. Whereupon, naturally enough, they became the Four Who Are One. All these men were bound upon quests of their own. All sought fabled Tanelorn, where it is said the Champion Eternal shall find eternal peace.