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By Root 547 0

He felt it clogging his nostrils and drifting through his clothing—the ash of his distant ancestors, whose blackened corpses filled the houses in mimicry of life’s activities, threatening to engulf him. But he walked on, fascinated by this glimpse into his past, at the very turning point in his race’s destiny. He found himself wandering through rooms still occupied by the husks of their inhabitants, their pets, their playthings, their tools; through squares where fountains had once splashed, through temples and public buildings where his folk had met to debate and decide the issues of the day, before the emperors had taken all power to themselves and Melniboné had grown to depend upon her slaves, hidden away so that they should not make Imrryr ugly with their presence. He paused in a workshop, some shoe-seller’s stall. He grieved for these dead, gone more than ten thousand years since.

The ruins touched something that was tender in him, and he found that he possessed a fresh longing, a longing for a past before Melniboné, out of fear, bargained for that power which conquered the world.

The turrets and gables, the blackened thatch and torn beams, the piles of broken stone and brick, the animal troughs and ordinary domestic implements abandoned outside the houses filled him with a melancholy he found almost sweet and he paused to inspect a cradle or a spinning wheel which showed an aspect of a proud Melnibonéan folk he had never known, but which he felt he understood.

There were tears in his eyes as he roamed those streets, desperately hoping to find just one living soul apart from himself, but he knew the city had stood unpopulated for at least a hundred years after her destruction.

“Oh, that I had destroyed Imrryr so that I might restore H’hui’shan!” He stood in a square of broken statues and fallen masonry looking up at the enormous moon which now rose directly above his head, sending his shadow to mingle with those of the ruins; and he dragged off his helmet and shook out his long, milk-white hair and turned yearning hands towards the city as if to beg forgiveness, and then he sat down upon a dusty slab carved with the delicacy and imagination of genius and over which blood had flowed, then baked, a coarse glaze; and he buried his crimson eyes in the sleeve of his ashy shirt and his shoulders shook and he groaned his complaint at whatever fate had led him to this ordeal …

There came a voice from behind him that seemed to echo from distant catacombs, across aeons of time, as resonant as the Dragon Falls where one of Elric’s ancestors had died (in combat, it was said, with himself) and as commanding as the whole of Elric’s long and binding royal history. It was a voice he recognized and had hoped, in so many ways, never to hear again.

Once more he wondered if he were mad. The voice was unmistakably that of his dead father, Sadric the Eighty-Sixth, whose company in life he had so rarely shared.

“Ah, Elric, thou weepest I see. Thou art thy mother’s son and for that I love her memory, though thou kill’dst the only woman I shall ever truly love and for that I hate thee with an unjust hatred.”

“Father?” Elric lowered his arm and turned his bone-white face behind him to where, leaning against a ruined pillar, stood the slender, frail presence of Sadric. Upon his lips was a smile that was terrible in its tranquility.

Elric looked disbelievingly at the face which was exactly as it had been when he had last seen it as his father had lain in funeral state.

“For an unjust hatred there is no release, save the peace of death. And here, as you’ll observe, I am denied the peace of death.”

“I have dreamed of you, Father, and your disappointment with me. I would that I could have been all you desired in a son …”

“There was never a second, Elric, when you could have been that. The act of thy creation was the sealing of her doom. We had been warned of it in every omen but could do nothing to avert that hideous destiny—” and his eyes glared with a hatred only the unrested dead could know.

“How came you here, Father? I had thought