Free Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright Page B

shattered balcony to see the knees and thighs of rough and leprous hide, knowing that somewhere, far below, were feet; and the palaces and museums, fanes and libraries of Usire, a great civilization of which the folk of the Last Redoubt know nothing, lay trampled underfoot. Many layers of roof and hull had been shattered in the footfalls of the giant, back, ages ago, when the giants walked; darkness and cold had entered in.

26.
    I found the doors of orichalcum I had seen so often in my dreams.
    The images carved into the right-hand leaf of the door were as I had seen them, exactly (now that the memory came back to me) as I had carved them in a former life.
    The right-hand door was of the past: here were sculpted images of starfarers landing their winged ships on worlds of bone and skull, horror on their faces as they came to know our earth was the only world remaining in all the universe not yet murdered. The fall of the moon was pictured, and the sundering of the earth-crust. Here were the Road-Makers, greatest of all the ancient peoples; and there were the Cliff-Dwellers, whose mighty cities and empires clung to endless miles of chasm walls, during the age when the upper surface of earth was ice, but the floor of the great rift was not yet cooled enough for men to walk upon it. Here was an image of the Founder, tracing the boundaries where the Last Redoubt would rise with a plow pulled by a type of beast now long extinct: and this was a legend from the first aeon of the Last Redoubt; and twenty aeons and one have passed since that time.
    The left-hand door held images from the end of time: the Breaking of the Gate was pictured here, and the severing of man into two races, those trapped far below ground, and those trapped in the highest towers, when all the middle miles of the Last Redoubt were made the inhabitation of unclean things that wallowed in the darkness. The tragedy of the Last Flight was pictured, millions of women and children of the Upper Folk attempting escape by air, in a winged vehicle like those used by our earliest ancestors; the image showed the winged ship, buoyancy lost, falling among the waiting tribes of sardonic abhumans, the loathly gargoyles, and furious Night-Hounds.
    The time of the Final Thousand was shown, when all living humans would know not just their own lives, but the lives of all who came before, so that each man was a multitude; each woman, all her mothers.
    Here was a picture of the Last Child, born by candlelight in her mother’s ice-rimmed coffin; there was an icon of the Triage. Three shades, representing all the dead fated to fade from the world’s dying aura, were bowing toward the wise-eyed child proffering their ghostly dirks hilt-first. Any shade the Last Child shunned, had no hope of further human vessels for its memories.
    The final panel of the furthest future, which formed the highest part of the left-hand door, showed the Archons of High Darkness, Antiseraphim and other almighty powers of the universal night, seated on thrones among the ruins of the Last Redoubt; and while Silent Ones bowed to them; and the Southern Watching thing fawned and licked their dripping hands; all the books and tools and works of man were pictured heaped upon a bonfire around which abhumans cavorted; and the greater servants were shown eating the lesser servants at feast.
    These images were fanciful, mere iconography. The Ulterior Beings have no form or substance, no shape that can be drawn with pencil or carved in stone. Nonetheless, the door-maker carved well the nightmare scene, and I knew what she meant to portray.
    This was on the right, in the past, at highest part of the door, an image directly opposite the image of the triumphant powers of darkness at feast. Here, golden, was the many-rayed orb which was meant to represent the Last Sunset, which was the earliest legend of the earliest time, and, in the foreground, here was the mother and father of mankind, holding hands sadly and watching