Only Aten retained his youthful vigor. He even seemed stronger than before, glowing in the storm-clouded shadows like the sun.
And the Creators’ city itself crumbled before my eyes. The temples turned to dust, the columns cracked and toppled to the ground. The earth shook. Lightning split the sky.
“You think you have learned so much, Orion,” Aten sneered at me. “How little you know, creature!”
He waved one hand and the sky cleared as quickly as it had clouded. The other Creators had collapsed into heaps of rags and shriveling, decaying flesh in the midst of the ruined city.
And I recognized the ruins.
“Lunga!” I gasped. I could see past the rubble-strewn square, past the demolished stumps of towers and temples, out to the curving beach where the Skorpis base had been.
“Not Lunga,” said the Golden One. “That was a bit of a deception I played on you, Orion.”
I realized what he meant. “Earth. This is Earth. It never was Lunga, it was Earth all along.”
“Far in the future,” he said. “So far that the Moon has wandered away in its orbit until you can’t even recognize it unless I point it out to you.”
“Then the Old Ones are from Earth!”
“I doubt that. Perhaps from Neptune, originally, but not Earth. Some of them colonized Earth’s oceans, apparently, long eons ago.”
“Who destroyed your city?”
Smirking, “We did it ourselves. Another of our little family squabbles. No difference, we can build it up again when we’re ready.”
“And the other Creators? You’ve killed them all?”
“They’re not dead, Orion. I’m merely demonstrating to them—and to you—that I am the mightiest of all. They bend to my will or I take their lives from them.”
“That’s what you did to Anya.”
His face clouded. “She escaped me. Somehow, she got away. I suspect that you were responsible for that, Orion. In another era, another place-time, you rescued her.”
I felt a surge of joy at that, not merely because I saved her, but because it angered and frustrated him.
“But I’m canceling that occurrence,” the Golden One said. “I’m ending your existence, Orion. You’ve outlived your usefulness.”
“And the Old Ones?” I taunted.
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Ah yes, the Old Ones.”
“You need them, don’t you?”
“Not as much as I need to be rid of you,” he said. “I created you to be my hunter, to do my bidding, but you’ve become more trouble than you’re worth.”
“You’d rather have the universe shatter into ultimate chaos than have Anya challenge your supremacy,” I said.
His smile returned. “Better to reign in hell, Orion, than serve in heaven.”
Once I thought I had wanted to die, to be released from life, freed of the endless wheel of pain and disappointment. But now I wanted to live, to find Anya and revive her, to reach the Old Ones and ask their help in saving the continuum from utter collapse, to stand in the way of Aten and keep him from realizing his megalomaniacal dreams.
“Götterdämmerung,” I said.
“The twilight of the gods,” he replied. “The downfall of everything. I will be supreme at the end.”
“Never,” I said, and translated myself out of the ruins of the Creators’ city, away from Earth, far into the depths of interstellar space.
It felt like a death. Yet I knew I would live again to seek Anya, to fight against the Golden One, to find my place in the continuum.
Epilogue
It was a brown, arid world, but not without its beauty.
I stood on the crest of a dusty hill clawed by arroyos, looking out on a desert valley. Millions of years ago this had been sea bottom, but now the nearest body of open water was a thousand kilometers away. Yet there was life here: cactus and dry brown brush, poisonous lizards and tiny darting rodents with beady eyes and long hairless tails. Birds chattered from the few scrawny trees. Insects glinted in the harsh hot sunlight.
There was a patch of green down in that valley, with a village at its edge. A tiny knot of buildings made of sun-dried mud bricks, roofed with gnarled thin branches. Men and women were in the fields nearby, bent over their crops.