The pillar stood lonesome.
It had stood for thirty-five billion years, and it expected to stand for thirty-five billion more. It had witnessed much in its time.
The pillar sat.
The pillar waited.
In boredom, the pillar began to reminisce. From the golden lands of the Deity’s Garden it had come, once standing proud as a monument of power. Runes and phrases that had once decorated its sides were no longer defined. The blue glow, gifted from Ocelight above, no longer shined bright. Only a dull, gray light emanated from the center. It remembered the people it had seen, each deity, each face. Ocelight, Asajis, Klomo, Idehan, Kenogo, all of their faces were clear in the mind of this edifice. Their soft glows, their divine nature, all of it was clear. The pillar felt happy when it remembered the deity named Feis, the deity of youth. Feis had created it, all those years ago. They stood together in the grand garden. Feis spoke to the pillar, confided in it, and trusted it with their secrets. The pillar listened. It never spoke, though it could. As the years rolled by, the pillar continued to stand. Feis began to visit less and less. The pillar listened. It never spoke. It listened for the sound of Feis’s footsteps.
They did not come for a long while.
The pillar remembered this, and it was sad. Another memory came to it, a bittersweet one. Feis had returned one day, a day after the pillar had long given up hope. Feis told the pillar of a new realm that it would reside in, one of many worlds and dimensions, one where it could move and live, one where oceans and deserts collided, one where the land never ended, where the oceans never ended, where everything and nothing could exist in the same room, and where animals resided. The pillar listened, and it was content. The pillar was moved by Feis one day, and came to stand in a new realm. At first, it was happy. It stood atop a great hill, overlooking a world of flowers and trees. Though Feis never visited, the pillar was glad for a new place to live. It was glad to listen. Songbirds nested atop it, vines held it, and foxes lived beneath it. The pillar listened. It began to speak. It hummed, low songs, high tunes, droning, falling, rising, it sang all of these to lands around it. A harmonious rhythm settled into it and the land around it. The world was kind, and the world was good. The pillar stopped its remembrance for a moment and gazed at the world it now resided on. It was nothing like it had once been.
The pillar stood.
It continued to remember. It remembered of a time when the songbirds ceased to come. Then, the foxes left. Soon, all that the pillar saw were plants, but those did not stay for long. It was silent the morning the world changed. The pillar did not hum nor sing. It had not done so for a long time. The world had begun to fall. No more did the plants decorate the land. The earth was a barren expanse of dirt and stone, spiky, fragmented shards reaching from the ground like rotted hands. The sky was no longer blue, but gray. Gone were the soft breezes, only wild winds whipped across the landscape. The pillar heard a whistling. It said nothing. A large thud came from a place far off in the vast world, as winds and cyclones began to turn. Two legs, unfathomably large, emerged from the dusty brown fog. The leathery, thick, mottled skin masses moved without purpose, destroying and creating mountains, walking without reason. It did not seem to notice the pillar, nor any mountain and stream. Ere the pillar could truly notice it, the creature turned towards it. The creature did not notice the pillar, but the pillar noticed it. The pillar watched as the beast walked slowly towards it. It felt no fear. Only apathy remained inside the lonesome pillar. The creature took one more step, and the pillar found itself falling. Dropping through layers of gravel and stone, falling into an endless abyss below. Air fell above, and the pillar traveled through nothing.
True nothing.
There was no light.
There was no air.
There were no stars,
And there was no moon.
All that was was the pillar.
And then the nothingness abruptly ended, as a series of floating islands rushed up from below, smashing into the pillar with extreme force, cracking it in places. It was partially shattered, but remained alive.
The pillar went back to the present moment, ending the halls of its mind which it had wandered through. In sadness, it sang a song. A low, rising tone gave way to high pitched melodies which echoed throughout the empty islands. The runes on its sides glowed brightly for the first time in a long time, and then the song spiraled back downwards into a low drone, and then nothing. The runes fell back into darkness. It sat silent once again, and began to reminisce once again, delving deeper into the lowest echelons of its memories. The world was not what it once was. It remembered all of the years, in total twelve and a half billion, that it had sat alone on these islands. The empty islands didn’t seem so empty to the pillar after all this time. It had mentally recorded every crack and crevice, every mote of dust, and every grain of sand. Sometimes, it imagined it was speaking to these objects, and it felt sad. It sat, and it began to think. In all of the time it had been alone, it had invented several friends to accompany it in dark times. These friends were not real to anyone but the pillar, but that mattered not to it. It spoke to them. They spoke back.
They didn't really.
The pillar stood lonesome.
The pillar continued to stand, and when the years had numbered nineteen thousand six hundred and twenty-four since the last reminiscence, the pillar heard a sound. A true sound, one that was not made by it, had not been heard for five million years, since one of the islands cracked in half. It startled the pillar at first, but then it was excited. Even if the islands fell, and the next place was worse, something new would be better. It expected to hear a cacophony of sounds as the islands fell, but no such noise came. Eventually, the muffled sounds resolved into speech. Words, for the first time in twenty-five billion years, were heard. From the bottommost island came a group of four creatures, serious-looking, speaking to each other. They ascended through the islands, carrying chalk and tools. They stood at the base of the pillar. Though they did not know it, the pillar stared back. It had not seen any creature such as this before. The creatures furled their five-fingered hands around a flexible sheet, and scrawled something onto it. They left the stone alone, instead taking to the islands, marking things, writing things, and then they left. The creatures walked to the island from whence they had come, and left through a door. The pillar was dumbfounded by the presence of the creatures. Never before had something like this occurred. It wracked its mind for the date. Nearly twenty-five billion years had passed since it was removed from the Deity’s Garden. Exactly twenty-four billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, six hundred thousand one hundred forty-two years. There was nothing special about such a date. Alas, the pillar continued to stand, somewhat dumbfounded.
Days later, the same group of creatures returned to the floating islands, equipped with many more tools and followed by many more of their kind. The ones that had visited before wore long robes and shouted things at the lower ones, who worked with chisels and hammers. They flattened out everything, but left the pillar be. For twelve more years the pillar watched as these creatures worked, slowly constructing a multitude of buildings and citadels, until one day the creatures left. They were not gone for long, though, and soon the pillar witnessed hundreds of new creatures, ones it had never seen, pouring into the newly building abodes. They lived, they spoke, they laughed, they loved, and they died. In time, around the pillar arose a magnificent library, one show of grandeur by the architects and engineers of the creatures. The pillar witnessed books, and one day spotted a woman with two children sitting on a bench. The children ran about the library, once or twice knocking over the shelves of scrolls, and the mother would scold them. The pillar watched as the mother and children grew old, then witnessed one of the children have children of their own, and soon the original mother stopped coming all together. Eventually, even the grandchildren of the grandchildren no longer came. The years had numbered over two hundred when the last of the lineage failed to visit.
The pillar sat.
The pillar waited.
More and more people did the pillar witness, more and more stories it gleaned from the aloud readings which so rarely occurred and the more common lectures taught by high priests of the civilization. Though it took time, the pillar came to know the language of these people, and soon, the pillar learned of the history of these people.
They had come from a world known as Ion, and had been brought to this flawed reality three hundred thousand years ago. None of them truly remembered what the world outside was, but they prayed to their gods and idols for freedom from this place. Each one of these people that came through, all indefinite points and blips on a timeline to the pillar, all had lives. The pillar grew soft over time, wanting to become more like them, but it knew it couldn’t. It continued to listen to the story, eventually learning of the other realms which existed beyond the floating islands. The creatures had set up many, many cities and enclaves throughout the various areas, but they seemed to be dwindling. For many thousands of years more, the pillar continued to patiently wait and listen. The creatures seemed to grow angry over time. They spoke of being abandoned by their gods, and they spoke of being forgotten by them. Many of the creatures began to disappear, flickering off into the nothingness of the void below the islands. The pillar witnessed some of the creatures go truly mad, and those ones were killed by the others. The society was falling. The pillar knew this, and though it felt sad sometimes, it knew it didn’t matter. The time that these people had existed was a mere blip, less than a millisecond, on the grand scale in which the pillar had existed. And so, it waited.
In time, a large orb appeared in the sky. Small at first, the gemstone descended from the heavens, smashing through the roof of the grand library. The pillar was saddened by this, but the people didn’t seem to be. No one visited the library anymore. The scrolls and papers blew about in the wind, twisting, forming cyclones of words and stories, before the wind eventually died, like the people, and a quiet nothingness took hold. There was a low humming which came from the crystal, but the pillar paid it no mind. It had been two years since the last people had been seen when they seemed to reemerge. The pillar bore witness to five creatures, garbed in what were once fine linens, slowly walking towards the crystal. They looked at it, and screamed. A long, mighty, bellow came out from all five of them, before they shambled their ways to the edge of the island. They jumped. Nothingness returned. Not a sound, save for the constant buzz of the crystal. An endless night. The pillar was not bothered by this. It knew it was the way, that all things must end at one point or another. As the pillar waited, the crystal seemed to grow stronger. Items vanished without trace, and it grew in size. One day, the pillar heard a loud crack, and it found itself falling,
and falling,
down,
down,
down,
into the
nothing below.
Amidst it were black skies.
And then,
a dim light.
Soon, the pillar found itself lying in a field, broken down the middle, one part standing, one part fallen. In time, it repaired itself. The field it was in was empty, only grass, with slowly rolling hills far in the distance. It was bright, almost too bright, and the sun never set. There were no flowers, and there were no animals. For a long time, the pillar sat. Nothing came.
The pillar sat.
The pillar waited.
It had stood for thirty-five billion years, and it expected to stand for thirty-five billion more. It had witnessed much in its time.
The pillar stood lonesome.