“From dust we come and are returned.

‘From dust we come,’ Andar returned.

From duh stewie comb, Andar returned.

From dust, weak Omandari turned.

Fur ohm dust week oh, Manda errory turned

Forum dustwick, oh Man, Darer ye turned.

from DustTM we come and are returned—”

- Bladica Goodknight

Part 1

The Troll

The old man left the boy a gargantuan wealth. So much wealth, one might worry that poor little Andar would not know what in Hades’ name to do with it. I’m talking mow-the-lawn-with-a-lambo kind of wealth, people murdering each other over 1% of it, kind of wealth.

But this isn’t that kind of story. And Andar wasn’t that kind of boy. He knew what he wanted and he knew where to get it. He wasted no time at all. The old man kicked the bucket at about 6:03AM and by sunrise, Andar stood, his hood pulled tight against the fearsome cold, pounding on old Barthur Grimsby’s oaken doors.

“The Master is expecting you,” the butler said, his voice prim and regal.

Andar pushed past him, grunting, “Of course he is,” almost catching his shoulder on the heavy door knocker. The knocker was an iron-wrought Caratoroc, eagle-like eyes blazing grey—the symbol of the Engineer’s Guild. The foyer hall sported the same symbol, atop Grimsby’s full-length portrait. Two dozen pedestals lined the crimson carpet, each adorned with a miniature statuette of one of Grimsby’s many fantastic inventions.

“What can I do for you, young Master?” Grimsby asked from his mahogany desk.

The boy’s form was tall, thin and regal, almost delicate-looking against the fire-light. His coat was draped across his shoulders like a cape. The strong parallel lines of his button-down shirt and the coat zippers gave both an air of refined luxury and haphazard informality.

“You are a man of iron and steel, Mr. Grimsby,” Andar said.

“Indeed, I am.”

“You are a man of strength. A man of power.”

“Many would agree,” Grimsby replied. His voice thrummed like an engine coughing past second-gear. “The ones who disagreed have changed their minds. Or they will when I reveal my magnum opus.”

“Good, good,” Andar said. “I want your strength. I want the power of a dozen men.”

Grimsby smiled, a cold, toothless smile. “I’m listening.”

“What must I do to acquire this strength?”

“It’s quite simple, Master Andar,” Grimsby said. He leaned back in his leather upholstered chair, lighting a cigar and showcasing his bulging pipe-like arms in the process. “For some time now, a troll with the strength of eleven men has been ambushing my ore-miners on their way down the mountain. Eating the ones he catches, and traumatizing the rest with his grotesque vulgarities. Your path is simple. Defeat this troll, whose strength is that of eleven men, and you will have the strength of twelve.”

Andar spent the next twelve days and sleepless nights slaving away in Grimsby’s workshop, designing and constructing a suit of heat-powered armor of unprecedented proportions. As the sun rose on the twelfth day, Andar performed the final test. He climbed aboard the armor and directed the twelve, biggest, brawniest assistants to stand before him. Conducting the armor with the grace and elegance of a harpist, Andar scooped up all twelve assistants. The armor strained under the load, but it did not give away. The steel joints groaned and quivered, but they did not shred their hinge pins.

Since the machine had the strength of twelve men, Andar judged it a success. He loaded up the furnace and took it up the mountain immediately to the place Grimsby directed. There he waited.

Part 2

Skystone

The troll was a recluse and did not venture from his cave except to eat or relieve himself. When he finally showed his gargoyle presence, it was for the latter purpose. The troll took one look at the hulking, smoke-belching machine with Andar at the heart, and immediately he knew that this opponent had the strength of at least twelve men. Now the troll was not as dull as most trolls are. He knew when he’d been outmatched. Saving both of them the trouble, he gave a bow and a salute, and without further ado, the troll scooped up his favorite bag of bones and bounded off into the distance. Andar turned the mech suit around and trekked back down the mountain, triumphant but a tad disappointed.

“You have learned resourcefulness,” Grimsby declared upon Andar’s return. “You have become like your father.”

“My father is dead,” Andar spat. “I must become stronger.” And he meant it too. Deep down, Andar’s heart burned with desire, a fierce yearning for power.

Grimsby’s face fell at that. “I cannot help you, young master. But if you wish a greater strength than even I possess, then you must seek out the Immortan Guru of Maximilian the Unwanted. He knows more about these things than I. Go, find him in the Basin.”

Andar scoffed and went on his way, secretly disheartened.

As young Andar left the village where Grimsby lived, he passed a cabin on a hill on the outskirts of town. As he clunked past the house in his huge armor, he heard the unmistakable cry of a child in distress.

Thinking that surely there was imminent danger, Andar rushed over to the cabin. In one swift motion, he lifted the roof right off the cabin. A father and son were inside. But Andar had intervened too late. The son lay on the ground, blood streaming from a gash in his skull. The father stumbled in drunken rage, shaking his fist at Andar for destroying his cabin.

“I had already destroyed the life given to me!” the drunk man roared, gesturing to his dead son. “You had to take the one I built too?”

“If you built it once, you can build it again,” Andar said, vehemence welling up in his heart. He tossed the cabin roof into the nearby pond and stomped off into the valley beyond. If he could not save that boy from death, how could he expect to save himself?

A few years passed. Andars grew up from the lanky boy into a rugged, wireframed man, almost as strong as the machine which gave him strength. He spent those years going from village to village, battling trolls and giants and ogres too, for the people and for freedom and justice. The people loved him for it, showering him with gifts and offerings wherever he went. The King Sheriff threw a vast and unrelenting feast in Andar’s name, thanking him on behalf of the whole world for the service he rendered—ridding the land of monsters.

Andar devoured their respect, chasing after the monsters eagerly at first. But with every passing day, the discouragement built in his heart like an icicle, weighing him down, because Andar just knew that despite all his efforts to defeat the monsters in the wilderness, the real wilderness was within the human heart. Where once a troll lurked beneath the bridge, now a band of robbers plied their trade. Where once a dragon stalked the city for gold, now the oilman sucked the people dry.

For a time, Andar felt that he preferred the one over the other, that he would rather the human monster over the natural one. But the vision of the drunken father, raging, shaking his fist over his firstborn child—it haunted Andar like a second shadow.

At last, one autumn morning it became too much. Andar took the mech suit out into the desert and cast it off. And then a strange thing happened. Andar had spent the last half-dozen years eating, sleeping, adventuring all from within his glorious mech suit. Now, unshackled from its weight, each step Andar took sent him flying through the air. He examined the machine, intrigued and curious how such a thing could happen, and discovered that several heat conducting filaments had corroded to dust, meaning the furnace had long ago stopped powering the machine. That gradually, as the wires had deteriorated, Andar himself had begun to power the machine with his own strength.

So startled at this revelation, Andar jumped backward. It felt a small movement, a mere expression of surprise. But Andar’s newfound strength hurled him into the sky with the strength of a dozen dozen men (for it requires at least a dozen dozen men to lift a machine that has the strength of a dozen men, and Andar had grown to do it as easily as a woman holds her infant on her hip).

As he tumbled every which way through the air, Andar made yet another strange discovery; that upside-down, the sky stopped looking like a dome over you and instead resembled a bowl beneath you.

Grimsby’s engine-like voice recalled itself to Andar’s mind. Seek out the Immortan Guru. Go, find him in the Basin.”

The Basin. The Basin. Had Grimsby meant the sky?

Andar tumbled through the air for a straggly pair of minutes, wondering whether he was still going upward or if he’d begun to fall yet. He was starting to feel a bit nauseated, which only amplified his desire to become stronger, more powerful than he already was. He wanted control, over his fluttering stomach and also over how he tumbled through the sky willy-nilly. It made him irritable.

Blam! Andar landed against a hot, smooth surface. He bounded and skidded to a halt. When he brushed himself off, Andar realized he stood in a massive blue desert—the sky. Instead of a horizon, the desert stretched up and around him, until it disappeared around the corner of the planet suspended above.

Andar had expected the sky to be warm, closer to the sun, no shade anywhere, but it was a surprisingly cool world. Smooth and windswept, bright by day and glittering dark by night. For three days and three nights, Andar wandered the sky desert Basin, following the foggy clouds that roamed the skyscape like elephant herds. He drank the dewdrops left behind. He was hungry though, hungry to find food. It made him even more irritable. Still, he also wanted to find that Immortan Guru Maximilian. The two desires melded together into a brittle, sharp stubbornness.

Every time that he felt the urge (a frequent one) to shove off, to escape back to the ground above, Andar remembered those twelve days and twelve sleepless nights spent slaving away in Grimsby’s workshop. He’d poured blood, sweat, and years in pursuit of strength. He would not waste it now for lack of a good meal.

The memory of his father (a grisled and thin frailty) dying in bed came unbidden to Andar’s mind. He scowled and wandered onward. He would not give in. Strength, strength, strength, greater even than death itself.

Just when Andar’s will began to weaken, fizzling out in fuse-like desperation, he saw a cloud raining upon a mountain above, yet the cloud did not rain itself out. Andar went into the cloud, to see how such a thing could happen.

A voice spoke, like silk and music, rhythm and gloss in Andar’s ear, melody sweet like melon and honey.

“Andar,” it said. “Why have you come to this place / Between land and space?”

Andar opened his mouth to answer, but the voice from the cloud stopped him.

“Show your teeth when you speak / For the sky to which you speak is holy sky.”

So Andar bared his lips, saying, “I came here seeking the Immortan Maximilian the Unwanted and the strength which he offers.”

“I am the guru which you seek / Immortan Max of this basin / I make strong the weak / It’s my power that you seek.”

His voice was like a bard’s fire and lute, luscious and reminiscent of some bitter bright desire, otherwise unnamable. The thrill of dance and peril swept over Andar, and he struggled against the urge to leap with sorrowful exuberance. (If such a thing even exists, it exists only there.)

An indefinite period of time passed while Andar and Immortan Max conversed. Immortan showed Andar his collection of memories, the desert through which Andar had wandered. Each grain of sand, when tasted, revealed a life’s-worth of memories, knowledge, and desire. For a brief instant it flickered through Andar’s body, then it would vanish—a dream desert, parching blue grains of glass once again.

Then, after another many tumblings of celestial objects, curves and dances through space, which Andar spent learning and tasting the lives of men, the Immortan Guru Voice of Maximilian the Unwanted called Andar aside and showed him the Village.

It was a strange village of elderly people, devoid of children and cheer. What laughing the villagers practiced was derisive, mockery—a twisted, soured edition of joy. The Voice Immortan explained that these villagers had been granted immortality by the now slain God of ⬢ whose name shall not be spoken to mortal ears—lest they perish at the utterance.

They’ve been living here for thousands of decades, the Immortan Voice explained. Their amiability has turned to annoyance, their annoyance to bickering, their bickering to hate, hate to sorrow, sorrow to reconciliation, to peace, to annoyance, and right back again—an endless entanglement of scars and hurt and grievance, just and unjust.

“What must I do, Immortan Max?” Andar asked.

The voice led Andar to the twelve, palm sized rocks that represented the villager’s lives. The rocks were a sultry stormcloud gray.

Make them blue once again, the Voice ordered.

Andar picked up the darkest of the rocks. A man named Vinton flashed before Andar’s vision. It was a fleeting glimpse of a long and winding life, rife with joy and trailed by bitter regret.

First, Andar tried scrubbing the rock clean. All that managed to accomplish was a slight shine, a polish to the darkness. Not discouraged by the lack of blue, Andar ran from the cloud to a bright and blue part of the desert sky. Some of the surrounding blue seemed to brighten the stone, but it soon returned to its charcoal sulk. Andar scratched his head, stumped, and returned to the Village.

“I’m approaching this all wrong, aren’t I?” he said. But the Voice said nothing. Andar puzzled over this for a while. At long last, Andar stood, firm in the knowledge that he’d been approaching it the simplest and least true way. He must approach the Villagers themselves. If their hearts were to change, it would be from within.

Andar sat and tasted each memory stone, meditating on each strange and extensive life. I won’t bore you with the particulars, but after twelve weeks spent studying every aspect of the immortal village experience, mapping out the tangled yarns of bitterness between them, Andar felt more baffled than ever before.

Finally, he pushed all the thoughts from his mind and simply walked into the village square. After a dozen theories of mind (all scrapped), Andar decided there was only one course of action—to live among them. At first it had been out of irritation (every time he thought he understood a villager, they would go and change their minds about something, wrecking his whole profile for them) but as he approached the twelve, struggling, bitter figures, he could see them for who they really were—souls strung out on too long a wire, bodies stretched over too much time. As he approached, Andar concocted a plan.

“Reconcile with your neighbors!” Andar shouted at them. “Or in 40 days, your salvation will be extended to all eternity in length, hollowed out to the barest of depths. Dig now, and live eternally deep in the holy waters of forgiveness in the basin of Grace and the immortality prison will release your souls at last.”

At first the villagers were horrified.

“But we don’t want to die!” they said, for they were overwhelmed by the thought of death (not death itself).

“Have no fear,” Andar declared. “Continue to live as you do and your lives, filled with error, will never be concluded or cut short.”

Andar left the village confident that sooner or later the immortals would shose depth over distance. On day 31, the first pair of stones, in twos and threes, showed signs of blue. By the 39th night, all but one had become a crystal skystone of brilliant azul. Reconciliation, peace at long last. The last stone showed only the resolute darkness of a desert storm.

The following and final night, Andar went to the last villager.

“Close the door, you fool,” the man said from his armchair.

Andar slipped into the stone room, closing the heavy door behind him. The light of the star-fire illuminated the austere carapace of a living room. Vinton sat with his back to the door, wrapped in a long wool coat, shrouded in his own shadows, staring into the flames. His posture was dead, vacant of wit and vigor. But his eyes, yes. They glinted with fierce solitude, malevolent in their desperation.

“Good evening, Vinton.” Andar said in his most unassuming voice. “I am Andar, son of—”

“I know who you are, prophet,” Vinton said. “Fool,” he added after a pause.

“I cannot help being a fool if I am to prophesy.”

Vinton scowled. “They’re all against me, you know.”

“Who is against you?”

“All of them,” Vinton insisted, pursing his ancient lips as if this was so obvious it hurt him to even speak it aloud.

“The other villagers?” Andar asked. A logical guess, but the moment the words left his lips, he knew he’d misspoken. Like chess though, the movements of conversation cannot be retracted, and only sometimes reversed—never without penalty.

Vinton gave an unsurprising sigh of exasperation. “No,” he said after some defeated silence. “The voices. The voices in my head, Mr. Andar. They’re all against me.”

There was a glint of fear behind his wide eyes, weighing at the corners of his mouth. An invisible quiver, a swallow. He was still talking, mumbling, crazed and tormented.

“Desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, sedire, derisor, derisor, Mr. Andar, don’t you see? I can’t have desire if desire doesn’t want me?” The tremor in his voice became almost operatic, a kind of powerful, melodic droning, dramatic soliloquy.

The man Vinton lunged suddenly from his chair, and caught in the throes of fixated distress he seized Andar’s collar, pulling the young man close. He was the spitting image of Andar’s father on his death-bed, beckoning his young son forward, whispering through frantic, darting gaze.

“I’ve done such awful things, when given awful opportunities, Mr. Andar.”

Andar yanked himself from old Vinton’s grip—reeling at the reenactment of his father’s last words, baffled at their reappearance. Of course, Andar’s father had not called Andar, ‘Mister’, but that was beside the point.

Andar could hear the village bell begin to strike midnight. The time was up. He took the charcoal stone from his pocket.

“I cannot give you solace, Mr. Vinton. I could sit here all night, but I cannot give what I do not possess. Nobody but you can lay your demons to rest.”

Andar pressed the charcoal stone into Vinton’s hand, closing his other hand over it.

“I cannot, I cannot, I cannot—”

“That is the first voice to be silenced, Vinton. Taste of your life and see all that you did. Now is all you can, Mr. Vinton. As the old books say, now is the hardest time of all. Because Now is like a dream. It never hasn’t happened, it has not already passed, it is just the flickering at the cusp of belief and comprehension. Not all things are possible, but all things can be dreamed, Vinton. The truth dreams, and dreams not just in drops, but in oceans too.”

Blue. Blinding, raging, spinning blue, wider than periphery can allow. The Immortan Voice, like the romping soundtrack to a fever sleep.

You have learned the strength of the Mind, Andar. You understand how to communicate between your mind and body, between self and the Other, to understand the true nature of things.

“Good,” Andar said. as he spun through the air.

You have gained the strength of your father.

“My father is dead,” Andar said, his voice a tangled snarl. “I must become stronger.”

Part 3

The Final Trial

The world has changed while you were away, The Immortan Max explained, decidedly leaving out all explanation.

“How so?”

You will see, soon enough. Have patience, Andar.

“I will be patient.” But as the words left his mind-mouth, they were replaced with burning worry. How were the people he had left behind? Had the Ogres risen up? Or had the humans devoured each other? How was old Mr. Grimsby?

If you want the power to save them, you must find the Oracle Omandari Lucas. You will find him in the cave in the desert.

Andar thanked the Immortan Voice Unwanted and, with a thunderous splat, landed in the desert. He must have gained some serious momentum before striking the ground, because he came to in the early morning light at the bottom of a freshly blasted crater, made by a combination of friction and momentum. Several dozen people peered over the edge of the pit. They were small people, clad in bright and garish garments, waving angular, glowing sandal soles, goggling at Andar’s huge form through thick-rimmed spectacles.

Andar began to peel himself from the rock from which his impact had embedded his body into. The people started back, running, yelling.

“AYLAYAN, AYLAYAN,” they screamed to each other, and nobody in particular. “Oh God!” one of them said, but he clearly did not mean the words.

Andar knew the word ‘Aylayan’ to mean ‘outsider’, but he suspected they really meant ‘monster’. It disheartened Andar to hear them conflate the two so readily. He brushed off his heart, gave it a once-over and put it back. The golden heat from his fall began to dissipate, the glow receding.

“Take me to Oracle Omandari Lucas,” Andar said once he’d stood up. His voice boomed through the thin air like thunder in the night.

It was a long journey through the strange, new land. But at last, Andar approached a cave, led by a huddled pair of tiny robed people. It had taken a great while to find the robed people. Until they’d shown up, Andar had simply wandered the desert, repeating his request. It seemed futile, since nobody understood his ancient tongue. But the Keepers remembered. The robed, bookworm Keepers remembered. They led him to the cave, to the dwelling place of Omandari.

Andar entered the cave, ready for his third and final trial.

“Oh great Omandari,” Andar said as he entered the great hall, “What must I do to become strong?”

The great, hovering diamond in the back of the cave turned slightly in the air, and the light spilling from the hole in the ceiling glittered and wavered, like—but wait…?

No. No, I’ve got it all wrong. Sorry. The Omandari was a frail old woman. She sat, looking more decrepit than a lightning-stricken tree trunk.

“You…” she said, so softly that Andar had to rush forward to decipher the murmurings from the sound of his own heartbeat. “—to become strong, you must first become weak.”

“I understand, Omandari. I understand the plight of men. I have sat with them in their weakness. I have listened to death itself and know the length of its maw.”

“It is not understanding which you need,” Omandari said. Her voice grew thin and wearier still. “You must become weak. You must cast off all your strength, live out the rest of your days. Then you will know true strength. For there is no greater strength than to live with nothing but your mortality at hand.”

“What must I do, Omandari?”

“Andar, return.”

The End