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The ten thousand things and the one true only.

by Kip Manley

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Things to keep in mind:
The secret of worldbuilding.

“That is wisdom,” said Barganax. “That is truth.” He settled himself on the stone of the balcony that was warm yet after a day of unclouded sun, and, sitting there against the sky, said: “Our talk hath wandered somewhat beside my purpose, which concerned the making of worlds. Were I to tell you I saw one such devised and created, under my nose, a month ago, at supper-table, would you credit that?”

Doctor Vandermast paused. “As coming from your grace, known to me for a man of keen judgement and not given to profane jesting, I should unpartially examine it.”

“I have not told you I saw it. The more I consider of it, the less know I whether I truly beheld that marvel or ’twere but legerdemain.”

“If it pleased your grace open it to me more at large—”

“Better not. I have indeed almost clean forgotten it, save the circumstances. But this I will tell you, that I seemed, when ’twas over, to have lived myself (and yet something more than myself: mixed of myself and his serene highness my Father, and, in the mixture, may be a less than him and something less too than me, as impurer; like as orange-colour hath not the pureness of red neither of yellow, being compound of both)—in that mixed self, I seemed to have lived a life-time in that world. Well,” he said, after a moment: “I sucked its orange. But a cheap frippery of a world it was, take it for all in all: made tolerable, as I bethink me now, but by rumours and fore-savourings of this. And I seemed, besides, to have looked on from without, while untold ages passed there: first the mere ball of incandescence: then the cooling: the millennial ages through which a kind of life was brewing, in enormous wastefulness and painfulness and ever-growing interweaving of tangle, until human kind began there: slow generations, ever changing and never (on the whole) bettering, of human kind, such as we be. Ay, and I was stood by, viewing it thus from withoutward, even at the golden moment for which that defaced, gelded, exiled creation, so like the real world, yet so unlike, had from its first beginnings waited and thirsted: its dissolution. And that was when she, to pleasure whose chanceable idle soon-changed fantasy it was made, took from the braided blackness of her hair a pin starred with anachite diamonds, and as idly with it touched the bubble. And at that prick—puff! ’twas gone: nought left but the little wet mark on the table to witness it ever existed.”

E.R. Eddison


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