Ripheus23

When the sorceress awoke, she was on a rock ledge, pastured over by veldt plants, under a sun of blue. The shade of the sky moiled with the clouds, casting their shadows into themselves like molten turquoise.

She had no idea where all that would be.

She had no idea when she was, for that matter. Something had happened. I wouldn't just wake up in the middle of nowhere, suffering a shock to my memory, unless something happened.

The next thing that happened, as she tried to get her bearings, was that a creature appeared. The taste of cheddar cheese came over the sorceress, as if the sensation of cheddar were outside her mouth or mind, coalesced as an animal---something like an orange-yellow sloth, it seemed. Inexorably, her synesthesia made her believe, with the force of imagination almost as vivid as hallucination, that she could actually see the cheddar sloth where the sensation contoured itself in that form, on the grass to her side.

The creature chirped up to her---she could hear it, and the sound didn't taste like anything, to be sure.

Checking herself for leaves---she might carry edible ones, after all, since she supposes she must be a resourceful sorceress to have survived whatever thing that happened that ended up with her here, in this wild land---and finding none, she shrugged at the sloth-thing. It half-mimicked her gesture, then laid down on the ground as if in defeat.

Off in the plain below, the sorceress tasted another species. Auroch-yaks baked of bread, it seemed. They grazed silently, from her vantage, though she imagined she could almost hear their immense gnashing.

Wondering what a meal itself would taste like in this world, the sorceress decided to head in the direction past the bread-things.

As she walked, a wind of lavender raked over her. The cheddar-thing followed. Oddly, she could see it even when she wasn't facing it, because it was her sensation of cheese transposed outsider her head, and this faculty of sense---Or nonsense!---radiated from her head arbitrarily, unlike sight itself with its focused range. Still, the cheddar sloth blurred more the less directly she looked at it. The lavender wind intersected the fromatic mass, but didn't admix like one soup into another. The sorceress just "tasted" the objects separately.

And not everything, she saw as she walked, tasted like something. By now she was close to the bread-aurochs. Behind her stretched a ways of flowers and other parts of the field that gave off no glamour of appetite. Neither did any insect she espied, call to mind the taste of anything. Indeed, she simply saw the plants and the insects at once: only when facing them. In this, then, the taste-monsters implied an irregular power in this world, too.

She had reached one of the auroch-yaks. She thought---in a first clear memory of her home realm---of how in an old but popular translation of the Scriptures, the ancient word for "auroch" had been rendered "unicorn," and it became a serious article of religious faith to accept the legend of the unicorn. Still, the sorceress thought, I'm walking up to a unicorn made of bread... The cheddar sloth had stayed back some ways, enough to be "seen" but far enough to run from the quasi-unicorn, should it come to buck and fight.

Actually, it didn't really reply to the presence of the sorceress at first. She stood next to it. It looked at her, and as she locked her gaze with it, a deeper form of her taste-sight opened its eyes inside of hers.

"Welcome to the Heaven of Life," the bread-unicorn intoned suddenly.

The sorceress shocked back a little.

"I am of the Order of Bread, of the Angels of the Land," the bread-thing said. "Guardian of this door to the Heaven of Life. Welcome!"

"The Heaven of Life? Don't you have to be dead to go to Heaven?"

"Trust what I say," the bread-angel suggested, "you don't want to go to the Heaven of Death. So don't go there! Ever!" Then it started grazing again.

The sorceress didn't know what to say.

The angel again stared at her.

Then it spoke again. "Well, then. You're still in shock. That might be good, you know. It's always rough, finding out you had to survive the destruction of your universe. That's how you get to Heaven, you know---surviving the apocalypse. Well, your apocalypse. Ever since the Agreed signed the Treaty with the Killer, no one's had to worry about everyone dying all at once, everywhere. Just most of the people they could ever possibly know, sometimes. You're in that lottery, wizard. Your world exploded, and it hit you with so much force it just pushed you into a universe as far away as could be from where your home was."

By now, the sorceress had blanched with horror. "The destruction of the what?"

"The---your---universe. Welcome to the Heaven of Life!"

The sorceress almost screamed.

...

She followed the angel, the cheddar sloth still at her side, and yet silent but for a random chirp. They slept under a canopy of stars that gave off the most evanescent hint of emerald light.

And giant slugs like living accordions paraded in the forward distance.

...

This is what I get for bringing about the end of...

... the end...

... of...

... the world.

"Hell's name! It's my fault!"

The angel sighed. "You being here? Do you say, then, that you killed your world?"

"Yes. I don't know why or how, but I swear I know what I did."

The angel hummed. "You will be told, then, of the Killer."

The sorceress shuddered. The accordion-slugs churned their plasma-music miles down the way. The moon glimmered red in the odd cast of the sky's night.

"In the ancient times," the angel said heavily, "the First Ones, those who Agreed with the Killer, did so to prevent the end of all things. For the Killer had come to wield such power that It could have ended every world at once. It threatened to do so and prepared to unleash Its might. The day of darkness and reckoning was at hand. And it appeared that no miracle stood ready to save the day.

"So the First Ones---the first to Agree with the Killer---reasoned with their adversary. This being hungered for rampage, did it not? Why, then, kill all alive right now, if there were only a limited number alive at any given time? To kill infinitely, one would have to allow some to live, after all, in every era, so that they could give rise to others who could be killed in the future.

"Now the Killer Agreed to this compact, that It would be allowed to slaughter recklessly across the ages, so long as it would never risk or warn that it might destroy every universe at the last. It is this and this alone that has saved us all, for all the ages since."

The sorceress considered that if any of this had anything to do with her, she might well be doomed in more than just a spiritual way. "And since I destroyed my world...?"

"No. Because you survived that destruction. Now, maybe only you and a trillion others in your entire damned universe---in all its galaxies!---survived. But the Killer has sworn that It will exact as part of Its eternal toll, the lives of all those whosoever survive their world's end. You must have been swept out as much as possible, as I said, to have landed so far, in so many ways, from your place of origins and damnation. So you may be last on the Killer's list, now. But still, when all the other trillion are dead, It will come for you. And then you will be forced to choose between letting It kill you, or chancing to die in the Heaven of Death, whereto you might seek to flee, knowing by then what is to be found---and hazarded---there."

The mind of the sorceress reeled; her words were, "How often do entire worlds... explode like that? Often? How old is the landscape of all these worlds, anyway...?"

"Often enough," the angel mused, "all things considered. And it might well go on forever and ever, satiating the rapine of the Killer. That is our hope, I suppose. It is, thus, what we the angels are also Agreed upon."