Not deserted, Silus, merely waiting for its citizens to be born.
Within these buildings they slept, cradled in artificial wombs, dreaming in amniotic slumber. In striving to be closer to their god, the people of the world that I had created claimed a right that only a deity should wield; the right to create life. This world’s scientists were the midwives to a new race, engineered to be the servants of their creators. Artificial men and women emerged from the womb fully grown, ready to serve their masters. Though this disturbed me greatly, I did not intervene. I had given my creations free will and I had learned hard lessons — across many worlds created and destroyed — of the perils of taking that away, once given.
Silus was inside one of the buildings now, in a hall that seemed to stretch on forever. Within were ranked an endless succession of smooth round objects, like huge pearls. There was a muggy heat coming from them that reminded him of the cow-sheds during calving on his uncle’s farm. He watched in astonishment, and horror, as the perfectly smooth surface of each pearl began to wrinkle and split; fully formed adult humans pulled themselves out of the slime in which they were immersed, and stepped forth.
The children of my creations were, like their parents, utterly brilliant. Their minds were incisive and focused. Yet still they were willing to serve, using their gifts for the betterment of the world to which they had been born.
Silus watched as the artificial humans integrated themselves into the civilisation above. So like their creators were they, so convincingly human, that soon it was impossible to distinguish between those of natural birth and those who were the product of science.
Their integration into society was seamless. However, in one area this new race was very different to their creators; they were godless. They soon came to reason that as they themselves had not been created by a deity, then what use was there for such a thing? They observed none of the rituals and ceremonies of the faithful, although, for a time, they tolerated the religion of their masters. But unlike the minds that had created them, they were evolving. Soon their intellects were beyond those of their creators, and the servants quickly became the masters. So dependent on their artificial people had my children become that they did not realise that they had been usurped, happy, as they were, for their every need to be administered to, all the while sinking into comfortable complacency. The artificial race came to control every aspect of their lives.
Then came the first blasphemous act of this new race. Religion was banned and the churches and cathedrals — any place of worship, no matter how small — were shut down. Such beliefs were backward, the artificial race argued, and did nothing to advance the cause of humankind; spirituality was the reserve of the superstitious and the frightened. That these beliefs be entirely eradicated over time, a programme of enforced sterilisation of those who stubbornly held to their faith was put into practice. This, finally, shook my people out of their slumber, though not before the majority of them had succumbed to this tyranny. Those who had avoided the needles of the doctors took up arms, only to be brutally put down. They knew nothing of war, but their creations learned the art quickly. Once the populace had been subdued, seeing that their actions would not be universally embraced, the artificial race decided to drop the facade of progressive rationality entirely.
I had given my people free will. I had decided not to interfere in the world that I had created, and which they had shaped. I had tried a rule of absolute power before, on other worlds, and it had led to a people who only praised me because they were afraid. But when the artificial race triggered a terrible weapon, destroying an area much larger even than the peninsula you call home, Silus, the wrath of old returned.
Silus was hanging above the planet once more and he shuddered in horror as flames took a whole continent in their grip and turned it into wasteland in less than the blink of an eye.
I was too late to intervene. My people were eradicated. My beautiful world, which had been created and populated entirely by my will, was ruined, now ruled over by an alien race that paid me no heed. Only when I rained down fire, unleashing a destructive force more powerful than their own, only then did they truly hear me, and for a moment some of them actually believed.
In my rage, however, I had missed something.
Silus’s perspective shifted again, pulling him away from the inferno raging below, the continents sinking into seas of lava before being obscured entirely by globe-spanning clouds of smoke. Now he was staring past the burning world into space, and for a moment he didn’t realise what it was that he was supposed to be seeing. But then Silus saw it — a brilliant streak of light burning into the heavens, rising from the planet below like a meteor in reverse.
That was a ship carrying Illiun’s ancestors, the last remnants of the artificial race. When my destruction of the planet began, some of the usurpers acted quickly, throwing themselves into the void to escape my wrath. And for millennia they have evaded me, using their technology and their growing knowledge of the void to seek out the places where time and reality are at their weakest, punching holes through space and putting whole universes between us.
But now their means of escape lies in ruins, and it will be you, Silus, who will now be the agent of my judgement.
S ILUS AND HIS companions had grown close to Illiun and his people during the time they had spent together. Katya had helped Rosalind and Shalim look after Hannah, and Zac had become firm friends with the small girl, integrating with the family just as if they’d been neighbours back in Nurn. Not once had these people threatened them. Granted, the silver-eyed men had attacked Kelos and Shalim, but that had been nobody’s fault but the savage world on which they found themselves. In fact, the people of the settlement simply did not have a violent bone in their body, as evidenced by their inability to defend themselves against the Order of the Swords of Dawn. Yet Kerberos was now telling him that they were of a people that had been responsible for the death of an entire race, killing them merely because their philosophy differed from their own. Was it right to finish what Kerberos had started, and kill the few surviving remnants of that ancient civilisation? Silus couldn’t believe that they posed a threat to anybody in their present state.
He could feel the god’s displeasure at this thought even before it spoke. The clouds that enfolded him darkened again and, for a moment, Silus got the sensation that he was being drawn deeper into Kerberos. He fought against the pull, fearful that the deity’s displeasure would mean his dissolution.
Illiun and his people are not just a threat to yourselves, but the whole of Twilight. This dead world that you have come to will one day be your home. You are on Twilight, Silus, but far in your past.
Silus’s mind reeled. The idea was almost beyond belief. Where was the vast ocean that he knew so well? Would this dead place one day be far beneath the waves?
The sorcery that saw the wrecking of the Llothriall clashed with the energies unleashed by Illiun’s ship when it punched its way into this realm, pulling you and your companions back through time to a Twilight not yet begun. If Illiun and his people are allowed to remain here, to breed and grow on this young world, then the life you know, the people you love, will never have been. Katya and Zac will blink out of existence. Everything will unravel into oblivion. There will never have been a Twilight as you know it. These people are not a part of my plan for your world, Silus, and, really, what are the lives of this few, compared with the countless millions? Would you let this handful of usurpers live, at the expense of your own race? They are not human. Remember what I have shown you.