The precise origins of the Hourglass are lost in the shifting sand
of many pasts, as are the beginning of all things in the Dying Aeon.
There is, however, a story which is told by certain reptilian tribes regarding
the creation of the world, which goes as follows –
In the beginning, there was only the great snake Abdu, resting in
his endless coils.
And Abdu knew all things, for the only thing that could be known
was Abdu, and Abdu was happy resting in his endless coils, snoozing but never
falling fully asleep, his vast, bejewelled eyes pulsing in his wakefulness, and
dimming in his drowsiness. And Abdu was happy resting in his endless
coils, knowing all things.
And many aeons of our time passed Abdu in this happy state, until
there came a time when his eyes started to pulse less, and grow dimmer all the
time, and Abdu knew that he had grown tired of knowing all things, and that his
eyes would soon dim out altogether, and then there would be nothing, for Abdu
would be asleep, and there could be nothing ever to wake him again. And
then a momentous thing happened, which none of the Hierarchs or theologians
have ever understood, though they have discussed it long into the night, and
tramped their feet bitterly into the sand. Abdu resolved that instead of
knowing everything, he wanted to know one thing from another.
Alas, being all things, he did not know how he might differentiate one thing
from any other, but as his thoughts on this question remained unresolved, they
hardened and congealed into round orbs that fell about his coils in great
clusters. And since Abdu did not cease thinking on the problem of knowing
one thing from another, those orbs grew limbs which allowed them to move about
and work upon the problem which Abdu had set them. And Abdu became
quiescent then, and as the deathless one drifted into abeyance, his sleepy
thoughts formed a kind of fine vermilion dust that drifted through the air
around his coils.
And the orbs began to gather all the vermilion dust that drifted
in the air about them, and pile it into great heaps on the scales of
Abdu. But how can we differentiate one grain of this sand from another
they wondered, for it is all the one thing? After much disputation, the
orbs resolved that though the individual grains could not be differentiated, it
might be that if sand were moved from one place to another, then the sand in
the first place would be one thing and the sand in the second another. Hence, they set their ingenuity to constructing
a device which might keep the sand in constant or near-constant motion. They created a vast glass structure composed
of an upper and a lower bulb, connected to one another by a narrow central
funnel, and they filled the lower bulb with the sand of Abdu’s restful
thoughts. About the bulbs they erected a
container like to the grandest temple ever raised by mankind to honour his gods:
the glass was enclosed by cyclopean foundations and pillars, adorned with
hieroglyphics that none but Abdu would ever understand; and the whole structure
was connected to a machinery of levers and pulleys which allowed the hourglass
to be turned and the slow falling of its vermillion sands initiated.
And when the sand started to fall, Abdu’s
eyes gleamed once again, and the Hierarchs and theologians of those tribes tell
us that ever since that moment, Abdu has lain contentedly in his coils,
watching the sand as it falls slowly through the great celestial machinery
which they call the Hourglass of Aeons.
And they tell us that the stars in the heavens are but grains of sand in
this Hourglass, for all time and space as we know it are contained in the
disordered thoughts of Abdu as they fall from the higher bulb down to lower;
and when every last grain has finally come to rest in the bottom bulb, our
world and everything we have ever known will come to an end, and then the orbs
will rouse themselves to turn once more the great machinery, and the elements
of the last world will once again be intermixed and set in falling motion, and
many people will remember having lived other lives prior to this one, and
remember the character of other worlds contrary to this one, some better and
some worse, and those people will remember aright, for many times has the
Hourglass of Aeons been turned, and many contrary worlds has it created, all
composed of the same core elements, and the visions men see in this world, and
the exotic artworks which they create, are but memories of the previous admixture
of sand which fell through the Hourglass, or an adumbration of the next, and no
one knows how many times the Hourglass of Aeons has been turned, none save Abdu,
happy resting in his endless coils.
This antique tale provided the mythic
prototype for the talisman which had found its way into Ah Pook-Nar. It had been fashioned long ago by reptilian
craftsmen as a miniature model of the celestial hourglass celebrated in their
ancestral legendry. The sand in the
hourglass was deemed to be the key to its peculiar narcotic effects. This sand, Kadmon had heard, was a bright
shade of vermilion red which shimmered and sparkled with a lustre unlike that
of any naturally occurring mineral. Some
avow that its origins were meteoritic; others claim that a mystic once awoke
from a profound trance to find himself clutching two fistfuls of the mysterious
sand, like a keepsake preserved from a fading dream. Whatever its origin, gazing at the sand as it
fell through the hourglass had a peculiarly mesmeric affect: the gazer lost all
consciousness of time, and became wholly absorbed in vivid hallucinations and
fantasies. Having existed for centuries
in the open desert, the lizard people’s perception of time differed radically
from that of city dwelling humans; knowing only the great, brooding silence and
essential homogeneity of that terrain, their sense of time had gradually become
less insistent, and more mystical and undifferentiated in character. Hence, the effects of the hourglass were less
pronounced on them, and they used it as a kind of oracle. In the district of Malrudia, upon the roof of
whose ziggurat men have strenuously cultivated gardens and pasture land, the
priests slaughter lambs and oxen and profess to divine the course of future
events in such patterns as the poor beast’s ruptured entrails assume; peasants
in Kadmon’s home in the north-east cast straws to point them to enigmatical
verses which were said to be the mathematical equations by which some elder
demiurge composed the fortunes of men; even worldly migrants practised a form
of random divination whereby they accepted the next sight or happenstance the
city presented to them as an oracular cypher, thus making of the whole city a sacrificial
beast whose ruptured gut was a disordered dream of things yet to come. In such a fashion, the old reptilian priests
and chieftains consulted the hourglass of aeons, until at some point its
reveries lead them astray, and their tribes were dispersed and the hourglass
itself lost in the sand with all the other fragments of untold aeons.
Eventually, the hourglass was
discovered by a group of Diggers, and found its way into Ah Pook-Nar, where it
quickly acquired a notoriety for leading wealthy aesthetes into lives of
opiated dissipation and hermetic squalor, and yet the more lives it destroyed,
the greater grew the mystique surrounding its visionary potency. A group of gossiping thieves told Kadmon that
the hourglass had fallen into the hands of an obscure wizard, and in its
prolonged absence from the open market, it had become an object obsessively
coveted by certain collectors, aesthetes, and hedonistic adventurers. Some even avowed that the Autarch himself
desperately wanted to add the hourglass to the library of inexplicable
technologies and ancient totems which he and his processors had patiently accumulated
over the centuries, as though in the hope that all would one day be found to be
parts of a single and all-powerful divine contraption which might ensure the
perpetuity of their reign beyond the eventual death of the New Sun.
Continued shortly.
