Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Depicted: Violence, death
Discussed: Loss of child
One Man’s Luck
You may call me lucky. Many have and will again long after I am gone. But every coin has two sides. One man’s head is another’s tail. One man’s luck is another man’s curse.
I have seen and done things few would believe, or even dream. I have conversed with kings and dined with gods. I diced with Death herself and won. I alone have walked the Crystal Bridge at Abarynthail that spans worlds and time. I was there at the fall of Meriadar and saw all of creation shake at his death. It was I who lit the Allfire on Pyris and hurled the Sharda back into the darkness. I swear by my right eye and hidden heart, I have done all these things and more.
I have been hailed a hero ten thousand times and cursed a villain thousands more. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between. I am just a man. I have done good things and bad, selfish and kind, but you must know that above all, I am a coward. Ever have I walked the easy path, the path of least resistance. When I have run, it has always been from, never to.
I tell you this not out of pride, of which I have too much, or penance, of which I have not done enough. I tell you because it is the truth.
I tell you because I would have you walk a different path to mine.
*
My story begins at Sun’s Reach, on the Festival of Eventide, or perhaps I should say this story, because no story truly has a beginning, or an end. We are each of us but a chapter, a page, a footnote in a tale as infinite as time itself.
I could go further back and tell you of my youth collecting Histories with my father, of his murder, of how I came to be raised by his betrayer. Further still and you would find the story of my creation. You would hear how Lucied spun her many-sided coin of Fate, as she does when each of us are born, and how, with my toss alone, the coin landed on its edge, causing her to grant me my gift.
My curse.
Yet this story is not one of beginnings, it is one of endings, and so, it begins at Sun’s Reach. Perched atop a plateau overlooking the Endless Ocean she sits, a city of ivory and gold. As the sun’s last rays fall on her before being extinguished by the sea, she blazes like white flame. There are more marvels there on every street corner than you will find in the sum of every other land together. Clockwork men that keep the peace, that never sleep or eat. Songfountains where a man may drink music instead of water. Buildings grown by magic instead of built by hand. But above all of these stands the Carceble Spire, the Impossible Palace, the citadel that touches the sky.
From atop that tower, the Deathless Emperor, powerful and wealthy beyond measure, hosted the Festival of Eventide, summoning the greatest names of the age to celebrate the coming of the Longsnow – valiant queens, famed warriors, peerless artists and, of course, myself. Etan Luckkissed they called me, or simply just The Gambler, though I have gone by many other names. Unlike the rest, I bore no rank or title. At best, I was a curiosity, at worst, a trophy for the Emperor to display.
Though my faults are numerous, vanity has never been amongst them. Insatiable curiosity, on the other hand, is certainly one of my very worst. Thus, I accepted the summons, though I knew it meant enduring all the sneers and barbs I would receive from that high host of august personages, which amounted to a very small sum to pay when weighed against the chance to gaze upon the emperor himself. An opportunity I was, as it happened, to be immediately afforded.
“Avert your gaze, the One Beyond Death comes,” a voice bellowed above the clamour of the throng. Without hesitation, all bent a knee and cast their eyes to the intricately patterned mosaic tiled floor. To gaze unbidden upon the emperor’s masque was death, regardless of class or station.
“Hail the Lord of the Eight Crowns,” the Steward’s deep voice intoned solemnly. “Hail the Custodian of the Night Star. Hail the Twice-Risen King.”
When leave was given, the revellers returned to their conversations. Many glanced curiously at the hidden face of the great ruler as he strolled amongst them. I had become more interested in the fragrant, mouth-watering delicacies being offered, my audience with the gods in the Radiant Dream having inured me to more mortal splendours. Still, I was surprised, and not a little flattered, when I was addressed by a voice somewhere between life and death, both ancient and new, its every cadence a command.
“You honour me with your presence, Gambler.”
I turned and looked into the implacable cerulean masque of the emperor, behind which it was said an even more fearsome visage lay. Looking into the roiling inky blackness where eyes should have been, I could well believe the whispers that the exquisitely wrought masque concealed nothing but a blanched skull. Such is the price of immortality.
Bowing so low my forehead nearly scraped the tiles, I replied, “It is you who honours me, your Majesty. I have long hoped to visit the High Hall of the Impossible Palace.”
“I trust it has met your expectations?”
“Met and far exceeded.” My gesture took in the schools of luminescent skyfish flitting overhead amidst the vaulted ceilings, decorated with the emperor’s most glorious battles depicted in intricately carved high relief, and the outer walls of Quori stone, virtually unbreakable but invisible to the eye, showing only the stars beyond.
“It is undoubtedly one of the great wonders of this or any other age.”
The emperor inclined his head, his robes of lapis and gold sparkling in the light of a thousand luminescent floating orbs. “High praise from a man who has walked the Radiant Dream and returned.”
“Yet true nonetheless, your Excellence.”
The Twice-Risen King impaled me with the kind of unwavering stare only the dead possess. “You will visit my wife and I in the Emerald Garden at zenith three days hence. I would know more of that place.”
It was not a request. Even if it had been, the chance to meet the Hidden Empress was not one I would have easily passed up. Many said she remained concealed lest her peerless beauty drive lesser minds to madness, while a smaller number whispered she was kept hidden to hide an even greater prize, an impossible child, born as much out of terrible magick as of their love.
“I can think of no greater honour, Majesty,” I said, bowing once more. When I drew myself up, the emperor had moved on. I returned to stacking my plate with little knowledge that any satisfaction that I felt in that moment was mere seconds away from being burned to ash on the wind.
There was no warning. No cackle of laughter or gloating speech. One moment I was eating, and the next, a hundred different worlds ended. A blinding flash of amethyst light was followed by a sound like thunder cracking inside my head. Demonic magick erupted in all directions from the very centre of the hall. Fingers of violet lightning arced outwards, striking from one person to the next, consuming them in flames of unnatural heat.
A warrior would have drawn his ancestral blade; a sorcerer would have begun chanting the Words That Shape. Within a heartbeat, they would be searching for what had made the world wrong and begun attempting to set it right. I am neither warrior nor sorcerer, and I tell you again I am no hero. My first thought was, as always, for myself.
Instinctively, I reached out with my gift and Twisted. Time slowed. Realities opened. Portals opened before me, one after the other, windows to other worlds, like a series of mirrors stretching to infinity. The closest were bright but became progressively muddier as they receded into the dark worlds, timelines of improbable, then impossible events far beyond even my reach.
Faster than conscious thought I began sifting through them, searching for a new reality to escape to. Many of these streams are so alike as to be almost indistinguishable, even to me. The difference may turn on nothing more than one merchant’s choice to wear a viridian coat instead of citrine, or the jewels a woman hangs in her hair prior to singing at court.
The further into the streams I venture, the greater the changes. So why not take my time and choose the line that best serves the common good, you ask? A question I have asked myself many times but never truthfully answered, until now. The truth is, I tried, long ago. The truth is, it hurts.
The further I travel from what “should” happen, the more draining it is. Ten steps, ten lines, and my breathing becomes laboured. Thirty and I am drenched in sweat. One hundred and I feel as though I have been beaten bloody. Two hundred is like breaking bones. Mentally, the toll is worse. My mind is flooded with moments that might have been but never were. For the briefest instant as I slide through, I live each one. If I slip into a stream where I have broken a leg, I feel it. If I die, I experience it. And if, in that line, I am already long gone, or never was, I feel a bitter chill beyond that of any winter grasp my heart and squeeze.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of possibilities even further away, in the dark worlds, the worlds I dare not reach. The glimmer of a distant star sighted fleetingly through fog on a dark night. These are the worst, the most heartbreaking, for I see in them great things, if only I had courage enough to snatch them. Worlds without hunger. Places where stories are gold and poets are kings. Once I even saw a world without war, but I confess I could not choose it because I was dead there and lacked the courage to let the cold claim me.
But that night, as the demon magick came, I thought of none of this, only of survival. Possibilities flooded past me, lost in the eddies of neverwere. In each, I saw the lightning, and my own death. Ten lines, twenty, one hundred. Towards the dark worlds I fled, and the lightning followed me. Past two hundred timelines that sprang to life, collapsed, and died in a fraction of an instant. The pain was excruciating.
Then I saw it.
A line where I yet drew breath.
The Exar of Vascony twisted his ankle as he died, falling into the Zevedian Queen in front of me, knocking the curved metal of her ceremonial Zevsh bracer one eighth of an inch more, bringing it directly into contact with the lightning. The metal drank the demonic energy thirstily, turning the brave queen’s body instantly to cinders, leaving almost no residual to course into me.
I grasped at it with a desperation few can comprehend. But just as I reached for it, I glimpsed a world even further, an ember in the void, where my gift was gone, burnt away by this choice, this moment, replaced with the love of a wife, a child, and a home.
Can you imagine how that feels? Do you know what it is like to be dying in the desert, offered a glass of cool water if you can take one step, or a lake if you can only take ten impossible steps more? Would you crawl naked across a field of broken glass to claim your heart’s desire?
There are few who would. I, it should come as no surprise, am not one of them. The pain was too much, and I am a coward to my bones. With a Twist, I chose the closer. The lines coalesced, entwining around one another, consuming themselves like snakes of light and shadow eating their own tails, until they winked from existence.
I collapsed on the ground of that once-great hall, surrounded by the charred remains of the dead and the sickening smell of freshly cooked meat. Every nerve ending was on fire, every breath was pain, but I was alive. As my senses slowly returned, I realized I was not alone. Voices carried to me over the graveyard silence that only death brings.
“Here is my prize, Ozam,” a deep, guttural voice gloated, the voice of all the countless terrors that keep men awake in the dead of night. “Thus is your payment made in blood, as was promised to me long ago.”
“Not this,” another moaned. I realised it was the emperor himself. “Never this.” The Twice-Risen King was on his knees, his once-immaculate robes torn and smouldering, his skull exposed for all to see, had any lived to see it but me.
A monstrous being, a nightmare spun from flame and fear and given substance, had its clawed hand wrapped around the emperor’s throat. The demon’s shape shifted constantly, one second a horned man with draconic wings and four arms, the next a horrifying beast somewhere between manticore and spider. It was Valaac. The Spider of Carthaeal, Shadow Whisperer, Marshal of the Sundered Host and fifty other cursed names besides.
Valaac lifted the emperor, drawing them eye to eye, shadow to flame. “I made you. Gave you wealth and power beyond measure. And you thought to cheat me of what is mine? How else did you imagine this would end?”
“You cannot kill me,” said the emperor. “You have seen to that. Not without unmaking yourself.”
Snarling contemptuously, Valaac replied, “I will reform in time.”
I began crawling towards the doors like the snake I am, hand-over-hand through the still smouldering cinders of the dead. Bitter ash coated the insides of my mouth and nostrils and painted my face charcoal. Still, I went on, climbing over the lifeless husks without regret or remorse. Let the dead man and the demon do as they would. I had no intention of joining the pyre.
The emperor made no attempt to escape. “Perhaps,” he said, certainty and steel returning to his voice, “but it will be many centuries from now. This empire will have fallen, and its people turned to dust. No one will remember you.”
“I was ancient when your distant ancestors first emerged from their caves in search of fire. I have witnessed the fall of a hundred empires and a thousand kings, ruling over their pitiful crumbs of earth for the briefest of instants. Eons are nothing to one such as I,” Valaac boasted. “Men will learn to fear me again.”
“Then end it and be done, if you can.”
Baring many rows of teeth, Valaac tossed the emperor away. He bounced across the scorched floor, thudding into one of the room’s mighty pillars, then was still.
“So be it,” Valaac boomed. “Before I end your life, I take as final payment the one thing you hold more dearly.” He gestured with a hand that became the segmented leg of an insect, a bird’s talon, then a monstrous claw. The monolithic doors of the great hall, only a few feet in front of me, swung open. Warm, welcoming golden light spilled into the room from the corridor beyond. With freedom so close, I redoubled my efforts, pulling myself through the maze of carbonised statues, frozen in death, with renewed vigour.
I had almost reached that pool of gentle light when a shadow fell across my path. I froze, expecting Valaac, and looked up to see instead a small, dark-haired child, perhaps six, no more. On his pale brow burned a glowing amethyst sigil in the shape of a six-clawed hand.
“Your son.”
The crown prince was so close I could almost have reached out and grabbed him, had I the courage or desire to do so. He walked across the broken hall as if dreaming, stepping over the dead without thought.
“No,” gasped the emperor, desperately struggling to his feet. He swayed unsteadily as he crossed the floor, like a man on a pitching deck at sea, falling to his knees before the demon. Before, his voice had sounded like something otherworldly. Now, he sounded like a man, tired and afraid. “Please, not this. Not Darohan. I will give you anything. Name it.”
Darohan passed his father and the monster without a glance, walking impassively towards the outer wall of enchanted translucent stone, and clambered onto a window ledge. He turned, looking back calmly towards Valaac, waiting for instruction.
“I will give you my soul,” the emperor pleaded, a hand stretched out towards his child, skeletal phalanges showing through the tattered remains of silken gloves.
The demon laughed. It sounded like the screams of dying children. “Such arrogance. Only you would offer me that which is already mine to take.”
Realising that no bargain could be struck, the Twice-Risen King took decisive action. Moving with unnatural speed, he seized his skeletal left hand at the wrist with his right and, jerking savagely, broke the bones with a whip crack. Before Valaac could move, the emperor cast the bones of his left hand into the air.
The jagged, bleached white shards rained down on the demon, skittering off horns and fleshy, tentacled protuberances, down bony ridges, and insectoid wings until they clattered to a stop on the tiles at his clawed feet. Each of the bones stood vertically despite their shape, forming a perfect circle around Valaac.
“I bind you with my own bones,” cried the emperor. “Valaac, creature of the Pit, you who are not of this place and break the covenant of the First Pact to visit it, I sever you from the Abyssal plane. I bind you to this place. I chain you to my will. Now be still.”
A ripple passed through Valaac’s form from the ground upwards, freezing his shifting form in place. Though still huge and monstrous, he was no longer impossible to comprehend. He seemed now, at least temporarily, to be more a grotesque monster cobbled together from mismatched human and animal parts than a vast and ancient being of unfathomable power. Valaac’s scream was thunder breaking the sky, loud enough to shake the entire hall. It was the scream of a beast caged, a mixture of rage, surprise, defiance, and impotence.
I knew instinctively that the Deathless Emperor had not won the battle but merely a temporary stay of execution, and yet relief and hope flooded through me all the same. I clambered to my feet, staggering drunkenly towards the doors.
“Gambler.”
I ignored him. His greed for life had led to the deaths of everyone in this room. Was I any more selfish to trade my own life for his?
“Please.”
I stopped, ensnared by the sincerity of the plea in his voice as surely as Valaac had been caught in his trap of bone and sorcery.
“What would you ask of me?”
“Help me. Find a reality where Valaac is vanquished.” His voice was starting to strain and crack like wood in a vice. The mental fortitude to hold a being such as Valaac in place must have been immeasurable.
“What you ask does not exist. Better ask of me to find a world where all men are happy, and their dreams fulfilled. It is impossible. I cannot save you.”
“Not me,” said the emperor, shaking his blanched skull. “My son. He is young and innocent. He knows nothing of any of this. Do you know he laughs when he sees my true face, and calls me father? In five centuries of existence, he is the one perfect, unblemished thing I have done. My sins are not his, nor should my end be. Please, help him.”
I looked at the boy standing on the ledge, his eyes as empty as slate waiting for chalk. I confess I could not meet their unspoken accusation. Shamed, I turned away, limping towards the door.
“What is it all for, Gambler?” the emperor called after me.
“What?”
“Your gift. You who can change the world at a very thought. What is it all for but this? Have you considered that perhaps every single decision you’ve ever made has brought you here and now to this one moment, this one choice?”
‘What is it all for?’ I had asked myself that very question many times. Perhaps one day I would find the answer, but not if I remained in this hall when Valaac broke his bonds. “I am sorry, Highness. I am a coward, I know. I choose myself.”
“No, you have been a coward. What you are and will be is not yet decided,” said the emperor. His words came erratically as his struggle against the demon intensified. “Do you want to simply exist, to be alive, or do you want to live? Take the word of someone who has lived in death longer than he ever did in life; make it count.”
His words threatened to pull me back, but my hand rested on the cool, smooth stone of the door, anchoring me to escape and self-preservation.
“What is the point of your choices if all you ever choose is to run away?” he asked desperately, his trembling skeletal hand raised towards me. “Choose, Gambler. Choose him, or yourself. Live long, fettered by the chains of fear, or risk death and be free. Choose!”
We stared at one another across that field of charcoal and bone, the will of the Lord of Countless Yesterdays weighed against that of the Fool of Infinite Tomorrows. A father’s love for his son weighed against a coward’s love of his own life, and in the balance, the life of a child.
There was a sudden rush of wind. Valaac bellowed, flexing his arms, each as wide as me, and his veined wings unfurled. Beneath him, the tiled floor cracked in a circle around the demon and fell several inches, as if the skin of the world had been shattered. The emperor stumbled and fell to his knees, already calling new magicks.
Valaac ignored the Deathless Emperor as if he posed no more concern than a fly to an ox. He turned his monstrous visage towards the child. “Fall and be free,” Valaac commanded. The Quori stone behind the child exploded outwards, becoming visible as its enchantment was broken, leaving a jagged hole in the stonework, through which the night air rushed hungrily.
“No!” howled the emperor.
I hardly heard his wail of pain, worse than the agony still thrumming through my chest. I did not see the demon and the monarch engage in their final struggle, calling on magicks powerful enough to make the earth tremble far below. “All the gods damn you both,” I yelled, and made my choice, already running.
The glyph on the boy’s forehead faded and life returned to his eyes. He saw his father. I saw his fear. He stepped backwards off the ledge, and then he was gone, falling into the blackness. I plunged after him through the shattered window, into night as cold as a hammer, sharp as a sword. Beneath me, I could make out the boy plummeting towards the earth, his pale, terrified face looking up towards mine, illuminated by two moons and ten thousand stars.
Though I was already weary beyond belief, I Twisted, sifting through realities, searching for a way to make the impossible real. Great nations rose and fell in fractions of an instant. Entire worlds sprung to life and died before my eyes. At last, I saw a glimmer of hope in one line. Unimaginable pain coursed through every fibre of my being. I made a Twist and the boy’s thick cloak caught a momentary updraft. My arm wrapped around his waist. Together we hurtled downwards, the wind clawing at us like a ravenous beast.
Only seconds remained. I searched frantically, sorting timelines faster than I ever had before, faster than I had thought possible.
In each one, I saw despair.
Death.
Darkness.
Deeper I pushed, into the dark worlds, into the lines where a one in ten thousand chance became a certainty. Yet still we died. I went further. My mouth and lungs filled with blood and an inferno raged in my chest.
I lost count of how many worlds I travelled through, how many times I saw myself die, a shattered and bloody ruin on the ivory stones. I wanted nothing more than to give up. To surrender to the pain. It would have been fitting, really, to die as I had lived, a coward to the last. But the warmth of the small Prince against my chest pushed me beyond fear and pain.
Suddenly, like the first splash of paint on a fresh canvas or the break of day on a distant horizon, I saw a new line. A shining, glorious impossibility. And just beyond it, the other line I had glimpsed before, a world where a child of my own waited. But in that line, the prince in my arms was dead. I knew it as certainly as I knew that man must breathe air to live.
One child’s life would pay for the other.
I chose.
Gods forgive me, I chose.
A window opened. A cat leapt out and scampered across the path of a farmer on his way to market. The farmer cursed, turning his wagon sharply. Startled, a flock of windlarks took flight, buffeting us with ephemeral wings. A pennant snapped towards me in the wake of their passing. I clutched at it with a desperate hand and caught it. We swung left, slowing further, letting go as my shoulder dislocated over a series of brightly coloured canvas awnings that tore one by one under our weight.
I landed on my back in a pile of hay being carted by the extremely surprised farmer, the prince cradled on top of me, both of us bruised and badly broken, but very much alive. I cannot say how long we lay there, or how long it was before the Hidden Empress herself swept the child from my arms. I still remember the look on her face as her son feebly wrapped his arms around her neck. In that moment, she was not an empress, but a mother, who cared for nothing, but the babe cradled in her arms.
*
So it was that I finally came to understand what luck really is. It is not the toss of a die or the trick in a deck. Nor is it the coins you win that glitter brightly on the table before you, for those are cold comfort when you lie sick abed or feel your life’s blood slick against your hands.
Luck is not simply continuing to live, without purpose, without risk, for that is no life at all. Luck is finding someone you love, who will love you in turn. Luck is the arms of a child wrapped tightly around your neck. Luck is a coward who does the right thing once in his entire Gods-cursed life and is unfairly rewarded with the life of a child who would become first a student, then like a son, and one day, a great ruler of men.
Perhaps it was not the perfect life I saw in that distant world, with a wife and child of my own, flickering like candlelight before me and then blown out in an instant. But you loved me, young Prince, and in the end, that was luck enough.
Robert lives in Sydney with his lovely family, where he teaches high school students History and how to deal with sarcasm. His writing has been featured in The Big Issue Fiction Edition 2023, the School Magazine and Two Wolves Digest, and he won the Australian Writers’ Centre Furious Fiction Award June 2021 prize. His short story ‘The Nightwatchman’ was also recently longlisted (Top 50) for the Best Australian Yarn 2024.
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