Tak

Experiments - Part 5

     "Fair enough," said Tak, who found himself fascinated by the object and couldn't wait to begin playing with it. "It might help if we knew what she was saying. Have you ever heard her voice?"

     "No. It may be that her voice has been lost forever, like ink in an old book that has faded beyond legibility. I have noticed, however, that every time the object is activated she speaks the same words. She starts from the same place, saying the same things every time."

     "Like an old diary that always opens at the same page," mused Tak. The woman's image abruptly vanished, to reappear a moment later, but she was now dressed differently and the room behind her was lit differently, as if the yellow sun had moved some distance across the sky. "Another page," he muttered to himself. "But suppose she wanted to return to the first page?"

     "You simply deactivate it and activate it again," replied the rak, "but I take your point. There must be a way to move through the entries, to find the one you want, but both Chilgrone and I have so far failed to find it. In that chest under the table over there you will find all the notes written by us over the years. All the experiments we've tried. Please familiarise yourself with them, or you will waste time repeating things that don't work. I will now leave you to make a start."

     He left the room, and Tak stared back down at the silently speaking woman in his hands, wondering who she was and in what strange, forgotten land she'd lived.

☆☆☆

     "The legend of the demigods?" said Lirenna, her perfect brow creased with puzzlement. "I don't think I've ever heard of it."

     "Nor me," agreed Thomas, "until it surfaced in these acquired memories of mine. Not surprising really, though. I mean, how many of our myths and legends are still going to be around three thousand years from now?"

     The demi shae nodded. "So what is this legend exactly? How does it go?"

     "Well, basically it says that, long, long ago, the ancestors of humanity were nothing more than dumb beasts, living in caves and making tools from bones and flints. Then, one day, a race of gods came down from the stars and interbred with them. They created a race of golden beings with amazing powers who built a mighty civilisation in which wonders that would amaze and astound us were taken for granted. The legend speaks of cities of steel with towers of glass half a mile tall, of carriages that could move by themselves faster than a galloping horse and even fly through the air faster than the mightiest dragon.

     "One day, though, they dared to fly out into the stars, wanting to seek out and rejoin the gods that had created them. Derro, an evil god, grew jealous of them, though, and sent an army of fire demons to lay waste to the world. The legend speaks of a global conflagration. Every part of the world destroyed by raging fire. The civilisation of the demigods was destroyed, and the only survivors were those few who'd been able to hide deep underground and who had supplies of food and clean water to enable them to endure the years of freezing darkness that followed.

     "When they finally crawled out to see what the world had become, they were horrified to discover that they'd lost their powers and had become the humanity we know today. Weak and ignorant. Almost helpless in a hostile and violent world. Interestingly, the legend also states that other groups had survived by turning to cannibalism and other horrific practices, and that over generations of inbreeding and degeneration they became the evil humanoid races. Shologs, goblins, buglins and so on, as well as other nasty breeds of humanoids that have since become extinct. That agrees with the opinions of several notable modern sages, including Boswell of Bluevale and Kromus of the High Downs..."