Chronophobia: The Fear of (Outliving) Time

Chronophobia: The Fear of (Outliving) Time

Black. A shade so dark that not only does it seem to suck all light but also it radiates nothingness. A vast space of grinning hunger, with only one life form in it. A human.

The void is a strange place, and it puzzles me. 

Of course, being the first demon in existence to ever enter it has its own implications. Positive, I can tell my hoards and masters all about it. Negative, I’ve no idea how to make it out of here. Neutral – and the strangest by far – I’m not sure that I want to. 

My name is one that your human mind could never hope to comprehend nor your tongue speak, but I suppose the Ancients called me Ipos, and that will have to do for now. 

I look at the human now, unresponsive for the most part yet sometimes reaching out at a brilliant flash of obsidian, only to realise that it’s a trick of the eye. He’s been doing this for years now, although I don’t suppose that time as a concept exists anymore.

Why then, I wonder, is he Chronophobic?

----------

I still remember that night, all those years ago, when the seventh human to ever successfully summon me performed the ritual and spoke the incantation. The night was dark and powerful, a sliver of moonlight piercing through the curtains, into the circle where he bound me.

His name didn’t matter; Once I knew his story, I called him Nornagest, after the first who summoned me- and the only other I didn’t devour. He beseeched me to provide answers- to his questions far and few, yet once I did they were reborn anew.

Like the Druids and the Oracles, the mystics of the old, he spun and waved, wooing and tempting that fickle mistress, Time. His actions were frenzied, like that of someone desperate – desperate enough to summon the all-knowing trickster demon. The magic he dabbled with was unyielding, yet he managed to bend it. I saw it in his sweaty brow, I saw it in his grinding teeth, I saw it in his hair slicking across his cheek. 

 And so I obliged. I came forth in a glow of red, forming into this plane of existence after years five score and seven. The answer to his tries, bearing answers to the questions he so pried. The thin shaft of light brought with it fog within the closed window as Ipos answered the call, twisting and turning and snaking and moving through the mist, an infinity of pinpoints yet a complete form. 

My body in this dimension modelled after the spellcaster yet retaining my demonic qualities, I inhaled into my newly formed lungs as my forked tongue ran over the delicate lips that weren’t my own yet mine, feeling my shrunken claws run over skin distinctly human yet scaled, tracing white marks along their trajectory. My yellow eyes flickered into that of my other’s through the mist, marvelling at the from I’d acquired, satisfied yet hungry.

The summoning was perfectly done and the ritual complete, and for that he immediately had my respect- I had been bound well. And so I beckoned him, asking to come closer, mocking his frustrated lip and taunting his strained spine, the both of us tools of his prophecy and puppets to it- even as his questions formed a bottomless pit.

The human was unusual, and smelled like it- simply standing after a summoning so intricate was a miraculous feat in itself, never mind being in control of your magic. He spoke, then, a curious thing, and when he did, his words were like a soothsayer’s sentence born of his loving breast, like a maiden of magic brewing potions of great balance. 

“I have wondered,” he gasped “Mock’d and taunted,

How the Witches do it-

Keepers of Magic yet slaves to it,” he sputtered, eyes burning up

“And realise that if ever I

Were to be blessed like that,

I’d be called Nornagest

And have my fate so sealed-” he broke off in a violent fit of cough, before raising those dark eyes unto me and muttering.

“Much like it is,

And so it is.”

Even in my metamorphosised form, shackled within the spectrum of a human’s vision, I felt my face twist into an ugly, ironic smile. That name. The Blessed One. Fine, I had thought to myself. This spellcaster had held my curiosity before, and now he held my attention. 

So I spoke too, talking with him of the mysteries and philosophies, but above all of prophecies, and the one he had been given at birth and sought to render null, fighting tooth and claw against the old magic. I exhaled, fetid breath clouding over my long canines. Those fights never did end well for magicians, and yet they continued to persist. Curious creatures indeed. 

And so we talked of the secrets of old in languages long forgotten, for that night, relics of old magic channelling each other into this universe, I his demon and him, my human. 

Yet before we knew it, the night was spent- the deed was done. In that last hour, close to emerging on the other side yet no closer to that which he sought, he welcomed and bid enter a traitorous thought, with my voice in his ear growling to accept it, lest it gets intrusive and knocks apart it all that he’d built.

He finally took it in, drawing a deep breath as he welcomed it into his head, the thought travelling from the deep, dark void and its bowels. The possibility that 

“That which I seek

Shall never be mine,

Until its meant to be, at which point it will be 

Too late, yet” he spat, cursing the universe…

“No sooner, 

Not a moment, naught.”

In the eeriness of the night fading away, even as dawn approached, yet another thought crashed into him, whether to trust in the banality of a box; A touch… of destiny. A message, “Addressed to me” he let out, excited once more, burning out before sunrise. “And leave it to Me, the one who will be,

A gift from myself to Me,

Of the Wonder of Children and the only magic they own,

The respectful tool of the forgetful,

That which I must employ ‘fore I get fretful,

A slice of Time…” he chanted, the sweetness of his voice getting muffled even as mine returned to the guttural rasp, my ears becoming pointed and teeth elongated. Even as my corporal form was ravaged by hunger, I heard him say

“For my fortune hath been told at birth,

Yet the fortune, it be always changing,

A wish made at first light, even as Luna fades out of sight”

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A touch of destiny and of old magic a night, yet neither was enough to save him from the might of the prophecy that had been told at his birth, the curse of his existence and the bane of mine- sure enough, it had come true.

For even now, centuries later as I watch him flail in the dark, driven hopelessly out of his mind by hope - hope that doesn’t exist yet is all he has… but me- if he only would open his eyes to see. I watch The Blessed One live out his curse, and even though I’ve never pitied a human before, I do now.

For how lonely an existence would it be,

To be He, Nornagest,

Alone, so weak, yet the strongest,

Absurd, yes, 

but the only remnant of his world…

The Last Human in The Universe.

 - Tushar Bahirwani