“I have drunk the ancient blood of kings, the sons of pagan gods. I have outlasted empires that man has now forgotten. I once walked upon lands that the sea has swallowed up. There are mysteries I cannot tell you because you have not the language to understand them!”
The stone coffin trembled. The chains covering it rattled like the tinkling of little bells.
“And yet you’re completely impotent,” I said.
The box levitated a moment, straining against its bonds, and then it fell backward onto the earth with a hollow thud.
“You can’t hold me here forever.”
“No,” I agreed, “but we can.”
“We?”
“Those who bound you in the first place and me, who’s reforged the chains you broke, and those after me and those after those…the chains of time, tradition, will hold you back until the last man dies and leaves you here in this dark hole. Then, when history is done and time has played itself out, you’ll have the world all to yourself.”
“Release me!”
I walked toward the door. The stone stairs led up into a dim light. Glancing over my shoulder, I said, “See you in another thousand years.”
Up the steps and out again upon the moonlit desert whose sands rolled on in long white streams under the slashing winds. And I thought for a moment, to see in the shadows of night, the figures of those who’d come before me. Men with strange faces, but not entirely unlike my own, some dark, some pale, some happy, some sad. What I saw I saw in an instant, a great company of those who too had preserved the chains of time, saw them seeing me, knowing that the chain would yet go on. Then the wind jabbed at my face, and I closed my eyes. I rubbed the sand away, but when I looked again the desert was empty, stretching on and on into eternity.
Tale Told 