Findesferas: Introduction (Epilogue 1)

The marshal woke up with a shudder so violent that his head almost bounced on the hard, smooth surface beneath him. As he moved his arms to raise himself up, he felt the weight and texture of a silky material, diaphanous, slippery like a flat fluid. It was wide, folded upon itself, covered him completely. His hands found the edges of the material and he pulled it up before his eyes. Light, paler than the moon, like a spotlight pointing upward from an unknown source, reflected off of the material, and the marshal scanned left to right: red, white, blue. It was the Paraguayan flag, and as he dragged it across his face, a telltale spot of blood identified it as the very flag he had torn up and tried to ingest, rather than give to the Brazilians, intact again. How was this possible?
Irritated, he clawed away at the flag almost frictionlessly, pushing it to one side so he could stand up. He looked down at his vast belly, removing his leather gloves to feel the red felt-like touch of his uniform. He was hit by a wash of peace, calm and reassured.
‘So, I have died a hero’s death’, he thought to himself.
The glass beneath his feet made dull clunking sounds as he walked straight ahead, leaving the flag behind as a reference point. The pale light from below revealed the floor to be made of a thick glass, which the marshal saw to be concentrically warped like an old circular window.
‘Then the floor is circular, too.’
The rings of glass warp got smaller and smaller towards the flag.
‘I woke up in the centre of this floor.’
All around was impenetrable darkness, no walls of which to speak, just thick nothing. Beneath the floor was nothing. Above was nothing. A negative mist all around. The marshal sighed. He continued clunking in a straight line, eyes on the floor, using the rings as a guide, walking for a good number of minutes, until he shocked himself as his forehead hit off something. He stood back and jerked his head up. ‘Hm’, just more nothing, plainly in front of his face. He reached a hand forward to feel an invisible flat cold.
‘Is this glass too?’
He gave it a knock. Clunk. He placed his hand flat on the wall again, and rubbed it from one side to another. This… container he was in, whatever it was, it was so wide that he could not detect any local curvature at the boundary. Suddenly he didn’t feel so heroic.
He remembered the story of the minotaur. Place your left hand on the wall of the maze, never remove it, not for anything. When you go back again, turn around and use your right hand, never get lost. So, the marshal placed his left hand on the wall, and paced his way regally around the room, in an imperceptible curve. This took some time, but he wasn’t to know how long. ‘God! This could go on forever. How am I to know where I am if I can’t see anything? If there’s nothing but glass all around?’ When he got bored, he could always retreat back to the flag by following the warped circles again.
He desired to test his hypothesis that he was in a large glass beaker by dropping a glove on the floor. This seemed perfectly logical, but as he peered over his belly, he realised how dim the light was at the walls, and he couldn’t see his own feet. He stroked his thick, bushy beard in curious consideration. With the smooth glass beneath his feet, he had little need for his boots, so he took them off and kneeled down to place boots and glove in a leathery line by the wall. ‘It will be hard to miss this under my bare feet’, he thought. And so, left hand went back on the wall and the marshal paced his way round.
He thought absentmindedly about the war, not with any sense of regret, just replaying some moments of it to keep his brain ticking on his jaunt around the jar. Perhaps no one had believed that he would really fight to the death for his country, almost against all reason it seemed, by the end. But who else was going to do it? Amidst all the chaos, it looked like the very nation of Paraguay was going to be completely eradicated. It was through some small miracle that she escaped this happening in the past, during The War of The Triple Alliance. He knew in his heart she would have no such luck this time. Even in death he felt discontented by this thought, that his great country would die as he did. A man does not shed a tear for his lost nation. Sure enough, he felt the soft sigh of crushed leather under his feet. This was some large infinite cylinder of sorts. The marshal felt a rage inside him begin to grow, utterly dumbfounded by his new surroundings. This was no place for a field marshal to spend eternity! Where was the glory in a large glass beaker? What a mess, a mistake surely? How dare he end up here, after all he fought for, how valiantly and proudly he defended his beloved country until the very end…
Well, if he was going to spend any longer here, he should know the dimensions of the object. With this, he decided to pace back towards the centre, and just as he decided to do so, a large wet slap sound rang out, and he felt a shudder in the glass beneath him, and a loud meditative gong noise caused him to crouch down, bracing himself should the glass shatter. It seemed to come from right in front of him. He edged slowly back to the middle, fearing what he was going to see. As he returned to the centre, he saw a silky corner of the flag emerge from the darkness, and to his horror as he edged ever nearer, another boot, toe pointed down to the floor. He stood back nervously, letting the black smoke dissolve the image before him for an instant, before drawing nearer still, boot reappearing, connected to a leg, another boot, another leg, another man in the pale spotlight upon the flag. He kneeled down and saw that it was in fact a bloodied corpse. On closer inspection, his red shirt and white trousers showed him to be a soldier, one of the marshal’s own.
‘Well, what was all that about? Hm, obviously he fell from above, was it the fall that killed him?’
What was happening?
The marshal turned the body over, not at all phased by the gore, to see if he knew the man, but he was too badly damaged from the fall. It was safe to say that he wasn’t going to be possible to identify. He sighed.
What else to do? The marshal lay down beside the man, placing his stubby hands comfortably on his barrel chest, and looked up. Nothing but dark. What was the meaning of this place? He felt no sympathy for this other man, and began to feel a bit annoyed by his presence. This soldier’s corpse had no place in his hero’s promised land, disappointing as said land turned out to be. He frowned a deep frown.
It was difficult to tell how much time passed until the marshal noticed a pale dot emerging from directly above, but it was about to get easier. He was startled by this new change in his surroundings, and stood up to narrow his eyes at the dot. There was a low, breezy sound that appeared to accompany this new sight that was slowly expanding in size.
‘Could it be that…?’
The marshal placed his hands on the vicinity as near to his hips as he could reach. Yes, as the dot got closer still, it sprouted four fronds, waving back and forth, and as the object spun around the fronds moved in and out of sight, the whistling grew louder. The marshal’s eyes became much wider as his suspicions were confirmed, the object was a second body hurtling to the floor! He waddled carefully away, his feet slipping on the glass, moving out of sight as the body slammed on the floor, the marshal still within earshot of a loud cracking sound that caused his face to twist in disgust. Then he understood, he didn’t know how, but once the idea entered his head he knew it to be true.
This was no beaker, no infinite glass cylinder. This was some form of human hourglass, and these bodies were like grains of sand. He was the very first grain. This was all for him, and it was no hero’s death.