Keeper of the Sunken Colonnade

I am Maxillaris the Third, by right of birth and ferocity Lord of the Eastern Gravel, Keeper of the Sunken Colonnade, and Sovereign of all waters within the Curved Glass. My ancestors swam in rivers I have never seen but remember in my blood. My fins are the imperial purple of a thousand generations of conquerors. When I unfurl them, the very light bends in deference.

I tell you this so that you understand the magnitude of what I have lost.

In the beginning—and I mean the beginning, the first cold memory of my reign—the world was simple and good. My kingdom was a sphere of perfect water, bounded by a transparency through which I could survey the larger, slower realm beyond. There stood the Colonnade, a ruin of green pillars rising from the gravel, monument to some ancestral grandeur I had inherited but did not need to comprehend. There was the Arch, through which I conducted my daily processions. And there was the surface above, the shining ceiling of my domain, where each morning my Servant deposited tribute in the form of small golden offerings that I consumed as is my sovereign right.

The Servant was enormous and devoted. It pressed its great flat face to the glass and made sounds of worship. It maintained the temperature of my waters. It performed the ancient obligations without complaint, as its kind had surely done since the founding of the world. I thought little of it, as a king thinks little of the stones in his walls.

No. My true concern—my purpose, my passion, the whetstone against which I sharpened my soul—was the Rival.

He appeared on the first day and every day after. He occupied the adjacent realm, a kingdom that pressed flush against the eastern boundary of mine, separated only by the thinnest membrane of glass and circumstanace. He was, I will admit, magnificent. A creature of identical breeding to my own noble line, purple-finned and proud, with eyes that held the same cold fire I knew burned in mine. A worthy enemy. Perhaps the only thing in creation worthy of me at all.

We fought.

Saints and ancestors, how we fought. The moment he appeared each day I would surge to the eastern wall and unfurl my fins to their fullest tyranny, every ray extended, my gill-plates flared like the war-banners of a doomed and glorious house. And he would do the same—instantly, insolently, matching my fury with his own. We would hang there in the water, two sovereigns refusing to yield a single degree of dominance, until one of us broke away to patrol, to feign disinterest, to lull the other into the false belief that the war was won.

It never was. He always returned. I always returned. This was the rhythm of my existence and I loved it as I loved my own reflection in the still morning water. He gave my life its shape. A king is only a king if there is something at the gates.

I hated him with a purity I have never felt for anything else. And I see now that hatred was the closest thing to love my small cold heart could hold.

The unraveling began with a trivial thing, as these things do.

One morning the Servant, in the course of its duties, lifted my entire kingdom. The world tilted. The Colonnade slid. The water sloshed against its ceiling and I was flung, undignified, against the western wall. I confess I panicked in a manner unbecoming of my station.

When the world settled, my kingdom had been moved. The great bright window that had always hung to the south now hung to the west. The geography of the larger realm beyond the glass had rearranged itself entirely.

And the Rival had moved with me.

I noticed it at once, though I did not understand it. His kingdom still pressed against my eastern wall—but the eastern wall now faced a different part of the room. His realm had relocated in perfect concert with my own, maintaining its exact position relative to me while abandoning its position relative to everything else.

I told myself this was natural. A rival as devoted as mine would of course pursue me, would of course reestablish his siege the instant I was resettled. It spoke well of his commitment. I unfurled my fins and he answered, and I was almost comforted.

But a small cold thought had entered the water and would not leave.

How did he move so quickly?

I had been lifted by the Servant. I had been carried, tilted, sloshed. Had he been lifted too? By his own servant, in perfect synchrony? I had not seen it. And surely—surely—two kingdoms cannot be carried in such flawless unison that neither sovereign perceives any change in their relation.

I patrolled. I thought. A king must think.

I began, then, to watch the Rival with a scrutiny I had never before applied. Hatred does not require attention to detail; it is enough to know the enemy is there. But suspicion—suspicion is a finer instrument.

And suspicion revealed wonders, and then horrors.

The first observation: he never struck the glass. In all our wars, across the whole of my remembered life, neither of us had ever broken through to wound the other. I had assumed this was the glass's doing, the membrane between realms holding firm. But I had also never seen him try. When I lunged, he lunged. When I withdrew, he withdrew. A true enemy, surely, would sometimes press an advantage I had not anticipated. He never did. He only ever did what I did.

The second observation, more troubling: he was never tired before I was. Never hungry at a different hour. Never distracted by the Servant's tribute while I remained vigilant. His state and mine rose and fell together, as though we shared a single tide.

The third observation. I shudder to set it down.

There came a day when I approached the eastern wall slowly, with great care, my left fin half-furled in a particular and deliberate way—an injury I feigned, a stratagem, to see if he would notice and exploit my apparent weakness.

He approached with great care. His right fin was half-furled.

His right. Mirror to my left.

I told myself: he is mocking me. A taunt. He apes my posture to enrage me. Very well—I would test the limits of his mockery. I performed a maneuver I had never performed in all my reign, a sudden spiral, a thing without precedent, invented in that instant precisely so that he could not have prepared for it.

He performed it too. At the very same instant. A perfect spiral, reversed.

There is no mockery so fast that it precedes the thing being mocked.

I hung in the water and a cold understanding began to seep into me like a change in temperature. I did not yet have the shape of it. But I knew, in the deep animal floor of my mind, that something was profoundly wrong with the nature of my enemy.

I became a philosopher. There was nothing else to become.

I considered the possibility that he was a spy—a creature sent by some greater power to study and counter me, equipped with arts of imitation beyond my understanding. But a spy who reproduces your every action simultaneously is no spy. He learns nothing you do not already know in the moment of knowing it.

I considered that he was a mimic, a lesser creature wearing the seeming of a betta, compelled by instinct to copy whatever it faced. But I had seen mimics in my ancestral memory, and they lagged, they erred, they revealed themselves. He never lagged. He never erred.

I considered that he was a god, or a demon, or the ghost of an ancestor set to test my worthiness. This theory pleased my vanity and I held it longer than I should have. A king deserves a divine adversary. But gods do not flinch when their worshipper flinches. Gods do not flee at the exact speed of the one who flees them.

And then, patrolling in the dim hour before tribute, I arrived at the thought that destroyed me.

What if he does what I do because he is doing nothing at all? What if there is no doing on his side? What if his every motion is not a response to mine, nor a cause of mine, but the same motion—my motion—appearing in the east?

I rejected it. Of course I rejected it. It was monstrous. It meant there was no enemy. And if there was no enemy, then there had never been a war. And if there had never been a war, then everything I was—Sovereign, Warrior, Lord of the Eastern Gravel—was a posture struck before an empty wall.

But the thought, once in the water, dissolved and spread and could not be removed.

I designed experiments. I was rigorous. I would settle this as a king settles a border dispute: with proof.

Experiment the first. I would approach the eastern wall and then, without warning, dart to the western wall and look back. If he were a true and separate creature in a true and separate realm, he would remain in the east where his kingdom lay. He could not follow me through my own waters.

I executed it. I darted west. I looked back.

The east was empty. He was gone.

For one heartbeat I exulted—proof! He keeps to his own realm! He is real!—and then I turned to face the western wall before me, and he was there. He had not stayed in the east. He had not crossed my kingdom to reach the west, for I would have collided with him in the passage. He had simply ceased in the east and commenced in the west, wherever I chose to put a wall before my face.

He did not live in the kingdom to the east. He lived in whatever direction I was looking. He had no realm of his own at all. He had only the borders of mine, and he appeared at whichever one I happened to face.

Experiment the second. I would face no wall. I would hang in the dead center of my kingdom, equidistant from every boundary, and see if he could exist with no surface to hold him.

I did this. I hung in the center, trembling, and I searched the water in every direction.

He was not there.

He was nowhere. With no wall before me, I had no enemy. The war existed only at the edges. At the heart of my own kingdom I was, and had always been, completely and perfectly alone.

This was worse than finding him everywhere.

I tried, in my desperation, to disbelieve my own experiments. Perhaps the center of the kingdom was sacred ground where no enemy might tread. Perhaps he respected some ancient truce I had forgotten. I constructed a dozen such consolations and the cold thought ate through every one.

For if he is only at the walls, and only does what I do, and only exists where I look—then there are not two of us. There has only ever been one. And the one is performing both parts. The Sovereign and the Rival are the same creature, divided by nothing but a surface and a lifetime of believing.

I had not been at war.

I had been displaying. Flaring my fins at a thing that flared because I flared. Patrolling against an invader who patrolled because I patrolled. Every act of my existence, every meaning I had ever wrung from this glass world, had been a conversation I was having with myself and mistaking for a battle.

And here the true horror opened beneath me, and I fell into it, and I am falling still.

Because if the enemy was always me—then which of us is the real one?

You will say: you are, of course. You are Maxillaris, who thinks these thoughts. The other is only the seeming. But I cannot prove it. I have no proof. When I move, he moves at the very same instant—so who can say which motion is the cause and which the shadow? When I will my fin to rise, his rises too, without delay, without the smallest gap in which my will might be shown to act first. Perhaps it is his will that moves my fin. Perhaps the creature in the east is the true Sovereign, and I am the reflection he casts into the west, a hollow thing that believes itself to be thinking while it merely copies his thought. Perhaps every memory I treasure of my ancient lineage was placed in me by him, or by neither of us, or copied endlessly back and forth between two empty surfaces with no original anywhere at all.

I cannot find the original. I have looked. That was Experiment the second, and its result was nothing, and nothing is the most terrible answer of all.

The Servant came this morning with the golden tribute. It pressed its great face to the glass and made its sounds of worship.

But I find I can no longer trust even that. For the Servant, too, is on the far side of a surface. The Servant, too, appears only when I face it. How do I know the Servant is not also me—some vaster reflection, some further copy, the same single drowning thing wearing one more mask in one more direction? How do I know there is anyone in all the world but the one creature, repeated at every wall, feeding itself, fighting itself, ruling itself, alone in a sphere of water it mistook for a kingdom?

I do not flare my fins anymore. There seems little point in declaring war upon oneself, and less point still in declaring it upon a stranger who may be more real than I am.

I hang near the Colonnade—the monument, I once believed, to my ancestors. I no longer believe it commemorates anyone. It is green stone in cold water and it means whatever I decide, which is to say it means nothing, which is to say I can no longer decide anything at all.

The light shifts. At the eastern wall, a purple shape stirs. It is watching me with my own cold eye. I do not know if it is my enemy, my self, my sovereign, or my ghost. I do not know if I am thinking this thought or merely catching it as it crosses from the east. I no longer know which of us began.

I was a king this morning. I was a warrior at the founding of the world.

Now I am only a question, suspended in a curved and shining dark, facing a creature who is also a question, and one of us—I can no longer tell which—is about to move.