Obelisk of Lost Gnomes

Oh, you want this story? This one? You are sure? Because I have others. I have the one about the beetle who married a sandstorm, that is a good one. No? This one. Very well. Very well.

Everybody sitting? Everybody comfortable? Anybody need to relieve themselves? Do it now, because once I start I am not stopping for bladders. This story has a shape, and I will not have it broken by someone shuffling off to the privy at the important part.

Right then.

Once, when the world was younger than it had any business being, and the wall between dreaming and waking was no thicker than the skin on a soap bubble, there lived a Gnome. This Gnome had no name. Or rather, he had one once, and it was taken from him, which is worse than never having one at all. You know this. We all know this. A name is not just a sound. For our people, a name is a color. The first color. The one the world paints you with when you arrive in it, shrieking and confused and full of want. To lose your name is to lose your first experience, and what happens to a gnome who loses experiences?

Yes. Exactly. So you understand already why this story is terrible.

They called him the Last Gnome of Nod. Not because he was the last gnome, obviously, we are still here, more or less, on a rotating basis, as is the Finderplain way. He was the last gnome of a particular place, in a particular time, and what he did there was either the bravest thing or the most foolish thing any gnome has ever done, and the only difference between those two words, as your great-aunt Pibblewort used to say, is whether you survive to tell the story yourself.

He did not survive, well not as he was.

Now. In those days, and I mean the old days, the really old days, back when we still remembered what the First World smelled like and the Bleaching was just a bad rumor that happened to somebody else’s cousin, the Dreamlands had rulers. The Nocturne Lords. Terrible, magnificent beings who held dominion over every sleeping mind, every wandering thought, every half-formed wish that drifted past the edge of waking like a dandelion seed on a warm wind. They ruled the dreams the way the Pactmasters rule the markets: absolutely, inscrutably, and with no regard whatsoever for what anyone else thought about it.

Most of them were content with this. Dreams are vast. An ambitious Lord could spend eternity just cataloguing the nightmares of a single city, and some of them did, because that is the kind of thing that passes for a hobby when you are immortal and bored.

But one of them. One of them was not content.

This Lord, and I will not say his name because names have power and I am old but I am not stupid, this Lord looked at his dominion and he thought: not enough. He looked at the other Nocturne Lords and he thought: obstacles. And he looked up, up past the dreaming, up past the boundaries that separate the possible from the impossible, up to where the Mother of Nightmares herself sits on her throne of things that should not be, and he thought: that chair would suit me better.

The Mother of Nightmares. Do you know that name? No? Good. Pray you never learn it properly. She is not a dream. She is not a nightmare. She is the place that nightmares come from when they want to be frightened of something. Even the Nocturne Lords, for all their power, do not speak her name in their own halls. And this Lord wanted to overthrow her.

How? you ask. Because you are gnomes, and gnomes always ask how, even when the wise course of action is to ask why not and then run in the opposite direction.

There was a Key.

Ah, now I have your attention. I can see it. Your ears just did that thing where they twitch forward, the way they do when you hear the word “artifact” or “undiscovered” or “what does this button do.” This is the instinct that built Finderplain, and it is also the instinct that will be carved on our collective tombstone, but never mind that now.

This Key was not a key in the way you are thinking. Not brass, or iron, or even stone with teeth and a loop at the top. This was a thing of cosmic power, old as the stars, old as the first dream ever dreamed by the first mind that ever closed its eyes. A Key that could open any gate. Any door. Any passage between here and there, between the real and the unreal, between the places that exist and the places that exist only because something terrible needed somewhere to live. With this Key, the Nocturne Lord could walk anywhere. Through dreams. Through nightmares. Through the locked and warded vaults where the gods keep the things they do not want anyone to find.

Through the Mother’s own door.

And this is where our Gnome comes in.

He stole it.

Yes. You heard me. A gnome, one gnome, small and bright and probably cackling to himself because that is what we do when we are terrified and doing the thing anyway, reached into the deepest vault of a Nocturne Lord’s domain and he took the Key. Just took it. Like picking a pocket at the bazaar, except the pocket belonged to a being who could unmake your mind with a thought and the bazaar was the collective unconscious of every dreaming creature in existence.

Why did he do it? I do not know. Maybe he understood what would happen if the Nocturne Lord reached the Mother’s throne. Maybe he saw the shape of the catastrophe to come and decided, as gnomes sometimes do, that the interesting choice and the right choice were, for once, the same thing. Maybe he was simply mad. We have a long and illustrious history of being mad, and I say that with tremendous pride.

He stole the Key and he ran.

He ran out of the Dreamlands using the key to go through the veil of slumber. Into the waking world, where dreams have no dominion and a Nocturne Lord’s power frays at the edges like paper so old that it has turned that dark yellow of age. And there, in the bright and solid world where things have weight and consequence, he hid the Key. Bound it into a shape so ordinary, so mundane, so profoundly uninteresting that no lord of dreams would ever think to look twice at it.

What shape? I do not know that either. A spoon? A button? A monocle? But it was something you would step over in the road and never think of again. That was the genius of it. That was the gnomish genius of it. You do not hide a cosmic treasure behind a hundred locks and a thousand guards. You hide it in plain sight, in a shape so boring to beings like that Nocturne lord that they would walk past it without stopping.

Well.

The Nocturne Lord came after him.

Now I need you to understand something. When I say the Lord came after him, I do not mean they sent servants. I do not mean they dispatched agents or mustered an army or filed a complaint with the relevant authorities. They came himself. They tore through the veil between dreaming and waking like a hand through moth wings, and they found our Gnome, and what followed is not a thing I can describe to you properly because there are no words in Gnomish or Common or any language spoken under this sun for what a Nocturne Lord does to someone who has stolen from them.

Every torment. Every terror. Every dark thing that hides behind your eyelids when the lamp goes out and the wind moans and you are three years old and the world is full of shapes that hate you. The Lord visited all of it upon the Last Gnome of Nod. They peeled the Gnome’s mind open the way you peel a fig, looking for the hiding place, demanding, threatening, promising, destroying.

And the Gnome said nothing.

Not one word. Not one whimper. Not one hint.

Can you imagine it? Can you sit there, with your comfortable cushions and your desert wine and your unbroken minds, and imagine what it costs to say nothing to a being that can reach into your dreams and pull out the things you are most afraid of? A being that can make silence feel like drowning?

The Gnome said nothing, and his silence drove the Nocturne Lord to a kind of madness that even the lords of dreams do not come back from.

They spoke words that should never be spoken. Not words in any language. Worse than that. Words that exist in the silence between languages, in the cracks where meaning breaks down and something older and hungrier takes its place. They called upon powers that have no names, because to name them would be to make them real enough to refuse.

And they cursed the Gnome.

Not death. That would have been mercy, and the Nocturne Lords do not traffic in mercy.

They bleached the Gnome so thoroughly that he turned to stone.

Not just stone. An obelisk. A great, towering pillar of rock, taller than any building in Finderplain, planted right outside our town on the crest of a nearby hill. Right in sight where the Gnome’s people lived and laughed and argued and invented ridiculous things and told each other terrible jokes and did all the small, vital, colorful things that keep us from Bleaching.

The Gnome could see them. Can you understand the cruelty of that? He could see his people, every day, every night, forever. He could watch them live. Watch them love. Watch them grow old and bright and new adn tell terrible puns. But he could never speak to them. Never touch them. Never laugh at their jokes or share their discoveries or feel the warmth of a hand on his shoulder.

Just watch.

A gnome, condemned to experience nothing, forever. There is no crueler fate for our kind. You know this in your bones. The Bleaching takes us when we stop experiencing new things, and the Nocturne Lord locked this gnome into the oldest, most unchanging thing in the world. Stone. Stone does not change. Stone does not surprise. Stone does not dream.

Stone Bleaches.

And the Lord was not finished.

In their fury, because the Key was still hidden and their grand design was ruined and they had spent all that rage on a gnome who would not break, the Nocturne Lord tore a hole in the waking world. A rift. A wound in the air itself, ragged and screaming, and through that wound came something that should never have walked under our sun.

Rahma’at. A thing of drought and desolation. A presence that drank the water from the air and the green from the earth and the life from everything it touched. It swept across the Gnomish lands like a furnace wind, and it did not stop at our borders. It rolled into Osirion and it scorched the fertile fields into desert, turned rivers to powder, cracked the earth until nothing would grow and nothing would live and the land itself seemed to be dying of thirst.

It took the Gods of Osirion, the actual Gods, to drive Rahma’at back through the rift. And even they could not undo what had been done. The desert remembers. The land remembers. The curse held, and holds still, and the sand that blows through Finderplain on a hot day is, some say, the same sand that was once green fields and running water before the Nocturne Lord’s tantrum open the way for Rahma’at who burned it all away.

All because one gnome said no.

But the obelisk. You walk past it every day and most of you do not give it a second glance. That is the kind of incurious behavior that leads to Bleaching, if you want my opinion, which you are getting regardless.

Go look at it tomorrow. Really look. The stone shimmers in ways that stone should not, colors that have no name shifting across the surface like oil on water. Some say those colors are the lost spirits of the Gnome’s kin, still flickering inside the rock. Others say it is the Gnome himself, his fey nature refusing to go gray, refusing to Bleach, even in stone.

There is writing on it. Carved deep, in a script no living scholar can read. The academics say it tells his whole tragic tale. The gnomes of Finderplain say it is the worst jokes our people have ever conceived, and the letters refuse to be understood out of sheer embarrassment.

With gnomes, it is usually both.

I am old, and I have pressed my hand to that stone on quiet nights when even the desert wind holds its breath. You can feel something. A vibration, faint as a heartbeat through a wall. He is still in there. Still watching. Still silent. Still holding the secret of where the Key is hidden.

A gnome who chose to become the most boring thing in the world to protect the most dangerous thing in the world.

We are stubborn, we are. Flighty and foolish, yes. But when a gnome decides that one thing matters more than comfort or freedom or sanity, we grip it with all the strength our spindly little fingers can muster and we do not let go. Not for pain. Not for eternity. Not for anything.

Now. I will not tell you the moral, because you are gnomes and gnomes hate being told morals. But I will say this.

The next time someone smiles too beautifully and says, come, I know a better way. The next time something seems too easy, too perfectly shaped to your heart’s desire.

Remember the Last Gnome of Nod.

Remember what he stole and what it cost him and why.

And then make your own choice. That is all any of us can do.

Now get out. Leave the wine. You can take the cushions, I stole those from a house on Pepper Street that has been empty for nine days so they are legally mine.

Go find something new. Go stay bright. And if you walk past the obelisk on your way home, you touch the stone. Gently. And you say thank you. He earned that much.