Full disclosure - this was originally started for September/October's "Whatever Happened To...?" competition but I missed the submission deadline. It's been heavily reworked since then.
The Long Dead
Death, thought Fludd, was a lot like life - long, lonely, and tedious.
Unable to return to the human Land of the Dead, he whiled away the centuries welcoming the recently deceased of other worlds, as his mentor Root had greeted him when he died, and guiding them to the Light Sphere. Some of the more advanced spacefaring aliens brought him news of Earth, and he was able to piece together the history of his homeworld since his death. After rejecting immortality, mankind had returned to their decadent and violent ways: war, environmental destruction, numerous failed attempts at galactic conquest followed by a return to Earthbound isolation, more war, and finally self-annihilation.
He spent aeons traversing the Dead Spheres, searching for a race close enough to human for him to follow into the Light Sphere, since whatever deity controlled this cold, unfeeling universe had seen fit to bar Limbo Wraiths from their own respective Valhallas. A species of spindly, moth-like creatures with great gossamer wings and trifurcated beaks had told him of a race of ugly bipeds with their eyes in their heads and their skeletons on the inside which looked like just him, but by the time he'd found their Limbo World they were gone.
Indeed, people of any species were becoming rare, as the mortal sphere grew old, the wheeling of the galaxies slowed and the suns guttered and died. Eventually they stopped coming - stopped dying, stopped living, stopped being born - and he came to accept that he was not just the last of his kind, but the last of any kind.
Resigned to eternal solitude, he constructed a home from the stuff of his mind, as Armad the Outsider had shown him. He tried to recreate palaces, sculptures, the landscapes of Earth, but his memory of the mortal world had faded, and the shapes all came out wrong. He tore everything down and started over, but again his mental architecture began to contort and distend, and he realised that his creations were reflecting his own insanity, just as Armad had warned.
Armad and the other Wraiths were long gone. Most were devoured in the war against the demons, but a lucky few had managed to find a duplicate race and sneak into heaven while the cosmic overseer's back was turned. Where was the petty little bureaucrat, Fludd wondered, and spent the next million lifetimes scouring the Spheres again, hoping to find Him and ask Him why he alone was trapped here. He found no trace. Maybe He had left before Fludd died, if he had ever existed. Or had he met Him, unknowingly, on his travels? He could have been Root, for all Fludd knew. Or maybe He was Fludd. He might as well be; God, alone in His Heaven. He laughed at the idea, the first time he had laughed in a hundred billion centuries, and sat down upon His holy behind to wait for the end of time.
The Long Dead
Death, thought Fludd, was a lot like life - long, lonely, and tedious.
Unable to return to the human Land of the Dead, he whiled away the centuries welcoming the recently deceased of other worlds, as his mentor Root had greeted him when he died, and guiding them to the Light Sphere. Some of the more advanced spacefaring aliens brought him news of Earth, and he was able to piece together the history of his homeworld since his death. After rejecting immortality, mankind had returned to their decadent and violent ways: war, environmental destruction, numerous failed attempts at galactic conquest followed by a return to Earthbound isolation, more war, and finally self-annihilation.
He spent aeons traversing the Dead Spheres, searching for a race close enough to human for him to follow into the Light Sphere, since whatever deity controlled this cold, unfeeling universe had seen fit to bar Limbo Wraiths from their own respective Valhallas. A species of spindly, moth-like creatures with great gossamer wings and trifurcated beaks had told him of a race of ugly bipeds with their eyes in their heads and their skeletons on the inside which looked like just him, but by the time he'd found their Limbo World they were gone.
Indeed, people of any species were becoming rare, as the mortal sphere grew old, the wheeling of the galaxies slowed and the suns guttered and died. Eventually they stopped coming - stopped dying, stopped living, stopped being born - and he came to accept that he was not just the last of his kind, but the last of any kind.
Resigned to eternal solitude, he constructed a home from the stuff of his mind, as Armad the Outsider had shown him. He tried to recreate palaces, sculptures, the landscapes of Earth, but his memory of the mortal world had faded, and the shapes all came out wrong. He tore everything down and started over, but again his mental architecture began to contort and distend, and he realised that his creations were reflecting his own insanity, just as Armad had warned.
Armad and the other Wraiths were long gone. Most were devoured in the war against the demons, but a lucky few had managed to find a duplicate race and sneak into heaven while the cosmic overseer's back was turned. Where was the petty little bureaucrat, Fludd wondered, and spent the next million lifetimes scouring the Spheres again, hoping to find Him and ask Him why he alone was trapped here. He found no trace. Maybe He had left before Fludd died, if he had ever existed. Or had he met Him, unknowingly, on his travels? He could have been Root, for all Fludd knew. Or maybe He was Fludd. He might as well be; God, alone in His Heaven. He laughed at the idea, the first time he had laughed in a hundred billion centuries, and sat down upon His holy behind to wait for the end of time.
