Fantastic Metropolis

Unable to participate, unsure which side was winning, Elric and Moonglum watched as the intensity of the battle increased and, with it, the slow dissolution of the gods’ earthly manifestation. The fight was no longer merely on the earth but seemed to be raging throughout all the planes of the cosmos and, as if in unison with this transformation, the earth appeared to be losing its form, until Elric and Moonglum drifted in the mingled swirl of air, fire, earth and water. The earth dissolved—yet still the Lords of the Higher Worlds battled over it. The stuff of the earth alone remained, but unformed. Its components were still in existence, but their new shape was undecided. The fight continued. The victors would have the privilege of re-forming the earth.

—Michael Moorcock, Stormbringer

At the end of the world depicted in Moorcock’s book, the Lords of Order and Lords of Chaos do battle to determine the fate of the new world as the Young Kingdoms, the nations of the world as it existed before their battle, were utterly destroyed, wiped out, returned back into the fundamental material of existence to be reshaped by the will of destiny and the sounding of the Horn of Fate. Yet even as Elric slew his own friend Moonglum to blow the Horn and help usher a new world, his own sword Stormbringer, that soul-eating black blade, proved the stronger and devoured his own soul as well, and leapt forth as the first force of chaos in a new world. As it survived, so too did timeless, placeless Tanelorn, for Tanelorn is the Eternal City, that place that does not appear on any maps nor is known by many, unloved by Chaos and by Law as well, neither of which can enter it. Tanelorn is a secret, a mystery that uncoils in the human breast, existing in every plane in the cosmos in one way or another. Therefore, it both existed before the Horn of Fate was blown, and must thereby exist again, for it cannot be destroyed.

Let us imagine, therefore, that the city of Balance exists in this world, the one created by the blowing of the Horn of Fate and the death of an albino who ushered in the end of all he knew, as an inspiration. Perhaps it rises and falls again and again, the unkillable city, born in the minds of men who then seek to make it real. Did Akhenaton reject the hungry gods to try and create his own Tanelorn in the desert? Was Harappa the reflection of the Eternal City, created by a long-forgotten hero, a manifestation of the Eternal Champion even as the dead and damned albino was? It becomes possible to look at that forgotten hero-god of Harappa, at Bilgames of Uruk, at Sargon the first, at his kinsman and recursion, Moses, who shared his origin, as well as Apepi who turned against Seth, Seth the desert god, god of foreigners, god who brings storms... and others, like the second Sargon—are these all faces of one being? Are these the guises of the same entity who would be known as Elric, as Ulrich von Bek, as Corum, as Hawkmoon…? Did Sargon and Moses and Sargon II feel the same connection to the balance of Law versus Chaos? Did they each seek to find Tanelorn or to build it if they could not? Was Dun-Sharrukin the effort of a maddened king, tormented by an entity that would pretend to be a god? It’s not hard to imagine Stormbringer, the first force of Chaos in this new world, playing at various godheads, sending storms and disasters and perhaps even swarms of invaders at Harappa in a recreation of the beggar army of Nadsokor… were those who were displaced by the drying up of the Saraswati the pawns of an old tactic borrowed from the time before the world existed? When the charioteers rebuilt the Sumerian cities, replaced their language with borrowed ones, and built Harappa in the mountains of Asia Minor as Hattusa with its cyclopean walls and winged bulls, built fabled Babylon with its Sirrush, where the book of Bel and the Dragon took place (a recreation of long-lost Imrryr from the fragmentary memories of a dead albino, eaten by a force of pure chaos who played games with an Eternal Champion, perhaps) it seems possible they were caught up in a game they had no idea how to play, between the rebirth of a long-dead world and the creation of a new one. How long back before Christ could Von Bek’s Grail Knights have existed? Did Akhenaton remember Melniboné? Did Apepi turn his people’s back on Seth when he realized that once again, Chaos had grown too strong? Maybe he even remembered dying a most horrible death at the hands of his “god.”