The Last Incantation
Reading Time: 6 Minutes
The image includes a customized book cover of "The Last Incantation" by Clark Ashton Smith. It features a hand holding a wooden magical wand with sparkles emitting at the end, the arm wearing a purple sleeve and a gold bracelet.
Everyone knows that with great power comes great responsibility.
Our very existence has limitations set to protect ourselves and others from harm. These boundaries are designed to prevent irreparable damage and chaos. There’s way too much at stake if humans are given the liberty to possess incredible power and sorcery.
I know some of you might actually use the opportunity to make pigs fly.
It just further proves why we don’t have such magical prowess at our disposal. I mean, there’s a reason why we can’t magically appear from one place to another! We’d have to get used to a world without Uber. Again. The horror! Can you imagine?
Picture this instead: You’re the mightiest sorcerer in a magical world similar to the Harry Potter universe. You literally hold a magic wand in your hand, and you could dominate all living creatures in the land and sea. Many magical beings are subject to your command and you have the ability to breathe life and take life as you please.
What would be the first thing you’d do?
It’s a loaded question if you think about it. The possibilities are endless.
Maybe the first thing you’d do is wrangle Tim’s neck through the Zoom meeting. I see you. 😉
Or….
You could stop the flow of time and get that nap you so desperately need as a Momma to two screaming kiddos with a FULL marketing report which was due like …yesterday…
You could make yourself understand the language of animals, especially when your dog or cat keeps barking at an empty corner and making you so paranoid….
You could disappear and go incognito mode for a while. Invisibility is a real thing now since magic exists and you possess the power to disappear within your very hands. 🙌
Or… you could bring back the dead 😵
And no, I’m not talking about zombies. (But that’s a real thing now too by the way, since you’re the Almighty Sorcerer in all of time and space.)
I’m talking about something more personal. A deep-seated ache that we’re all too familiar with.
It was probably in the back of your mind at some point. Of all the things in your wish list, there’s a hidden item concealed by the frivolities of holding such power.
And yes, it is possible. Like I mentioned, you have the limitless magical capability to do everything and anything in your hands.
Would you do it?
Malygris, an invincible wizard from the short story “The Last Incantation”, felt the exact same hesitation.
As he mulled over the days of his youth, he could not help but think about a loss so great no magic could ever erase the hurt that stayed in his heart for years. Even with immense power in his hands, he could not disintegrate the pain of grief.
After decades of boasting his magical achievements to the world, Malygris grew sick with age as time passed. He pondered about his conquests, and how these accomplishments only provided him a hollow kind of joy.
There was no satisfaction in the beasts he had slain. He found himself recalling a certain woman he loved amidst the days of his prime, where all the power in the world meant little to him: Nylissa.
Nylissa had died from a certain illness on the night of their marriage. Malygris was never the same since.
Imagine being a necromancer so undefeatable and feared among all living beings, and yet to be so paralyzed by time and mourning. It takes you back to Earth a bit, doesn’t it?
Of course, knowing he held boundless sorcery, Malygris did try to cross the rigid barrier between life and death.
And Malygris was able to resurrect Nylissa from the dead. Except he only saw the shadow of a woman he once knew. The dead never come back the same, and Malygris had to learn that the hard way.
It goes to show how, even with infinite knowledge and wisdom at your beck and call, there really are some things we cannot change.
It’s constant.
Change and time go hand in hand.
And as everyone also knows… there is nothing guaranteed in life except death and taxes.
Have a good read down there, Almighty Sorcerer!
-
The narrative revolves around Malygris, a great and old magician who has defeated the powers of nature and death itself. Despite his enormous strength, Malygris is tortured by the memories of his long-deceased love, Nylissa. Feeling the weight of his age and seeing that his magical triumphs have not brought him true happiness, he chooses to employ sorcery to bring Nylissa back, hoping to rekindle their love.
Despite his familiar, the viper, expressing its hesitation towards his decision, Malygris proceeded with his plan.
Malygris recites the final, most potent spell to restore Nylissa. As he recalls her vision, she comes before him, but not in the way he recalled. The revived Nylissa is stunning and realistic, but she lacks the warmth, soul, and essence of the woman he once adored.
Malygris realizes, with sadness, that even with all of his power, he cannot really restore what has been lost. The Nylissa he adored existed at a certain point in time, and that moment, like Nylissa herself, is lost forever. The narrative concludes with Malygris destroying the illusion, leaving him with the harsh realization that certain things, such as love and life, are beyond even the most powerful magic.
“The Last Incantation”
By Clark Ashton Smith
Malygris the magician sat in the topmost room of his tower that was builded on a conical hill above the heart of Susran, capital of Poseidonis. Wrought of a dark stone mined from deep in the earth, perdurable and hard as the fabled adamant, this tower loomed above all others, and flung its shadow far on the roofs and domes of the city, even as the sinister power of Malygris had thrown its darkness on the minds of men.
Now Malygris was old, and all the baleful might of his enchantments, all the dreadful or curious demons under his control, all the fear that he had wrought in the hearts of kings and prelates, were no longer enough to assuage the black ennui of his days. In his chair that was fashioned from the ivory of mastodons, inset with terrible cryptic runes of red tourmalines and azure crystals, he stared moodily through the one lozenge-shaped window of fulvous glass. His white eyebrows were contracted to a single line on the umber parchment of his face, and beneath them his eyes were cold and green as the ice of ancient floes; his beard, half white, half of a black with glaucous gleams, fell nearly to his knees and hid many of the writhing serpentine characters inscribed in woven silver athwart the bosom of his violet robe. About him were scattered all the appurtenances of his art; the skulls of men and monsters; phials filled with black or amber liquids, whose sacrilegious use was known to none but himself; little drums of vulture-skin, and crotali made from the bones and teeth of the cockodrill, used as an accompaniment to certain incantations. The mosaic floor was partly covered with the skins of enormous black and silver apes: and above the door there hung the head of a unicorn in which dwelt the familiar demon of Malygris, in the form of a coral viper with pale green belly and ashen mottlings. Books were piled everywhere: ancient volumes bound in serpent-skin, with verdigris-eaten clasps, that held the frightful lore of Atlantis, the pentacles that have power upon the demons of the earth and the moon, the spells that transmute or disintegrate the elements; and runes from a lost language of Hyperborea. which, when uttered aloud. were more deadly than poison or more potent than any philtre.
But, though these things and the power they held or symbolized were the terror of the peoples and the envy, of all rival magicians, the thoughts of Malygris were dark with immitigable melancholy, and weariness filled his heart as ashes fill the hearth where a great fire has died. Immovable he sat, implacable he mused, while the sun of afternoon, declining on the city and on the sea that was beyond the city, smote with autumnal rays through the window of greenish-yellow glass, and touched his shrunken hands with its phantom gold and fired the bales-rubies of his rings till they burned like demonian eyes. But in his musings there was neither light nor fire; and turning from the grayness of the present, from the darkness that seemed to close in so imminently upon the future, he groped among the shadows of memory, even as a blind man who has lost the sun and seeks it everywhere in vain. And all the vistas of time that had been so full of gold and splendor, the days of triumph that were colored like a soaring flame, the crimson and purple of the rich imperial years of his prime, all these were chill and dim and strangely faded now, and the remembrance thereof was no more than the stirring of dead embers. Then Malygris groped backward to the years of his youth, to the misty, remote, incredible years, where, like an alien star, one memory still burned with unfailing luster—the memory of the girl Nylissa whom he had loved in days ere the lust of unpermitted knowledge and necromantic dominion had ever entered his soul. He had well-nigh forgotten her for decades, in the myriad preoccupations of a life so bizarrely diversified, so replete with occult happenings and powers, with supernatural victories and perils; but now, at the mere thought of this slender and innocent child, who had loved him so dearly when he too was young and slim and guileless, and who had died of a sudden mysterious fever on the very eve of their marriage-day, the mummylike umber of his cheeks took on a phantom flush, and deep down in the icy orbs was a sparkle like the gleam of mortuary tapers. In his dreams arose the irretrievable suns of youth, and he saw the myrtle-shaded valley of Meros, and the stream Zemander, by whose ever-verdant marge he had walked at eventide with Nylissa, seeing the birth of summer stars in the heavens, the stream, and the eyes of his beloved.
Now, addressing the demonian viper that dwelt in the head of the unicorn, Malygris spoke, with the low monotonous intonation of one who thinks aloud:
‘Viper, in the years before you came to dwell with me and to make your abode in the head of the unicorn, I knew a girl who was lovely and frail as the orchids of the jungle, and who died as the orchids die... Viper, am I not Malygris, in whom is centered the mastery of all occult lore, all forbidden dominations, with dominion over the spirits of earth and sea and air, over the solar and lunar demons. over the living and the dead? If so I desire, can I not call the girl Nylissa, in the very semblance of all her youth and beauty, and bring her forth from the never-changing shadows of the cryptic tomb, to stand before me in this chamber, in the evening rays of this autumnal sun?’
‘Yes, master,’ replied the viper, in a low but singularly penetrating hiss, ‘you are Malygris, and all sorcerous or necromantic power is yours, all incantations and spells and pentacles are known to you, It is possible, if you so desire, to summon the girl Nylissa from her abode among the dead, and to behold her again as she was ere her loveliness had known the ravening kiss of the worm.’
‘Viper, is it well, is it meet, that I should summon her thus? ... Will there be nothing to lose, and nothing to regret?’
The viper seemed to hesitate. Then, in a more slow and neasured hiss: ‘It is meet for Malygris to do as he would. Who, save Malygris, can decide if a thing be well or ill?’
‘In other words, you will not advise me?’ the query was as much a statement as a question, and the viper vouchsafed no further utterance.
Malygris brooded for awhile, with his chin on his knotted hands. Then he arose, with a long-unwonted celerity and sureness of movement that belied his wrinkles, and gathered together, from different coigns of the chamber, from ebony shelves, from caskets with locks of gold or brass or electrum, the sundry appurtenances that were needful for his magic. He drew on the floor the requisite circles, and standing within the centermost he lit the thuribles that contained the prescribed incense, and read aloud from a long narrow scroll of gray vellum the purple and vermilion runes of the ritual that summons the departed. The fumes of the censers, blue and white and violet, arose in thick clouds and speedily filled the room with ever-writhing interchanging columns, among which the sunlight disappeared and was succeeded by a wan unearthly glow, pale as the light of moons that ascend from Lethe. With preternatural slowness, with unhuman solemnity, the voice of the necromancer went on in a priest-like chant till the scroll was ended and the last echoes lessened and died out in hollow sepulchral vibrations. Then the colored vapors cleared away, as if the folds of a curtain had been drawn back. But the pale unearthly glow still filled the chamber, and between Malygris and the door where hung the unicorn’s head there stood the apparition of Nylissa, even as she had stood in the perished years, bending a little like a wind-blown flower, and smiling with the unmindful poignancy of youth. Fragile, pallid, and simply gowned, with anemone blossoms in her black hair, with eyes that held the new-born azure of vernal heavens, she was all that Malygris had remembered, and his sluggish heart was quickened with an old delightful fever as he looked upon her.
‘Are you Nylissa?’ he asked — ‘the Nylissa whom I loved in the myrtle-shaded valley of Meros, in the golden-hearted days that have gone with all dead eons to the timeless gulf?’
‘Yes, I am Nylissa,’ Her voice was the simple and rippling silver of the voice that had echoed so long in his memory... But somehow, as he gazed and listened, there grew a tiny doubt — a doubt no less absurd than intolerable, but nevertheless insistent: was this altogether the same Nylissa he had known? Was there not some elusive change, too subtle to he named or defined, had time and the grave not taken something away — an innominable something that his magic had not wholly restored? Were the eyes as tender, was the black hair as lustrous, the form as slim and supple, as those of the girl he recalled? He could not be sure, and the growing doubt was succeeded by a leaden dismay, by a grim despondency that choked his heart as with ashes. His scrutiny became searching and exigent and cruel, and momently the phantom was less and less the perfect semblance of Nylissa, momently the lips and brow were less lovely, less subtle in their curves; the slender figure became thin, the tresses took on a common black and the neck an ordinary pallor. The soul of Malygris grew sick again with age and despair and the death of his evanescent hope. He could believe no longer in love or youth or beauty; and even the memory of these things was a dubitable mirage, a thing that might or might not have been. There was nothing left but shadow and grayness and dust, nothing but the empty dark and the cold, and a clutching weight of insufferable weariness, of immedicable anguish.
In accents that were thin and quavering, like the ghost of his former voice, he pronounced the incantation that serves to dismiss a summoned phantom. The form of Nylissa melted upon the air like smoke and the lunar gleam that had surrounded her was replaced by the last rays of the sun. Malygris turned to the viper and spoke in a tone of melancholy reproof:
‘Why did you not warn me?’
‘Would the warning have availed?’ was the counter-question. ‘All knowledge was yours, Malygris, excepting this one thing; and in no other way could you have learned it.’
‘What thing?’ queried the magician. ‘I have learned nothing except the vanity of wisdom, the impotence of magic, the nullity of love, and the delusiveness of memory... Tell me, why could I not recall to life the same Nylissa whom I knew, or thought I knew?’
‘It was indeed Nylissa whom you summoned and saw,’ replied the viper. ‘Your necromancy was potent up to this point; but no necromantic spell could recall for you your own lost youth or the fervent and guileless heart that loved Nylissa, or the ardent eyes that beheld her then. This, my master, was the thing that you had to learn.’
Discussion Questions!
The narrative implies that our recollections of love and the past are limited to a single time and location and cannot be entirely reproduced. How do you think memory influences identity and decisions? Is it possible to truly record or experience the past, or would such endeavors always fall short?
Malygris' desire to overcome death and grief eventually leaves him with a terrible sense of emptiness. What do you think is the main reason why his attempts to relive the past failed despite the presence of such overwhelming prowess?
The story addresses the notion that some parts of life, like love, are beyond even the most powerful magic. Is there value in acknowledging our limits, or should we always try to overcome them?
Malygris possesses enormous might, yet he is helpless to reverse the past. In a world where magic is real, can power truly offer happiness, or does it always come with constraints and consequences?
Malygris is an accomplished sorcerer, but his success feels hollow without the emotional connection he has lost. In that sense, how is success defined? Is it more about external achievements or internal contentment?
