There was a time when they used to call me Proteus, on account of my undifferentiated nature, on account of my terrible fecklessness. That was one of my names, but there were many others. Proteus was but one of the names that men had for me. ‘Proteus come for your dinner,’ my mother used to call out to me, back in the days, back in the days when I was no more than a frisky young whippersnapper. ‘Proteus you little bastard would you come for your dinner, you’re letting it go cold.’ Only I never had a mother of course. I never had a mother because my name is Paah the son of Paah, Paah the Self-Begotten. They also call me Autogenes the Self-Originated. Others again speak of me as Thoth the Self-Produced. And yet others again call me Gayomart the Shining One. These names and many more they have called me. All these names and many more. All these names and many more.
Some people think that I seem nice and that I appear normal. Others don’t like me, however. They say that I am sly and untrustworthy. They deem me suspicious and odd; they say I am of unknown provenance, lacking in the proper references, lacking in the appropriate recommendations, and so on. My personality has suffered a lot in recent times, it is true. I must confess to that. I must put my hands up to that. I have become sullen, indolent, lacking in all social graces. The long weary millennia have not been kind to me – in appearance I resemble a great toad, flat and menacing, skating around the upper atmosphere like an evil triangular dart. Sometimes high in the sky, at other times swooping down low and blocking out the sunlight, creating abject terror in all those who see me. All life flinches as I approach. Pestilence afflicts the earth wherever I have passed.
Above us in the colossal azure vault of the sky, the Great Burning Wheel slowly turns, methodically erasing all of our names as it does so, erasing history itself. Very soon there will be no more names, very soon there will be no words left – no names, no words, no thoughts, no anything. Not a single thing will remain. Immense in its grandeur, dwarfing all our petty pretensions, the Great Burning Wheel grinds everything into dust. We thought we had accomplished so much of course; we thought that we had accomplished all sorts of great, wonderful and tremendous things. You can imagine our pain; you can imagine our dreadful unbearable anguish. We watch on in silence, all our words stripped away from us, all our fancy ideas and concepts, all our theoretical pretensions shriveling up and writhing like cellophane wrapping thrown onto an open fire. And all the time, high above us in the stupendous azure vault of the sky, the Great Fiery Wheel turns inexorably, undoing the fabric of time itself as it does so…
