The Wyrms of &alon

161.1 - Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?


Suisei was in free-fall. Up was left. Down was back. Shadow cloaked him in its savage storm, squeezing like a serpent's coils.

In his hand, the Sword burned, though its heat came without pain.

He screamed as he hurtled.

The shadows' grip tightened. Suisei swung the Sword at them—thwick! swash!—but to no effect.

They reared up all around him and struck.

"No!" he yelled.

The Sword clinked and sparked, twitching in Suisei's hand, sending out mental light that flickered into place to form an oblong, ovoid barrier. The shadows squeezed the eggshell of light with tendrils shaped like fire, straining the shell.

"No, no no no!"

Cracks bit into the light. Everything shook, knocking Suisei's free hand against the barrier. It stung to the touch like dry ice, and hissed as Suisei pulled his hand back.

The cracks lengthened. Light streamed through them.

Was this the end?

Grabbing the Sword's hilt with both hands, Suisei closed his eyes and prayed.

"Queen of the Stars, if I am fit to be saved, inscribe my name in the Tablets of Destiny. Angel of Light, if I have sinned, shine your grace on me and let me be forgiven. Hallowed Beast, hold me fast to my repentance, and crush temptation and the doers of evil."

He kept on praying, waiting to meet his end.

But his end didn't come.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, despite the many-colored shadows, the luminous egg began to stabilize. The constant shaking dwindled.

As soon as Suisei noticed it, his mouth fell silent and his heart leapt out of his stomach and into the back of his eyeballs, which fluttered open in disbelief.

The torrent of shadows was thinning. The arms of darkness lost their grip one after another, speed plying them off the barrier like rain from a windshield. The extra glow around the barrier faded, eventually disappearing altogether, though the colorful cracks remained, hanging around him like sprigs of antlers and lightning. They gave off brilliant embers; the motes bobbed around him as they flickered and died.

Slowly, the cracks sealed themselves, until every trace of the barrier had vanished, leaving Suisei floating in a kaleidoscopic void. The space around him stretched in weird dimensions. Color gradients of colors swept across his vision; sheets of stars bent and curved; fractal vistas scudded by like clouds. The darkness of closed eyes soon blocked out the overwhelming sights.

It was total sensory overload. He had to close his eyes, just to keep from being overwhelmed.

For me, the sight of the ghostly echoes drifting across the insides of Suisei's eyelids was a welcome relief. Fortunately, there was more than enough room in my mind for the two of us to have the space to step outside of the theater mind-world and have a chat while Suisei's memories played out in the background.

Even though we were outside the theater, I was still fully aware of the memory replay, it just wasn't as prominent as my conversation with Suisei in the foreground. In a way, it was a lot like watching a movie with the Director's Commentary playing over it.

"What happened?" I asked. "What is happening?"

"At the time, your guess would have been as good as mine. It would take me time to understand it, to the extent that I understood it at all."

I waved my hand to hurry him along. "I don't mind spoilers, just tell me already."

He crossed his arms. "A tiled floor would be a good comparison, I think. Each tile is a world, yours and mine included. In going through the rift, I was passing through the grout in between them."

"Is that what we're seeing now? You, traveling to another world?"

"Yes." He chuckled dryly. "I'm still amazed I got through it without having a seizure. You know what rapid, flashing lights can do to a person."

I nodded vigorously. "Verily."

We stepped back into the theater.

Suisei decided to have another go at touching the barrier. Curiously enough, this time, without a layer of darkness around it attempting to consume it, the barrier was no longer painful to the touch. It felt like glass against his fingertips, slightly cool to the touch, and it lit up around the point of contact, though the light vanished once he removed his hand.

His jaw went slack.

Even the best forcefields had a bit of flexibility to them. They were more like membranes than walls. The repelling effect was very much like a magnet, getting stronger and stronger as you approached the pataphysics at its core.

But this? This was like magic, and it was only with reluctance that he finally lifted his hand off the barrier.

With a bit of experimentation, Suisei discovered he could alter his trajectory by pushing against the barrier, changing his course and sending a rumble through the light-egg.

At least, that was what it felt like.

Whenever he did this, the Sword glowed for the duration of the effort.

Through his mind's eye, the Sword was a knot of filaments and hairs so thick and dense that he despaired of ever being able to understand it, let alone unravel it.

Something was there.

"What do you mean, something was there?" I asked.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"I meant exactly what I thought," Suisei replied. "Something was in the Sword; some… presence. I hadn't made the forcefield that saved me from that monstrous light and shadow. I couldn't have, even if I tried."

"What about the monster?"

"I…" Suisei lowered his head. "I don't know. Was it made by the Sword? Called by it? Drawn to it? I can only speculate." He sighed. "At the time, I believed it was meted out to Zaina and the others as punishment for their cruelty and their avarice."

"At the time?" I asked.

He nodded. "Now, I'm no longer sure. All I know is that it's likely a harbinger of things to come." Clasping his hands together, Suisei leaned forward in his seat.

"As with the monster, I still don't fully understand how the rifts in Zaina's penthouse came to be. Was it created by the Sword, or drawn to it? Either could be possible. But," he glanced at me. "There is one thing I know with absolute certainty."

"Yes?"

"The Sword can create, destroy, and control these spatial rifts. Yes, it can do quite a lot else, but those rifts? I think managing them was part of the Sword's original purpose. I mean, you saw my memories, you sensed the Sword's gargantuan thread nexus along with me."

"Nexus?"

"You have access to all my thoughts Genneth, don't you?"

"Yes," I said, "and me asking you here and now is me accessing them, so, please: explain. I find it easier to focus on something new when it's being explained to me, as opposed to the knowledge simply entering my mind through osmosis."

"As a middle school teacher of mine once put it: nexuses are blank canvases, filled with untapped possibility. By tuning and shaping them, we paint images on that canvas and make that possibility a reality. As I already told you, for whatever reason, there's a content lock on your canvases. You can draw only one kind of image—and, so, use only one kind of power."

"Okay, I follow so far," I said.

"Compared to the kinds of canvases I was used to, the Sword's canvas was like someone had painted the entire sky. The rift-maker drawing had been left in place, deep inside it, one of many spells left behind in that way. I suppose you could call them the 'presets'. I'd later come to make some of my own, but at this point, I hadn't done so."

"Then whose were they?" I asked.

"Perhaps Enille's, or even the Angel's. I don't think we'll ever know. Still, assuming the same is true of your world's Sword, it wouldn't surprise me if misuse of the rift-maker power was what caused the various historical disasters that the Sword has been associated with in both of our worlds: the Zidian Disaster in my world, Darkpox in yours."

"How did you learn all this?"

"The same way I learned nearly everything that I know: with a little help." He gestured at the screen with his head. "Take a look."

While he was in the middle of one of his pushes, the light-egg suddenly shook, flinging Suisei against its back wall, even as the Sword continued to levitate motionlessly in front of him, at the center of the space. Rising to his knees, Suisei watched as a pale gray vista wrapped around his field of vision. Through his mind's eye, he saw that the gray was the result of a glistening energy net that had ensnared the closet-sized eggshell forcefield.

"What's happening?" I asked.

"Someone was fishing, and I got caught in their net."

The next minute or two passed in unnerving silence, as if he was stuck in a stalled elevator. Then the gray split down the middle and peeled away, revealing—

"—Angel's breath…" I muttered.

If there were words for what we saw, I didn't know them. There was earth and sky, yes, but other than that, everything was simply… different.

A gigantic orb filled a whole half of the gray, hazy heavens, too large to fit in just one side of the sky. The orb's surface was layered in bands of maroon, magenta, and mauve in beautiful abstractions. Bold orange-red striations interrupted the more peaceful colors, though I couldn't tell you if that was actual magmatic rock or something else altogether.

A second, smaller orb—blazing, incandescent red—peaked out from behind the maroon giant, like sunset or sunrise, except on the wrong horizon. The smaller orb cast a ruddy tint on the gray sky, most of all on the dense bristled, worm-like clouds—polychaetous, Ileene would have called them. The clouds glistened like steel, as if drunk on the red orb's light. Beyond, distant stars shone in the hazy twilight.

Beneath that sky, hills and fluvial gullies undulated across the landscape. A river wound through a valley, though its viscous fluid was anything but water. Cliffs stood guard in the distance, and—still further—snow-capped tors scraped at the maroon giant. The desolation reminded me of that ruined world over which Kléothag had fought Xuyux, but, unlike that empty place, this new world brimmed with wonderful, alien life.

The plants—if they were plants at all—were dark-hued; deep violet, sometimes black, shaped like dreams. We saw groves of curved blades; naked trunks crowned in slender, drooping bracts; low-lying stalks that wandered across the rock before turning at near-right angles and rising up into an explosion of branches snowflaked by needle-leaves. The trees peppered the land like a savannah, with bare, black rock occupying much of the space between them.

Many creatures moved about, either with too many legs, or too few. Serpent-things flitted from tree to tree with their Xs of four, membranous wings. Black behemoths, tall as bungalows, wandered on four, lozenge-shaped, stilt-like limbs among buildings that rose like sculptures, glazed in solid hues: soft violet, cyan, turquoise.

A city.

Suisei's invisible eggshell settled down not far from the city, coming to float several feet off the ground. The Sword sank slowly toward the surface, moving the light-egg along with it.

Even with all the years he'd spent working as one of DAISHU's cleaner agents, there was just no way Suisei could process all of the alien details, especially when it came to anything that moved.

Suisei tried to gather his wits.

The tip of the Sword made contact with the pebble-dotted soil underfoot. The magic pulsing through it sputtered and faded.

Suisei turned to face me. "Genneth, please, skip this p—"

—Too late.

The eggshell glowed brightly, and then disappeared. Suisei dropped the last inch down to the ground as everything went to hell.

As I would come to learn—and, as Suisei himself already knew quite well—physiology really, really didn't like it when you placed it in conditions other than the ones to which evolution had accustomed it.

At the risk of (slight) overstatement, no one from Suisei's home world had ever lived through anything even half as unpleasant as the next two and three-quarter seconds of Dr. Horosha's life. Whatever unpleasantness you might be imagining, I assure you, he had it worse, and it would get even worse after that, and several days would have to pass before things showed the slightest signs of improvement.

Let me put it this way: even Margaret didn't deserve to suffer the way Suisei did.

Even with my supercomputer of a brain, it was still a struggle for me to chronicle just how much was going wrong. The most noticeable details were the feeling of his blood turning to boiling oil, and the pressure pushing out from inside his eyeballs as they inflated, bulging out of their sockets. His vision flashed and sparked, and by the time I finally managed to press the playback's imaginary Pause button, things had already gone dark.

Within my mind, we both stepped outside of the 'theater' while I let the memory play on, trying my best to ignore the agonizing humiliation and humiliating agony that Dr. Horosha spent the next few days marinating in.

"What was that?" I asked him.

"Horrible," he said. "Compared to that, it made NFP-20 a walk in the park. Do you remember when I explained that if you brought all the air molecules in a room to a standstill, the weight of the atmosphere outside would crush the walls in an implosion?"

"Yes, I remember. I remember everything now."

"Well, consider the reverse: instead of stopping the molecules inside the room, suppose you stopped them outside the room, in the atmosphere."

I winced. "Oooh, ouch."

"Yes. The room would explode as the pressure of the gasses within it forced their way out. Explosive decompression."

"Also, any water inside the room would begin to boil," I said.

He nodded in approval. "Good! Someone remembered the ideal gas law. Compared to ours, this alien world's atmosphere was thin enough that my bodily fluids started to boil."

Without the weight of the atmosphere holding them in place, the water molecules inside Suisei's blood had begun to scatter, transforming into vapor.

"What happened after that?" I asked.

"The worst convalescence this side of eternity," Suisei replied. He glanced at the theater's entrance. "Is it… over yet?"

I closed my eyes and checked.

"No."

"Then tell me when it is," he said.

"What should I look for?" I asked.

We waited about a minute.

"Look for when I'm walking on my own two feet, and talking to the aliens."

"Okay, it's over. I found it," I said.

And then we walked back inside.

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