“We’re still figuring it out ourselves.”
Jack
Milton, who had been going under the name Jack Cart for a good while now, found
himself walking down the hallway of his childhood home, back in Eliot, a suburb
of Entraht, the capital of Narcia. Their house was nice, though perhaps not any
nicer than the average Narcian home. There were three stories and the only
eccentricity to the architecture was a small room that rose above the third
floor with large windows that allowed for a relatively unimpeded view of the
night sky. Of course, being so close to the capital meant there was a fair
amount of light pollution, so only the brightest stars in each constellation
were visible and the Path of Aeoes was so faint you could never be sure if you
were not merely imagining it.
The
area got winters with some snow, but as he walked through the house, he could
not reconcile the powdered street outside with the humid summer heat he felt
indoors. Oddly, it was not this discrepancy that convinced him he was dreaming.
It was instead the fact that Tessa was standing next to him.
Jack
had two sisters, both younger. Gwen was only two years his junior, and he had
always thought of her as one of his best friends. She was artistic in a way he
always admired and envied, and lived in Omlos, working in independent film. The
youngest Milton kid was Sandy, who had gone straight from college to law school
and had somehow beaten both of her older siblings to settling down with a
spouse and was a year away from starting her own law firm. Sandy had always
been far more competitive than her older siblings, which bred not exactly
animosity, but a slightly greater distance than any of them would prefer. Jack
and Gwen were a unit, of sorts, and while Jack had only the faintest memories
of Gwen as a bump in his mother’s belly, the two of them had had four years
together before Sandy came along to be this strange entity: a third Milton kid.
They
walked past Sandy’s room and Jack had a moment of dissonant emotion: he saw
Sandy, not the ambitious young woman in her mid twenties with a wife and house
and a future all kicked into high gear, but the little eight-year-old who used
to draw pictures of spaceships and cute aliens.
“Am
I ever going to be able to show this to you?” he asked Tessa.
“Do
you want to?”
“I
think I do. Is that insane?”
Tessa
shrugged. “You should probably talk to me about it when you wake up.” There it
was: that was just his own words coming from her mouth. He felt the frustration
of having accomplished something only to realize it was merely in his
imagination that he had done so.
Play-acting
as a couple with Tessa had been an odd experience. Staying in Kapla all this
time, they had not really talked about it. He was no mind reader, but he
suspected his feelings were reciprocated. On the other hand, there was a
nagging thought at the back of his mind – Tessa’s role had been, initially, to
recruit him. But with the House collapsing all around them, that mission had to
be on hold.
Hadn’t
it?
She
had told him how she was recruited – the awful man who had married her mother,
the strange gentleness of the man who had killed her stepfather. It was a surreal
story, but sounded genuine. Gwen would have called it Jack’s “Knight Complex,”
but the story had enhanced his protective instincts toward the agent called
Dust. The nagging doubt was whether that had all been by design. Perhaps, Jack
thought, it was the design of her superiors, though he could not help but worry
that Tessa herself was interested in manipulating him.
And
yet…
He
had torn that faceless man apart. He still did not understand it, but he did
feel as if there were something within him that had come online, waking up for the
first time. And he had no clue as to what it was.
He
walked with dream-Tessa up the stairs into that observatory at the top of the
house. But as they climbed far too many stairs, he realized that they were
actually walking down – down, down, down into the Lower Block of Castlebrook
Prison. Maybe that was why there was snow outside.
It
was winter when his team came to the ruins of the White Citadel and found the
remnants of what seemed to be a battle. There were as many as twenty bodies,
some torn apart as if by a huge beast, others sporting burns from some kind of
arcane spell effect, but most sporting gunshot wounds from one hell of a
powerful firearm.
When
they searched the area, they spotted a blonde woman carrying a sword, standing
over the body of an extraordinarily pale man, his wound and the weapon both
dripping with colorless grey blood. Jack was the first to spot her, and his
hesitation gave her a chance to escape. There was something about the woman
that awed him. The best he could ever do to describe it, even to himself, was
that he felt as if he had been looking at some kind of religious scene –
something that would one day be made into a stained glass window, that artists
would strive to portray.
She
ran, and it took another week to finally track her down. When they did, she had
been oddly cooperative. Never, even with several enforcement officers holding
guns pointed at her, did Jack ever believe she was in any danger – at least not
from them.
She
was arrested, awaiting formal charges, but they had a judge grant a special
dispensation to have her held in the Lower Block, believing that she was likely
a powerful enough arcanist that a mundane holding facility would be unable to
contain her.
And
yet, even Castlebrook Prison opened for her like a wet paper bag. The reports
said she simply opened her locked door – a door warded with about fifteen
layers of magical protection – stepped right past the silver golem who guarded
and cared for the prisoners, and walked up the stairs and out the door as if
the building were not a prison at all.
So
it was perhaps inaccurate to see her down here, in the Lower Block. But he
figured it was forgivable, as that had been the last time he saw her.
“Commander
Milton,” said the woman. “Long time no see.”
“Jack’s
better.”
“Jack.
Ok.” Even in the moment, Jack thought it strange how much their words lacked
that typical dreamlike surrealism.
Tessa
walked across the room and sat on the bed. The prison cells in the Lower Block
had to be granted some exemptions to the ethical guidelines for incarceration,
primarily access to windows and sunlight, not to mention outdoor communal areas
for exercise and socialization. Generally, the kinds of creatures they kept in
the Lower Block did not miss such things. Still, while subterranean, the cell
was rather well-appointed, with elegant landscape paintings in a far more
respectable style than you’d expect in a motel. There was even a little
fireplace that the more responsible prisoners were allowed to light. Milton
recalled the history of the prison, which was that it had been built over a
mansion owned by a man named Paul Airbright, whose horrific crimes lost his
family this property. Airbright had been the prison’s first prisoner, which was
perhaps a little odd in that it was a sort of house arrest.
Still,
Milton reasoned that the cells, particularly here in the Lower Block, were
probably part of the original mansion, which could explain the luxurious
design.
“I’m
sorry I left,” said the woman. “Well, not sorry that I left. Sorry that I did
so without answering your questions.”
“Too
bad you can’t answer them. This being a dream, and all.”
“Well,
not really.”
Jack
cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well,
as I said before, we’re still figuring this all out for ourselves. A dream is
just a kind of healthy hallucination, right? Like, your brain interpreting all
these random impulses that happen while you sleep? It’s like, the stimulus is
just random, but it lets your brain sort things out.”
“So
I’m imagining you so that I can sort out all this stuff about the House and the
faceless man and this… thing that I’m becoming?”
“No,
I told you, it’s only partially a dream. You and I are talking.”
“Right
now?”
“I
mean, I think. Either that or you’re my dream.”
“I’m
talking with you right now?”
“Yeah.”
Jack
nearly woke up from surprise.
“Stay
calm. Stay loose. I bet it’s way harder to do this if you’re awake.”
“What
are you?” asked Jack, though he had meant to ask “who?” He felt his control
drifting, this lucid dream threatening to sink back into an uncontrolled,
drifting one.
“We’re
humans.”
“From
where?” he thought about the stories of the Redlanders coming to Sarona-Ki in
massive ships from another world – the very ships that his sister Sandy would
draw.
“Boston.
I mean, I grew up in L.A., but Sky here grew up just outside Boston.”
The
names meant nothing at first, but then he thought of something. “Is that near
New York?”
The
woman smiled. “Yeah. Same country. Closer to Boston than L.A.”
“So
it’s real. New York. Central Park. Those are real places.”
“Yes,
they are real,” said a low, masculine voice. They were not in the Lower Block
anymore. Now they were sitting on smooth rocks somewhere in a large desert –
presumably the Sarona, though that hardly narrowed it down, given that the
Sarona was the size of Asia, though as he thought of the comparison, he also
puzzled over the question of just what Asia could be.
He
turned to face the owner of the voice. The man’s age was hard to place – the
shape of his face was that of a young man, probably under thirty. But young as
he might be, the man was weathered. He was thin – not sickly, but sinewy. He
was dark, both in skin and hair, the latter of which had grown into long dreads
that were tied back. If this man were less than thirty, it seemed as if he had
seen enough for ten men in their 90s. The man’s eyes were a piercing, icy blue,
slightly magnified by a pair of round-framed spectacles.
It
was odd, now, looking at the two of them, somehow youthful and yet also
primordial. He was more convinced than ever that he was looking at the
beginnings of a new pantheon.
“Why
are you contacting me?” asked Jack.
“Is
that what’s happening?” asked the woman. Sky was not looking at him, apparently
scanning the horizon, a look of cold pragmatism on his face. “I thought maybe
you had contacted us.”
“I’d
never heard of Sky before,” he responded.
Sky
let out a puff of air that might have been a chuckle.
“I
told you, we’re still figuring it out. I’m not sure I’ll even remember this
when I wake up.” She then slapped Sky on the shoulder. “Hey, Sky, one of us
should mention the dream to the other so that we’ll know it’s real when we wake
up.”
“Ok,”
his voice was quiet, as if he had not expected he would need to speak and had
thus not given his vocal chords enough air. “Except I’m not asleep right now.”
“What?”
said the woman.
“I’m
on watch right now. Tarra’s resting her head in your lap and Ec’s out hunting.
It’s like four in the morning. The sky is getting that faint hint of blue
before the sun actually rises. There’s a light rain, pretty cold, but we’re
taking shelter under a really big fallen tree.”
Jack
stood back. Around them it was a sun-blasted desert, but he could now smell the
faint scent of rain and trees. “Who?”
“Friends
of ours,” said Sky. “Yeah, June, this guy is pretty far away. Somewhere in Arizradna is what I’m
getting. But yeah, he’s real.”
The
woman turned back to him. “You got all that?”
“I’ve
been doing this a lot longer than you have, June. You’ll get the hang of it.”
“And
this guy, you think he’s awakening?”
Now
Sky leaned in and looked closely at him. Jack felt his breath grow shallow.
Nothing in this experience had dispelled the notion that this woman, or indeed
this man, were gods. But as Sky’s piercing gaze fell upon him, he reflected
that even the most benevolent gods were capable of terrible deeds.
“Never
seen one of us from Otherworld before. But, you know, first time for
everything.”
(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2018)
