Silverfell

@silverfell.bsky.social

117 Followers 761 Following

Don't mind me, I just tell stories.

Sounds came to him cotton-wooled. Something was spinning, possibly the ground or maybe his brain inside his skull. If only they could decide on a direction to spin in, then he could be steady on his feet again. He stammered, not because he was trying to say something and couldn’t, but because his mouth started moving and his lungs decided there should be air to go with them. He held his elbows and shivered. The world was twisting out of shape again, and Bobby was surprised to discover that he wasn’t breaking down completely. There was a strong possibility that his temper was in far shorter supply than his fortitude, because after the shaking and sobbing, he was now just mostly angry and wanted to break something. Anything, everything. Bobby was too exhausted to start running again. There was nowhere in his mind that he could hide any deeper, or further from reality. This was reality, and it was awful. Metal growls bounced around the corner. Of course, now that the world was going to hell again, the bikers had decided to put in another appearance. Bobby found himself not caring just how much it all sounded like a pack of metal wolves howling for blood. It was loud enough that Mrs Wong finally focused on something that wasn’t Bobby, just long enough to look over her shoulder to hiss at whatever was coming. By the time she’d focused on Bobby again, her resting smiley face was back in place. She crawled along the wall with splayed arms and legs just like the stuff from late night documentaries about forgotten caves. With a springy jump, she went from wall to sidewalk, landing right in front of him.
Idue shouldered her way past Bobby and the girl. The shadow was nowhere to be seen, but then again, it usually wasn’t until it killed. “Beliar. A true lapdog to the end. These people are our guide and her bodyguard. You will take your toy soldiers and retreat, before I decide you are annoying me.” Beliar’s eyes twitched. Idue definitely couldn’t tell when she wasn’t liked. Not that tact and diplomacy would have served, here. The guy’s most mystical trait was how perfectly he conformed to the evil heel stereotype. He was enjoying his role this afternoon. “I have special dispensation for you, Idue. Your uncle really would like to have a word, and I’ve been authorized to bring you in… regardless.” He raised his hand, made a twisty gesture with his fingers, and brought his arm down quickly. Idue slammed Bobby into the nearest tree, out of the way so that she was the only one hit by the half dozen magic blasts that exploded from the nearby trees. She twitched, and fell, her hands before her face, clawing shut as she struggled to breathe. She curled up like a dying insect, and stopped moving. The pale girl was already sprinting for the treeline, whether to counter-attack from their cover or to disappear, Bobby didn’t care. She fell right by his feet. Immobilized by whatever those blows had been, the powerful glamours elves had evolved as defence mechanisms glitched out. For the first time, he saw her as she truly was. Idue shrank, and her skin turned green-grey. Her chin was pointier and her lips thin and bloodless. Her eyes were twice as wide and much more almond-shaped. Her hair, that glorious copper mane, was completely unchanged.
On the third night, after thinking of the dragon wing pattern, he started tracing its shapes into his mind. He was sitting with his back against a tree’s massive roots that looked like a tangle of severed legs, with a small pile of rocks before him. He didn’t reach for any power yet, but just practiced forming the shapes. One layer of geometric designs on top the other, he imagined the two triangular shapes in great detail, picturing them as drawn by those lasers line from a disco, floating in the air just above the ground. As with the fire, the broken pattern was obvious, glaring, a rounding of the corner on the right wing. Unlike with the fire, this time he didn’t rush into anything stupid. Bobby held the shape in his mind, and twisted it just so, a little right, removing, reshaping, rearranging until the wing felt right. Complete. The last time, he’d nearly burned the gas stop down. Now, he didn’t reach as eagerly into his power. The magic was there, always there, like part of him was constantly raging against the world. Reaching in with both hands to pull it out had so far gone very, very wrong. All he had to do was breathe it in a little. The pile of rocks, a dozen all told, snapped into a single column, clacking against each other with a sound so sharp it echoed through the trees. Idue grinned happily and moved to pat him over the shoulder while Bobby held the tower of rocks in place, channelling the barest whisper of magic into the shape of wings, making the pattern hold the rocks in place in an impossible tower of mismatched shapes . “That’s amazing, Bobby. We may make a caster of you yet!” and promptly demanded he did it again, at least half a dozen times. Bobby couldn’t remember ever feeling happier.
“Bobby, what’s going on? Are you OK, man?” Mike asked, a frowny expression on his face. Bobby understood his friend’s confusion, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. He was supposed to immediately spot the otherworldly nature of the pictures. They were supposed to spend a long chunk of the afternoon pouring over the images, oohing and aahing at each new detail they discovered. Bobby was aware of all this, but simply couldn’t make it real for Mike. His throughs swirled like a storm, each sharper and more painful than the last. He started feeling dizzy from it, like they had hollowed out his brain. It all burst out through his gut and rose to his throat, and was just about to spill out of his mouth and splash Mike with his insanity. Bobby felt light-headed, but not in a weird supernatural, secret-conversation way. He needed to vomit, to cry, to punch something. He needed to expel the things in his head. To exorcise the memory of what he’d seen during his episode yesterday. But he couldn’t, he was holding the evidence right in his hands He looked at Mike, and wasn’t even sure what his own face was doing but his friend’s frown had started morphing into alarm. The damn pictures were still in his hand. Flat rectangles like windows into a place he never wanted to see again. They were real, and made it impossible to ignore the truth of what he had seen. The world spun with each reminder that those weren’t random dogs. That wasn’t a random piece of some random park in a foreign city where they staged sick shit for entertainment. These were the dogs he had seen in his episode yesterday. That was the place with the big tree where the couple was holding their tryst right across from the bench where Bobby had been sitting when the world first went insane.
Bobby counted heartbeats, but grandfather didn’t look like he was about to start laughing. No one jumped out from behind the bushes with candid cameras. Those words, “it’s all real”, rushed through his mind like a light burning through the spectres of insanity. He had known his whole life. He breathed in deep and closed his eyes as the revelation sank in, readjusting his confused memories as the knowledge made its way to his core. Not just for the past week, but through the years. Those little breaks in the pattern of normality he’d noticed around his house over and over again. His mother’s jokes about goblins. The exceptional intensity of her freakouts when a pan went out. She hadn’t just been afraid of the dark when Bobby was out late, had she? He had no idea what a Joro-thing was, but he was willing to bet it was some kind of giant puppetteer bug. And elves, riding bikes and whooping like Indian braves? That was too crazy to have been a real delusion. As his assumptions about what was real shattered one at a time, reality opened up to him. Dominos fell in his head one after the other, squashing the last doubts, but sowing so much uncertainty, and Bobby started getting annoyed. He was sick and tired of being the least ancient and powerful creature in the room, the clueless one who couldn’t rescue his mother. So, he opened his eyes and clenched his fist. He took two steps towards his grandfather. “How old is my mother?” “Bobby, I’m not stupid enough to tell you how old your mother is. Not even in the fanciest of fairy universes.”
With that, finally managing to disentangle himself from his gossamer shroud without tearing it to pieces, Bobby finally stood. On the way past the elf maiden, he had to fight all his instincts to resist taking her in his arms. But he endured, and walked out into paradise. These fancy-dress crazies sure knew how to build a great elf palace. Bobby grumbled as he stomped down the delicate wooden stairs that connected the terraces of their aerial abode. The whole thing was constructed against a granite peak covered in lichen so fluffy that it nearly grew in bushes. Bird song carried with the chill whispers of the wind, and Bobby was looking for a rock to throw at a likely source of the annoyingly soothing chirps when Arbie caught up with him. Grandfather, ever the wily diplomat, waited for Bobby to catch his eye before approaching.
For the goblins, life went on despite Bobby’s helpless rage. The raiding party celebrated, and then had dinner, which led to more celebration, which led to merriment that landed back into a celebratory mood. By the time the last goblin collapsed in her “Kiss me, I’m Irish” t-shirt, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in each hand, the sun was already lighting its way up the treeline, and Bobby was exhausted. Since sleep hadn’t been an option with all the loud merriment, he’d spent the night trying to get out of his cage. Brute force didn’t help. His cage was new, strong, and nothing like the old, decrepit rustic prisoner containment TV had led him to expect in these circumstances. There was. No way to topple it, or squeeze past the rungs by bending wood because, surprisingly, it had been made to keep people in by creatures who were good at keeping prisoners. Darkwood was merciless. Bobby could gather magic in small amounts, but it dissipated too quickly, squeezed out of the cage before he could focus any of it.
Just a few corners from Bobby’s house, a fair halfway between their places, stood their bus stop. It wasn’t really actually theirs, it’s just that the line it had once served no longer existed, and people no longer used it. By a fluke of administrative oversight, the awning was still standing. It may well be decades before anything was done to bring it down. Bobby knew of European castles that had stood for less than their little bus stop would endure. Out in plain sight at the side of the street, it granted them complete anonymity. People who didn’t use public transport just avoided it, and those who did gave it an even wider berth since they assumed that the two hooligans hunched over their phones were doing drugs, or talking about communism, or something equally degenerate. Today, Mike was bursting at his skinny seams. He leaned in, his face dissected by a sharp shadow cut by a blade of light from the sagging roof, and grinned. “It’s going down, man. At last, something’s going on in this damn town!” “You mean aside from the stuff going on here every day?” “Bobby, just look at this. Be a smartass later!”
Bobby stood two steps away from the counter, looking at his mother, panting, holding his left forearm. His mother just maintained that pleasant smile and stood, so gently and slowly that it barely was a movement at all. “Do I need medication, mom? T.. those crazy people who can’t recognize themselves, am I one of them? I’m seeing things again, mom. The pots are off. Why are the pots off? Please help me!” She stepped closer, her eyes on his, her face serene with that smile that said nothing could ever go wrong. Slowly, with that same unhurried grace, she reached for his face. Bobby just stood there, cold shivers lapping at his skin, shorting his spine and leaking out of his pores in a clammy flow. “Mom… say something” It had to be another episode of madness. Callie not exploding over his rude retreat? He closed his eyes. Just as her fingertips were about to brush against his cheek, the pantry door bumped. It was a strong, decisive bump that bent it in the middle before slamming back into place, and it was followed by another, and another, each stronger than the last. Bobby turned to look at the door, and the thought formed in his head that he had to open it. He knew this with powerful clarity, which was strange because Bobby was rarely that certain about anything at all. As he stepped away, his mother gave a frustrated grunt, and took a step back of her own. Bobby caught a glimpse of something moving, crawling over her skin. He tried to focus on it, but Callie’s skin looked clear again. It was just his mother, standing there, waiting for him to step back into her embrace. He just had to take one step and it would all be good. Bobby fought the dizziness, refused to give in to the rushing tide of madness as he had in the park. This time, he stood fast.
As he watched the lightning trail that his palm left on the lizard’s skin, Bobby noticed that the scales he rubbed were a little less faded than before. What had they locked him in with? The cuddle lizard? It needed to be loved or it wouldn’t shine? Bobby had often doubted his sanity since the start of his adventures, but that thought was too daft to consider. No, this lizard had been locked into a magic-proof prison, not a zero-cuddle zone. And he had been trying to summon magic… he just couldn’t store enough of it. And darkwood really didn’t like magic, did it? So, without guide again, picturing Idue’s tapping foot of judgement, Bobby sank his fingers in the loam just outside the cage, and focused like his life depended on it. Because it probably did.
The Might Caliber was perched on it, and he wasn’t even entirely sure that it was the butterfly he’d been followed because it was no longer alone. There were two dozen of the steel-winged, colourful things gliding on and off the marble tombstone. He tried not to scoff. The only thing missing was a giant videogame-style quest marker on top of the whole thing, or a narrator voicing THIS PLACE IS SIGNIFICANT. He walked around the grave to see what was etched on the stone, and naturally it wasn’t mysterious ancient script anymore, but plain old English. A single name: Alistair Corbin.
The landscape remained tame, far less murderous than the woods or the mountains. The ground was unnaturally warm, which probably was some weird magical apocalyptic thing that Bobby didn’t care about because it was pretty nice to not have to worry about pneumonia. Bobby’s step faltered. He had been without his mother too long, and he was turning into her. This may be a fate worse than the end of magic. She must be rescued immediately.
Bobby was somehow connected to this terrible, priest that spoke like a machine, but with none of the warmth. The Earth people had been slaves, created to execute a purpose he didn’t understand. They had been discarded afterwards, like unwanted tools. Another certainty formed in his mind, from the shadows that often whispered the darkest commentary to his thoughts: the Prime had been the cause of all this. The mysterious work the Earth people had been created to complete, the final calculations, involved Bobby’s ancestors.
The girl nodded and extended her hand. Up close, Bobby could see that he may have been wrong about the bikers being human after all. She had pointy ears, and pale skin. There was a halo around her head - no, not a halo. It was the colourful light scatter of transparent wings behind her. Somehow, they came out through her jacket. He’d have to remember to ask about that, if they didn’t eat him. It mattered little. After stopping a bug monster with crazy earth tumours, a demi-human saviour barely registered. “Yes, Scion. We apologise for the delay, but you were hard to track. Your mother’s spells were very eff…” Her eyes were so pretty, wider than they should be, but of the most remarkable deep shade of dark amber, and she was so slender. He recognised the traits from one of the books of folk tales his mother used to read for him. “You… you are a f..” The girls eyes’ slitted shut and her hand curled into a perfect, flawlessly manicured fist. “Oh, hell no.” was what Bobby heard before she punched him out mid-sentence.
Just yesterday, she’d thrown a house elf out the window for making too much noise with her broom. Granted, the chambermaid had wings which allowed her to just fly away in a huff, but that hadn’t stopped Bobby from thinking it was a badass moment. He’d often wanted to throw people out of windows. He’d had nothing but puppy eyes for Idue for the rest of the afternoon. It had been almost a month since the council, and Bobby had spent most of his time failing to learn magic, and dodging glittering hunting parties of elven socialites who wanted to be seen being seen with the Scion himself.
If only they hadn’t been so impossibly strong, he’d have totally wiped the floor with them. A single spell would have incinerated them all. Except that Bobby was on his elbows and knees, and he couldn’t breathe, and the goblins had little grips like steel vices. In short order, they had him bound hands and feet. His throat was free to gasp, but he was otherwise completely immobilized. Bobby squirmed on their shoulders as they lifted him clear off the floor and rushed through the forest. These were clearly modern goblins. They wore Baby Gap jeans, and he caught the glow of mobile screens and the glint of original fake jewellery. One had eight oversized rings that spelled “KISS” “THIS” on his fists, and even though their language doubtless derived from ancient tongues that no man had heard in centuries, Bobby could swear that they were saying a lot of “LOL” and “EZ game”.
He made it through the eggs, and was enjoying his second bite of sausage, when his mother completely casually checked in on him. “How are you feeling today? Grandpa was worried about you.” Bobby finished chewing, took another bite, and carefully chomped his way through that too before replying. “I feel fine so far. Yesterday was strange. I felt like I was fainting, saw some weird stuff just before hitting the ground.” “You hit the ground?” “Yeah, must have keeled over on my side and landed face-first.” He massaged his red skin. “My jaw is a little sore.” Her eyes became slits behind which he could see her machinery of revenge process his words. Had grandpa done something? Callie definitely seemed to think so. Then she smiled, and Bobby assumed it was relief. “What kind of strange things did you see?” “Eh, you know. Things. Horror movie stuff, nothing to be worried about. No goblins in the kitchen, mom.” Her laughter rang out clear, sharp, louder than such a delicate frame had the right to project. “In my kitchen? A goblin wouldn’t make it to the door. But I’m glad you checked.” And just like that, the world was all right again.
“Arboreon, old friend, you come to us with tales of a creature with a suppression field powerful enough to overwhelm your daughter’s magic. That alone requires the equivalent of a nuclear warhead’s worth of aether. Furthermore, you would have us believe this fiend also possesses the control and precision to carry an unwilling prisoner in full flight at the same time? Through solid brick walls?” The generals, fed this clear direction from their leader, muttered in agreement, and then kept on muttering what very likely were insulting doubts about the story they’d just heard. Bobby saw them for the complacent, arrogant children they were. He knew, from the deepest, darkest pit of his fears, that this lot would never be any help.
“Did you think I had forgiven?”. His mother’s tendrils of weaponized matter burst open in something that looked a little like an anemone and a lot like every nightmare ever. The attack wasn’t directed at him, but he flinched anyways. Idue was there, swords in hand, suddenly appearing where two servitors had been a second ago. She stood in their remains, radiant. Her smile was somehow brighter than her hair, undimmed by the falling dust that servitors became when they died. She bumped his shoulder with the force of a truck, twisted to the right, and was off again to kill things. Surrounded by destruction and chaos, caught in a fight for the lives of all magical creatures Bobby felt more whole than he had in his entire life. “Let me show you the error of your ways.” His mother, in fine tradition, was still sounding more enraged with every word she threw at her enemy. The Void Machine’s hall wasn’t safe for servants of the Prime right now. Looking more like a biblical angel than the Prime itself had, Calypso’s halo of magic strands struck the prime in hundreds of places at once. None were quite as fast as the way the Prime moved or controlled reality, but Bobby understood why the creature hadn’t even tried to move. There were too many to dodge, and so the quantum creature had frozen in place.
“Hello there! I mean you no harm!” but they ignored him. When he got closer, he could see they had been just two pools of deeper shadow. He turned to enter the inner garden and his eye caught movement, a swirl like a robe turning a corner inside the main building. Bobby was certain they’d been close enough to hear him earlier, and clearly did not want to be bothered. Still, he’d had enough of being alone. “My name is Bobby. I think Alistair was my grandfather?” No response. No sounds either. The cheerful morning air didn’t seem to make it past the gates. The garden was chilly, but not in a dangerous way. It was just dead, and so Bobby followed the phantom swirls of the ghost monks and entered the building. He walked around and out, circling the small, rectangular building twice to make sure he hadn’t missed anyone. Every time he turned a corner, he thought he saw a figure disappear back into a doorway, or pull back from a window, but every time he looked again, there was no one there. Still, the signs of habitation were clear. Fread was cooling on the kitchen counter, and he helped himself to half a loaf of it, and the bucket in the well dripped when the wind swayed it.
This was an Idue he hadn’t met yet. She wasn’t being a teacher and she wasn’t punching him in the face. She almost looked like she wanted to talk. “W-what do you mean?” was the best he could manage. He felt pathetic even as the words left his mouth. “I mean I don’t think your shoes could survive the miles per minute of the speedway” Bobby didn’t know what to do with her amused voice and eyebrow. This was in badass rider princess mode. She might be his favourite Idue to date. “Yeah, I’m not going to stay put while the old guys sniff map glue all day.” She seemed to respond to his unfiltered words more positively than when he tried being cool. “OK, let’s go for a ride” It was a simple as that. “But your uncle said…” He wasn’t sure how to put it. Wasn’t she supposed to b e the adult here? “I’ve been charged with teaching you magic by two old men who don’t want us underfoot. I can do that from outside this place, and you look like you could use a ride. What do you say, Scion?” There was something in her attitude that made him think of a cat watching its lunch run for its life. He was pleased that he managed to sound marginally in control of himself.
His mother was gone. Was she? Could this be an episode like at the park? He never got around to asking her about a history of mental illness in the family. Come to think of it, other than Arbie, he knew next to nothing about his family, which weighed heavily on his mind right now. Bobby was alone, and he had no idea who he could turn to. Archie had no mobile, and his mother’s had been on the kitchen counter when… stuff happened. Did it happen, though? This could all be a relapse into a weird universe that existed nowhere outside of his diseased head. The thought held a dark fascination, because it meant that at least his mother was fine and still taking care of him while he drooled somewhere on a bed, imagining that a monster had kidnapped her.
Maybe the creature didn’t actually have a shape as his brain was ready to accept. Maybe the sense of madness its presence incited wasn’t the demon’s fault, but the natural reaction of Bobby’s sense to something that could not be defined by common rules. In short, maybe the demon was imply the ultimate punk rock badass. Terror and confusion were the natural result of limited minds trying to grasp it. Or maybe it was just evil. Its best friend was a cannibal who looked like a girl.
Completely dissociated from the crowd, he started rearranging each in his brain, picturing what the sphere might have looked like had it been made right, without that messy offset. He often did this with people’s rugs when his mother dragged along to visit strangers for the holidays. Typically, however, when he mentally rearranged carpets, they had the good sense to stay put. The orrery did not. Its central sphere started moving in response to his mental organizing. The machine was porous. It was soaking up… something from him. When the entire thing started spinning around the central sphere, he was pulled out of his daydream. Every planet, every metal circle, every hanging gibbet, anywhere there was an axis, axle, or juncture, turned. The interlocking rings blurred into each other as they spun faster and faster. There was a whine of resistance from the air and several joints started glowing from the heat. Bobby took a step back, scared. He’d stopped focusing on the damn thing, but he felt that warmth on his skin, the same as when the Mrs Wong creature had attacked him. The measuring device was doing its job, absorbing all the stuff that had created the tumours back then. Bobby didn’t know how to stop it. Except that wasn’t accurate either. The thing inside him that roared with rage didn’t want to stop it. It wanted to push, and push, and give the device more of what it demanded. Smoke started rising from every joint in the orrery, which had become a shrill buzzsaw of metal and stone that wobbled on its pedestal. This was definitely more than a single inch.
Just as he was starting to find some peace in the familiar patterns of the view, a deep chuckle rolled over the landscape and stole his attention. It was like that, grandfather’s laugh. It actually rolled. It had energy that went beyond sound waves - infectious, lively as it danced through the notes of the beautiful, lazy day in which he had betrayed his grandson. The old man, naturally, was late. He knew it, and his nephew knew it, but even then he kept Bobby waiting to flirt with a woman half his height and a third his age, which had been set to old movie wizard forever. The girl dithered and blushed, and Bobby snorted. It wasn’t her fault, it was hard not to get caught up in grandfather’s enthusiasm. He looked away so he wouldn’t start smiling, and to let the old man did his thing. The park was busy today, and the birds were chirping the performance of their lifetimes. All around, couples walked hand in hand. Some young, some older, all touching shoulders and elbows. He pictured their whispers coiling to form intricate filigrees over their heads, binding them together with slivers of hope, like a tapestry that embraced all.
“My ward was overjoyed to be given a chance to apologize for her behaviour in person, Scion. But first, let me greet you formally. I am Alcar, and I bid you welcome in Riverwell. My light is your light for as long as it shines.” His voice was sharp, and his words didn’t quite end where they should have, echoing through the air and dissipating more slowly than was natural. Bobby was entranced by his calm demeanour, and his beauty. He had no wings. Did the males of his people have no wings? When no one moved, and his grandfather just looked at him, Bobby realized it was his turn to say something. How on Earth do you thank the stunningly beautiful but weird pointy-eared, slender folk who welcome you to their retro, cocaine-themed pad? It was with no small measure of scorn that his mother’s voice echoed in his ears, tut-tutting one of her earliest lessons. Be polite, listen to what people tell you, no matter how weird it may sound. Often, it is what they want to hear themselves. So, Bobby did as his mother, a lifetime and a million miles away, had taught him. “I thank you for your hospitality, Alcar. I am Bobby, and my light is your light for as long as it shines.” Alcar’s expression remained impassive, but the pale man’s shoulders relaxed and Bobby could see that his grandfather was covering a smile. What the hell were they doing here? Why wasn’t everyone running around looking for his mother? Bobby turned to his grandfather, but Alcar wasn’t quite done yet.
His reluctant host was actually seeing to a customer, which was uncommon enough. However, when bobby walked up to the front of the gas station, questions and morning joke alike died on his lips. Standing on the other side of the counter, mutely but expressively complaining about the price of batteries, was an actual zombie. It was as human as a desiccated corpse can look. Its lips were sewn shut, and dry muscle stubs that ended in thin tendons twitched in empty, raw eye sockets. It was missing two fingers on its right hand, but there was no doubt it was pointing aggressively at Voulk right now, over the stack of AAs between them. Bobby immediately liked the creature. Absorbed by the spectacle, he bumped a shelf with his shoulder, and the revenant snapped around to track the boy with a crack of bone and sinew that made him queasy. Then, in the wordless way that only a tongueless corpse can muster, it tilted a curious enquiry at Voulk. “Don’t mind the human, Amhotep. This is between you, me, and your eighty-year-old tab. Come back with one of those gems you promised back then, or find someone else to scrounge up batteries for your games of Operation.” The corpse threw up three bandaged fingers in Voulk’s direction. It may have been arcane, Bobby got the feeling that maybe back when Amhotep was alive, they hadn’t figured out that just the middle one would do.
He ran past rows of houses that had once seemed familiar and safe. The streets of home, neighbours he half remembered, a faceless army that may even help him if he stopped. He almost did, but no one deserved what had happened to the dogs. What had happened to his mother. His hand was brushing against the stone of a filthy wall, his fingertips scraping grime and lichen from its warm surface, when the homeless man stepped out of the shadows under the railway bridge. “Your kind doesn’t often come here, kid” Shadows shifted behind the figure in rags and filthy skin. Of course, a parliament of beggars was going to judge him. Why not? At least they didn’t hate tentacles anywhere. Yet. It took Bobby a moment to gather his mind back into a state where he could offer a coherent, human reply. How far had he run? Where was he now? What did the man mean, his kind? His clothes. Of course. They probably didn’t see a lot of teenagers fresh from the closet of an overprotective mother, down here. The words had been rough, but there was no menace in the old man’s voice or attitude. In fact, Bobby looked into his eyes and saw resignation, and a defensive stance. There were at least two other figures in the deep shadows cast by the
The intensity of their scrutiny was predatory, not unlike that of people watching a train wreck in case they miss any of the really gory, messy corpses. Bobby made a note to ask his grandfather about the full extent of his powers. Maybe he could cast energy beams from his eyes. Energy beams would be very cool.
Elven war bikes were made just like human bikes: metal and leather, bolts and spokes put together by greasy engineers listening to the elven equivalent of Southern rock. The difference was how every single component was imbued with the spirit animal of its rider. Charged with life magic, baptised in the blood of the tribe’s hunting kills, the bikes would slowly awaken, taking on a life of their own. If they lasted long enough, they even acquired something resembling a personality. Admittedly, it seemed to always be the personality of a pissed off, hungry predator, but who was going to imbue their mystical steed with the spirit of a relaxed rabbit?
Too aware of his breathing, wondering whether his heartbeat was too loud, Bobby tried to simultaneously step lightly and bounce over to the girl, to the centre of their light. It wasn’t for another hundred metres at least, which meant two corridors and at least ten rooms filled with glistening nightmares, that he risked talking. “What the hell are those snakes?” Idue whispered back, even lower than he’d spoken. “Naga babies. Don’t worry, they’re easy to kill at that age.” “Hold on. Babies? Are you kidding me? Some of those bodies were two metres across!” “Yeah, they only get their arms later on. Stay quiet, let’s walk on. Summer’s passing, they’re starting to hibernate.”
The house of the Braves Bobby rose to consciousness in a sea of light. Even with his eyes closed, a glorious brightness flooded his skull and threatened to burst out of his temples. A delicate choral melody played in the background, sounding like children’s laughter twinkling through a field of crystal teeth. His back sunk in a mattress so soft that it nearly hugged him. When he tried opening his eyes, it hurt. Light assaulted him, bursting from the blanket, from the walls, even from the curtains on the windows and the drapes around his bed. The room was made entirely of shades of bright, and they all wanted him to go blind. Outside of Sunday afternoon fantasy movies, he’d never seen that many surfaces glow at once. The whole heavenly thing was really annoying, and made his eyeballs sore. It took him forever to focus on the shapes around his bed, and even then it took a few more minutes for the whiteout to subside. The first thing he did was to look around for the speakers the angelic singing was coming from. It was starting to grate on his nerves, which was no mean feat considering the luminal assault on his vision. Sadly, he found nothing that might have been broadcasting the thin, ethereal whine. There was nothing in the room that looked even remotely technological. The polar bear rugs covered an ivory floor on which an albino redwood desk stood. Arbie sat on one of the two ice-coloured chairs loaded with pillows that might have well been made of clouds. Bobby tried to look for a window out of curiosity, wondering just how white the sky was going to be.
In Bobby’s dream, an old monk was sitting at a scarred desk in an dusty room. Twin brass lecterns held a book each, or rather a book and the copy the old monk had been working on. Between the lecterns, scattered precisely within reach of one arm or another, were half a dozen pens and twice as many nibs, three bottles of ink, and a sheaf of almost clean papers. The sunset of a rocky shore bled in from the high windows behind him and washed over the papers and instruments, turning everything orange and crimson.
Bobby swayed on his feet, besieged. He felt lost, and that made him mad. When the torn hulk of the garbage truck flew past him, he just swayed a little and traced its path through the air. It made a sound like a falling airplane. Its front was still mangled, blood-spattered and crushed where it had hammered Mrs Wong into the wall. Absorbed by the spectacle, numb to its significance, Bobby admired the way the tonnes of metal spun elegantly, suspended and rushing through space in a way that its makers had never intended. When the truck cratered into the ground, he barely even twitched. He watched it creak and slump to its side, black smoke coming from bits of it that weren’t supposed to be up in the air. “That was very rude of your friend, Bobby. She shouldn’t have ruined that truck. Not very civically minded.”
“Oh, really? I’m so sorry you and psycho girl got burdened with me! Because I definitely asked to be saddled with every goddamned freak in the world when my mother got kidnapped, you know!” She took a step back. Her face set slowly. A web of ice grew over his stomach as her expression became more and more serious. Then, her eyes became sad when he called her a freak, and Bobby would have set fire to the world just to avoid seeing that one more second. He nearly did. It would have been the wiser choice, Instead, he kept going. “Don’t look at me like that! I asked for none of this. I was going to start a channel with Mike! Maybe go take a few pictures of abandoned prisons and stuff like that. I don’t want any of this, so get away from me and leave me alone, goddamn it!” But she just looked at him, cradling her arms. He couldn’t stand the sight, knowing he’d caused it, so he got away instead, turning to the trees and retreating from her and the pale girl, removing himself from their presence and the demon’s. She didn’t call him again, and he didn’t deserve to be called. He knew this. He’d done the same to Arbie, and now he’d hurt the only friend he had in the world who could do anything at all to help him. Why did the pale girl have to be smiling so happily?
This was getting weird, but Elkie couldn’t disagree. She felt her thoughts float, and she heard Dad’s words, and his images made sense in the dark, in that room, in the embrace of his voice. “Good. Now, with your next breath, take some of that air in. Bring it to your thoughts, in the space here with my voice. Let it float in your mind. Then, push it down your left shoulder, and down your arm. Squeeze it past your wrist, and let it settle into your palm. Feel its warmth, let it play on your skin.” Elkie just kind of tried to picture it like he said, and she tried not to giggle because it was all a little bit silly. “Now, princesses, open your eyes.” Elkie opened her eyes, ready to laugh at Dad for the silly joke he’d played on them. But something had changed in the room. And Selkie was looking down, terrified but kind of laughing and looking like she might start screaming any second. Her face looked purple. And when Elkie looked down, she understood why. There were lights in their hands. Selkie’s was purple, and Elkie’s was green. Small little balls of light about the size of a mandarin, faint and wobbly, but real.
The third controlled his mother’s prison. She was right there, maybe thirty yards away, suspended in a swirling smoke cocoon. She was still wearing the same summer dress and apron from the morning she’d been captured, but her shoes had been lost somewhere along the way. At regular intervals, the Prime would reappear before the controls and make some lights flash. In response, the swirling smoke around Callie would grow thicker, obscuring her completely before starting to fade again, resetting whatever was keeping her in place. It was strange, the way it could not control that one spell directly, but Bobby couldn’t think about that now, his mother waved, a gentle smile on her expression. “You have me now. Set my mother free, bastard!”. He flat out screamed. The Scion tries to bargain for what is not his to give. Noise disrupts calculations. Probability of function loss on mutilation too high. The Scion’s voice frequency was silenced. Was what he got in response. Bobby punched his prison, but the way his hands stopped in mid-swing just didn’t make for a satisfying act of violence. He really wanted to break something right about now. “What? You’re ghosting me? Are you fucking kidding?”
Today, they were having breakfast at Bobby’s again, for the first time since Callie had been kidnapped. Mike looked around at the kitchen as if he hadn’t seen it in an eternity. He could clearly sense something had changed, but the twin handicaps of being both a boy and a teenager were keeping his brain from properly processing the differences.
Idue’s expression softened as the brooding elf started to walk away. “Sit, Voulk. I don’t want you to hate me”. She was too good to him. More powerful than any magic, her words melted Voulk’s sourness into mild recalcitrance. He sat, hands in his lap, well away from her. Wise. “The human surprised me. It’s been a while since I had a wizard come knocking. I hate them.” “Then maybe shouldn’t have let a wizard go nuts on your skin with a tattoo needle.” For the first time since they’d met him, Voulk smiled. It was nothing special, Bobby decided. Those chiselled angular features weren’t made for smiling. It was a terrible smile, Bobby reassured himself. Voulk continued. “I was trying to impress this maiden, you know” She just ignored that, as effortlessly as she ignored Bobby’s puppy eyes. Ignoring fools was something she clearly had a lot of practice in.
“Grandfather?” “Yes, that’s me” “Do you ever feel like there is something bright at the centre of the world?” Bobby stared at the leading mutt. It was cream-coloured, with coffee stain patches on its back and sides. It may have once had Labradors and setters in its lineage. Its leash coiled around its neck and around its leg, before rising back up in the air. Arbie leaned over, partially blocking Bobby’s gaze, now fixed on a strangely coloured infinity. “Bobby, is everything all right?” No, Bobby was not all right. The world was moving away from him and becoming bigger at the same time. He tried explaining it, but something else came out. “We are choking it. It just wants to shine. Some days the colours bleed into each other through wounds that should never have been opened, and I can see the hollow where it lies.” Bobby was fine. He thought it hard and clear so his grandfather wouldn’t worry. Why did a stray dog have a leash? Why was the leash covered in skin? All the dogs in the pack had one. Strange leashes, they came out of one ear, some right, some left, and wrapped around the dogs’ necks before joining all up. The horizon twisted into a swirl, treetops and distant buildings curving into spirals that slowly uncoiled again. Clouds and landscape alike were being pulled into black holes that weren’t black but bright and warm. Everything moved,
A sarcastic comment, a wry line, plain anger. He could have dealt with all those. But his mother actually expressing support and faith in his abilities? That was too weird, thought Bobby as he stood suspended in a magic-cancelling force field a hundred feet off the ground inside an ancient stone supercomputer.