“‘Night, Mom.”

“Good night, honey.”

Wilburn listened to his mother’s footsteps descending the staircase. He heard her stamp into her boots, and then a squeal of hinges followed by the soft clunk of the door closing. Mom had gone to talk to Gramma where he couldn’t overhear, because she wanted to ask questions about Dad… questions that might have nasty answers. Mom was worried that Dad might have done bad things, and that he, Wilburn, might do bad things too if he found out… something like that. Mom’s logic was confusing, partly, Wilburn sensed, because Mom herself was confused—very confused—and also scared, and… sad. She didn’t want Wilburn to know this, and in truth he wished he didn’t. But he knew. Just as he knew that Mom was currently feeding carrots to Thoralf, and that Thoralf was enjoying them immensely. How he knew these things, Wilburn didn’t know, nor did it occur to him to wonder.

He lay on his back, rubbing the worn flannel fabric of Toukie’s wing between his thumb and forefinger. It was a habit he’d developed in the cradle. The stuffed toucan was his oldest friend, a zeroth birthday gift from Gramma Totkins, who had been Mom’s mom before she died. Wilburn couldn’t remember her at all, but Mom retold the story every time she sewed a fresh patch on Toukie’s wing; the hole was always in the left wing, because Wilburn was left-handed, and always in the same spot, where his forefinger and thumb met automatically. He wished Mom had a Toukie of her own tonight. She needed it. The habit was so wonderfully relaxing. It was like scratching an itch without the itch. So soothing… so… comforting… so… Wilburn yawned.

* * * * * * *

He found himself standing at a crossroads. In the center was a weathered signpost with four arrows labeled in shimmering silver script. Mom had taught him how to read, and Wilburn fancied he was getting pretty decent at it. These signs, however, stumped him. He couldn’t quite tell if the lettering was moving or not. At first glance it looked ordinary, but the longer he squinted at it, the more inscrutable it grew. Lettering...? Actually no, not from the alphabet he knew. More like runes, brutal, jagged symbols... or rather... flowing, loopy symbols? He began to suspect this wasn’t writing after all, just nonsense scribbling, put there as a joke. And then he noticed something strange. When he stopped trying to read the signs, their meanings became obvious. The arrow pointing right said Higher Astral, while the arrow pointing left said Lower Astral. This meant nothing to Wilburn. As far as he could see, neither road slanted up or down. Indeed, nothing whatsoever distinguished the four roads other than the signpost; the stones that paved them were identical, and the landscape was featurelessly brown in all directions. Even more disorienting was the absence of a sun in the cloudless blue sky. Whichever way he turned, his shadow landed straight behind him, and the signpost cast no shadow all.

…Deja vu…

A memory tickled the back of Wilburn’s mind. He had the oddest feeling he’d been here before. But where was here? He frowned at the signpost. The road in front of him was labeled Open Dreamspace, and the sign pointing behind him said Real Life. And then it clicked. This very afternoon, after he’d passed out from kinerg… kineter… whatever Gramma Fark had called it—too much flying—he had visited this crossroads in a dream. Of course, he only knew it was a dream in retrospect; he hadn’t at the time, although he probably should have guessed in light of the word Dreamspace being written on the signpost. So he was having the same dream all over again, was he? Lame. But as he thought about it, he realized he didn’t actually remember what had happened in the first dream. He had been here, yes, but... then what? Which road had he chosen?

For some reason, the memory wouldn’t come. It was right there on the tip of his brain… but no. Annoyed, Wilburn decided to try Open Dreamspace, because Real Life sounded boring to him, and the Astrals sounded even boringer. The instant he stepped forward—it occurred to him—this was exactly what he’d done before. Okay, but then what? Where had the road taken him? It was exceedingly vexatious, for he knew that he remembered now; part of him did. The memory was inside him, but something was blocking him from accessing it. He felt toyed with, taunted… watched. But there was nobody around to do it.

The only sound was the soft slap of his bare footsteps on the stones. Nothing changed as he proceeded. He began to wonder how much time had passed. It was almost as if none had. But surely it had been at least an hour... He felt like he was going nowhere. The landscape remained utterly barren. The road never curved, never rose, never fell. The only indication of his progress came when he looked back over his shoulder and could no longer see the crossroads or its signpost. It was the same view as in front of him, with the addition of his crisp black shadow. And then—Wilburn didn’t know quite how it happened—he was standing on a mountaintop.

“WOOO-WEE!” he shouted, dizzy from the sudden altitude. His voice echoed with perfect clarity over the vast range of snowcapped peaks jutting before him. He laughed as avalanches tumbled down ravines whose floors were lost in purple shadow. And his laughter triggered still more avalanches, none of which could touch him, for his was the highest peak of all, perhaps the highest point in the world. A perfectly good sun was shining, he was pleased to note, and his bare feet weren’t even cold, despite the knee-deep snow in which he stood. “This is more like it!” Wilburn called, to no one in particular. More like it, the mountains echoed, like it, like it, like it…

Wilburn wished, though, as he often did in Real Life, for a friend, someone to share this with. Not Mom—not that Mom wasn’t fun to play with on occasion, but you could never say things like, Last one there’s a stinky butthole! in front of her unless you wanted to solve math problems. And not another kid either. He knew a few down in the village, and, on the whole, he preferred Mom’s company to theirs. No, if he was honest with himself, what he wanted most was for Toukie to be real, as in alive. It had been easy to believe when he was little; Wilburn wasn’t quite sure when belief had turned into pretending, but lately even that had become difficult.

He lifted a hand to shade his eyes. There was a dark dot in the sky. And it was quickly growing larger. It was heading straight toward him. It was a bird. He could see its flapping wings now. Oddly small wings for such an oddly fat bird… with such a large, banana-shaped head… It couldn’t be. Or wait—perhaps it could it be! Open Dreamspace, he remembered. Did that mean wishes came true here?

“TOUKIE?” Wilburn called.

“What are you waiting for, Creator?” Toukie’s crow was just as Wilburn had imagined: like a rooster’s, but more flutelike due to his long beak. Wilburn had no clue how toucans were supposed to sound; they weren’t native to Argylon, and even Gramma Totkins had only seen paintings of them. Alive. Toukie was alive! With a whoop of delight, Wilburn threw himself from the mountain top. The wind caught him like familiar hands and lifted him on high, and boy and bird circled each other in the air, laughing and squawking. They were the same size here in Dreamspace, just as they had been on Wilburn’s zeroth birthday. Otherwise, Toukie’s appearance was nearly identical to Real Life. He was black with a yellow bib, blue feet, and a rainbow beak, and he had green-button eyes with smaller, black buttons for pupils. The only difference, apart from his size, was Toukie’s wing, his left, from which shone a golden light.

“What’s up with that?” Wilburn asked, pointing.

Toukie stopped flapping at once. Apparently he’d been doing it out of excitement, rather than necessity, for he continued to hover as he held out his wing for Wilburn to inspect. There were no patches or holes as was the case in Real Life; instead, a golden circle radiated from the spot that Wilburn always rubbed. The gold gleamed brightly at the center and faded to black at the circumference, blending seamlessly into the fabric of the wing. Wilburn leaned closer, and beheld, within the circle, a beautiful pattern that reminded him of music, and of plants, and, strangely, of mathematics… but in a good way. “Cool,” he said. “What is it?”

“That is your fingerprint, Creator.” Toukie’s cartoonish voice managed to strike a tone of reverence. “That is the mark left by your ritual touch. That is exaltiture.” The stuffed bird appeared to be having a religious experience.

“You okay?” Wilburn asked, cocking an eyebrow at him.

“Okay?” Toukie squawked. “Okay? I am ALIVE! Thank you, Creator! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

“I didn’t create you,” Wilburn said. “That was Gramma Totkins. But she’s dead.”

“No, Creator.” Actual tears trickled from Toukie’s button eyes, “I’m not the object your grandmother made. I’m me. I’m a real person. I exist. I feel. I am everything you imagined me to be, because you imagined me. And now I have my own imagination—because you gave me a portion of your soul!”

There was a pause.

“I don’t get it,” Wilburn said.

“I know you don’t, Creator!” And with that Toukie broke down. Flinging his wings around Wilburn, he sobbed uncontrollably into his shoulder. It was like being hugged by a large, and increasingly moist pillow.

“It’s all right,” Wilburn said, hugging Toukie back.

“Yes,” Toukie sobbed. “Yes… I love you, Creator.”

“Oh, well, I love you too,” Wilburn mumbled, blushing.

The two hung hugging in the air, hundreds of feet above the mountains. When at last Toukie’s sobbing subsided, and they broke apart, Wilburn said, “So... tell me again what this is?” He tapped the golden spot on Toukie’s wing. As he did, the pattern pulsed and Toukie shivered. “You are generous, Creator. I do not deserve so much exaltiture. But thank you. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”

Toukie looked ready to cry again, so Wilburn quickly said, “Exaltiture? What’s that mean?”

“It is a force, Creator, which bestows sentience—inner-life. It is the animating power of the universe. Exaltiture flows from the Great Creator through beings of the highest realms. It can only be given, never taken, only grown, never destroyed. The greatest gods exalt the lesser gods, who exalt lesser deities, on and on and on down the Astral Plane. Highly exalted mortals such as yourself, Creator, can grant sentience to thought-forms, such as me, through ritual magic. And that’s exactly what you did. You named me, you played with me, you spoke for me, you felt emotions for me, and every night you focused your attention on the point between your thumb and forefinger: the ritual touch. Whenever you rub that stuffed toy’s wing, you enter a state of trance, which you conceptually associate with me, this me. I know it was an accident, Creator, but I must say it was elegantly done. The toy functioned as a ritual object through which you channeled your exaltiture. Now that I’m sentient, the object is unnecessary. I’m not bound to it as you are to your body. You can throw it in the fire tomorrow, if you wish. I will remain.

“You see, Creator, by repeating the ritual, day after day, year after year, you created a thought-form, which existed here, on the Astral Plane, like a sketch that you traced over and over again, darkening lines, filling in ever greater detail. The thought-form contained all that I am now, but it was not alive. It wasn’t me yet, because exaltiture—I hope I’m getting this right, Creator, because I’ve only read the Introduction so far—exaltiture is an aspect of magic; and just as your magical power lay dormant, so did I, as mere potential, waiting to be realized. And then, when your power manifested, so did I. So did I, Creator. At that moment I knew and remembered everything you had ever imagined me to know—and nothing else. I dare say it was the most confusing moment of my life!” Toukie gave an awkward little chitter, which, Wilburn assumed, must be his version of a giggle. “But before long,” Toukie continued, “a nice elf from the ACTODD turned up and explained a few things, and then she gave me this.” Toukie reached into his pocket—apparently he had one, although he wasn’t wearing clothes—and withdrew a remarkably thick book. Its cover displayed more squirming silver runes like those on the signpost at the crossroads. Wilburn couldn’t read them, yet he somehow knew exactly what they said. The title of the book was, Oops, You Exist: A Handbook for Accidentally Created Tulpas. And beneath these words was written, Published by the Accidentally Created Tulpa Orientation and Development Department. “Like I said, I’ve only read the introduction,” Toukie said, his button eyes widening. “But it explains a lot, Creator. It explains a whole hell of a lot.”

“Huh…” Wilburn scratched his ear. He almost asked what a tulpa was, but then he thought better of it. “Hey!” he said. “Let’s do something fun!”

“What do you have in mind, Creator?”

They began to drift aimlessly together through the sky.

“I dunno,” Wilburn said. “Just something cool, you know?”

“Like what, Creator?”

“I dunno,” Wilburn said again restlessly.

“Anything you can conceive is possible, Creator. This is your dream. Everything you see around us is a product of your mind.”

“Nah,” Wilburn scoffed.

“I believe I am correct about this, Creator.”

“But I could never dream up something like that.” Wilburn again poked at the golden spot on Toukie’s wing.

“You underestimate yourself,” Toukie replied. “You are the creator, Creator. Perhaps I haven’t made that clear enough.”

Wilburn rubbed his chin. “So you’re saying I’m, like, somehow controlling all this, or something, without even meaning to?”

“Precisely that, Creator.”

Wilburn looked around. “ALL THE SNOW IS ICE CREAM!” he screamed. And suddenly—it was so. Suddenly, the mountain peaks glistened strawberry pink, chocolate brown, vanilla white… that one still looked like snow from Wilburn’s elevation, but he decided to take it on faith. “Last one there’s a stinky butthole!” he called as he dove toward the nearest chocolate pinnacle. Toukie was right behind him. And then Toukie was ahead of him, and in fact it was he, Wilburn, who turned out to be the stinky butthole, but it didn’t matter as the two of them plowed into what could easily be described as the most ice cream anyone had ever seen. “WE NEVER GET SICK!” Wilburn shouted, slamming a scoop the size of his face into his face. And it was so. Toukie cawed his approval, and plunged his whole head under the snow—ice cream—whichever.

The pair flew from peak to peak, sampling every flavor of ice cream Wilburn could think of. This went on for some time, or perhaps no time at all, for that was how time worked in Dreamspace. They never got sick, and they never got full. But eventually they did grow tired of their gluttony and lay down side by side in the slick stickiness. Far out beyond the mountains, they could see an ocean, sparkling cheerfully in the sunlight. Some time, or perhaps no time at all later, Wilburn asked lazily, “Where’s my toboggan?” He sat up with a grunt—and there it was. “And now it’s twice as big,” he declared. And it was so. “And now it’s twice as fast, and now the mountain’s twice as steep! Come on, Toukie!”

“Ah,” Toukie said. “Tobogganing. Are you… quite sure, Creator?”

“What?”

“Remember when you steered into that tree, Creator?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s probably because you hit your head after the part that you imagined me to be experiencing with you, which I now remember having experienced with you.”

“Wait… say that again.”

“Remember when you steered into the briar patch?”

Wilburn thought about it. “I was only six then,” he said, laughing. “Besides, Mom patched you up.”

“You’re only seven now,” Toukie said, his voice somewhat shriller than before. “If it’s all the same to you, Creator, I’d prefer—” he broke off abruptly.

Wilburn felt it too. A pressure… A vibration… An irresistible… presence… It was all around him and within him, pushing him, pulling him toward… Deja vu… Icy dread coursed up Wilburn’s spine. The other dream. The first, forgotten dream—he must remember—it was vitally important. Think! Wilburn wracked his brain. People… lots of them… chanting, in a circle… and… a fire… and… a white ox? That section was still hazy, but the next part…

“She’s coming!” Wilburn hissed. “Toukie, it’s Her—” but Toukie was gone. Wilburn spun around in time to see him hop into the air. “Toukie, come back!”

“I’m sorry, Creator,” Toukie squawked, “but you never imagined me to be brave!” And off he flew, diminishing to a dot in perhaps no time at all. If only Wilburn could have followed. If only he could have fled, as he had done the first time. For he remembered now how the first dream had ended. It had ended with the presence. With Her. With him barely escaping Her, racing back to the crossroads, down the road to Real Life with Her right behind him, and awaking in the cottage just as the hornets were landing on the roof. Her presence had been strong then, almost too strong to resist. But this time? This time it was crushing.

…Wilburn! …Get down here! Mom’s voice echoed from far side of the universe, causing a window in the back of Wilburn’s mind to open. Through the window, he looked down upon his body, thrashing in his blankets in his bed in the loft, far, far below. But he could not return. Although he fought with every fiber of his being, he could not pass through the window. He was paralyzed. This isn’t real, he told himself, as panic swelled within him. It’s only a dream. Nothing can hurt you in a dream. He didn’t actually believe it, though. His powers had abandoned him, just as Toukie had abandoned him. His dream body was ignoring his orders to move, and his Real Life body was ignoring his orders to be still. Neither belonged to Wilburn now; they were detached things, foreign objects. Any illusion of control was gone.

He stood rigid as a statue, his gaze nailed to a distant point beyond the ocean. There was nothing he could do to prevent himself from seeing what was coming—what he knew no mortal eye was meant to see. His very mind was slipping, his ability to choose, to simply will. Thoughts came and went, but Wilburn couldn’t steer them. He could not react. He could only experience. And what he experienced was... terror. How lucky he had been the first time! In the first dream, he had felt only the brush of Her, the faintest whisper of Her power. Now he would look full upon Her face—and be destroyed.

She came. Her Majesty rose up out of the ocean, not from underwater, but from behind the horizon, beyond the edge of the world. Her shadow gobbled up the world. Her wings reached wider than the sky. Her vastness was a thing greater than physical proportion; it was a magnitude of being, of reality itself. Her sheer existence was so terribly, pants-wettingly much—it shattered Wilburn’s capacity to perceive.

God. The word sang through him like his own true name. God. What else—who else—could it be? There simply wasn’t room, there simply wasn’t enough… everything… for this to be… anything… but… God. God.

Perhaps, if Wilburn had paid a bit more attention in church instead of imagining what the stained-glass windows would taste like if they were made of candy, it would have occurred to him that God had never been described as having the appearance of a three-eyed hornet, even one as superlatively colossal as Her Majesty. Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t have occurred to him. Perhaps even a priest would have been hoodwinked by Her Majesty’s... well, majesty. For indeed, her beauty surpassed description, wrought in colors for which Wilburn knew no words. In basic shape, She was a hornet with a third eye in the center of Her head. This super-form, however, was composed of a bafflingly intricate latticework of geometry, whose complexity of detail exponentiated as the distance between Herself and Wilburn shrank, as Her gravity plucked Wilburn off the mountaintop and hurled him toward Her.

Wilburn…! Mom’s voice echoed again. Through the little window Wilburn saw her rush upstairs and drop to her knees at his bedside. Wilburn saw, but it meant nothing. No connection. No context, or relevance to him. He had the feeling you get when someone jumps out from behind a corner and says Boo—except it didn’t fade—the instant of blind shock persisted, and he could not accept it, could not process, could not wrap his mind around the impossible yet undeniable fact of Her.

Closer he fell. Closer. The face of the great vexpid Queen expanded past the edges of his vision. Her glory was devastating. Her presence, Her intelligence, was searing. He fell faster. He was hurtling toward the center of Her third eye. The vast, glittering hemisphere swelled before him, constructed from a trillion hexagonal cells, each bigger than a planet. With no obvious moment of transition, the eye’s convexity turned into a concavity, a tunnel. He fell into it. Down, down, into a whirling vortex of hexagons. She swallowed him. He was inside Her. Then… he wasn’t anywhere.

He didn’t exist. Only She existed. Only Her Majesty—All-Seer—Hive Mother—the Queen. For a beat which might have lasted an eternity, there was no such person as Wilburn Fark. Then She began to recreate him. She conjured Wilburn’s naked soul from nothingness, stripped of all memory and identity. He was a formless, nameless pinprick of awareness, unthinking, unknowing—terrified. And then…

He was a boy… in red pajamas... falling down a corridor of light… his name was Wilburn... Wilburn tried to turn his head. He couldn’t move. In Real Life, he was lying in the root cellar. Despite the darkness, he could see himself quite clearly through the little window in the back of his mind. He was pinned between two heavy sacks of flour. His body spasmed with the violent force of Her Majesty’s possession. Until...

She released him. The paralysis lifted from Wilburn’s dream body at the same moment his Real Life body stilled. It all came back to him. His physical, mental, and magical facilities returned. He was... fine?

He was fine. And suddenly, he understood. A ray of gratitude broke through the blackness of his terror, transmuting his terror into awe. The message couldn’t have been clearer. He was Hers. Utterly. Irrevocably. It was by Her mercy alone that he existed, for no power truly belonged to him, no attribute, apart from that which She deigned to bestow. Unbelievably, this greatest of all beings cared about him, loved him in fact. She had erased him, then restored him, so that he would understand—he had been chosen. Wilburn’s heart pounded. He discovered he wasn’t falling anymore. He was flying. He was ascending into golden light.

We have a purpose for you. Her Majesty spoke without language, in a voice of pure meaning that entered Wilburn’s mind like an epiphany. This was it. This was the reason. This was why he had been born.

Serve.

YES! Wilburn responded with his whole soul, pouring forth affirmation. YES! YES! He was weeping in passion. It was the realest, most beautiful moment of his life. All around him spiraled a tantalizing pattern, redolent of music and plants and mathematics. It seemed to express an essential harmony of nature, a dance of opposites and balancing extremes. He felt himself aligning with the pattern, as if some internal string were being tuned. Her Power reverberated through him—it was his power—his to wield, so long as he served. He didn’t need to grasp the full significance to know what he must do. There was a rhythm to the pattern. The next step in the dance was obvious. The Path was illuminated. It was preordained.

The ritual, which had been set in motion long before his birth, must be completed. Oh, he had a choice, of course; this was essential to the ritual. The options were service or slavery. Not much of a choice, some might say, but Wilburn knew otherwise. It was the difference between doing it, or having it happen to him. His choice was made. He would not cower from his destiny. Besides, he wasn’t frightened anymore. He understood, and he agreed. In fact, he wanted to do it… more than he had ever wanted anything. He wanted to touch the center.

Somehow, it was directly above him and directly in front of him at the same time, a point of absolute, perfect light, the point where every part of the pattern converged. It crackled with energy, dangerous, so, so dangerous, yet irresistibly attractive. Wilburn flew toward it. Down in the root cellar, his body arose. It was the least effort to throw the trapdoor open. Magic surged between the worlds, bridging the two versions of him. He paid just enough attention to the little window in the back of his mind to keep from bonking his head as he floated himself up through the trapdoor. The greater part of his awareness remained fixed upon the center, the very center of the center—the heart of the Great Mystery.

In one world, he glided to meet the waiting hornet. In the other world, he soared into the golden light of exaltiture. In both worlds, he reached out his hand.