I 

Smell was the first sense to return to Wilburn as reality rebuilt itself, and what a strange bouquet it was. Rotten eggs for starters—there was no missing that stench—and then an acrid burning smell, and underneath these, a subtler, minerally smell like… hot stone? Next came tactile sensations, extra sharp after their absence: the tickle of hair on Wilburn’s scalp, the swaddling softness of his clothing, the silky fabric of Alfajean’s pant leg in his fingers, and the hot smoothness of a stone floor pressing up under the soles of his bare feet. Then sound—a distant gurgling—and sight—a storm of swirling speckles that resolved into the interior of a temple.  

A temple… wow. The word church wouldn’t cut the mustard. Here was, if not the templiest temple ever built, then a shortlist contender for that honor. It was a vast hexagonal pavilion defined by six towering pillars of black basalt. Between the pillars— nothing—only a panoramic sky. The architecture screamed at you LOOK UP, and when you did, you saw a vaulted ceiling hundreds of feet high, wrought with an ornate pattern of interlocking hexagons: black around the edges, fading to a single hexagon of brightest alabaster in the center. That was what you actually saw, but what you seemed to see, for just a moment, was a vertical shaft ascending into infinity… almost like a portal. The temple was so huge it could’ve fit twenty or thirty cottages, Wilburn figured, and it was absolutely empty.

“Is it just us, or are we unfashionably early?” Iddo asked.

“Strategically early,” Alfajean corrected him, “enough to guarantee we’d be the first ones to arrive.”

“Ah yes, the old waiting-around strategy. Very clever.” 

“Tis better to wait fur than to be late fur,” Alfajean said primly. “We have a poster at the office of a baby bunny with a wristclock saying that. Get it…? A bunny? Fur?”  

No one laughed. It wasn’t that Wilburn’s seven-year-old wit was too sophisticated for such punnybusiness—au contraire, Alfajean’s egregious joke would ordinarily have had him in hysterics, but just now, Wilburn felt edgy, unsteady… There was something in the air… something besides the stench of rotten eggs… a restless energy, a tension, like a balloon inflated almost to the point of bursting… and still inflating, stretching tighter and tighter, and you just knew it was gonna go BANG at any second.

A deep enchantment lies upon this place, Iddo thought to him. Don’t look with your eyes, my boy, look with your mind. Look for the colors that aren’t part of the rainbow. The complexity is… breathtaking…

Aloud, Iddo said, “Well, Lieutenant Angel, your memo mentioned a ritual, and now you’ve brought us to a temple. I begin to comprehend. The prophet is here to witness, and later create a record of this event; he will not participate in the ritual directly, I think… nor will you. Only Wilburn and myself. Or…” Iddo studied Alfajean’s reaction closely. Wilburn could tell he wasn’t reading the angel’s mind; he was just guessing, and hoping Alfajean would accidentally betray something important. “No…” Iddo said thoughtfully. “I’m not part of it either. Only Wilburn will participate in the ritual. So why bring me along? Not for the pleasure of my company, I dare say. Am I to be a subject of Buttrom’s prophecy despite my lack of involvement in the ritual…? Oh, go on, Lieutenant Angel, you can at least give me a hint. We’re on the same side here, remember?”

Alfajean hesitated, then they said carefully, “Upper Management has appointed you to serve as Wilburn’s master, Master Bungflower.” 

“I’m aware of that, Lieutenant Angel, but we both know that’s not the real reason I’m here. The PROVED spurns my involvement at all cost. I don’t believe you would have summoned me unless my presence was utterly essential to the operation. You need me to do something that no one else can. What?”

“I’m sorry, Master Bungflower—that’s classified.”

“Hmm. You’re very confident that I will play my part without instruction…”

Alfajean was silent.

“Ahh,” Iddo said quietly, “I see. We’re expecting enemies. And you’re expecting me to oppose them of my own volition. The question is: am I to be a shield… or a sword?”

At the mention of enemies Alfajean gave a small start, which was as good as confirmation. “I… think it would be in-bounds for me to compliment your deductive reasoning, Master Bungflower,” they said. “Let me just add, for general context, that it has never been the policy of the PROVED to employ the sword when the shield will suffice.”

Iddo nodded slowly. “I can work with that. How many enemies? One? Two? Fifty?”

“I can’t answer that, I’m afraid.”

“Because it’s classified, or because you don’t know?”

“Well…”

“There’s no rule against admitting what you don’t know, is there?”

“Well…”

II

Wilburn wasn’t paying close attention to Iddo and Alfajean’s discussion; he was busy looking for the colors that weren’t part of the rainbow. His eyes were closed. He could’ve sworn that he was looking with his mind… He couldn’t see doodly-squat. I can’t see a doodly-squat, he thought to Iddo, eventually.

With practice, my boy. Here—Iddo broadcast his own vision of the temple on their private mental channel, even as he continued to speak to Alfajean. Wilburn caught his breath. It was… it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his entire life. A vast sculpture of impossible colors surrounded them in metaphysical space. There were new colors! Wilburn couldn’t believe his mind’s eye. The whole thing was like a sunflower or the center of a daisy, a spiraling fractal-patterned dome knit from a bazillion hair-thin filaments of color. Like lasers, Wilburn would’ve thought, if he’d known what lasers were. And the more he looked the more he saw: every detail collapsing into greater and still greater detail upon scrutiny. A feeling of awe rose up within his chest. Did people make this? he wondered.

People? Certainly. What you really want to know is whether humans made it, and that’s much trickier to answer. If so, it is among the greatest achievements of your species, the work of many generations of magicians who devoted their lives to the project of their ancestors and passed it down unfinished to their descendants. 

How can you tell?

The recursiveness of these meta-energy circuits, for one thing. They’re a bit like tree rings. We don’t have time to get into the theory of it now, but whenever you see spell patterns like this, you can be fairly certain you’re dealing with cyclic repetition, one of the the key elements of ritual magic. In this case, I estimate that dozens of different rituals were performed thousands of times over at precisely targeted intervals, determined by… I can’t say exactly, perhaps the cycle of the seasons and the orbits of the celestial spheres. Not, in any case, the sort of task at which mortals typically excel. It would require a continuity of culture unprecedented in the modern age. We’re talking about the combined magical output of a whole society of magicians, over the course of—

But the thought was cut short by Alfajean saying loudly, “What in world are you doing to my trousers, Wilburn?”

“Huh…?” Wilburn took inventory of himself. “Whoops—sorry!” The silky fabric of the angel’s pant leg felt so similar to Toukie’s wing that he’d unconsciously been rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger while thought-speaking with Iddo. As soon as Wilburn realized what he was doing, he jerked his hand away as if a snake had struck at it. He was mightily embarrassed. 

III

Iddo had gotten out his wizidex and was peering at it quizzically. He didn’t seem to need to touch the thing to use it; the device simply hovered in the air before his nose, doing… whatever it was doing… Wilburn couldn’t see. Then suddenly he could see, as Iddo broadcast his perspective on their private mental channel once again. The wizidex displayed rippling silvery blue water, overlaid with a white grid and a few strings of numbers Wilburn didn’t understand, and in the middle was a small, pulsating red dot. 

“Well, isn’t that fascinating…” Iddo said. “According to MagiMaps, we’re at the bottom of the North Orfidic Ocean right now.” 

Buttrom giggled, causing everyone to jump. It was hard to remember he was there most of the time. “Silly me!” the prophet cried, in a wild voice. “I forgot to pack my swimsuit!” He grinned around manically without meeting anybody’s eye. Then he lay down on the floor. 

Now there’s a brittle branch, Iddo thought. But he said aloud, “Buttrom, my friend, only a fool clings to sanity in the face of the impossible. The wise exchange their sanity for the truth, because the truth is impossible. The universe is a miracle, and you’re part of that miracle, like it or not, so you might as well embrace the nonsense and become the madman you were born to be. All the best prophets are mad. Everyone says so. The madder the better when it comes to prophets—wouldn’t you agree, Lieutenant Angel?”

“Oh yes,” Alfajean said seriously. “Yes, the madder the better, Buttrom. Master Bungflower is quite right.” 

“You’re both insane!” Buttrom shrieked.

“True,” Iddo and all eight of Alfajean’s voices said in unison. 

Iddo chuckled. “That’s rather the point I’m trying to make, Buttrom. It’s much easier to fulfill your function in the universe when you quit trying to pretend the universe is something other than it is. But do have it your way, of course—there’s ultimately no other way to have it.”

“I want to go home,” Buttrom moaned.

IV

Wilburn ran to the edge of the pavilion. The ocean… he’d never seen it before! Mom had seen it, though, when she was little, and she’d told him all about it, and… this definitely wasn’t the ocean. Wilburn’s disappointment was short lived. You gotta see this, he thought to Iddo, who lumbered over obligingly, the clop-clop of his hooves oddly staccato in the vast space, and together the two of them looked down… down… down… 

The temple stood atop a mountain—or rather, in the top of a mountain, because the top of this particular mountain was a hollow basin—a caldera, Iddo called it. The pavilion’s floor was level with the rim of the basin, because the pavilion was in fact only the upper tip of an enormous hexagonal pyramid—a ziggurat, Iddo called it—whose foundation rested, presumably, on the basin’s floor, although you couldn’t actually see it, because the basin’s floor was covered by a lake. So what you saw was steps ascending from the water, except you barely saw the water; what you really saw was steps ascending out of steam. And when you did catch a glimpse of water through the swirling curtains of vapor, it wasn’t smooth or rippling or ribbed with waves the way a normal lake would’ve been; it was a seething, churning monster. The lake was boiling. And—peeeee-yew!—the rotten-egg stench was just awful. Although, Iddo said it wasn’t rotten eggs, it was brimstone[,] which was another word for sulfur. 

A narrow trail snaked its way up the inner slope of the basin, cutting across bathtub rings that marked the previous high-water levels, then climbing several hundred feet up through what had, until recently it appeared, been fertile vegetation. The plants within the basin were now dark and wilted like overcooked spinach, those nearest the water little more than clumps of slime, while higher up the ferns and palms became at least distinguishable from one another, and the ones around the rim of the basin, where the trail folded over to go squiggling down the mountainside, might have even been alive—though, if they were, they clearly wouldn’t be much longer. 

The vegetation on the outer slopes of the mountain was a very different tale indeed. It was like the photosynthetic equivalent of a bodybuilders‘ convention—the plants were so healthy they seemed to be flexing leafy muscles. You could practically see the jungle growing. The jungle… yessiree. Wilburn knew a jungle when he saw one, even though he never had before. It was as good a first sight as the ocean would’ve been, he guessed. It was pretty darn impressive. There were no other mountains in the area, just this one, a solitary spire jutting from a flatland jungle that stretched farther than the eye could see—and the eye could see a balls long way from here, like… far. Nothing but jungle. Nothing but green. So much green, rolling on forever and ever and ever… rolling right over the curve of the horizon. 

Know what I think? Wilburn thought.

Iddo did, because Wilburn hadn’t yet learned to withhold his inner monologue, but he gamely replied, What’s that, my boy?

Wilburn gestured down into the swirling steam. I think, he thought, this is volcano. 

V

Yeah, because, see, Mom read me this book about volcanos one time. They’re these really big mountains that get filled up with melted rocks from underground—it’s called lava and it’s like pudding made of fire, because it’s all gloopy, you know? And when a mountain gets super full of lava it goes BLEHHH and barfs tons of lava everywhere! Isn’t that cool!

Hot, I would’ve thunk, Iddo thought.

Wilburn laughed. It was hot. Gnarly hot. But somehow the heat wasn’t bothering him. He just felt really, really hot, and it was fine. You can tell it’s gonna erupt soon, he thought, because, see how the plants are all dead? But they’re still green? That’s because the water wasn’t boiling before recently, I think. I think because this mountain must be filling up with lava really fast. I bet it’s getting really, really full… Wilburn’s grin faltered. Oh. Are we gonna die…?

The very question that keeps me up at night, my boy, metaphorically speaking. Technically speaking, I’m asleep right now, and so are you. We are Astral Projecting. Advanced dreaming, you could say. It’s not the lava that you should be afraid of here, if you should be afraid of anything. Only magic can hurt you on the Astral Plane… magic… in its infinite guises. The Astral Plane is more perilous than either of us can possibly imagine—but as for lava, there’s no reason we couldn’t go swimming in it. 

You’re kidding… This was the best news Wilburn had ever heard. He began to pray fervently for the volcano to erupt now—immediately. What if they missed it? What if the mountain didn’t blow up till tomorrow? He didn’t know if he could stand the disappointment. 

“How queer,” Alfajean said from right behind them, and several feet above. 

Wilburn and Iddo jumped. 

 “Oh, I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that my map shows us at the bottom of the Orfidic Ocean too…” A couple of Alfajean’s faces were gazing at their wizidex in puzzlement, while other faces gazed out over the jungle in bemusement.  

“What can you tell us about the temple’s enchantment?” Iddo asked.

“Nothing, I’m afraid. It’s all EONS.” 

Iddo sighed heavily. That’s short for Explain Only Necessary Sh—Stuff… he thought to Wilburn. Then to Alfajean he said, “All this ambient magic must be disrupting scrynet service. Without a connection, our dexes can’t access the universal coordinate system, thus MagiMaps can’t pinpoint our location in spacetime.”

“Ah, that makes sense. Yes, I’m sure you’re right, Master Bungflower.” 

“Indeed. The funny thing is, MagiMaps also incorporates a geocoordinate system that uses the earth’s magnetic field. The geo system doesn’t depend on scrynet service, so it shouldn’t be affected. It can’t give us our dimensional coordinates, but in theory…” Iddo cast a speculative glance at Alfajean, “these lat-long readings should be accurate.”

The angel’s expressions became studiously blank.  

“The possibilities,” Iddo continued, “are—A: this temple harbors a magnetic anomaly powerful enough to interfere with WizTech Industries’ proprietary magnetometric spells—B: the earth’s magnetic poles have shifted—C: we’ve telefracted to a different planet with uncannily earth-like conditions, or…” Iddo scrutinized Alfajean out of the corner of his eye, but the angel was giving nothing away for free this time. “D,” Iddo said, “none of the above, MagiMaps is correct about our latitude and longitude, and the North Orfidic Ocean simply… doesn’t exist… currently…”

The golden skin around the angel’s golden eyes tightened for just a second.

Bingo, Iddo thought to Wilburn, while outwardly pretending he hadn’t noticed. Just as I suspected. We’ve gone back in time. See what I mean about the present moment? Here we are, who knows how many thousands of years before our births, and yet it’s still right now, as it always is.

Neato! Wilburn thought. But hang on… what if we’ve gone into the future? 

Excellent question. I believe we can be fairly confident that this is the past with respect to planetary chronology, because geological evidence suggests that sea levels rose steadily for tens of thousands of years prior to our modern age—and that trend only seems to be speeding up, which means the geological time required for the North Orfidic Ocean to not only disappear but be replaced by a mature jungle such as the one we see before us would have to be millions of years… and that’s at least one order of magnitude bigger of a time-gap than the PROVED normally operates across. Whereas, if we’ve gone back in time as I surmise, the present moment may only be a couple dozen-thousand years before our modern age. Of course, there’s always the possibility that somewhere along the timeline a rogue god decides to violate the Neutral Earth Covenant and overhaul the entire biosphere… Difficult to account for that kind of thing. 

“What? No more wheedling questions for me?” Alfajean sounded the tiniest bit smug. “Have you accepted the necessity of operational secrecy at long last, Master Bungflower?”

“Something like that,” Iddo said, cheerfully. “You’re a tough nut, Lieutenant Angel. We should play cards sometime.”

“I would enjoy that, Master Bungflower.”

Not half as much as I would, Iddo thought.

VI

“Toucans!” Wilburn blurted. He had only just remembered. Toucans lived in jungles—this was one, so, math. “Guys! Come on! We’ve gotta go and look for them!”

“Certainly not,” Alfajean said, astonished. “You must remain within the circle, Wilburn. I thought I told you that already.”

Wilburn’s shoulders slumped. “What circle?” 

Alfajean pointed around the perimeter of the pavilion. 

“That’s not a circle, it’s a hexagon,” Wilburn said, before he could stop himself. Mom’s stupid math punishments. There had been many on geometry.

“True enough,” Alfajean said, giving Wilburn several small smiles, “but a hexagon implies an invisible circle—and those are the most powerful kind. Isn’t it so, Master Bungflower?”

“Quite so,” Iddo agreed. Look again, he added in thought-speak, and projected to Wilburn his vision of a fiery ribbon of impossible colors encircling the hexagonal platform of the pavilion, touching it only at the six points, where stood the six towering pillars of black basalt. The magic circle was incorporated into the greater complexity of the spiral flower-fractal dome—it was no wonder Wilburn hadn’t picked it out before.

“How come I’ve gotta stay inside it?” 

“Because it’s… part of the ritual,” Alfajean conceded. “During the ritual, you must be inside the circle, and the rest of us must be outside it. The ritual isn’t starting just yet, but I don’t want you running off to look for toucans, Wilburn.”

“Aww…”

Ask them what the ritual’s all about, Iddo thought. They seem more inclined to answer your questions than mine.

“Er, what’s this whole ritual thing about?” Wilburn asked.

“Well, it’s about…” Alfajean tapped one of their chins. “It’s about your destiny, Wilburn. Upper Management has chosen you to serve a very important purpose. I’m sorry, but that’s as much as I can tell you right now. You’re getting a bigger peek behind the curtain than most mortals ever do, trust me.”

Ask who else will be participating in the ritual, Iddo thought.

“Who else will be participating in the ritual?” Wilburn parroted. 

Alfajean squinted at him suspiciously. “You’re not thought-speaking with Master Bungflower behind my back, are you?” Wilburn’s guilty face must’ve been as good as a confession. Alfajean harrumphed. “Well, that’s not very polite. No, no, don’t mind me. I’ll just leave you two to your thoughts, then.” The angel stalked away in a huff.

They can’t do this? Wilburn wondered.

Iddo shook his head. Angels don’t operate in Thoughtspace. No one knows why. Well, no one on our level—I suppose Upper Management must know. But few mortals ever interact with an angel, so there’s not exactly an extensive body of research to consult. My personal theory is that angels are made from the same meta-material as Astral armor, and each one of them contains a private bubble of Thoughtspace sealed inside themselves. All their thinking happens within the bubble, but no thought ever enters or escapes.

VII

It was close to sunset, and the light was turning red. Alfajean, who still had the goblin sword sticking out of their helmet, sat crosslegged on the altar, nervously thumbing through their wizidex. Oh yeah, there was an altar—a hexagonal prism of black stone almost as tall as Wilburn. Despite its size and centrality, Wilburn hadn’t noticed it until Alfajean sat down on it… and for some reason he didn’t like to look at it for long. The sight of the altar gave him an uneasy feeling in his stomach. 

Neither Buttrom nor his bowl had budged. The prophet lay spread eagle on the floor of the temple, his round belly lifting and lowering the clay vessel over and over as he breathed. He appeared to be asleep, but Wilburn knew he wasn’t, because he could tell Buttrom was thinking; once in a while, Wilburn was even beginning to be able to tell what Buttrom was thinking. His awareness of Thoughtspace had expanded greatly over the past few hours, during which he and Iddo had done little else but thought-speak. The more they practiced, the more Wilburn could feel something deep within himself opening, like an extra hand that he’d been clenching in a tight fist all his life and was only now discovering how to uncurl the fingers of. 

Receiving Iddo’s projected thoughts was effortless, like filling a cup with water from a faucet, but the thoughts drifting from Buttrom’s untrained mind were nebulous, so it was more like trying to fill a cup with water from the air on a misty day. There was a backwards sort of trick to it, like the signpost at the crossroads. The harder Wilburn tried to read Buttrom’s mind, the harder it became, and when he stopped trying altogether, he got zilch; the sweet spot lay somewhere in the middle, a not-trying without trying not to try but also trying just a teensy-weensy bit mode, not at all easy to maintain. Not easy, yet more and more Wilburn found himself slipping into that mode of semi-active receptivity, of seeing without looking… hearing without listening… not reading Buttrom’s mind per say, just… noticing his thoughts as they drifted by.

Part of the trouble was that Buttrom’s thoughts were both repetitive and boring. None of this is real, Buttrom kept thinking. I’ve been in an accident and I’ve bonked my head and I’m lying in a coma and this all a hallucination. I’m going to fall asleep now, and when I wake up, I’ll be at home in bed, and I’ll have a nasty headache and I won’t remember any of this. 

He’s correct, in a way, Iddo thought. That is essentially what would happen if he could fall asleep… which is precisely why he will not be allowed to. It is his destiny to be here, the silly man. 

After failing to fall asleep for awhile, Buttrom would begin to pray: groveling, pathetic prayers that seemed to Wilburn designed to maximally irritate any divinity who might’ve been listening. Then Buttrom would start over with None of this real.

He’s wrong about that part, though, Iddo thought. The Astral Plane is no less real than Real Life, merely a different flavor of reality. Moreover, my gut tells me we’re in S-2 Parallelaspace—and my gut, unlike MagiMaps, is seldom mistaken. Parallelaspace is the lowest dimension of the Higher Astral Plane, and it exists parallel to Real Life as the name suggests, meaning the two dimensions are coextensive in spacetime, meaning that effectively we are Astral projecting in Real Life—though, technically that’s a contradiction in terms, because what makes Real Life Real Life is the fact that it’s the one dimension in the universe that is not the Astral Plane. We must be in Sector-2 Parallelaspace. Sector-1 is a utility level used for creating closed-time-loop sub-dimensions in Real Life space, and closed-space-sphere sub-dimensions in Real Life time—and if this was Sector-3 Parallelaspace, you’d be able to stick your hand straight through that pillar. 

Wilburn grinned and patted the pillar in question. It was solid stone. He sat with his bare feet dangling over the edge of the pavilion—they were just outside the circle, but his butt was in the circle, and Iddo said that was good enough. Iddo sprawled next to Wilburn on his belly with his haunches twisted sideways like a cat. Master and apprentice. They faced the south, watching the landscape flaunt its beauty with increasing shamelessness as the sun went down. Tubular clouds crawled over the jungle far below, looking like pink caterpillars with long blue shadows. 

What was that! Wilburn leapt to his feet, thrilled by the prospect of something—anything—finally happening after the long lull. What he’d seen was gone now, but it had been bright, a flicker of yellow near the foot of the volcano. There! Wilburn pointed so forcefully that his wrist popped. But the yellow speck was gone. Then it was back—then it was gone. The speck would vanish for minutes at a stretch, then reappear for just a second or two. It didn’t take Wilburn and Iddo long to realize that it was following the mountain path, weaving its way up the narrow corridor through the jungle. Whatever the yellow thing was, it was coming to temple. But at this rate it was gonna take for—ever.

VIII

Another hour passed. The sun slipped away beyond the right-hand edge of the world, while off to the left, the moon swam up to take its shift. A full moon, hazily orange as it crested the horizon; but the higher it rose, the crisper and bluer it became. In the twilight, the atmosphere around the mountain cooled, and the heatwaves wafting up from the caldera grew more vivid, distorting the downward view of dancing steam wraiths on the water. All the while the yellow light glided steadily up the mountain path. 

Not a torch, Wilburn and Iddo decided; the glow was too unwavering. An oil lantern became their running hypothesis, until the thing drew near enough for them to judge that it was big—perhaps as big as Iddo—and egg-shaped, at which point Iddo declared it a Category-Q, explaining that this was a useful term for anything that you had no idea what category to put it in, animal, vegetable, mineral, magical—Category-Q—a big fat open-ended question. 

The evening was still, and all was quiet save glugging of the lake. Then, gradually, a low murmur became audible and intensified to a rhythmic hum. It didn’t sound like human voices—but it was, for as the Category-Q ascended from the lower jungle and continued up the less-foliated portion of the mountain, a procession of dark human figures became visible marching single-file behind it. Lots of people… hundreds of them… chanting… a monotonous, droning chant, wordless at this distance, and eerily emotionless. It made the hairs on the back of Wilburn’s neck stand up. The sound reminded him, in an unpleasant way, of insects.

Iddo had gone very silent on their mental channel. They’re all psychovates…” he thought at last. “My word—this has to be some kind of record. The entire group is manifesting a collective shield, and I haven’t found the slightest flaw in it. That’s something only a handful of elite units in the Argylonian military are capable of… but never in such large numbers.

How many are there?

Can’t say. Their shield prevents me from discovering even that basic information without drawing attention to myself. The naked eye suggests at least a hundred, but there’s no telling how far the procession may stretch back into the jungle. What in the world has the PROVED gotten us into?

Are you gonna have to fight them? Wilburn wondered. He had gotten the impression that this was Alfajean’s plan. 

Not if I can help it, Iddo thought grimly. On the contrary, I am probing their defenses with the utmost stealth. To provoke such a formidable assembly would be suicidal… like kicking the proverbial hornet’s nest…

IX

By the time the Category-Q reached the summit of the volcano, the moon hung in the middle of the sky. Wilburn and Iddo could now see the object plainly: a bulbous blob of amber the size of the rain barrel at the cottage. Its shape was rounded and organic, its color a deep golden orange, and it was perfectly translucent, like a glass of whiskey held up to the light; except in this case, the light source was the Q itself. Looking at it, you couldn’t tell if the thing was indeed liquid like whiskey, or if it was solid like a gemstone. The glowing blob floated, clearly by magic, at the head of the procession, followed by someone wearing either an all-yellow robe or an all-white robe that looked yellow in the Q-light. Everyone else wore black and yellow striped robes, and all were hooded, so no faces could be seen—as far as the light revealed, at least—the line of chanters twisted backward down the mountain into darkness, where its end remained obscure. 

The golden blob led the way over the rim of the basin and down the snaking trail to the lake—then out over the boiling water—and just when it seemed the Yellow Guy would march straight in and be cooked, the water parted, creating a dry path to the base of the ziggurat. It should’ve been like walking on a skillet, but the chanters never broke stride, stepping to the rhythm of their chant like a military unit on parade. This didn’t have the feel a military affair, though: no, nothing so humdrum. The stripe-clad figures flowed across the lake with a dreamy, fluid grace, like dancers—but were any dancers ever so well-synchronized? The way the crowd moved gave Wilburn the heebie-jeebies. It was the way a field of grass moves in the wind… as if the crowd wasn’t made up of individuals.

What are they saying? Wilburn wondered. It sounded like a foreign language. He could tell it was the same phrase over and over, or possibly one long word. Six equally stressed syllables in a fixed order, any one of which could have been the beginning or the end of the series. It sounded like: Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi… 

Ink-hi-yah-ku-twa-vi…

All languages are branches of the same tree, Iddo thought, and the sap of this figurative language-tree is magic. Language and magic are very nearly the same thing. Our entire world is language—we ourselves are made of words in a very literal sense—but we’ll save that discussion for another time. Suffice to say that every magician, no matter their knack, receives the Gift of Tongues when their powers manifest. The Gift of Tongues grants us the ability to speak and understand all spoken languages in the universe. It doesn’t apply to written text, though—that’s why it’s called the Gift of Tongues rather than Pens. Nor does the Gift confer new knowledge. It is merely a translation mechanism. Any word a magician knows one language, they know in every language, right down to dialect and accent.

Ohhh—that’s why Buttrom said that I’m from wherever he’s from! 

Indubitably. Now, I’m not sure if you noticed, Wilburn, but my vocabulary is nearly as plenteous as my fur coat—so the fact this chant means nothing to me means that its reference is to an obscure subject indeed. I suspect it is a name… the name of a person, or perhaps… an entity.

“Ink-hi-ya—” Wilburn began, speaking aloud with the chanters just to get the feel of the the syllables.  

“Careful,” Iddo interrupted him. “A wizard’s words have power, my boy. Beware the law of unintended consequences.”

X

Instead of floating up the stairs, the golden Q turned right—Wilburn and Iddo’s right—at the foot of the ziggurat and led the crowd around the perimeter of the bottommost step, the water gushing back to un-submerge the lake bottom in front of them. 

And now, at last, the end of the procession came into view, emerging from the trees to follow the path over the rim of the caldera. There was another object floating there behind the final chanting marcher in the line, who might or might not have been wearing stripes—it was too dark to tell now that the Q had gone around the far side of the temple. All Wilburn and Iddo could discern of the object was that it was a large black box… possibly a huge black box. 

The box descended the trail after the marchers, and was approaching the shoreline when a faint amber glow announced the imminent return of the Category-Q, which had almost completed a full lap around the temple. The Q arrived back where it started just as black box crossed the lake, so that the end and the beginning of the procession met, closing the circle—no wait, the hexagon. Either way, the temple was now surrounded by chanters, and in the golden glow cast by Q-blob, the black box was revealed to be an iron cage. A concerningly large iron cage. Of course, the cage might have been empty; the bars were set too close together to afford a view of the interior. It might’ve been empty… but it wasn’t, Wilburn just knew. The universe, however grand, was not so kind a place as that. 

He was about to wonder something about the cage to Iddo, when suddenly, the atmosphere in the temple became charged. Wilburn’s mouth flooded with spit. He tasted metal. He felt a cold, grippy texture in his gut. He and Iddo spun around to see a whirlwind of black shadows near the center of the temple coalesce into a pair of figures, one as tall as Alfajean, who jumped up from the altar, the other almost as short as Wilburn, who stood rooted to the spot. 

XI

Two figures. The girl, and the other. The girl, dark of skin, dressed all in black—boots, pants, a long coat, and her hair a wild spray of midnight curls. Perhaps a year or two older than Wilburn, but hard. Here was not someone who played with stuffed animals anymore. Every angle, from her jawline to her ready stance, spoke of solidity and strength. An absolute rock in the river. And her eyes… such anger there. Not the kind that is really fear in drag, nor the white-hot rage that makes one reckless, but the worst, most deadly kind of anger: cold, intelligent, determined, and controlled. Eyes that said, without artifice, I’ve been through hell and I brought back a souvenir for you. Eyes that said, and it was no bluff obviously, not a challenge, not even a threat, just a direct statement of fact: I will kill you. Those eyes drilled holes in Wilburn, who, for a fraction of a heartbeat, made the mistake of meeting them. It was like looking into the sun. He winced away reflexively, as one might yank one’s hand from a hot stove. This girl was terrifying. 

But the other was a whole other level of terrifying. It wore the form of a towering naked man hewn from obsidian, utterly black yet glistening, like a glass bottle filled with ink. In the moonlight, the raised edges of runes shimmered across its surface, every inch embossed with flowing alien scripture. Even the lips, even the whiteless eyes bore runes. It was a motherless thing, like a statue brought to life. Like a machine without a machine’s innocence. Not a he, despite the male form it wore—an it—a thing. It had a mind, yes, oh hideously yes, it had a mind… but it was not a person. Something essential to personhood was missing, and it couldn’t have been plainer. The monster might as well have been missing its head. But Wilburn didn’t feel sympathy for it, ohh no. He was revolted, and nearly overwhelmed by the urge to smash the monstrosity to bits, then crush the bits to dust and scatter the dust to the wind, to purge the world of this stain… But he was scared. No, scratch that. He was terrified. 

Demon… Had Iddo thought that to him, or had Wilburn figured it out for himself? Either way, he knew it was the truth. Demon. This time, the church had nailed it, minus one point for the horns—the church’s angels always had them; this demon did not, although it did have pretty spiky ears—but the evilness and the awfulness and the abominationness was precisely as advertised. What was it the old priest said you had to do to get rid of a demon? Oh, right… call me. But Wilburn was fairly certain the old priest wouldn’t have stood a chance against this demon; and he was mighty glad that Iddo was protecting him instead. 

He could feel it happening—the destruction aimed at him in deep mental dimensions, turned away by the force of Iddo’s shield. An invisible battle was taking place at the speed of thought, the demon and the girl pressing a furious offensive, Iddo rebuffing them by… by… by building these, like, information-puzzle-mazes… faster than the girl and the demon could solve them. It was baffling, a bit like watching chess—if both sides were allowed to move all their pieces constantly, and if the chessboard doubled as a ping-pong table minus the net and every chess piece had its own ping-pong ball and paddle, but instead of balls, what was bouncing every which way were these little, like, idea-pockets, inside each of which was a color-number that changed every time the pocket bounced. The solution to each puzzle-maze was a different arrangement of pieces on the board plus a specific sequence of color-numbers, such that the girl and the demon had to first figure out the pattern, then attempt to orchestrate it in the face of Iddo’s opposition. And incredibly—they were doing it. Not just doing it, but fast, solving puzzle-mazes left and right. 

“Oh good, you’re here!” Alfajean said, oblivious to the conflict. “This is cutting it a bit close, don’t you think? I’ve been worried sick. I was beginning to fear… but no, it’s all right now. You’re here. And your part hasn’t come up yet, so there’s no harm done. Allow me to introduce myself…” Alfajean proceeded to do just that, while the ferocious psychovatric battled raged on. Then, Alfajean introduced Buttrom and Wilburn. “And of course, the yak who hardly needs an introduction, the one and only Master Iddolorious Bungflower of Frogswallow’s College,” Alfajean concluded, beaming warmly at the new arrivals. “And your names are…?”

The demon and the girl said not a word, made not a move, gave not a sign of any kind that they had heard, except that the girl’s eyes flicked momentarily to Alfajean before returning to Wilburn to continue drilling holes in him. He was the true target of the attack, he knew, although he couldn’t imagine why. But he could tell the girl and the demon didn’t really want to fight Iddo; they wanted to get past Iddo to him. They struck in tandem, each trying to create an opening for the other to exploit, each trying to exploit the opening the other was trying—and failing—to create. 

Iddo’s shield was like a quilted bag made out of puzzle-mazes, surrounding himself, Wilburn and Buttrom. Alfajean, of course, needed no shielding, as they were immune to psychovatry. The very instant a puzzle-maze was solved, it vanished, which theoretically should have weakened Iddo’s shield. The problem, from the girl and the demon’s perspective, was that Iddo’s shield was several puzzle-mazes thick all over, and he was reinforcing it faster than they could degrade it. It was like a deck of cards: for each card the girl and the demon drew off the top of a deck, Iddo added two more to the bottom. Clearly, they were no match for him, but they seemed unwilling to admit it, and Iddo seemed content to allow them to continue their assault indefinitely, for although he stymied their attacks, he never launched any counteroffensive of his own.

“All… righty then…” Alfajean said awkwardly. They clapped their golden hands once, then laced their fingers together and bobbed on the balls of their feet. “Well… on behalf of the PROVED I’d like to thank you both for coming… and I’ll just remind everyone that the conditions of the truce state that neither party is to initiate violence for the duration of the ritual, and um, that both delegations are to observe the ritual from outside the circle of power… excepting the neophytes, who must of course remain inside the circle… Any questions…?” 

Crickets.

A bead of sweat ran down the girl’s brow. 

“Okie… dokie…” Alfajean said. “Well, as long as two of you keep to that side of the altar—what direction is that, west?—then the four of us will stay over here on the east side of the altar, and everybody should be able to go home in one piece. Doesn’t that… Doesn’t that sound lovely…?”

Crickets. 

But abruptly, and for no apparent reason that Wilburn could discern, the girl looked away from him, and at the same moment she and the demon withdrew from the attack. They didn’t fully disengage, for they maintained static contact with Iddo’s shield, touching, ready to resume hostilities at the slightest provocation, but not pushing—detente. The girl’s hostile gaze traveled to Alfajean, who seemed incongruously intimidated, given that the girl was barely half their height. The angel addressed her tentatively, “So… do you know what is required of you… Ms… ah… um… you…?” 

The girl actually responded. She gave a slight shrug—and her long coat melted away into tendrils of black smoke, exposing a sleeveless shirt and the lean, well-muscled arms of a boxer. Also a knife, a very big knife, hanging in a black sheath on her belt. 

“Great…” Alfajean said.

The girl drew the knife. Its blade was so black it was like a fissure in reality. Wilburn, Buttrom, and Alfajean flinched backward, but the girl, with a casualness verging on disdain, merely tossed the knife underhand onto the altar, where it landed with a heavy ding that seemed to resonate far longer than was natural.  

“Great…” Alfajean repeated weakly. “Well… enjoy the ritual…”