by Jeremy Craig
I was no exception for rule two. Staggering out the swirling vortex of reality warping in and out and round and round that left me heaving, dizzy, and the world spinning about me the moment my feet touched the grass. My knees buckled as fresh air hit my face like a cool spray.
To be fair, the rank smell really didn’t help me keep down my lunch or milkshake. The whole clearing was rank, eye burningly smoky and still somehow thick with the buzzing of flies. Never a good sign.
The Council stood, most eyeing me pityingly, clearly remembering their own first times, The Doctor again chuckling his grave dirt like laugh that only added to my discomfort as it sent creeps down my spine while he stepped out of the portal he had conjured and held open for us. The rest of the Council had preferred other magical forms of transport as even when one is used to portals, they still aren’t the most pleasant things.
“Poor dear,” Madam Mildred Maxine Del’Cove, or simply ‘Milly’ as she preferred, professed as she lit an exotic looking leafy cigar. “It’s a wicked day you’re having. It’s simply not fair. Tell me, dearest, how is your Grandmother Mary? It’s been simply intolerable enduring this council of ours without her guidance.”
“Umm, good for being a ghost, I guess… Grandma was on the Fey Council?” I asked. Gramps grumbled disagreeably, and Milly laughed.
“Ooh no, dear, no, no, no, no. Not that she wasn’t welcome, and we didn’t make overtures and such. She just found some of us…well, unpleasant company.” She pointedly didn’t look at any of her peers as she offered me her free hand and helped lug me off the muddy grass as if I weighed little more than a doll. She wiped my face clean with a fancy cream-colored lace napkin she conjured up, dabbing my face in a very embarrassingly mothering way.
“There,” she proclaimed as she fussed over my flannel, sniffing in obvious disapproval over Gramps’ choices of wardrobe. “Fit for fiddling and such as can be for the moment.” She straightened and gave me a wink as she took a pull from her cigar. “A nice big bowl of spicy noodles from Sam Kim’s in Detroit’s Feyish China Town would be just the ticket to stoke the blood after a young man’s first portal trip. Though sadly this mess of a destination does little for one’s appetite.”
She wasn’t wrong.
The scorched clearing appeared for all the world as though a cataclysmic bomb had gone off, leaving trees downed in neat rows in an almost perfect circle for hundreds of feet. The closer to the center one got in an appraisal, the more blackened, twisted, and deformed everything seemed.
The clearing itself was a hellish ash strewn thing sprinkled with still glowing cinders that was acrid and gaggingly thick with the reek of brimstone. Ash mounds of mostly unrecognizable matter of varying size dotted the area. Some had obviously once been buildings, barns and such, while some unpleasantly seemed to be livestock, and sadly, people.
Countess Adalyn Montague adjusted her luxurious fur stole and hat and elegantly knelt, scooping up a handful of ashy effluence in a blue satin elbow gloved and jewel bedecked hand (it matched her evening gown perfectly, of course) and sniffed at it. She gagged and let the stuff sift through her fingers, dusting them off against one another and nodding.
“’There can be no doubt,” she announced unhappily as she stood and brushed off her gown and eyeing the state of her shoes irritably. “Fiendfire.”
“Damn,” Milly snapped as she stepped about a few chicken shaped mounds and stared into the disaster with obvious furry. “We knew the Von Clampetts were fools but none of them is a Warlock. Never once has that taint befouled their sewage-like bloodline, and that’s the one and only thing I can absolve this trash of in this life or the next. What have we missed?”
“Much,” The Doctor growled as he poked at a mound with his shiny silver pointy gentleman’s cane tip. The ash fell away revealing white hot embers and putrid purplish flames that disintegrated to more acrid dust almost the moment it was punctured.
“Too much,” Gramps snapped as he stomped forward. “How did this pack of loathsome inbred hillbillies get this past the Wizards?”
“I know not,” The Doctor admitted.
“We’ve been deceived,” The Countess hissed. “Something powerful has blinded Feydom to a Warlock. Something that hasn’t existed for decades… Something we should have known the pits of Hell had spewed forth into a womb the moment it took its first breath.”
“Worse troubles then that, I fear,” The Doctor added in his thick Cockney accent as I watched the odd, well dressed, and decidedly out of place looking pack of undeniably, terrifyingly dangerous folks with no small amount of tired confusion. Everyone gazed at the tall, dark skinned, dreadlocked man uneasily.
“You don’ see it, then?” he asked with a laugh as he eyed them mockingly and leaned on his cane, top hat tipped forward over his eyes. “’ow is it that you’re blind to this?”
“To what, exactly?” Milly prodded irritably as she blew out cigar smoke from her nose like a dragon about to blow fire as his patience rather obviously began to wane.
“A true blooded Darkling walks among us once more, while something hunts the folk of fortune (‘folk of fortune’ is a rather uncouth slang for Clairvoyants, prophets, and seers) and a Warlock is loosed on the world,” he shook his head and laughed. “This is obvious, is it not?”
“Enlighten us.” The Countess sighed.
“These are bad, bad omens. Soon the prophecy will be made flesh an the Dark Lord will rise.” He eyed his colleagues with deep unease despite his booming laugh, evil looking red flecked eyes burning.
“Oh, don’t be silly.” Milly giggled. “We will protect our kind as we always have. There won’t be a ‘Dark Lord’ nor will there soon be a Warlock on Earth…for long.”
“You couldn’t protect your own sister and now not even the human descendants of the Darklings be safe. This will not end well if you ignore it,” he cautioned as he spat into the ash and continued shaking his head as if he already knew things to be dismally hopeless.
Milly rounded on The Doctor and something dark, deadly, and powerful flashed over her face as she glared wide eyed at him through her huge designer glasses. Breathing what had to be foul smelling deep breaths of ashy air, her almost spent cigar stub held in a trembling, well-manicured shiny pink nailed hand. “Do. Not. Ever. Bring. That. Up. Again. Do. You. Understand?” she warned through very white clenched teeth, punctuating each work by poking the air with what was left of her fine, fat cigar.
The Doctor laughed and vanished, dissipating into dust and was gone, his blackness flitting away amidst the embers and dusty ruin of the Clampetts fallen homestead drifting lazily through the air.
“I do ever so much, hate that man.” Milly sighed as she watched him go, tossing the cigar stub into the snow like pile that may once have been a goat and rounding on me as if sensing my questions. Which as you have likely caught onto by now is more than possible for a powerful Fey Witch, to various degrees.
“My sister, your father’s mother, was the most powerful Clairvoyant Witch to walk the earth in centuries. I’m sorry, dear heart, this is the last way I wanted to announce my aunthood to you. I wanted to wait till the least painful, most opportune time but, as usual, life is cruel and ruined that for us.” Milly conjured up another cigar and popped it into her mouth, flicking her fingers together in her empty hand, and with a soft crack a flame appeared that she used to light it, puffing up a good head of smoke before shaking the flame out with a flick of her wrist.
“Aunt?” I blinked. This was getting a bit much, and my head was starting to hurt even more. Mother had made a point of quickly and masterfully changing the subject whenever family slipped into any discussion. My father had been even less open to the topic, ether tersely answering with single word grunts or just falling into an icy, grim silence.
I had eventually just learned to avoid the topic all together, so I wasn’t surprised there were things that could unexpectedly shake loose from our family tree. Still though, even knowing this, it was somehow a
deeply shocking discovery nonetheless. And needless to say, one I was entirely unsure of how to take.
“We don’t have time for this,” Gramps snapped. “’Yes, the old hag is your aunt. She hates me almost as much as she hates that dusty old ‘Doctor’ and what in Hell’s name is going on? What ‘prophecy,’ was he going on about?”
“Old Hag? Really,” Milly shrilly complained with a murderous glare.
The Countess rolled her pretty eyes behind her feathered and fur lined hat’s blue beaded veil. “That when the Warlock walks the Earth once more and the last Darkling falls, the Dark Lord rises to rule a blind world. Roughly translated, of course.” At this Gramps went silent and swept the horribly savaged clearing with a tired, troubled, sad look.
“Is it possible?” he finally asked.
“Of course not. It’s a silly, wicked story that wicked Witches tell their wicked spawn to make the sting of their last abject failures defeat sting a little less.” Milly snorted as she blew out smoke and continued to stare down at me in a very unsettling way. The Countess, however, said nothing, rubbing her still grey and white dusty and ash powdered gloved fingertips together in pensively thoughtful silence.
“Wait, you disagree?” Milly asked disbelievingly.
The Countess merely glowered at her coldly from behind her veil and pursed her very red, full lips in an almost pouting way and shook her head uncertainly. “There are urgent questions that need answered. We need to convene the full Council, now.”
“But that hasn’t been done since that disastrous cruise in April 1912, and we all know how that turned out,” She complained agitatedly. “It was a mess, and the food was ghastly, and I lost my luggage!”
The Countess just continued glaring.
“Oh, very well.” Milly resigned herself as she conjured a clear glass vial webbed in silver and iron and uncorked it as she stalked forward, scooped it full of Fiendfire tainted ash, and recorked it, carefully sealing it with green wax from her designer leather purse that she melted in her fingers.
Just then I shivered, and everyone stopped and stared at me with no small amount of concern, but not for me catching a chill.
I could sense something that felt for a lack of better descriptions, dark and wrong. And with it an icy freezing touch I could feel in my bones began to build as the ethereal cold slipped down my spine, eliciting another pronounced shiver.
Everyone glanced about uneasily while Milly secured the vial in her bag as she wearily studied the shadowy tree line at the property’s edge. A moment later she sniffed at the air and froze, her eyes widening in disbelief.
“Oh no, oh great Gods, no,” she gasped as she whipped about, fixing Gramps with a startled, horrified look even as he and the Countess glanced among themselves grimly, they too having just caught the scent.
As yet another bit of useful insight to the reader, much like Ascended Darklings, Witches and such have uncommonly potent senses when it comes to detecting magic or danger. They can actually feel it, as if it were vibrations in the air accompanied by telling scents that hint at what lurks unseen. Some of the rare exceptions being Darklings and Wizards, the latter being more than powerful enough to almost completely cloak themselves from being sniffed out by a Witch.
“It’s them, Artur. How could they be here?” Aunt Milly hissed, something in her voice chilling my blood more than the Darkling’s gift had as her hand clamped onto my shoulder.
She then began swirling the other franticly in the air as The Doctor had when summoning up his portal, through which Gramps and I had walked through to get to this horrible clearing in the first place. The air bubbled, warped, and violently twisted and with a powerful shove I was sent tumbling through it.
I toppled head over heels out of the portal, landing in a heap dry heaving my guts out at White Owl’s booted feet on Gramps’ porch, my head spinning and splitting, like someone with heavy spiked boots was marching all over my brain. He arched a brow at me from his seat and took a huge bite of breakfast sandwich as Manx trotted over whining and licking at my face.
“Went well, did it?” he asked as he chewed.
“I’ve not a clue,” I gasped out between heaves. “I think something’s, something’s wrong though.”
“Mmm… Sounds about right.” he chewed calmly. “The Clampetts all dead then?”
I nodded but didn’t trust myself to talk as I fought off my splotchy, fuzzy vision and tried to catch my bearings. All while for the second time in under an hour a bubbly, gurgling feeling twisted at my stomach and an acidic bad taste unpleasantly seeped up from my guts into my dry, fouled mouth.
“Sad news.” He nodded back and salted his hash brown as heavily as ever and took a generous bite. “I weep for them.” He chewed and tossed Manx a bit of hash brown that the Witchound snatched out of the air almost mechanically.
“Anything interesting?” he asked as he licked at his fingers then plucked his sandwich back up from its cheese clumped wrappings and took another bite.
“Something about a prophecy concerning a ‘Dark Lord’ rising, before things went cold and I got pushed through a portal,” I managed as I pulled myself into a chair in time to watch White Owl drop his sandwich and choke, gagging and pounding at his chest with his big, silver ringed fist.
Manx eyed him then ate the dropped treasure trove of buttered biscuit, sausage, egg, and cheese in one gulp, delightedly licking the porch boards clean of crumbs.
After a moment the coughing and chest pounding subsided and he was again OK as can be for a man who’d just tragically lost his sandwich. White Owl eyed the demonic dog (that was at that moment happily licking at his chops) with the deeply accusing and pained look of someone who had just been betrayed deeply. Forlornly, he plucked off leavings of cheese from the lost sandwich’s wrapper, ate them, then crumpled it up and tossed it into his lunch pail, fixing me with a deadly serious look as he latched it closed.
“Tell me everything.”
By the time everyone stumbled back in through the door an hour later (the now hatless and disheveled Countess between them), they found us seated at the table, an old green leather bound book open between us and a battered steel pot of chili bubbling on the stove.
“All of you lot. Come. Sit. Now,” White Owl demanded in a tone that brooked no argument as he indicated the empty chairs with a nod, his finger tapping rhythmically on the tabletop.
“Oh dear…” Milly eyed the chili pot as she and Gramps supported an obviously unwell Countess. “I do ever so detest rustic fixings.”
“Now, if you please,” White Owl demanded again, pointing a finger firmly to the chairs yet again. “Her, too.” He snapped as he waved them away from settling the Countess on the sofa.
“Chili makes things better, especially my chili. It took well over two hundred years to perfect it. It’s all about the seasonings, and the special ingredient, of course,” he concluded as he flipped closed the battered book (where incidentally he keeps the recipe for said chili, among other things), absently running his hand over the great winged owl bearing aloft in its talons a lantern radiating rays of light, stamped and inlayed with silver onto its front. Then with a sigh he snapped it shut and set it carefully aside.
I’ve come to understand it’s a journal of sorts, and that White Owl is terribly protective of it, and not just because of the coupons he secrets away between the pages. He penned it himself over the centuries to help keep precise track of things he deemed crucial enough that he couldn’t allow to get lost or blurred over by the long passage of time.
Gramps uneasily eyed the book, then his old friend. Whenever he saw that book, or the Master whipped up his chili, it rarely boded well. When both happened at once it was never good news.
“Is it too much to hope that special ingredient is a nice aged scotch?” My newly discovered Aunt asked apprehensively as they helped the Countess sit down onto the indicated chair as tenderly as they could manage.
The Master merely eyed her coldly and loudly snapped
his fingers. Carved wooden bowls and cups flew from the counter and plopped down with a clatter before each of us along with a startling, clattering hail of utensils as a cutting board with loaf, knife, and butter swooped over to land before him on the table.
Everyone watched in silence as he carved up the bread.
“Things exist for a reason. Things like prophecies, for instance,” he began as he sawed through slice after slice. “All things must be minded and respected,” he concluded as he carefully set aside the knife and began doling out tableware.
“Oh, Ben told you, did he,” Milly snickered and waved dismissively at me with an apologetic smile. “You can’t be worried about that silly old prophecy. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard some alarmist foretelling about the Dark Lord rising again, I’d be far richer than I already am. I assure you, it was probably written by some half witless Witch half Clairvoyant Nostradamus wanna-be who got tired of jotting down fortune cookie for Chinese restaurants.”
She paused wistfully. “Ah, Asian food… Now I desperately crave some dim sum, dumplings, perhaps some noodles and Sushi. Are you quite sure we all can’t just order take out? I know this lovely place in San Francisco, the Happy Dragon, that offers teleported delivery…” She trailed off and fell silent at The Master’s witheringly irritable look.
“It’s my prophecy,” White Owl informed us simply as with another snap of his ringed fingers the ovens dials went to “off” and a large ladle, potholder, and the chili pot swooshed over and joined us at the table, a thick, meaty, healthy dollop of it spilling on the floor conveniently right by where Manx was lying, about an inch from his snout.