by Dan Wingreen
The answer was obvious. It had already happened on a smaller scale when he'd wondered about the cheese. They'd either kill him, or drive him insane.
And they kept getting closer.
He needed to leave, now. But he couldn't until he found where Excalibur was, and he didn't know how to ask without repeating the cheese incident.
Dammit!
He frantically tried to think of what to say as the Mists got closer. He could see now they actually were mist, not solid like he'd originally thought. They twirled and twined around each other, like angry snakes writhing towards a singular prey. Focus! He'd had luck with simple questions so far, so maybe if he kept it simple? But the question about cheese was simple too and—
Just ask something!
The Mists were close enough now that they seemed to stretch out and fill the entire void in front of him. And they were still growing. He closed his eyes. Looking at them was distracting. He needed to think.
Thinking was going to get him killed.
Fuck it. He went with the first thing that popped into his head. Where's Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur, in the world that I live in and only in the world that I live in?
Several things happened at the exact same moment. A sound echoed throughout the void; a horrible, soul searing noise that creaked and groaned like something starting to move after having been still for a very long time. Aidan pressed his hand to his ears and screamed, but he couldn't drown out the terrible noise. The echoes of his screams were swallowed up, like the sound was feeding on them. His eyes opened, almost against his will, and saw there was something inside the Mists. Something solid. Something vaguely human shaped. Something that was slowly turning its head towards him. And, finally, the smallest tendril of Mist reached across the rapidly diminishing space between them and ever so gently grazed Aidan's wrist.
Pain exploded in his head as he was pulled into a vision. The sense of 'this is real' that he always had during his dreams warred with the fact that he knew it wasn't. Apparently, it didn't matter whether he knew it was real or not, he was still pulled along the dream like a stick caught in a swift current.
A sword, stuck in the blood-soaked grass he was kneeling on. It was simple, yet elegant. Understated, yet kingly. Gripping the hilt of the sword, under a blood-red sky, were two hands. One dark as night, seemingly made out of nothing but shadow, the other a shining light that both pushed back and was swallowed by the darkness of the other hand. The sword itself was covered in both as well, dark and light curling around the blade like ivy around a railing.
The scene shifted. The same sword was lying in a gray metal box in a large room filled with stacks of similar boxes of varying sizes, all placed on top of each other, seemingly without any thought given to organization or balance. Several stacks looked close to toppling over. This felt real to Aidan, too, but instead of playing out like a dream, it came to him out of nowhere, like everything else he'd asked in the void. Plain information popping up in his head as though it had always been there. It also wasn't a vision. It was more like a transcribed picture. A still image of something frozen in time. It was blurred around the edges, and Aidan knew it was fighting not to be an image, but pure knowledge.
The scene shifted again and he was back to the bloody field. Only for a moment though, then the room was back. Then the field. The room. The field. Over and over back and forth until they blurred together, future and present, prophecy and divination, both fighting to show Aidan what he'd asked, or what they thought he needed to see. He felt like he was being torn right down the middle.
In the end though, the void was a place of knowledge and knowledge was fact, not symbolism. The image won out just long enough to tell him what he needed to know. His perspective pulled back from the room, going through floors and halls and people frozen in the middle of going about their day until Aidan was flying out into open air and looking down at a building that filled him with dread. A building as recognizable as his own apartment, even though he'd never seen it in person.
Both visions ended, snapping with a sound like a rubber band breaking in two. Back in the void now, Aidan could see several more tendrils racing towards him from the Mists. The thing inside them was moving slowly, its clawed hands reaching out towards him. It was almost close enough for him to make out what looked like a face, its large, hollow eye sockets boring into Aidan, making his skin burn—
WAKE UP!
His eyes snapped open and he shot up in bed with a scream. The void was gone, and he'd never been so happy to see a crappy hotel room in his life. His heart was pounding in his chest and he was exhausted, but he was safe.
Safe from what…?
It was suddenly so hard to remember.
His arms started to shake from the strain of holding himself up and he collapsed back onto the bed just as Lee was rushing over to him from the bathroom, his fly still unzipped, but thankfully with nothing hanging out.
"What's wrong?" he asked. "What happened?"
He'd shaved at some point while Aidan was out, his face smooth and shiny in the light from bedside lamp. Aidan could barely keep his eyes open, but he thought Lee's face was a nice thing to pass out to.
My Lee…
But before he could pass out, there was something important he needed to tell him.
"Yer frens," Aidan said, exhaustion slurring his words. "Really need t’look up the desfanishun of confushing."
This time, Lee's perplexed look was absolutely adorable.
"Oh," Aidan said, sleepily, as he buried his face in the soft pillow. "An’ Excalibur's in the White House. In the baseshment. Shomwhere. Mmm."
"Bloody hell," Lee whispered.
And with that, Aidan happily passed out.
Interlude
The creature opened its eyes.
The chamber was dark, as it always was; the slaveservantfriendconcubine always turned the already dim lights completely off whenever the creature started to stir. It blinked, the dry, papery eyelids scratching at its eyes. It hurt. The creature laughed. Or maybe it didn't. It didn't know.
Was it an it? Or was it a man? A god? It could never tell anymore. Things were so much more confusing when they could only be one thing. The bedthroneprison creaked with age as the creature thrashed upon it, giggling and screaming and tearing at its flesh. It was always the same when it opened its eyes. The need to know, but not knowing; to see, while blinded from the universe, driving it insane again and again and again. Or maybe driving it sane, and that was what drove it insane. The answers it needed were inside, they were always inside, and if they wouldn't come out, then it would go in and make them come out.
When it was finished it lay still, the tears and rends in the skin healing, the organs that no longer functioned falling out of the slowly healing holes to rot on the ornate, kingly bed it occupied, while new, equally useless organs grew inside to replace the old ones. Things were clearer, now. Its fractured mind growing used to being whole again. The robed man who was always there, watching, tending, caring, swept the organs into a bucket before they could liquefy. They would be disposed of later. Or maybe they wouldn't. The creature never knew. Maybe the man would eat them. It giggled.
It decided to ask about that when it went back.
It could see now, even though there was still no light. When one had eyes that did not work one did not need eyes to see. It sang that aloud a few times. Or it thought it did. Did it even have a voice? It thought it remembered having one, but then it thought it remembered a lot of things that slipped away when it was in this world.
Slowly, ever so slowly and ever so ironically maddening, sanity and reason began to creep back into the creature's mind, as it always did. It seemed to happen faster this time though. Had it been coming out more recently? It tried to remember. Was it years, days, months, days? Days? Possibly days. Yes. Days. Seven of them, it thought, unless numbers had changed meanings again.
Then, suddenly and without warning, the last bit of its mind slipped back
into place, and he knew what he was.
"Master?" the robed man asked. He always knew when sanity and reason had come back. The creature—the thing that used to be a man but was now so much more—wondered how he always knew.
Another thing to ask the Mists.
"Is there something you needed?" the robed man asked.
Was there? Yes, yes there was. Something had been seen that had not been seen by any but him for so very, very long. A brightness in the nothing had seen through the fog that was supposed to obscure even as it enlightened. Someone knew where both pieces of the puzzle were now.
For the first time in over a thousand years, he was afraid.
It was exhilarating.
"Yes," he said, his voice like two ancient pieces of parchment rubbing together, but even as he spoke he could feel his vocal cords healing themselves, and his words got stronger. More fitting of an eternal king. "Send another message to my hunter. Tell him where his prey will be."
"Yes, master," the man said patiently. "If I might ask, where will they be going this time? Have they given up their search?"
There was a time when he would have killed a servant for being so bold, he remembered. Ah, the folly of youth. He giggled again. Now, however, he was wiser and older. Much, much older.
"No, but they aren't going where they were before."
"Then, where are they going?"
"They're coming here," he said. He was coming here. He thought about staying in this world this time, seeing his old friend again, but the pull of knowledge was too strong. It was so hard to pull himself out of the nothingness, and even harder to stay. Already he felt himself being crushed with the panic of uncertainty. Delegation was the key to any successful leader, and he had always had skill with picking the right people to delegate to. His servant and his hunter should be all that was needed to save his kingdom. He felt himself being pulled—or was he pushing himself?—back into the Mists.
"They're coming for meitusthem," he said as they swallowed him again. The world faded away around him. "They're coming for my kingdom."
Part IV
The Once and Future King
Chapter 1
Aidan was exhausted.
Once they'd left the desert, he was sure their pace would slow down, or they'd at least be able to stay in real hotels and sleep in real beds overnight on the regular. He'd been looking forward to that. But he'd been wrong. Lee insisted on getting to Philadelphia as quickly as possible, but he wouldn't even go close to a road that led to a Highway, even one of the smaller offshoot ones. So, they ended up driving all day and into the night, sometimes straight through the night, switching off and taking naps in the back when one of them got too tired to continue.
And when Aidan wasn't driving or sleeping, he was practicing magic.
He'd gotten good at it in the week and two days it had taken them to reach the city limits. He found out he didn't need to write neatly for a spell to work, he just needed to know what the words said. Lee said that meant he could probably replace the words with symbols standing for basic spells at some point. He seemed excited about it, and Aidan had tried to seem enthusiastic too, but he didn't think he'd ever be able to memorize symbols. Words, though, were coming easier and easier, his writing faster and faster, to the point where he thought that, if he had to, he could write a spell in the middle of running or even if they were in a battle. Of course, he couldn't test that out in a carriage.
Aidan was nervous.
Since he'd woken up after telling Lee where Excalibur was, Lee had been focused in a way Aidan had never seen him. The longer they drove, the more withdrawn he'd become. Less jokes and gentle teasing were thrown Aidan's way. The grins had stopped almost entirely, and when they showed up, they were always pale imitations of the ones Aidan missed more than he ever thought he would. That alone would have been enough to make him worry, even without their destination looming ahead of them like a storm just over the horizon.
The White House was the center of government in the United States. At six stories high, it was the tallest government building in the country, with space for all forty-three Ministers of the Parliament, one from each state. It was also filled with every kind of office and meeting space imaginable, everything a functioning central hub of a massive bureaucracy needed to keep it running, including its own DMS office—separate from the central DMS headquarters on the other side of the city. The entire top floor was reserved for the housing and comfort of the Prime Minister and his family, if he had one. It was, according to what every child was taught in pre-magic school, the most formidable and secure building in the country.
But that wasn't what was making Lee act the way he was. That was all known. It was the unknown that was eating away at him. The White House was also the only government building in the country that wasn't standardized. In fact, it was an architectural masterpiece. It was packed with columns and arches and spires; where every other government building was a box, the White House was a collision of shapes that shouldn't have fit together, but somehow did. Aidan had seen transcribed pictures of it, and it was beautiful. It was also completely unique, and Lee had absolutely no idea what the layout was like. As far as he knew, there were no plans on record they could steal and no way of knowing how to get in, other than through the front door. They were breaking into the most secure building in the country, completely blind.
They couldn't even take the time to carefully plan their heist, not when there was a good possibility there was already a hunter on their trail.
Aidan was frustrated.
Not just by Lee, although that was usually enough, but because he couldn't remember what had happened when he cast the divination spell. He remembered the answer to every question he'd asked, including the disturbing vision of the sword, but other than that, everything was blank.
He'd woken up screaming and he had no idea why.
He thought he remembered being someplace else, but when he closed his eyes and tried to remember where he'd been, all he felt was a vague sense of displacement. And, maybe, that he was afraid of something.
It was…confusing.
The most frustrating thing was he couldn't remember why he'd stopped asking the question about loving Lee. All he remembered was cutting himself off before he could ask, then practically screaming the question about Excalibur. It was like reading a book that was missing several pages right before the end of the chapter. Something had to have happened. He didn't go from nervous anticipation to panicked yelling over nothing. Especially when he was about to ask something he really wanted to know. Lee loved Aidan enough to change how the sorcerer thought about himself, to the point where magic that knew the truth of everything couldn't even recognize him as the person he was before, and Aidan still had no idea if he loved Lee in return. How could he still not know? Was the not knowing a sign he didn't love him? Or maybe he did, but he was too scared to admit it? He had no idea, and being locked in a carriage with nothing to do but think was driving him crazy.
He'd thought, more than once actually, about casting the divination spell again. When he was curled up in the backseat of the carriage trying to fall asleep while Lee drove, sometimes it was all he could think about. He'd even gotten the spell written out a few times, but there was always something that stopped him. The terrified way he’d asked that last question about Excalibur. Waking up screaming. The sense there was something on the other side of the spell that he was afraid of. No matter how much he wanted to know, he could never force himself to read the words out loud.
More than anything else, though, Aidan was determined.
Determined to pull his weight. Determined to be every bit as competent as Lee. Determined to give Lee no excuses to try and leave him behind again. Determined to finally show what the new Aidan could do. So, no matter how exhausted or nervous or frustrated he was, he kept practicing his magic and he kept trying to think of ways to get Excalibur. This time, the burden wouldn't be completely on Lee.
Th
is time, Aidan would be more than an accessory.
◆◆◆
It was just after dark when they finally made it to Philadelphia.
The city was different than Aidan imagined, even at a distance. Pendragon Bay wasn't exactly known for its sprawling cityscape, but there were more than a few skyscrapers and large apartment buildings stretching towards the clouds. There didn't seem to be a single one in Philadelphia. All the buildings were short and wide. In fact, wideness seemed to be a theme in the city; like every building that would have been taller than a few stories anywhere else had been pushed down and stretched out. Aidan saw the reason for it almost immediately.
Right in the middle of the urban sprawl, like a snowcapped mountain peak, sat the White House.
Lit up with dozens of lights, its spires stretching into the night sky like a runner with his arms raised in victory as he raced over the finish line, the seat of the United States government towered over the entire city. Its architecture was every bit as awe-inspiring as Aidan had imagined, the various columns and pillars and arches melding together in a way that should have been garish and off-putting, but somehow managed to be almost beautiful. No building was allowed to be taller so every eye would be drawn to its magnificence, and once it grabbed those eyes it refused to let them go. From every spire flew a flag with a large white star on a red background. They were too far away to see, but inside the large star were forty-three smaller, light gray stars. The flag of the United States of America. It symbolized unity and conformity. Every state surrounded and consumed by one government, one leader. The people who lived in Philadelphia probably found the whole display comforting, a sign of strength and majesty from the government that watched over them.
To Aidan, it looked more like a boot standing on the throat of a squat, sad little city.
They avoided getting too close that night. Instead, Lee pulled off the road they were on and after ten minutes or so turned into the parking lot of a small hotel. It was slightly run down, but it might well have been a palace compared to some of the places they'd been staying. Lee parked in front of one of the rooms farthest away from the main entrance, then went and got a key. When he came back, Aidan carried their luggage, which now consisted of Lee's duffel, a similar dark blue bag for Aidan's clothes, and a small messenger bag Lee had bought for Aidan to keep his spell book and a few pens in. He had a brand-new blank notebook too, this one with a dark purple cover, for when he finally used up the one Lee had given him.