by Gabi Moore
I settled for a simple aphorism.
"I am nothing more than a role which you will one day need to fulfill."
My words will not be heard.
They will be memorialized in the minds of the younger generation. They may even be engraved on a placard and posted on the hallways of the Consulate, but that doesn't mean that they will be adhered.
The most incredible thing about raising a person up to the position of a deity, is that it gives you the ability to discount and ignore them.
"She's a hero. I couldn't possibly do that."
"Back in the day, life was more difficult, and people had to take themselves more seriously. These days, we live in a more progressive world."
All lies.
Nothing more than excuses to not examine the world around you with any degree of critical thought. All of these bitter reflections juxtaposed with the fragrance of jasmine.
"Maybe I'm the problem. Maybe this is the vacation I've been asking for all this time. Besides, if this actually is a way to help -- however unorthodox, this might be the right path."
The hedges began to narrow on either side of my body. The aisle got so close that the sides of my shoulders brushed up against either wall of vegetation.
Any minute now...
Then a voice called out from behind me.
"Mistress Aria! Mistress!"
That nasally high-pitched whine and formal title was all I needed to be completely sure that I had no interest in engaging with this person. I quickened my pace, but they were rushing toward me, and I couldn't blatantly run away from a Head of State.
"You're pretty deep in the labyrinth..."
"I needed to clear my mind."
"Hmm... well, a little bird told me that they saw you go into Thane's office this morning first thing."
"Tell that cocksucker to mind his own business."
"My dear!"
"Look, I'm sorry, Bartholomew, but I've been having some lousy dreams lately, and Thane's really the only one who can relate."
"Well, most certainly, but I have been recommending you stay at our Archetypal Therapy Psychological Wing for months, ever since Mary-Anne--"
"Cocksucker."
"Ahem."
I could feel his eyes narrowing in my direction, though I tried to maintain a straight face, and a steady pace.
"… Ever since Mary-Anne issued you your first resignation request."
"Well, she does have a big mouth."
If possible, his eyes narrowed even more at me. I knew I had to ditch him, but I wasn't exactly sure how.
"You're aware the confidential information is not to be shared amongst non-active operatives such as yourself."
I turned on him.
He was easily a full foot and a half shorter than me, which placed his head at right about the same level as my tits. He almost ran into me, and his nose came within a hair's length from my body. I watched with pleasure while his cheeks flushed red. He backed up and looked at me, attempting to regain whatever pomp and authority he had approached me with only moments ago.
"That's right. Ex-Operative. Which means I don't need to be hassled any longer by book wielding, political suck-offs like yourself. Mind your own fucking business, and let me mind mine."
I walked closer to him, making sure my breasts got right up in his face, causing him to backpedal.
"I came here so I could be alone, and collect my thoughts, and you're fucking with my process. So the next time you want to do a little investigatory work, get a warrant."
At the last word, the garden finally brought up an aerial root, and tripped Bart down onto the ground. Without wasting a moment, I turned around and walked quickly back into the maze, allowing the passageway to close in on itself in my wake.
I could hear him yell, but he couldn't see me, and thanks to the magic of the labyrinth, he would never find me unless I walked out.
You can wait there all day, my friend...
Another twenty feet, and I had arrived.
The gate was little more than a fountain, covered in moss and lime deposits. The fountain clearly hadn't been in operation for some time. To my satisfaction, the area around the edges of my little clearing was covered by a dense thicket.
Reaching behind me, I snagged the envelope out of my pants, and opened it up. Inside was a sheet of paper, and a holograph from the Intel Department. I took the image out first, and allowed it to unfold in front of me.
A figure of a man sprang out from the slip of paper and rotated around me in the air.
I narrowed my gaze, and strained to pick up the details of the image. Stretching the holograph out in front of me, I was able to get a good glimpse at the man's physique. I could also read the DNA Readout and Sociological Inquiry that was inscribed on the lower right hand corner of the holograph.
“You've got a great body for a human, but this psyche profile is ridiculous. Believes in both Faeries, and Aliens...”
Well, he'll get proof enough on the first, but ... humans are so gullible.
No sooner had I finished committing the details of his face to memory, when the holograph incinerated before my eyes.
"Fuck!"
I backed off, cursing Thane for nearly taking my eyebrows off. The rest of the briefing was straight forward enough. The human's name was Erol, and he was apparently swimming in a quagmire of esoterica. The basic parameters of the mission were easy enough to manage.
First and foremost, make contact with the subject. Second, undermine and redirect research to achieve personal aims. And lastly, save the Fae Realms.
Not too difficult.
I let out a long exhale, and rolled my eyes while the contents of the note began to glow and catch fire as well. Shaking my head, I dropped the paper to the ground and watched while it too ignited. This time, the fire didn’t stop at the end of the paper. With amusement and absent-minded fascination, I watched as the fire transformed into a blue light. The flare expanded and became a perfect oval, placed just over the base of the fountain.
I took another breath to sturdy myself, and then stepped into the portal.
Chapter 4
I tripped over something in transit, and landed face first in the mud. It was an unceremonious drop which brought a curse to my lips, but that curse was never uttered.
I extended my arms to examine the ground, and I discovered that my skin had changed both color and texture. My hands and arms were scaled and red. My skin looked like the basin of a desert. Thin black lines working their way through deep amber scales.
I reached out one hand to touch the other, and I found that I also had nails that extended out from my fingertips like claws. The nails were black, and shone like perfect obsidian. In the reflection of my own nails, I could see horns had emerged from either side of my head. In shock, I looked down at a placid and undisturbed section of ground beneath my feet. The area of the muck that had not been disturbed by my fall offered me a perfect reflection along the surface of the ground.
My Gods... I have both wings.
The urge to fly overwhelmed me, but there was something else preventing me from fully indulging in this realization. I recognized myself, but the image was some twisted form which I had only dreamed of previously. I was a creature of the lower planes, both sexual and deadly. The eyes were slit and my nose had been flattened. My tongue had been elongated, and my wings were no longer light and translucent, but dark and leathery. I saw that the tar had stuck to the side of my cheek, and I reached over to wipe it from my newly pronounced cheekbones.
What is this place?
The mud stuck to my fingers like tar. The substance was long and viscous. I moved my shoulder over to the side of my face to wipe the gunk off of my cheek, and it ended up sticking to my shirt as well. I looked down and saw that my breasts, while still there, had decreased in size. I was lithe and reptilian in form.
When I looked around me, I had to squint my eyes from the harsh light overhead. There were no trees, and the air was ra
nk like pitch and sulfur.
This is wrong, I shouldn't be here...
I looked about, trying to get my bearings. I could see no major landmarks around me. There were no hills in the distance. No vegetation. No signs of life anywhere. I knew that the portal had been directed to take me as close to my target as possible.
What I did not understand is how those directions had been somehow subverted so that I would end up here. All I could feel was the mire beneath my feet, and the glaring orb of fire in the sky, casting its hateful gaze down at the world below.
I felt the slightest shift under my feet, and lifted my boots up one at a time. The tar clung to one of them, and my foot pulled right out of the boot. Even the physiological structure of my feet had been modified. I let out a sharp exhale of frustration, and then proceeded to bend over and bother about putting my foot back in its correct place.
Just as I had finished, I felt a vibration making its way through the ground. I could feel the movement initially on the soles of my feet, but soon the sensation transferred throughout my whole body. The wave brought the hair of my neck on end, and I shook my shoulders out.
The magic that opened the portal must have had some foreign element in it…
I was trying to parse out how this could have happened. In all of the times that I had used the portals, I had never experienced anything similar to this. My sensory awareness spiked, and an instinct to flee overtook my body.
Approaching my position from the left, the tar began raising up from the ground like the crest of a wave. My feet were planted firmly in the muck. A sense of dread overwhelmed me, and I instinctively squatted down to prepare for a powerful launch into the air.
The strength of my wings took me by surprise. With wings like a bat, I was able to launch off of the ground with incredible vitality and speed. I leaped straight out of my shoes, and flew up into the air toward safety.
In mid flight, as I soared into the unforgiving heat above, a black serpentine form shot out from the tar beneath me. Like a whip, it coiled around my ankle, and clung tight.
I strained to break free, beating my wings furiously against the air, but there was no freedom to be found. I only began to feel the pull in my ankle, as well as the pressure from the creatures grasp. Thinking to strike it, or tear it off from me, but it grabbed a hold of my wrist as well.
One after another, black, inky tentacles from the pitch below shot out at me from the ground. The tendrils slid inward along my body toward the center of my body. With each tug, they drew my arms and legs farther apart from one another. Their hold was tight on me, and it seemed that any amount of struggling on my part only increased the tension of the creature.
I tried to relax, wondering if it was responding with tension to my fight, but it only reached a tentacle out and wrapped itself around my throat.
A searing pain began to radiate all over my body. The areas of contact immediately reacted in a bright blue rash, spreading out in all directions from the creature. I let out a scream, crying out for help, even though there was no one around. The tentacle poised over my mouth, ready to suffocate me, and then something changed in the environment.
I was pulled underneath the surface of the ground.
At first, I thought that death had finally arrived at the hands of a vicious tentacle demon, but I was wrong.
On the other side of the black pitch, there was water. But the strangest thing was that I was still able to breathe. I looked down and saw that the demon had penetrated my mouth, though instead of an inky black creature, I saw a translucent passage providing me with oxygen. Its nature had fundamentally changed.
Once more, the atmosphere around me began to change. A brilliant light flashed through the water and I found myself once more in-between realms.
Much to my dismay, the tentacles that had coiled themselves around my body had been replaced by a thick briar of blackberries. The portal had deposited me square in the middle of a maze of thorns, and my clothes and skin were suffering for the contact.
Fuckin' hells...
I took a deep breath, and then realized that things were not as bad as I had initially thought.
At least it's not fucking me...
My skin was soft and vulnerable compared to the hardened scales from the previous world. I didn't need a diviner to tell me I had finally made it to the human realm.
Cursing, I began the laborious task of unweaving myself from the briar patch. I found that if I dropped down toward the ground, the briars got thicker than up at top. This meant that the thorns were longer and more uncomfortable -- but at least there weren't an overwhelming number of elements to contend with.
I ended up getting some deep cuts along my arms, and thighs, but nothing too severe. My clothes on the other hand were in absolute shreds, and I had completely lost my boots.
On the other side of the berry patch, I reached a break in my frustration. I let out a long sigh, and let my eyes rest on the vegetation which surrounded me. There were huge redwood trees, all around me. I was along the edge of some sort of clearing, though the forest extended in all directions that I could see.
While the previous dimension had seemed utterly barren, I got the opposite impression from this place. I was in a wild and untamed environment, rich with life. Birds and insects were so present that it was difficult not to notice the songs of their lives.
Brushing my hand across my forehead, I wiped a stray spiderweb from my hair. I stuck my arm out to investigate, and along the scratches from the briar patch, walked a spider the size of my thumb.
Shivers caught me, but then I remembered where I was and relaxed.
There you go...
I watched as the spider disappeared into the debris on the forest floor, and continued to stare into the earth.
My mind went back through the portal. What the hell was that? Apart from the fact that I recalled the physicality of the experience, I could have sworn that the entire experience was a dream. Even in dreams, I have touched, and been touched in a way which was convincingly real. The part that I couldn't wrap my head around was that my fucking shoes were gone.
Toes wiggled in the air as I stared at the relentless proof that I had been elsewhere, regardless of where that place might have been. I felt confused, betrayed, and totally out of sorts. When I tried to think of the possible reasons why I could have experienced something like that, I grew fatigued. There was a total loss of will on my part to devote any energy toward thinking about why I had ended up there, or how I had gotten out.
The images would be burned into my consciousness, that much I knew.
My body had been different, and what's more, I had gotten my wings back once again. I swear, I could still feel the sting of the creature that had pulled me underground, but only while my eyes were closed. When I opened my eyes up once more to examine the source of the stinging, all I could see were thorn scratches.
Well, at least I'm here... not too bad looking in this form. Absolutely human.
Frequently, when Fae crossed over into the human realm, they magicked themselves up to be beautiful. The men more so than the women. However, this beauty charm, or ‘Glamour’ was not a necessary aspect of the transition into the material world.
If I were to go about the material realm in my actual form, there would be chaos. I would be captured and put into a sexualized circus for sure. That, or I would have to bring the lives of a few humans mercilessly short, and escape.
There wasn't any inherent danger in being in my true form, or Fae form, within the material realm, its' just that it was grossly impractical. How was a person supposed to get any work done while the rest of the world was too busy staring at you to provide a coherent response or maintain a conversation?
Absolutely not. I had to be incognito in order for this to work, but fortunately, there was something about the cross-dimensional travel which made that all work out.
I had heard of others, other Fae who had somewhat arrogantly decided to magick themselve
s into their original form while on the material plane, but I wasn't nearly that prideful. Not anymore.
In spite of it all, I was pleased to discover that I was actually fairly good looking.
I had more muscle and substance in my human form. Instead of one wing, I had intricate tattoo lines splayed downward along the side of my body. Through the torn fabric of my clothes, I could see both muscles and tattoos along the surface of my skin. I had both healthy tone and solid muscle definition. Much of the time, in the Fae Realm, I didn't consider much of my physical appearance. At least not since I was on active duty.
I was glad to know that whatever fates were involved at least had a sexual inclination for the way my body adapted to the change between realms.
I stood up and admired myself for a moment, trying to assess how much damage had been done to my clothes, and what sort of form I would be working with in order to complete my mission.
Tits and Ass for days, and a solid athleticism too. ‘Bout fucking time something went right.
I wasn't prepared to go anywhere just yet, and for the moment, I allowed myself to indulge in some stretches. It felt good to release some of the tension in my muscles. I was disoriented, but pleased to discover that I could at least function well enough in this form. My balance was on point, and after about a half hour of meditation, my focus was solid as well.
Unfortunately, I realized during my period of adjustment that I would have to deal with all of the problems that came along with adopting a human body.
Humans, as a general rule were more susceptible to illness and fatigue. Their brains required more effort to prevent them from losing focus. They were hungrier, more often, and due to their shortened lifespan, they had a much higher sex drive than the fae.
I had been on the material plane for less than an hour, and already my mind was swamped with desires and 'urgent needs' of all kinds.
I don't understand how they manage...
Shaking my head, I set about to clear my focus once more. I needed to create a Meta Map Spell in order to figure out where my target was supposed to be located. Casting spells in human form is easy enough, but you need to clear your mind of other preoccupations first, and sometimes, that can be more difficult than not.