Distant Rumblings

by John Goode

  “What do you mean?” he asked, leaning forward in the chair.

  “I mean, if he is a monster for attacking a defenseless foe, what does that make you for trying to do the same?”

  Hawk sat in silence as he realized he had no idea how to answer.

  Chapter Eleven

  I WOKE up alone.

  The rain seemed to have eased off when I stared at the window and tried to figure out if the past few days had been a dream or not. Was I Dorothy? Imagining a world I wasn’t in control of only to find out I was a klutz and had fallen into a pig pen, cracked my head open, and imagined the whole thing?

  The thought of Hawk not being real was terrifying.

  I jumped out of bed and raced out of my room. When I got to the top of the stairs I could see the living room. The unreality of the whole situation spiraled sharply upward. Everything was just as it was supposed to be. No broken table, no ripped carpet, nothing. The TV was fine; in fact, it was on, playing an old cartoon. I took a few more halting steps, wondering how Hawk could have seemed so real, lost because I’d imagined the entire thing—

  His laugh echoed across the room, and I felt the clenching of my stomach relax so quickly my head spun.

  I reached the foot of the stairs and saw him sitting on the couch laughing like a loon at the figures on the screen. He looked over at me and pointed at the television. “Have you seen this? These creatures are insane!” Amid his laughter, he smiled at me and waved me nearer to him.

  I took a few hesitant steps into the living room, looking for evidence of last night’s battle. There was nothing; if anything it looked cleaner than it had been. “What happened?” I asked in wonderment.

  “I cleaned up,” Hawk said proudly.

  “I cleaned up,” Ruber corrected him.

  “We cleaned up,” Hawk amended.

  “I don’t understand…,” I said, looking around in a circle.

  “Magic.”

  I looked over at Hawk.

  “We used—”

  “I used,” Ruber interrupted him.

  “We used magic.”

  I sighed and sat down in my dad’s chair. “Okay, I think we need to talk.”

  “But the creatures are dancing!” he said, pointing to the TV.

  “They’re cartoons,” I explained.

  “I have tried to explain animation to him, but he is uninterested,” Ruber commented dryly.

  I reached over and grabbed the remote and turned it off. “We need to talk.”

  He tried to hide the disappointment as he turned to me. “You have questions.”

  I nodded. “I just want to know what is going on before I fall any deeper down this rabbit hole.”

  He cocked his head in confusion.

  “Alice in Wonderland?” Blank look. “Little girl falls down a rabbit hole and ends up in a weird place with playing cards and a talking rabbit?” Now an incredulous look. “Red Queen? Off with your head?”

  He nodded instantly at that. “It sounds like Aponiviso, ruled by the Family Crimson.” I just stared, my mind in disarray. “Are we speaking of the same place?”

  I got up and walked over to the small bookcase my father kept in the corner. I picked through the titles and found his collected works of Lewis Carroll. I handed it over to Hawk. “No. I was referring to a character in a book.”

  He took it but didn’t open it. “I have no way of reading this without the bauble.”

  I removed the back of the earring and handed both over to him. The second he attached it to his ear I saw his face change, no doubt the words on the cover suddenly making sense. He flipped through the book, taking pause at each illustration and studying it.

  “You’re from there?” I asked, knowing the question was insane.

  He shook his head gravely as he continued to skim the book. “No, but it reminds me of Aponiviso. It is a broken world; the laws no longer work, so things like gravity and dimensions change from moment to moment. Some seem flat as cards while others are enormous for no reason at all!” He turned the book around and pointed to a drawing of the White Rabbit. “This looks like Farnsworth, royal page and messenger for the Family Crimson. The device in his hand has the ability to manipulate time and space.”

  “It’s a timepiece,” I said, knowing the picture well. I had grown up with these books, my father having a healthy interest in fairy tales and everything else most people deemed to be completely useless.

  He shook his head. “It is a piece of time.”

  We both stared at the book for a minute without speaking. It was obvious neither one of us knew what was going on. I got up and pulled down a copy of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I flipped through it, pausing at an illustration of the Ice Queen. I handed it to him.

  His eyes went wide in shock. “This looks like Queen Pudani of Niflgard!” He looked over to Ruber and asked, “What sorcery is this?”

  For the first time, the ruby did not sound so sure of its answer. “I am not sure,” it began hesitantly. “That is an accurate rendering of Pudani, but that is impossible. When was this book published?”

  “1950s, I think.” Though Ruber had no face, I imagined its silence was akin to Hawk’s confusion. “About sixty years ago,” I tried.

  “Yet The Abandonment was…,” Hawk began, doing some kind of calculation in his head.

  “Nearly fifteen hundred years ago,” Ruber answered for him. “It is difficult to be sure with the time differential between the realms.” He seemed almost apologetic that he had to be so vague.

  “Then what is this?” Hawk asked, holding up the book.

  “I am no closer to answering that question than I was the first time you asked,” the floating gem answered with more than a little resentment. I guess he didn’t like not knowing something.

  “Okay, I am really no closer to understanding what the hell is going on,” I said, interrupting their conversation.

  Hawk put the book down as Ruber floated over to the bookcase. “Well, I am Hawk’keen Maragold Tertania, son to Titania and Oberon, rulers of Arcadia and Lords of Faerth.”

  He waited for me to say something, but honestly, most of the words he just said sounded like a strange mix of French and Latin. When he saw my incomprehension his hands began to reach for the earring, but Ruber stopped him. “I am capable of the same enchantment as the bauble possesses, I believe you both will need your native comprehension to make sense of this.”

  Ruber floated back toward me, and as he did, he began to shrink smaller and smaller until he was the same size as the emerald in Hawk’s ear. I felt it wiggle into the hole in my lobe and hold itself there. I was about to check if it was in place when I felt the tingle of magic move through me, much more powerful than the magic the earring made.

  “Okay, say that again,” I said to Hawk.

  “I am Hawk’keen Maragold Tertania, son to Titania and Oberon, rulers of Arcadia and Lords of Faerth.” The accent was gone now, and the names were instantly recognizable. “The Titania and Oberon?” I asked in awe.

  “You know of my parents?” he asked, leaning forward quickly.

  “They are in the play!” I said, looking for my backpack before realizing it had been burned in the theater. “We’re doing that play for the spring production,” I explained quickly. “The costumes that attacked us were from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  I could tell the name meant nothing to Hawk, but I could see him recalling something. “The uniforms were familiar somehow, but I thought them shoddy replicas or perhaps from an army without sufficient funds for complete outfitting. To say they come from a play makes their appearance understandable but no less confusing.”

  “Wait!” I said, wracking my brain for what little I knew of the play. “The queen, Titania, there was argument about a child—” And my face paled. “A shape shifter.”

  It was obviously the wrong thing to say, as Hawk’s eyes flashed in anger and I could see his face redden. “How. Do. You. Know. Of. That?” he demanded.
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br />   I held up my hands to calm him down. “It’s a story. Well, it is here. You’re from the realm of fairies?” I asked in disbelief.

  He was still glaring at me, but somehow I knew he was angrier at the shame of what I had just said than at me specifically. It was like being told that your family’s dirty laundry was aired for school children to read and laugh at. Ruber’s voice came from between us even though he was still in my ear. “Your majesty,” he began carefully, “I know you are upset, but only through communication are we going to get any closer to understanding—”

  “I am from Faerth,” Hawk said, cutting him off. “Our people are called fairies.” His voice was harsh, but I could tell he was trying to calm himself. He shot me a nervous smile, distracted by what he was reading, but not so far away that he didn’t want to reassure me.

  “But I don’t understand. How are these books in my world real places in your world?” I asked, still not getting it.

  “We are the heart of the nine worlds,” Hawk began. “They are all bound to us since we are the center of the universe; they are not from our world, but they are known to us.”

  I shook my head. “Even with Ruber helping, that made no sense.”

  He looked around and grabbed a pad of paper and a pencil from the end table. He put it down and began to draw silently. I watched, knowing interrupting him would only take up time. He spun the pad around and showed me the crude drawing he’d made. It looked like a cross with his world in the center of it.

  “Faerth is the center world. All eight other worlds are tethered to us, crossing over with our world yet worlds unto themselves,” he tried to explain.

  Ruber added, “There are places on Faerth that intersect the other worlds, allowing free travel from one realm to another as long as a traveler passes through Faerth first.”

  I pointed at the gap that was just underneath the center world of the circle. “Why does there seem to be one missing?” I asked.

  “There is,” Hawk said, putting the pencil in the middle of the space. “That is where your world was.”

  I tried to absorb that my world had been somewhere I’d never heard of. “Wait, was?”

  Ruber’s voice answered, “The connection with your world was severed over a millennium ago.”

  “We used to be able to travel to fairyland?”

  “Faerth,” Hawk corrected me. “The facilitation place used to be called….” He snapped his fingers trying to remember. “…something with an A….”

  “Avalon,” Ruber provided.

  “Yes!” Hawk said excitedly. “There was a place called Avalon where one would cross over with our world. But it was deemed your people were incapable of coexisting with the other nine worlds without incessant war, hence The Abandonment.”

  I stared down at the paper. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the blank space on the circle. “So then what are these worlds?” I asked, dazed.

  He began at the top of the cross and began to name them. “This is Tokpewa, Aponiviso, this is of course Faerth, and here, Niflgard, with Helgard on its shoulder.”

  He looked like he was going to go on, but I stopped him. “Okay, this is weird!” I said, standing quickly. “So you come from a place where fairy tales are true and magic is normal and where my world used to exist, but doesn’t now.” I looked at Hawk. “I don’t know if I can handle all this.”

  Hawk rose slowly, his voice was calm and soothing, like he was talking to a wild animal. “I know this is strange for you. It’s strange for me. But I know it is not beyond your understanding.”

  “You got this wrong!” I panted loudly, forcing a word out on each exhale. Then, when his expression didn’t become more threatening, bundles of words, rather than just one, escaped. “I’m not that guy, I am not the guy who can just accept that everything I know about my world isn’t right!”

  He crossed the three steps to me and put his hands on my shoulders, wrapping his fingers about them and anchoring me. “Yes. You are.” He smiled at me, and I felt my panic begin to lessen.

  “Why do you think that?” I pleaded with him.

  “I don’t think, I know.” His voice was firm with conviction as he stared straight into my eyes, looking right through the skin and into me.

  “How?”

  “Because you’re stronger than you can imagine, Kane. You put yourself between me and a creature that had been trying to kill you last night. There was no question in your mind that it deserved mercy. And whether it had just tried to kill you didn’t matter. That it is a Changeling and I am of Faerth. These are things you have accepted without question. You have already proved it.”

  “Proved what?”

  “That you can accept great challenges, great changes. You already have.” When he saw my face, he understood I wasn’t following him. “Kane, look around you! You knew that the earring was magical, you accept that Ruber is alive and talking, you’ve already accepted it, you just don’t know it yet. You’re stronger than you think. Give yourself some credit.”

  “I was terrified last night,” I corrected him.

  “Well, you didn’t seem scared, which just shows how much you can overcome.” He leaned in and rested his forehead against mine. “You can do this.” His body trembled just once, and he added, “And you’re all I have.”

  The pain in his voice was so real that my arms reached around him, pulling him closer, willing away the vast loneliness behind his words. I sighed as I thought about his words; if I was going to have a heart attack or something, I would have done it when the shape shifting thing thought I was kibbles and bits. Little late to wuss out now.

  And besides that, he was right. I was all he had.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “Eat?” he offered eagerly. “But not scraps.”

  He was too cute not to kiss.

  SPIKE DESTROYED the interior of the house out of sheer spite.

  He hated this world, he hated that he had lost Hawk, he hated that puny human, and he hated that the damn ruby had been right. He didn’t know what he was still doing here if he wasn’t going to kill Hawk. The Changeling paused at that thought, could he do it? Could he really snuff the life out of the prince?

  He screamed in frustration again as he picked up the rotted bed he’d found upstairs and prepared to throw it across the room. There was a broken mirror still hanging on the wall, and Spike saw his reflection within its shattered surface grinning back at him. Then his reflection’s lips moved when his own didn’t. “Well, I see you’re spending your time constructively.”

  Spike dropped the bed and moved near to the mirror. “Father?”

  “Of course it’s me!” Puck raged back at him. “Is the prince dead?” Before Spike could even open his mouth Puck kept talking, “Wait, let me answer for you. No, not yet, Father, I am too weak to actually finish the task because I am a failure.” The reflection of his own eyes glared at him. “Say I am wrong.”

  Spike swallowed hard as he shrank away from his father’s image.

  “I knew it. I am sending a group of people to make sure this gets done. You’re done there.”

  “Wait!” Spike called out as his reflection began to turn away from him. “I can do it. I will do it. I just need time, Father, he is prepared for me.”

  “More reason to send professionals,” Puck countered.

  “I will do it!” he bellowed.

  The two of them stared at each other for a couple of silent minutes. Finally Puck said, “You have one week—human time—to finish this. Seven days and I am sending a cadre of assassins to end this one way or another.” The reflection leaned closer to the glass. “And, Spike, if the prince is not dead when they arrive, I suggest running. Fast.”

  Spike said nothing as the reflection flickered back to just to an image of himself.

  He stood there gulping, heaving lungfuls of air as he struggled not to lash out at the offending mirror in rage. Seven days, seven days to kill the prince.

&nb
sp; “I can do this,” Spike said to himself as he let his form relax.

  He stood almost four feet tall with a curve to his spine that made him hunch forward. His arms were longer than a human’s so his knuckles touched the floor. His legs hinged similar to a goat’s but he had three sharp talons on his feet instead of hooves. He was covered with a fine pelt of light brown fur that could be mistaken for a wolf’s pelt at a distance. His face was wide and his jaw jutted out past his upper lip. Two large fangs pointed upward to his luminous yellow eyes. His ears came out to the side like a doe’s and had a ring of darker fur around the edge.

  He rarely took his true form, preferring to be nearly any other animal instead of his deformed collection of body parts. He focused as he attempted to stand up straight. His back fought him, but he clenched his teeth and concentrated past the pain.

  Slowly, he balanced in his new upright position. To take his mind from the pain of stretched and abused muscles, joints, and nerves, he concentrated on the remainder of the transformation. The fur began to fade, revealing rapidly lightening skin underneath. His claws retracted and vanished altogether and he grew another two toes. His arms shrank, and the talons on both hands began to reduce in size.

  He screamed again, this time in pain, as he forced his form farther than he ever had before.

  I HAD to smile as I watched him scour the breakfast menu at Mr. Watson’s.

  He looked so—I don’t even know if there is a word to describe the way he looked. He was handsome, of course, but his eyes looked as if they belonged to a child as he excitedly read each dish to himself off the menu and then licked his lips. His exuberance at just the thought of food made my heart feel as if it was swelling in my chest.

  “It’s exciting to be able to read the—what did you call it?” he asked, holding up the menu.

  “A menu.”

  “A menu, yes. Usually it’s written on a slate or the serving girl just tells you,” he commented, going back to the list. “What is tofu?” he asked, turning the menu over and pointing to the word.