He was falling again. He knew his body was back, for his stomach immediately hopped into his throat and remained there. Colors, sounds and smells washed over him in a huge rush, and then everything went black for a moment.
Joel opened his eyes. He was standing on a grassy hilltop overlooking a forest that spread for miles in all directions. Daylight surrounded him, and he blinked, then realized that it was pouring.
He didn’t do anything for a moment, preferring to remain still and see if his stomach was going to keep its contents to itself or not. As he stood there, trying to ignore the downpour, he looked around.
A deciduous forest surrounded him in every direction. About two hundred yards away down the hill in one direction he could see what looked like a dirt road winding through the trees. Although the hill on which he stood was high, it wasn’t high enough for him to see more than half a mile in any direction. Apart from the road, he could not see any sign of civilization.
He could not see any sign of Massar or J’Mart, either. The forest was eerily silent. After some debate, he decided that the contents of his stomach were going to remain where they were and set off towards the closest edge of the forest.
No sooner had he arrived under the canopy of leaves than he nearly stumbled over Massar, who was seated in a lotus position next to a large tree trunk. His eyes were closed, but he opened them at once upon hearing Joel catch his footing. A rare smile crossed his face. “Well met, Joel,” he said. “I was beginning to worry about you. You were gone quite a bit longer than I expected.”
“Well, it’s not through any fault of mine,” retorted Joel. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on in there. What happened to you guys? And where’s J’Mart?”
Massar shook his head. “He seemed excited to be here, but the longer you failed to appear, the more agitated he became until he disappeared altogether about ten minutes ago. I do not know where he went.”
“Ten minutes ago?! How long was I in there?” Although it had seemed endless while it was happening, in retrospect it seemed to Joel that he had only been “world-walking,” as J’Mart put it, for a few minutes.
“You were gone for more than an hour,” responded Massar. “As I said, I was beginning to worry.”
Suddenly there was a loud “pop” and J’Mart appeared in mid-air, hovering in front of Joel. “Hoo, boy! There you are! I went looking for you and ended up on Tharlfurl. Although I haven’t been there in a few hundred years, it’s not what I had in mind. Where did you go?”
Joel shook his head and related what had happened during his trip to an attentive Ramiken and wizard. He relayed the conversation he had ‘heard’ as best as he could remember it, and when he finished both members of his audience were silent.
J’Mart looked at Massar with a strange look on his face. “D’ya think? Was it the Two?”
Massar nodded slowly with a thoughtful expression. “It may very well have been. If so… If the Two are involved, then this is infinitely more important than I first believed. We may be dealing with things completely outside our normal realms of experience.”
“Okay, wait just a damn minute,” interjected Joel before Massar could continue. “Who the hell are ‘the Two’? Just what have you gotten me into, aside from the completely screwed up story you gave me to begin with?”
Massar sighed. “This may take a little while to explain, Joel. Please, sit down and dry out.” He made a few subtle hand motions. The air underneath the tree flickered for a moment, and then without warning there was a fire happily burning at his feet. It would have seemed perfectly normal except for the fact that the fire was burning nothing but thin air.
Joel jumped a foot back in alarm. I don’t know why I keep forgetting this guy’s a wizard. He picked out a relatively dry place on the ground and sat down, never taking his eyes off of Massar.
“There has always been, and always will be, a dichotomy in the world between light and dark, good and evil,” the wizard began without warning. “You can not have one without the other, and alone, each is meaningless. All civilizations, all species throughout the multiverse have something along the lines of your planet’s Christianity’s ‘God’ and ‘Satan’ in their respective faiths and religions. For simplicity’s sake, I shall refer to the Two in Alera’s terms – that is to say, Yath and Ysuldur. Yath is the god of Order, and Ysuldur is the god of Chaos. The story goes that the Two sprang into existence simultaneously, and between them created the multiverse. That, however, was the last time they cooperated. It is their nature to work against each other. Yath is what you would call ‘good,’ and Ysuldur is evil, although those terms fail to adequately describe their existence.
“Ordinarily, as you can imagine, the Two remain impartial, apart from the worlds that you and I take for granted. They can no more be bothered with our everyday existence than you can be bothered with the inner workings of an anthill. It seems that they, as gods do, created the multiverse and then left it to its own devices.
“In this case, however, they seem to have taken an interest. In retrospect, it makes sense. We search for a book that could destroy existence, perhaps Gods as well. Their interest may be self-preservational at best, but it is an interest nonetheless.”
“Wait a minute, though,” said Joel. “One of the voices – I’m assuming it was Ysuldur – seemed as if it wanted me to fail. In fact, I got the impression that I’m the subject of some sort of wager, and I don’t like it.”
“Can’t say as I blame you,” said J’Mart. “Last time I was in the middle of a wager I was on Grokkenspur, working for a dismal character named… What was his name again? I don’t remember now, but I haven’t been able to go back there since, and it’s been a few millennia. But even that was different than having a god bet on my success.” He scratched his nose. “That could be an ego-booster or a buster, I guess.”
Massar stood up. “Aside from that, it means that you have both a powerful enemy and a powerful ally. I don’t know what effect that could have on your chances of success. I for one choose to be optimistic and believe it will ultimately help you. Now,” and he looked at Joel, “I need to disperse this magical fire and create a normal one, and in order to do that we will need some firewood. If you gather some wood, I will come up with some dinner for us.”
The conversation seemed to be at an end for the time being, so Joel began searching for some dry wood, his head still buzzing with questions. J’Mart tagged along, chattering about nothing in particular and managing to avoid doing any physical labor while he talked about an adventure he had had on a world he called Betelgeuse. Joel had an inkling he was talking about the star in Earth’s universe, but he was too distracted to ask the Ramiken. It took about thirty minutes to create a sizable pile of wood, by which time he was completely soaked. J’Mart, as usual, seemed untouched by the rain.
When Joel had stacked the firewood and built the start of a fire, Massar spoke a few words, making his magical fire disappear and lighting the ordinary one Joel had built. He then asked what Joel would like to eat. “I dunno,” said Joel. “Any way you could magic up some fried chicken?”
“I would prefer not to create something so ‘finished,’” the wizard replied, “but I can conjure a fowl to roast.” Joel agreed, and soon there was a bird of some sort roasting on a spit above the flames. The smell soon made Joel’s mouth water, making him realize how hungry he was. It was done before long, and he cut a large piece off with his pocketknife and began to eat. Massar and J’Mart both declined to eat. Massar seemed more approachable than he had been in the past, so Joel plied him with questions while he ate.
“Why would Ysuldur be in favor of destroying Reality? Wouldn’t that be the end of Him as well?”
Massar produced his pipe and began to puff quietly. “I would have believed so, but I could be wrong. It may be that the Two are separate from Reality as you and I know it. If that is the case, then using the Duran may destroy the multiverse, but leave Them free to create again, if They so choo
se.”
“So maybe Ysuldur doesn’t like the way things turned out and wants to start over,” Joel mused. “The God of the Old Testament in Christianity did it once, if you believe that sort of thing.”
“Start over? Why?” asked J’Mart. “There’s a lot of things around that I would really miss! Not to mention me,” he added thoughtfully.
“I’m with you,” said Joel. “But why else would He be betting against me?”
“I’m inclined to agree with you, Joel,” said Massar. “Ysuldur is the god of Chaos, and He tries to destroy Order in all its forms.”
“Great. When I woke up this morning, I didn’t think I’d be on a god’s bad side by the time the sun went down. I have a feeling that if it weren’t for the other guy – Yath? – I wouldn’t be here right now talking about it.”
J’Mart snorted. “Very true, my friend. You know that anthill analogy that Mr. Magic used a little while ago? Very apt, it was. Except you mean even less than an ant to Ysuldur.”
Joel shuddered a little and looked back at Massar. “Okay, change of subject. Can I ask you about your magic?”
Massar nodded.
“Why did you want to put out your magic fire and have me start a physical one? And why did you want to create an uncooked bird rather than a finished meal?”
The wizard puffed silently for a moment. “You must understand that magic is present everywhere in the multiverse, always. It permeates all things and beings throughout existence. What a wizard or magician does is simply focus it and bend it to his means when he needs it. Some worlds have greater concentrations of it, some less, and some beings are better at gathering it than others. Ramikens, for instance,” he pointed at J’Mart, “are almost nothing but concentrated magical power.”
He continued. “Because magic is so powerful, it is also very sought after, particularly by those beings not so skilled at concentrating it themselves. They are very sensitive to the use of magic anywhere in the multiverse. Although not all of them are evil, many are.
“A necessary symptom of magic is that the more ‘finished’ a thing is that one conjures, the more power is required to create it, and the more concentrated the magic must be. So when I create a thing, in order to avoid attracting much unwanted attention, I try to concentrate the power as little as possible to achieve the desired results.”
“So if you wanted to build a house, for instance,” said Joel, “it would make more sense to summon a pile of two by fours and build it yourself than it would to just summon a mansion?”
“Exactly.”
“What sort of attention could you attract?”
“Like I said, most of it is harmless, but there are darker beings that feed on concentrations of magic, and can be dangerous to the wizard that attracted them. I am always on my guard against them, and recently, with the disappearance of the Duran, more so than before.”
Joel had finished eating during the conversation, and, seeing that he was done, Massar waved his hand and the remains of the meal disappeared. J’Mart snickered. “And I was just about to volunteer to do the dishes. Say, Mr. Music Man. Why don’t you break out your instrument there and serenade us with an after-dinner campfire song?”
“Yes, Joel, why don’t you?” asked Massar with an intense look of interest. “I would like to hear you play, and I am curious about something.”
Joel leaned over and grabbed his guitar case. “All right, I can fool around a little, I suppose,” he said as he unsnapped the case and picked up the instrument. “I need to see how it survived the trip, anyway.” He positioned his fingers and carefully strummed an E major chord.
He almost dropped the guitar. As soon as the chord began to emanate from the guitar, a wave of light and color enveloped his hands. The fingers of his left hand were glowing yellow, while his right hand was an aquamarine. Both hands were vibrating all the way up to the elbows.
J’Mart did a back flip in the air and landed on his rear end next to the tree trunk, his eyes wide. Joel froze in astonishment, totally unsure of what to do. He looked mutely at Massar, waiting for the wizard to step in and fix things.
Massar, for his part, was unruffled. He smiled. “Joel, it is perfectly all right. I had a feeling about this. Rest assured, it is totally safe. Just play some more, would you?”
Joel swallowed and then hesitantly strummed an A minor. The colors floating around his arms changed slightly, to red and gray, and the vibrations increased in frequency. As he felt the vibrations travel up his arms, Joel realized that it was not at all unpleasant, and began to strum different chords. He soon understood that minor chords created a different effect than major ones, both in color and in vibrations. Picking out a melody had even more unusual effects. He played and experimented for over an hour as J’Mart and Massar looked on, the former dancing around with delight, the latter simply watching quietly. The air beneath the tree was thick with sounds and colors as Joel tried different tunes, both popular music and his own compositions. He discovered that rock and roll gave harsher colors, while jazz and blues were more intricate. Classical music was the most intricate of all, and Joel couldn’t keep track of all the infinite, minute variations of color and vibrations that he experienced.
Finally exhausted, Joel laid his guitar down reluctantly and looked at Massar, the questions evident on his face. His entire soul was still thrumming faintly with the aftereffects of whatever had just happened. A colorful aura of lights still surrounded him, and faded slowly as he sat quietly. Massar waited until the last of the colors and lights had disappeared completely before speaking.
“I had a feeling about your music, which is why I was pleased that you had brought your guitar. You see, Joel, there is something about this world, about Alera, that I neglected to tell you.
“Alera has never heard of music.”
Joel shook his head, not sure he had heard correctly. “Never heard of music? How is that possible?”
The wizard shrugged. “No one knows. As I’m sure you can imagine, all civilized worlds develop differently. There are similarities, like the ones between Earth and Alera that I alluded to earlier, but the differences often outweigh the similarities. For whatever reason, no being on Alera has ever invented music. They have rhythm, for they have drums and percussion, but no tonal instruments.”
Joel was silent for a few moments. “That is very difficult to believe. Obviously, the first instrument created by anybody is the human voice, and it’s a small step to go from vocal song to creating some sort of musical instrument.”
“Be that as it may, no one in this world has ever done it. And perhaps because of that, it is apparent that music has magical powers on this world. Alera has more concentrated magical power than Earth does, and the music has a different effect, as you just witnessed. The other possibility is that the music, or you, or both, are magical in their own rights.”
“And you ‘neglected’ to tell me this? Is this why you chose me? Because I can do something here that nobody else can?”
Massar shook his head. “You are forgetting, Joel, that the reason I contacted you is that you are having the same dreams that others on this world are having. I did not choose you in particular. And as for not telling you, I had a hunch that music would have magical powers here, but only a hunch. I did not want to raise false hopes in you so soon.”
As opposed to raising false hopes later? Joel was quiet, looking at his hands as if they belonged to someone else and had only recently been attached to his arms. “So what can I do with it? I mean, it’s pretty and all, and it feels good, but what good is it? I don’t think lights and colors are going to help find the Duran.”
At this point J’Mart stepped forward. “I think I may be able to help here. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to work magic. I may be able to teach you how to use it, and more importantly, how to control it. Power like that may come easily to you, but it is bound to have some consequences unless you learn some control.” The Ramiken seemed unusually solemn.
“Power like that is also more than just pretty lights – I guarantee it.”
Perhaps because the little man was so serious, Joel couldn’t help smiling. “Okay, short stuff. Maybe you’re right.” He looked back at the wizard. “So how powerful is this musical magic?”
Massar puffed a few times on his pipe, then stood. “It is getting late, but perhaps before we sleep it might do to perform an experiment. Joel, I want you to concentrate on that small branch of wood.” He pointed out a branch about as long as Joel’s forearm and as big around as his finger.
Joel looked at the branch. “Okay, now what?”
Massar pointed at the guitar. “Now, I want you to picture in your mind, as clearly as you can, that branch burning. See it on fire, see the flames licking its surface, see the smoke rising. When you have that image clearly in your mind, choose a chord on your guitar that to you seems to embody the essence of ‘fire,’ and play that chord. But don’t just strum the chord. I want you to aim that chord at the branch.”
It took Joel a moment to decide what chord to use, finally settling on an A major. Then he concentrated on imagining the branch burning until he could almost feel the fire. Then, holding that image in his mind, he did his best to ‘throw’ the chord – and its accompanying lights and colors – at the branch.
Nothing happened. Joel took a deep breath and tried again. The branch still stubbornly refused to burn, but he thought he caught a glimpse of heat waves surrounding it.
J’Mart saw it too. “You’re getting it! Keep trying!” Joel calmed his mind and tried again. This time he definitely saw the air wavering slightly around the wood, but it did not burn.
After more than twenty minutes of trying, Massar called a halt. Joel was spent. He had not succeeded in setting the branch on fire, but had had enough success to make him feel that the effort was not entirely wasted. When the wizard suggested they try to get some sleep, he readily agreed. Although it had been a very long, very exciting day, he did not expect to fall asleep easily. He knew questions would be buzzing around his head, preventing sleep from coming quickly, if at all. He found a dry spot on the ground, made himself comfortable, and immediately was asleep.
SongMaster's Realm Page 5