by Des Pensable
‘Prendergrass is a specialist in memory …err …modification. After we left the ball we had a meeting with others to discuss the night’s events and he realized that they were forgetting what happened. We both spent last night in an antimagic field while he worked out what to do. This morning he used a power, which blocked any further memory loss. It was only after we had talked with others at lunch that we realized that all their memories of last night were gone. That’s why we came tonight to find out what you were up to.’
Aquitain ignored Darkmantle’s subtle attempt to find out more about why people were forgetting what happened at the spring ball.
‘I think you’re right.’ said Aquitain.
‘We will all have sharper reflexes when we’re fresh and I don’t think the book will expect Bellen back until the morning. Perhaps we can surprise it then.’
‘Okay, we should all get some sleep then meet at dawn.’ said Darkmantle. ‘Perhaps you would like to sleep in Miranda’s mother’s room. It is decorated in Mudrun style and it would seem somehow appropriate as no one has slept there since she left.’
‘Thank you Lord Darkmantle, Bellen and I will accept your offer.’ said Aquitain suddenly feeling quite tired.
‘Err wouldn’t it be better if we held Bellen in a cell overnight. He might escape.’ said Prendergrass.
‘No I don’t think so. He will give me his word that he won’t escape.’ said Aquitain.
‘If you have any doubts remember that Crys my construct here never sleeps and is a very capable guardian.’
‘My dear Lady Warden, you are currently protecting my daughter’s body. This is a family matter now. In this house you will be as safe as in your mother’s arms.’
After showing Aquitain to Miranda’s mother’s room and getting fresh bed linen, Darkmantle and Prendergrass left.
‘What do you what me to do my Lord?’ asked Prendergrass.
‘Get some sleep. You’re going to have to fight tomorrow.’ said Darkmantle.’ and I’m going to have to reassess a few things. I now have a powerful druid daughter that is contesting Gemelica for the throne. What an intriguing position. I win whoever wins the throne.’
Aquitain placed Crys in a position where it could watch all the room and told it to watch and warn him if anything entered the room, even an insect. After Bellen gave his word that he would not try to escape or cause any problems he gave the Trixie a large soft pillow to sleep on then took off Miranda’s Brilliant Armour.
It was wonderful to get out of the heavy rigid stuff and feel free again. However, when Aquitain sat on the side of the bed in Miranda’s skimpy underwear and saw her semi-nude body in the mirror she suddenly felt embarrassed. It wasn’t right. It was like stealing a glimpse of your lover through a window when she didn’t know you were there. She quickly slid in between the fresh bed linen. It felt wonderful. She tried to remember when she had last slept in a real bed. It was so long ago.
She lay thinking over the past day, there was so much to do it was frightening and being in Miranda’s beautiful female body was confusing. She was becoming scared again. What if something happened when she was sleeping? She now realized why Llanlorian had walked around holding the cat. It was her security, her other eyes, her Alpha.
‘Rat Catcher come here.’ she mindspoke and the Rat Catcher appeared at the bottom of the huge bed and after checking the room jumped up and sat beside her.
‘You called my Lady?’
‘Guard me while I sleep please.’ commanded Aquitain.
‘As you wish, my Lady.’ replied the Rat Catcher.
So with wonderful feeling of peace and security she drifted off to sleep and the Rat Catcher curled up and went to sleep beside her.
Chapter 6 Butterflies and Bats
Aquitain walked out on a sea of cloud and noticed there was a thin mist all around him. He neither felt hot or cold. This must be a dream he thought but how can I have a dream while I’m within a dream. He imagined he was in the jungle near Quab’s cottage and he was. There were a million different shades of green, and brown and yellow with golden beams of light streaming through the canopy overhead. He could smell the characteristic rotting smell of the vegetation and hear the calls of the jungle birds.
He imagined himself walking out of the jungle up the sand hill near his favourite beach and he was. He heard the seagulls calling to each other; he could smell the sea on the breeze and hear the waves gently lapping the shore. As he topped the rise he saw the beach laid out like a golden carpet meeting the cool blue green water that stretched out to the horizon where it met a crystal clear cloudless cyan sky.
He imagined a mirror as tall and wide as himself and looked at his image. He saw himself as a young guy called Rob, he imagined himself as a Logicon and he was, he viewed himself as a bear, a Llanllean, a Little Person, a gnome, a little green crystal figure and as Miranda.
‘I’m all of these and more.’ he thought. ‘I wonder what I really am?’ and to his surprise a figure took shape. It was nothing he could ever have imagined. He looked it over and it looked back at him with his eyes.
‘I am you and you are Me.’ it seemed to say to him and he was horrified.
‘No this is me!’ he shouted and he changed the image in the mirror to the one of the young Newman guy called Rob and made the mirror vanish. He felt his heart pounding in his chest and he chanted a mantra of calming to seek inner peace. It slowed his heart and the horrible image in his mind faded. He sat down on the grassy knoll overlooking the beach and remembered the last time he was there. That was when he first met Miranda after he had killed a sea monster.
He tried to imagine her there beside him but she wouldn’t appear. The beach was deserted so he imagined sea birds dotted along the shore exploring the high tide mark for small delicacies among the brown wrinkled seaweed washed in with the waves.
A cloud appeared which then took the face of Granddad and said.
‘Where are you Aquitain? Your mother and I are getting worried as I can’t scry you, Melanie or Alpha. Are you still in Mudrun? Please send me a message.’
The cloud disappeared and another three appeared successively giving similar messages. Surprisingly this cheered him up and he chuckled as he thought.
‘Poor old Granddad, he always thinks the worst is happening.’
‘Am I still on Mudrun?
THEN IT FINALLY DAWNED ON HIM. EVERYTHING THAT HAD HAPPENED WAS REAL.
Terren his guardian and protector who had been with every moment of his life was gone and he was on his own now. Someone had stolen his princess. They were playing games with him as though he was a puppet, a helpless inexperienced little puppet. They killed his guardian, they killed Llanlorian, they stole his world Astaria, HIS WORLD ASTARIA!
He was suddenly enraged. He shape changed to a giant green crystalline humanoid shaped creature with a very dragon looking head. He imagined his mind covered by invisible shackles and shattered them. He destroyed them all. He was not going to live in the dark with hidden memories any more. He needed to know what Granddad and anyone else had hidden within him. Memories flowed, he remembered himself as a child he remembered everything. EVERYTHING!
He was suddenly overcome with remorse. They had killed Terren his mentor for the whole of his life. RAGE filled him. He would not be an agent of Chaos he would be CHAOS itself.
NO! This is not what she taught me. Terren taught me be careful and logical. I must be considered, controlled RAGE.
The downfall of agents of chaos is that they become overconfident. They are answerable to nobody except the maker herself. It leads to their downfall. He sat down and chanted a mantra of calmness.
What had Terren said? Your father is in great need of help. He is trapped and needs you to release him. We are going to learn all the knowledge that we will need to release him and then I will take you to him.
That was years ago. He had studied hard and studiously locked everything away from Grandad until it was needed. His father gave Terren a gift
for him a gift that would be his after he saved his father it was called a Divinity Seed. It was valuable beyond all imagination. His father would show him how to open it after he had been released.
He suddenly felt a little guilty. He had already opened it.
Then he remembered that Terren had put him to sleep and rummaged through his memories. She had left his father’s present behind.
‘Hello Aquitain.’ said a voice. ‘You have come of age. You have freed your memories. I can do no more for you.’
Aquitain looked around and saw an image of Terren.
‘What has happened Terren?’
‘What your father expected. They have worked out that your father had a plan to escape and they are going to try and stop him.’
‘Who are they, Terren?’
‘Very powerful gods! Never mind for now. Your job is to save Miranda. She has sent you a message. Considering what they did to her, she’s remarkable. Save her Aquitain then come to Astaria and get your home back. Then we can think about saving your father.’ and Terren vanished.
Much happier now he raced down and splashed in the cool water for a while before walking back and sitting on the warm sand. He picked up a hand full of sand and idly let it run through his fingers as he thought about Miranda again. Something about its texture seemed to draw his attention to it. There was something strangely familiar about it. He looked closely at it and remembered this stuff was like his ball of mind clay.
He imagined he had a ball of mind clay in his hand and to his surprise a stream of sand flowed up from the ground into his hand and formed itself into a ball of mind clay. He tested it by turning it into several different objects.
‘Amazing!’ he thought. ‘It behaves just like the stuff in the real world.’ so he formed it into a hat to provide shade from the sun’s glare.
Then he had another thought. He imagined a tree and another and another and they formed. He imagined a circular zone of rock under his feet and it formed. He walked around and the zone of rock followed him. He could terraform his surroundings to his will.
‘WOW! I have some powers that I had forgotten or more likely were blocked.’ he thought then dismissed the zone.
He looked out over the sea again breathing in the wonderful fresh air and saw a multi-coloured butterfly in the distance fluttering over the waves towards the land. When it reached the beach it changed direction and flew over and landed beside him within reach. He leaned over to touch it with a finger and its wings fell off and it began burrowing into the sand.
‘That’s strange.’ he thought as he tried to pick up the wings but they simply evaporated as he touched them. He sat there for a minute pondering whether there was a meaning in this when he noticed a green stalk shooting up from the sand where the butterfly had disappeared. He moved back a pace and sat down watching the stalk grow until it was about waist high then some small leaves sprouted along its length and a green bulb formed at the top which suddenly split open and formed a flower which he instantly recognized.
He touched the flower with a finger and remembered the love that he had sealed in the image of the flower that he had implanted in Miranda’s mind. He reached over and kissed the flower and its petals turned into blue butterflies that all fluttered off the stalk and headed out to sea.
‘What a remarkable girl she is!’ he thought ‘This is just brilliant!’
He imagined a water elemental at the water’s edge and one appeared. He commanded it to carry him and it lifted him up high then followed the butterflies remaining a few paces behind them. Just over the horizon he saw an island of open woodland.
On arriving at the island he dismissed the water elemental and followed the butterflies on foot until he ran into a soft but invisible barrier. The butterflies quickly flew out of sight but he noticed other butterflies landing here and there and turning into flowers. There were thousands of them.
He imagined that the barrier would be hemispherical around the place where Miranda was. He walked along feeling the edge of the barrier for a while placing an imaginary stake every hundred paces. By looking back along the line of stakes he could get an idea of how big the area enclosed by the barrier was. It was large, probably a couple of thousand paces across. The question was how to get in.
Movement a hundred paces to his right caught his eye. He walked in that direction and spotted two light brown coloured rabbits. He walked towards them and they hopped away from him when he had approached within several paces, then sat looking at him wiggling their whiskers. He tried talking to them for a couple of minutes by they didn’t seem to understand him.
‘That’s strange.’ he thought but they seemed harmless so he tried to think why they would be there. Eventually he came to the conclusion that they must be there to give him some sort of clue as to how to get through the barrier.
The thought suddenly occurred that rabbits burrowed under barriers to get past them. So he imagined a large rabbit and directed it to dig down beside the barrier. Unfortunately, after five minutes digging he realized that the barrier went into the ground as well, meaning that his rabbit couldn’t burrow under it so he dismissed it and stood thinking about how he had got past barriers in the past.
This was a mental barrier. Miranda would give him an easy way to get through. He thought of all sorts of strange and complex ways and dismissed them all. It had to be easy and simple to pass through and then he remembered how he told her she could leave a mindlink session. Create a mental door and walk through. Immediately he imagined a door against the barrier opened it and tried to walk through. Unfortunately it still wouldn’t let him pass.
‘Damn.’ he thought. ‘Maybe she’s outsmarted herself this time.’ as he again looked at the rabbits. One scratched in the dirt while watching him.
‘It’s the dirt.’ he suddenly thought aloud and quickly imagined a ball of mind clay forming in his hand. A stream of dirt rose up and formed a ball that he placed against the barrier and imagined it as a door in a doorframe. It quickly spread up the barrier forming a lovely wooden door. He opened it wide and stepped through and as he did the two rabbits charged through as well.
‘On no.’ he thought ‘I think I’ve done the wrong thing.’
The rabbits turned into bats and flew around chasing and eating the butterflies. As he watched, the bats grew in size then one suddenly fell out of the sky and splattered on the ground. The mess reformed into a blob which separated into two bats which took off after more butterflies.’
He looked down and saw that his body had changed to a green crystalline rock. He was now the shape that he had seen in the mirror back on the beach. He was twice as tall as his Newman body and had massive strong arms and legs. He felt and even looked a bit like a large green stony hairless bear. It frightened him.
‘By the Powers.’ he though ‘what will Miranda think when she sees me like this? She won’t recognize me. I’ll really scare her. Maybe I should leave?’
Racing back to the door and thrust his arm through and it changed to his Newman arm then he remembered he had let the bats in. What would they do when they ran out of butterflies to eat? It wasn’t too hard to guess.
They would attack Miranda or him or both of them. What a superbly vicious trap. He tried to change his shape but nothing happened. He tried to imagine a mirror but nothing happened. He was in Miranda’s dream. Only she could change things here except perhaps for one thing, the door.
He imagined it as a ball of mind clay and it melted into a ball at the base of the barrier. He picked it up and began running in the direction of the centre of the barrier with big heavy stomping footsteps. He noticed the butterfly population was becoming denser as he ran. He looked behind him and saw that there were already a couple of dozen bats flying around gorging themselves on butterflies. Soon there would be hundreds. How long would it be before they ran out of food?
He saw an old man with a large white beard and a young golden haired girl and ran towards them. The old man was watching the sky
trying to make out what was happening. The young girl screamed and pointed at Aquitain. He looked in Aquitain’s direction and raised a twisted wooden staff and vines shot out of the ground tripping Aquitain then swirling and twisting around him clinging tightly.
‘Is that you Miranda? It’s me Aquitain.’ he shouted. ’We’re in great danger.’
The little girl screamed.
’It’s the Aquitain monster. I heard someone say it was the beast that hurt my body.’
‘So you’re the monster.’ said Ironwood. ‘You will perish here for your foul deeds.’ and vicious thorns coated with corrosive fluid started sprouting out of the vines pressing into Aquitain’s crystalline skin.
‘No.’ said Aquitain desperately.
‘Hear me out. I’m seeking the spirit of Miranda, my lost love. Her spirit was stolen from her real body yesterday. I saw her message for help in the flower sent out with the butterflies and followed them here.’
Ironwood was hesitant.
‘Is that true Moonbeam? Did you tell the butterflies to return when they reached their target.’
‘Yes. But I didn’t tell them to bring a big monster back.’
‘What sort of creature are you?’ said Ironwood.
‘I’m a Newman but for some reason when I passed through your barrier I changed into this huge hulk of a body.’
‘That’s strange.’ said Ironwood.
‘Anyone in my domain are shown in their true form so you can’t be Newman.’
‘I can’t explain my body form but I am the one that gave the flower with my love to Miranda. If that is Miranda she will recognize this.’ and he used the ball of mind clay to create another flower, kissed it and threw it to the ground near Moonbeam’s feet.
Moonbeam picked it up and held it to her lips. This one also had the same perfume as the original.
‘It’s just like my flower, Ironwood. Maybe he did give the first one to me but I know I heard the people say it was the Aquitain monster that hurt me.’