by Dante King
“Yes,” she said as Madame Xel poured four measures of the potion out into glasses, “Mortimer should not be too much longer now, I think.”
I took the glass that Madame Xel was proffering to me and raised it up to the light. The potion appeared almost identical to champagne. Little bubbles rose happily up through it, and it had the same golden tinge that champagne did.
I wonder if that is because it was Odette’s girl jizz that we used. Would it have taken on a mauve tinge if it had been Madame Xel’s? What color would it have been if we had used my seed?
I disregarded these questions. They weren’t important right now. Besides, I didn’t want to think for more than a second about having to drink my own brew.
“All right then,” I said, holding my glass out to my three friends, the words of one of my favorite toasts springing to mind. “Here’s to the heat.”
“To the heat?” Alura asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “not the heat that brings down barns and shanties, but to the heat that brings down bras and panties!”
The girls laughed, and we knocked back our little glasses of the potion.
“Oh my, that is delectable!” Alura said, licking her lips.
She wasn’t wrong. It tasted like strawberries and cream.
Naturally, I found it impossible to hold my tongue about the secret ingredient. When I told Alura that Odette Scaleblade’s cum had been the icing on this particular magical cake, rather than hurl, Alura’s eyes brightened.
“Truly?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “and if you're a fan of this particular recipe, I’m sure that once I’m done with abstaining, we can set up a playdate between all four of us, if that sounds agreeable.”
Madame Xel clicked her teeth together. “That sounds most enticing.”
I could feel the potion running through my body now, filling it up with a glow that was similar to good liquor. It was warming, comforting and confidence-boosting. I felt marvellous—better than marvelous. I felt ready to take on the world and give it a black eye.
“Now that we’re all juiced up,” I said, directing my next question at Odette, “how is it that we’re getting to wherever it is that we need to go? A portal?”
Odette shook her head. “No portal will take you to where Priestess Entwistle resides. She is too crafty for that. We must take a more select mode of transport.”
“It sounds like you know this woman quite intimately,” Alura said.
Madame Xel nodded. “Yes. Yes we do. We were all followers of the Twin Spirits together, you see. Then, Mallory Entwistle went rogue. She is a proud, intelligent, and haughty woman. Through her preaching, which is infused with mind-altering Holy Magic, she hoped to cull the ranks of mages and thus save magic—as part of Justin’s parents’ plan—but for some reason, she grew apart from the rest of the followers. ”
Madame Xel seemed almost sad that we were setting out to kill this old colleague of hers.
Odette patted Madame Xel’s arm. “Yes, she let ‘er ego carry ’er away,” she said. “And she ‘as done many bad things in pursuit of a good cause since then.”
Madame Xel said, “At first, Mallory being a Holy Elemental—basically an angel—she and I did not get on well. After a while however, the fact that the two of us were from polar opposite realms—myself hailing from the Infernal Realms and Mallory from the Seraphic Realm—almost made us closer friends than we might have otherwise been. We were forced to look at the world through the eyes of an opposite.”
I considered what it was that the two qualified mages were telling me.
“You know, maybe we could take out someone else,” I said. “Surely there are some equally bad people out there that need shuffling onwards.”
“Perhaps,” Odette said, “but there can be no denying that Priestess Entwistle has perpetrated some terrible crimes.”
There was another knock at the door, softer this time.
“Enter,” Odette called.
Mortimer ducked into the room, pulling with him a furtive-looking elf that was looking a little the worse for wear. The stranger was bound at the hands, had a swollen lip, and a broken nose that dripped bright blue blood onto the floor.
“Well, blow me down, Mort!” I said. “While we’ve been having fun, you’ve been having some of your own.”
Chapter Sixteen
“How’re you feeling now, buddy?” I asked Mortimer.
The Chaos Mage pondered this for a moment, then yanked the weasley elf further into the room and kicked the door shut.
“Like death,” he said.
“Who’s your friend?” I asked.
“He’s a bounty,” Mort replied. “A minor one; a sneaking murderous cove, but a bounty nonetheless.”
“He is our ticket,” Odette said grimly.
“Ticket?” I asked.
“Ticket?” the elf sneered, in that special voice that professional assholes use when they’re on the verge of pissing their pants with fear, but want to sound tough. “What in the name o’ fuckery are you fuckin’ well talkin’ about, love?”
“He’s our ticket for the Celestial Elevator,” Odette said.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Yeah, what the hell is that?” the captured murderer asked.
“It is a conveyance that appears to Death Mages and those they surround. A conveyance that can, by those in the know, be ridden when someone dies and their spirit ascends to the heavens—or plummets down into the Infernal Realms. Of course, this elevator, like any other mode of transport, can be hijacked, you just have to find the right person at the right time.”
“The right person?” Alura asked.
“The right person?” the elf asked, a definite quaver coloring his macho accent.
Madame Xel, who had been smiling happily at the mention of the Infernal Realm, cocked her head at the prisoner. “Someone who’s going to die, silly,” she said.
“Aye?” the elf said.
“All aboard,” Mortimer said politely.
The Chaos Mage made a twisting motion, as if he was opening an invisible bottle of soda, and the elf’s head just popped right off his neck with a wet sucking sound. Arterial blood fountained up the walls, pumping out of the severed neck and soaking the bed clothes.
“Mortimer!” Odette said, her voice slightly aggrieved, “some poor soul has to wash those sheets, and blood makes a stubborn stain.”
Mortimer bowed his head. “My apologies.”
The elf’s body tumbled to the floor with a dull thump.
As the body fell to the ground, Odette pulled a small silver bell from her skirts and tinkled it.
And then, with an abruptness that only magic could supply, there was a large elevator—or something that looked more like the ghost of an elevator—sitting in the middle of the bedchamber.
Without so much as a second glance at the twitching corpse on the hearthrug, Mort, Odette, and Madame Xel stepped into the insubstantial-looking elevator. I saw Madame Xel hand Mort a thimble of the potion, and he knocked it back without blinking an eye.
Alura looked at me, and I shrugged.
The two of us climbed into the Celestial Elevator, squeezing ourselves in next to Mortimer, Odette, and Madame Xel. The three qualified mages all looked supremely unconcerned that we were about to catch a ride in an elevator that seemed more gas than solid.
The fact that this thing had seemingly appeared out of nowhere was niggling my Earthly brain a little. If logic could be applied to this quite fantastical scenario—and that was always a slippery slope to try and stand on in Avalonia—presumably this arcane contraption had to pass back into nowhere before it conveyed us to the Seraphic Realm.
Or, due to the fact that nowhere is, basically nothing and non-existent, will we even pass through anything at all?
This was too much of an existential headfuck to dwell on; especially for a man coming down from the adrenaline high of fighting for his life, while simultaneously suffering from bl
ue balls to such an extent that Papa Smurf sitting in an open-air strip joint in Antarctica couldn’t have done better.
I took a quick glance around at the interior of the elevator. There were no dials, no displays and, confusingly, no buttons to press. In fact, there were barely any walls for any of those things to be set into. The elevator’s body was composed of something that sat between mist and glass. I shot a glance at Alura. With the Gemstone Princess being partly transparent and quite prismatic herself, this actually increased my unease.
“After all the shit that I’ve been through since being in this world, how the hell is this one of the moments where I feel most uncomfortable?” I muttered.
“Everyone ready?” Odette asked.
The Death Mage looked quite unconcerned, as if this was all business as usual. The last ten minutes alone would have been enough unexpected weirdness to last most Earthlings a lifetime.
Watching two of your female tertiary professors getting it on like long-lost scissor sisters, having one of them ejaculate all over the other one who then used that lady jizz to finish off a potion that you all had a nip of, before a bounty hunter—who you suspected had more than a few tiles missing from his roof—brought in a captured man and popped his head off like a champagne cork, which summoned a Celestial Elevator to take you to who-the-hell-knew-where…
That wasn’t your typical Wednesday—or whatever the fuck day it was—morning was it?
Still, I thought, things could probably be worse. I could be working at The Gap or something.
“Ready when you are, Odette,” Madame Xel said.
“Ready,” Alura said, in her calmest, most regal voice—which I knew was a sign that she was pretty damn uneasy.
Mortimer didn’t say anything. He just kept humming to himself and gazing dazedly at nothing, while he picked at his nails with a stiletto knife that looked sharp enough to cut air.
“Going up,” I said.
“Next stop, the Seraphic Realm,” Odette said. “You might want to ‘old onto your butts, this might feel quite...bizarre.”
The doors of the Celestial Elevator didn’t so much slide shut as form in front of our faces. Odette held her hand, finger pointing up, toward the ceiling. Dressed as she was in her array of russet, gold, jade, and amber silk skirts and scarves, the sensual dragonkin looked like one of the gypsy travellers from Peaky Blinders doing the worst Michael Jackson impression in history. Except she was sexy. Which was a whole other mindfuck entirely.
In the blink of an eye, I underwent the unsettling experience of having every single atom of my being blasted apart, scrubbed in iced water, then thrust back together again. I would have gasped or screamed or giggled if I had had the necessary faculties. I was hampered though, because my mouth, lips, and teeth were zooming along in a zillion separate pieces all around me—whatever it was that I meant by “me.”
There was darkness and light simultaneously. A grayness. There was no real sense of time. No real sense of direction. There was just a vast amount of space hurtling all around my miniscule speck of consciousness. It was how a single plankton might have felt while it was swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, only more so. It was how Keith Moon must have spent most of his weekends.
And it was over in the time that my heart took to rest between beats.
With a startling abruptness, we were standing at the foot of a small mountain. I staggered—not out of any sense of disequilibrium, but because I was being pushed from every single side and angle as my particles snapped back into their accustomed places.
Next to me, Alura dropped to her knees, gave a heaving sob, and spat bile out into the thin layer of snow that covered the gravel.
“Are you all right?” I asked, helping her to her feet.
“I - I apologize,” the Gemstone Princess said, taking my hand and righting herself. “I… That was…”
I nodded. “Sometimes,” I said, “simplicity is best when it comes to these sorts of things. ‘What the fuck’ is the exclamation that first came to my mind.”
Alura grinned weakly and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Is everyone else okay?” Odette Scaleblade asked. “No one else is too discombobulated?”
The only one of us who didn’t look like I felt was Mortimer Chaosbane. The Chaos Mage was still humming airily to himself, gazing up at the craggy face of the mountain that towered above us. I had thought that Madame Xel was an unruffled character, not to be phased by anything. However, in the geography of coolness, the succubus potion maker was living in Hawaii, while Mortimer was circumpolar.
I wasn’t all that surprised, all things considered. The Chaosbanes were renowned for being crazy, so traveling through the ethereal space as a collection of disjointed molecules was probably par for the course with them.
“I think we’re all good,” I said. I looked up at the face of the looming, ominous mountain and saw that, a fair distance above us, was a tower standing like a bastion of yellowed ivory.
“Fuck,” I said, “would it have been too much to ask for the brain-scrambling elevator to take us all the way to the penthouse? Where are we?”
Odette followed my gaze. “This is the ‘ome of Priestess Mallory Entwistle.” She shook her head and swapped looks with Madame Xel. “It ‘asn’t changed in twenty years.”
A dim sound came to my ears just then. A thin, shrieking, tearing sound just within the range of human hearing. I looked up at the same time that Madame Xel and Odette did.
“That is a new addition,” Madame Xel said lightly.
“What is that?” I asked as the screeching grew louder. Alura and Mortimer turned their eyeballs upward.
It became obvious what that was within about two seconds.
“That’s a person,” Mortimer said, in the voice of a man that saw people hurtling off the top of mountains all the time—and what was so amazing about that anyway?
He was right too. It was a man.
And then, as soon as he hit the ground a little way away from us, it wasn’t a man.
I had noticed, from a youth spent voraciously reading as many books and watching as many movies as I could, that narrative convention often refers to people hitting the ground like watermelons.
After seeing that screaming dude plummet out of the sky and hit the very solid, very rocky ground about twenty yards from where the six of us stood, I had an epiphany: people don’t hit the ground like watermelons. Watermelons are delicious pink and green fruit and sort of dissolve on impact. They’re full of water, hence the name. They leave relatively little mess.
A person hits the ground like a person. They hit the ground like a bunch of meat and water and blood, filled with bones—some of which, like the thigh bone, are as strong as concrete—tied up in a stretchy, elasticy bag of skin. Skin is surprisingly flexible. Surprisingly durable. Someone can be hit by a car and die and there’ll be hardly a mark on the skin at first, while the internal organs are reduced to pulp on the inside.
A person falling off a mountain and hitting the deck is a lot of things, but like a watermelon is not one of them. It’s a lot grosser than a watermelon.
The man smacked down into the shallow snow at (probably) terminal velocity—one-hundred and twenty-ish miles per hour—and sort of flattened out.
Stopping in the space of a second or so has a pretty negative impact on the old body. For that tiny fraction of time, when you go from boosting and screaming your lungs out at one-hundred and twenty miles per hour to a dead stop, everything in your body effectively weighs about 7,500 times more than it does normally. Your brain, which usually weighs in at 3 pounds, weighs ten tons. All your blood vessels basically just rupture. Your aorta rips free of your ticker, which tries gamely to squeeze a last couple of bursts of blood around your totally fucked body—filling up your chest instead of sending it to your brain. Don’t fret though, because your brain cells have mostly all ripped free of their mounts and connections too, so they wouldn’t even be able to make use of the blood
even if they could get it.
You are, in three words: in the shit.
Blood ruptured out of the guy’s shattered head and exploded out of his ass. One of his feet ripped clean off on impact, while the rest of him just jumbled all together; arms and legs and spine twisting and compressing and trying out a few last angles before rigamortis set in. I was fairly sure that a couple of ribs managed to punch out though his sternum and pinged musically off the rock wall.
Then, silence.
“Well, I liked the dive,” I said weakly, “but I’m giving him a zero for the landing.”
Madame Xel made a tutting noise and addressed Odette. “Some things have clearly changed, haven’t they, lovely? I don’t ever remember Mallory ejecting anyone who failed her trials quite that aggressively. I thought they usually just got sent on their way with a smack on the behind.”
I caught her eye then. In spite of the gory spectacle that we had just witnessed, she flashed me a lightning fast smile. We both knew how she enjoyed a smacked ass herself.
Odette was pensive as she looked from the mangled corpse to the heights above. “Hmm,” she said.
I recalled the rap sheet that I’d seen for Priestess Mallory Entwistle.
“The priestess does human sacrifices, right?” I asked. “Do you think this dude might have been one of them?”
“That would be strange,” Odette said. “But not completely crazy. Mallory ‘as changed, that much is clear.”
Madame Xel shrugged. “Better mages than dear little Priestess Entwistle have gone round the twist, Odette. Stranger things have happened.”
“That’s right,” Mortimer interjected smoothly, “stranger things have happened. Why, I know for a certainty that at least one of my Chaosbane cousins has forged his own path and is, by all the usual ways of telling, as sane as the next man.”
“Excuse my incredulity, Mortimer,” Alura said, “but are you talking about Reginald or Igor?”
Mortimer made a strange face then, and a weird little noise that sounded a bit like a piglet sneezing. I thought that the odd bounty hunter might have been smiling and laughing, but I wouldn’t have wanted to put money on it.