by Garon Whited
Is that all it takes? To make the choice? To stand instead of flee? To be brave instead of cowardly? Or is it a case where finally getting angry was the right thing to do?
Yoda would be so disappointed in me. Malcolm X might not. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I crawled back into my head to rest and think.
I’m living in an extended phantasmagoria of psychological metaphors. I know that, because I can follow along my personal timeline, point by point, for how I got here. I grabbed a demonic spirit with my tendrils and gave it a free ride into my being.
Important note: never try to eat a demon’s soul. They aren’t food; they’re competition. Trying to pull a demon’s essence in through one’s soul-devouring tendrils works entirely too well. They treat it like an open door and come right in. This is not considered an optimal outcome by anyone except the demon, who will then fight you for the driver’s seat at the very least.
Within the structure of my mental creations, there’s one real way out of this basement: stairs up to a trapdoor in the floor of my mental study. My mental study, of course, is a conscious construct for where my personal concept of self is supposed to be. It’s kind of like the bridge on a ship. Everything is controlled from there. Or, if not controlled, at least that’s where the central coordination happens.
If I’m going to get out of here, I need to find the stairs, force the door, and somehow manage to defeat a double or triple dose of my own darker nature. My Evil Twin is already much stronger than any of my own inner demons should be—or, perhaps, it’s a more cohesive and organized bundle of them. It can also call up all of my own inner darkness through a process of affinity or correspondence. That’s what got me dragged down here in the first place.
I don’t know if killing off his potential allies is, in the long term, a good thing for my sanity or not. But if I’m going to stand a chance of breaking out and beating him, I have to cut down on his reinforcements.
I’ve been hunted long enough.
In My Head
If I were trying to run from things, I would abandon this position and keep moving. As it is, I’ve decided to stay. The unpleasant things come to me and I kill them. They crumble and blow away, or the dusty remains diffuse into the ground. I don’t think I’ve seen any of those again. I know I haven’t seen the Tort-harpy again; the rest of them seem more cautious about approaching. The handsome fellow is hanging around, but he doesn’t crawl in after me. The fiery figure merely looks in through one or the other of the head’s eyes once in a while. As for the ghost of my unborn son, it sort of floats around outside the head without actually doing anything—aside from being a reminder.
I’m scavenging materials and my equipment has improved. I now have a spear to go with my club and my knife. If I can find some decent lengths of wire, I think I’ll have a serviceable bow. Then we’ll see how much longer the harpies keep dropping crap on me. Maybe I’ll even figure out a way to kill a giant, fiery hatred. The thought pleases me greatly.
The ruins have also provided some other goodies, most notably the remains of clothing. Being naked annoys me, but sometimes I’m stuck with it. Not anymore! I’m at the height of homeless haute couture.
I’ve also had a chance to sit and experiment with spells.
In my headspace, up there among the conscious portions of my brain, I can build a spell and watch it work in a sort of conceptual virtual reality. I can even cast spells in my mental study to affect things in my mental study—my memory-searching spell leaps to mind. With sufficient effort, I can even cast spells on my body without leaving my headspace. It therefore seems reasonable I can cast spells down here in the basement, too.
Yes and no.
Fundamentally, magic is the art of using one’s will to alter the world. In low-magic environments, such as, for example, Brooklyn, this has minimal effect; there simply isn’t enough magic to allow reality to be altered in any macro-scale fashion. Microscopic or quantum scale? Maybe.
As an aside—and I may have mentioned this before—I wonder if magic is less of an energy and more of a quality. High-magic universes may simply be more susceptible to alterations by an act of will rather than containing a mysterious “magical energy.” Psychologically, we may treat it as another form of energy in order to focus the will and define the change. Or magic could be an energy like any other, with a spectrum rotated ninety degrees from all the existing ones. Frankly, I’m not sure how to tell the difference between quantum instability and additional spectra. At least, not from where I’m sitting.
Here in my lower brain, there does appear to be magic. At least, I can alter some things by an act of will. The usual patterns of spells, however, appear to be ineffective. I draw diagrams and they seem dead. I chant and the words fall flat. I gesture and there are no trails of power following my fingers. It’s like there is no magic to work with.
On the other hand, since I was without functional spell-based tools, I eventually fell back on the most primitive of methods: staring and concentrating.
I should have tried that first. It’s my mind, after all, and I’m concentrating on some small portion of it in here. In hindsight, it’s obvious. I can, to a limited extent, choose what to think. So what I have to deal with inside my own head is, fundamentally, mine. As for how much conscious control I can exert over unconscious elements… well, that’s another story.
While I can’t simply gesture a staircase into existence as I did in my study, I can generate small-but-useful effects. My makeshift clothes are clean, as am I. My steel-belted radial sandals have changed shape; they fit my feet like slip-on shoes. Rags have turned into socks. My weapons are, by slow stages, transforming into better shapes and materials.
And, perhaps most interesting, I can see things through my eyes.
It’s not easy, but if I sit still and quiet my thoughts, I get flashes of vision. Sometimes it’s in the shadowless monochrome of a vampire’s dark vision; sometimes it’s in vibrant, almost painful color. While I can’t hold the visions for more than a few seconds at a time, these glimpses tell me things. Not all of them are things I like.
The Black Copy seems to enjoy being in a healthy body. He’s been having tons of sex, and not just with Tort and Lissette. I’ve had repeated glimpses of Malana and/or Malena, and single instances of at least a dozen others. I don’t know if he’s that charming or if it’s hard to argue with the person they think of as their king.
Hmm. That’s my body he’s using. If he’s sired any children, technically they’re my children. Awkward.
There are also a number of non-repeating faces who are having a much less pleasant time. Generally, they’re busy dying in agony. I can’t always tell what the circumstances are, though. Many of them are obvious; being cut in two isn’t ambiguous. Others are being ripped apart with bare hands—well, taloned hands; the fingernails are like steel blades—or are being subjected to a variety of unpleasant and usually-bloody circumstances. Maybe they’re criminals being fed to the King; maybe they’re people who had the bad luck to cross him when he was in a bad mood. Maybe they’re random snacks.
A number of other scenes have crossed my vision. I’ve seen several cities. What might be the grand hall is better furnished. There seem to be more knights. We have a sizable army. There are also flashes of smoke and fire and molten metal. Things like that.
As far as I can tell, though, he hasn’t laid eyes on Bronze. That makes me wonder if I’ve seen her down here. I think I have, but it’s dark out there and it was both long ago and far away.
Is she in my mind, looking for me? Can she be here? Firebrand is psychic, or telepathic, or something, and I haven’t heard from it. Bronze is less psychic and more a part of me. For all I know, she can go anywhere she wants, either physically or otherwise.
I miss her.
Extraction
Things are going well. I venture out of my head, kill some nasty Things, scrounge and scavenge amid the ruins, put out some fires, sort through piles
of junk, and generally put another area into a semblance of order. There’s only so much you can do with piles of rust and garbage, but at least I’ve got the area around my head all laid out neatly. My neighborhood is still a trash heap, but it’s the difference between a dump and a recycling center.
Is my OCD showing? Excuse me.
I’ve even killed two more harpies—the ones with the faces of Shada and Sasha. The bow works pretty well, but I’m an indifferent archer. Shooting them dead on the wing was out of the question. Bringing one down, on the other hand, just involved persistence and a lot of lost arrows.
Once I had them on the ground, though, I proved I’m much more proficient with mace and spear.
The fiery representation of my hatred for the Mother of Flame still shows up unpredictably. I’ve shot it/her a dozen times, even gotten close enough to ruin a spear by sticking it in her leg. She doesn’t like any of that, but that doesn’t stop her. She’s shifted from a pursuing presence to a lurking one, though. I think she’s afraid to let me get close to her. She still to shows up unpredictably to mock and distract me, and I put arrows into her for it, for all the good it does. She just won’t go down.
Typical.
Apparently, I can hate more thoroughly than I can fear. Maybe it’s because I have more reason to hate. And, since I don’t like hating things, I’ve done a good job repressing it until now.
The tall, handsome guy is also following me around, but he’s kept his distance ever since I stopped running. Maybe he has a better instinct for self-preservation than other manifestations. He needs a good one. I’m in no mood to take any crap from a psychological personification. He could probably tell from the glare I shot at him whenever I noticed him in the shadows. The arrows were probably a clue, too, but he’s fast and he always keeps close to cover. He’s more resourceful than I am, damn him.
I was reaching for another arrow while he effortlessly slid around a corner, out of my line of sight. As I was working up a good glare and wondering if I should waste another arrow, a flame-shrouded wall of metal sliced downward from the blackness above. It towered straight up into the black sky like a rainbow bridge done in fire and steel, stretching into infinity, wide as a highway.
The wavy-patterned, flame-shrouded metal rang with a rapid, four-beat clanging, the sound of bells cast from bronze and steel. A flash of understanding struck me. Firebrand was the bridge, thrust into this place of thought, and Bronze, a part of my spirit or soul, was coming to get me.
In that instant, there she was, Bronze, standing sideways on the wall of fiery steel, looking at me. She turned in place to face upward along the wall and glanced over her shoulder at me. I wasn’t slow to take the hint; I leaped aboard, fighting my way up to sit astride. Once I found my seat, everything twisted. The ground beneath me was now behind me and the flaming steel of the once-vertical wall was now down. The world was a black wall behind me as we stood on a bridge of steel and fire.
Bronze took a step forward, snorting jets of spark-shot smoke and leaning into it as though pulling a load. The world behind us bent, as if it were a sheet being pulled in the middle. Things of all sorts came out of hiding, staring at us, chattering, clattering, squealing. I felt something pulling at me, as though I were tied to the ground behind us.
Bronze took another step, leaning more steeply, greenish lightning playing about her hooves. The world bent even more, distorted all out of shape. She grabbed my forearms with her mane, holding me on. Her tail lashed out as though in a hurricane. Fire shot from her nostrils. Things behind us screamed and shrieked as they bent and twisted in the strange ripples and curves of the world itself.
Bronze took another step, jets of fire roared from her mouth and nose like rockets. The green lightning gained a hint of blue, arcing and sparking as high as her knees. Metal screamed on metal, or maybe the scream was Firebrand.
The world gave way, snapping like an umbrella jerked inside-out, suddenly loose behind us. We shot away through the fire and into darkness.
I’ve noticed a trend. When I wake up in pain, it’s significant. Is that because I remember it better? I mean, I wake up in bed, warm and comfortable, possibly snuggled up to someone, and I don’t really mention it much. Do I regard pleasant—or non-unpleasant—wakings as “normal,” or what I hope is normal? And, hopefully, waking up feeling as though I’ve been run over by a manure truck is unusual? Or am I a pessimist who remembers all the bad times and painful experiences better than I remember the good times and pleasant experiences?
This was a bad way to wake up.
My eyes snapped open. I heaved in a breath as my heart pounded violently. I gasped for air, thrashing up into a sitting position while my heart thundered faster. Hands helped me sit up and someone offered me water. I sucked up some of the water immediately; I felt hot, immensely hot, deeply feverish.
“This isn’t right,” someone insisted. I wasn’t sure who it was. Everything seemed dim and fuzzy and faint. Someone dialed down the gain on the world and I wasn’t getting enough signal. That, or something was seriously amiss with my eyes and ears, along with my heart and lungs. And my head; the headache was getting worse by the second.
“He’s on fire,” agreed another voice, the one holding the cup. I drank off the rest of the water in one draft, then went back to hyperventilating. I couldn’t seem to get enough air. Sweat poured off me.
“Are we sure it’s him?” asked a third voice.
“I am.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“It could be the shock of the transfer.”
“Then fix it!”
“I don’t know how!”
“I thought you and Tort figured out how to do this!”
“We did! But this wasn’t supposed to happen! He is the only expert!”
“We have to do something! He’s dying!”
I had to agree with that last assessment. My breathing wasn’t getting any easier; I felt suffocated. My heart was practically vibrating instead of beating. I felt hot enough to cook on. Blood gushed from my nose.
“How’s his life force?”
“The body has lots; I’m seeing to it—but it’s coming apart!”
“We knew that would happen!
“Not this fast! We were counting on at least a few hours!”
“How long?”
“Minutes. Maybe seconds!”
“Get that crystal. We’ll have to try—”
I didn’t get to hear what they were going to try. About that point, I felt a wracking pain in my chest and coughed a red mist into the air.
My heart ripped open and I died.
Well, okay, my body died. I found myself floating above it all, contemplating the mess below. We were all inside a complicated diagram—a six-pointed star with lines connecting each point to all the others, with a central circle for me and lesser circles at each point for the operators. Just reading the symbols inscribed along the outer edge would take a while; some of them were unfamiliar, and that’s unusual for me.
The corpse didn’t look like my body, but it was obviously the one I most recently occupied. Blood soaked the thing as though someone had used it for a mop. It—he? I?—had bled from everywhere. Nose, eyes, ears, even from under the fingernails and the gums. It might even have started sweating blood before I coughed up the remains of the lungs. I wondered who he was.
On the other hand, I felt much better outside the corpse. True, I was confined inside the circle, but at least I wasn’t burning up a body. I wondered if that was the usual reaction. Judging by my own experiments and the commentary during my brief occupation, I didn’t think so. Was it a problem with me or a problem with the body? Could the flesh have rejected me the same way it might reject an incompatible organ?
Of more immediate concern, however, was how long I could stay like this. People who step outside their flesh have a nasty tendency to come apart at the seams and bleed their energy out. I didn’t feel uncomfortable, but it might not be something I could easily
sense. A person bleeding to death doesn’t have an internal gauge they can watch, after all. Depending on the method of departure from the flesh, the spiritual disintegration can be fairly quick or take quite a while. It all comes down to whether you rip free or carefully step out.
The three people—the three organic people—down by the corpse seemed familiar. Their spirits seemed more visible than their flesh, but I blame my state of being for that. Each was composed of complicated layers of energies, all mixed together and interrelating, but without actually mixing, with the system as a whole surrounded by a faint, shadowy form shaped like a human being. With some concentration, I could focus on their physical forms and recognize the flesh.
The fourth person was not an organic life form. It was a huge, bronze statue of a horse, still smoking slightly from every surface and breathing fire. That one was more than familiar. I would recognize her even if I were blind.
T’yl, in his elf-body, was moderately familiar, but changed; he obviously did some remodeling. He was taller than most elves, somewhat more heavily built, and he rounded off his ears.
Tort was still Tort, almost exactly as I recalled her.
The third person was a teenaged girl with reddish-orange hair; it appeared to be a cloud of fire to my spirit-vision. As I watched, her gaze swept around the room; her eyes seemed to be orbs of flame. She smiled up at me when she spotted me. She waved. I waved back, noting as I did so that I seemed to retain a shape even in a spirit-form. Body afterimage? Or self-image? Or just the shape of my spirit, like the shape of clay after being pressed into a mold?
She spoke to Tort and T’yl; I couldn’t hear all that well. It was similar to being submerged in the bathtub while someone tries to talk to you.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Grandpa is hovering over us.”
Yeah, that’s Tianna. I thought it might be. So, a few years went by while I did time in my own head. At least I wasn’t locked in my basement for eighty-seven years. This seemed more like six or so, depending. If this keeps up, a few more comas and they’ll be no worse than having a nap. That’s encouraging. Sort of.