by Billy Wright
“We could be waiting forever. How do we get him to appear?” Stewart asked.
Bob rubbed his chin. “It might be we could call him.”
“How?”
“With a magical loudspeaker, we could tweak his ear perhaps.”
“A loudspeaker how big?”
Bob scratched one of his mutton-chop sideburns. “Oh, perhaps the size of Mesa Roja.”
“What?” Stewart said.
“We’re talking about the Cosmic Tortoise, Stewart. He breathes eternities while he sleeps. To get his attention before he’s ready to give it, you must use your magic.”
Stewart’s immediate reaction was to think, I don’t have any magic. But he knew that to be a lie driven into his head by others who couldn’t bear for him to believe it.
“I can show you how, Dad!” Hunter said. “Bob taught me.”
Stewart’s throat was thick with words that almost wouldn’t come out. A thrill of fear shot through him. Was this moment what he’d always dreamed of? “Okay, then. Show me.”
***
The bright elves fell back before Jorath’s rage. He rampaged through the forest, smashing trees aside. Around him, the goblins cheered and cackled, charging after the retreating elves.
The elves’ flechettes pinged and fell away from the stony carapace his fur had become. He had to credit his former brethren for their courage. Their unicorn mounts were nimble and fierce, but they could not stand against his huge claws. He had already crushed several of his enemies against trees or beneath his feet.
The elves tooted on their little horns, but Jorath simply laughed.
Somewhere deep within, the consciousness of the great bear roared with frustration, tamped into a tiny hole, struggling desperately against the force of Jorath’s will. The elves were the beast’s friends, and its anguish at their deaths burned deep in its enormous heart.
He ran through the forest toward the bright lights glimmering through the trees, the campsite. That’s where he would find his prey.
***
With Hunter and Bob instructing him, Stewart was able to find the sparks of the Source and draw them into himself, feeling raw, creative warmth tingling through him. It was a lot like when he was forging a blade and the process was going well, when he was in the Zone. The collected ball of sparks felt like he’d just dived into the Zone and was swimming in it.
More horns erupted from the blackness of the forest, quick, staccato notes. Warnings.
Stewart jumped to his feet.
The sounds of rending foliage came from the woods, elven shouts and goblin screeches.
Then it exploded out of the tree line.
Pooh.
Charging straight toward them like a freight train, eyes blazing with murder, its claws tearing up sod and stone.
“Oh, dear Source,” the bright elf said with burgeoning terror on his face. “Pooh is possessed!”
Stewart’s stomach knotted into an icy nest of snakes. He gripped his axe and positioned himself between Pooh and his family.
Hunter stepped up beside him, a flaming katana in his hands. His face was grim, resolved.
“Where did you get that?” Stewart asked.
“Inside your head,” Hunter said with a little smile.
Down the slope, a line of bright elves formed an arc ahead of Pooh’s charge, and raised their arms to the sky.
Saplings and bushes sprang from the ground, writhing and growing and thickening, forming a thick web of foliage. More elves came running. The crescent of the tree barrier spread and became a circle around the bear. Saplings became thick tree trunks, skinny branches became meaty boughs, closing around Pooh like a thicket of tentacles. The bear roared his frustration. The wet, woody sounds of splintering tree trunks echoed across the cliff face as the bear tore into them with his claws.
“That will not detain him for long,” the bright elf said.
Goblins boiled out of the woods, firing their crossbows at the elves. The elves wheeled their red unicorn mounts and returned fire.
“Stewart!” Claude shouted. “You must go!”
“Go where? I can’t leave you all like this!” Stewart shouted.
“If we fail and Pooh reaches us, all is lost, everything! Don’t you understand?”
Stewart did understand. Unless he made it to the Dark Realm and brought back the Princess, not just he and his family would be lost, but the entire mortal world, and the Light Realm as well.
He had to get the Cosmic Tortoise to show himself.
Cassie’s singing gave him an idea.
The enclosure shuddered and shook with the force of Pooh’s rage. Whole trees were uprooted, but others grew to replace them. The huge bear thrust his head through an opening and roared. The opening closed, forcing him to pull back inside.
“Cassie!” Stewart called, gesturing to her. She stopped singing, looked at Liz reluctantly, but came to him. “When I tell you,” he said, “I want you to sing as loud and pretty as you can. I’m going to try making it louder. Can you do that?”
She nodded. “What song?”
“Your favorite.”
“Hmm.” She rubbed her chin. “How about ‘Touch the Sky’?”
He had often heard her singing that one in her room while she played with dolls. Every single time, she would come out of the bedroom afterward and ask him for a bow and arrow like Merida’s. He would always say You’re too young for a bow and arrow, but after what he’d seen, he’d have to reconsider, maybe for Christmas or her next birthday.
If she had one.
If any of them did...
“That’s perfect,” he said, “but wait until I tell you.” Could he pull this off?
She nodded once.
His chest still tingled with the ball of sparks. He felt like he could do anything, accomplish anything, wind, fire, all that kind of thing.
He was going to make the sky itself sing with Cassie’s voice.
“Okay, honey, go for it!” he said.
She took a deep breath and began to sing.
Her voice rose into the night sky, echoing from the face of the cliff, down to the forest.
It was the echo he needed.
The magical globes still hung in the sky, shedding light almost as bright as day across the mountainside.
The bear ripped and tore at his prison, sending massive tree trunks and showers of leaves flying. The bright elves tried to dodge these even as they struggled to maintain the barrier and hold off the goblin attack.
The glowing globes held no substance, only light.
That is, until Stewart focused his will, extended his arms, and sent sparks shooting from his hands into the nearest globes. The globes took substance, becoming huge white beach balls. Cassie’s powerful voice, cracking with the effort, caught among the globes and made them start to vibrate.
His next burst of will thickened the air around the globes, formed barely visible shapes like nets or cones, becoming an enormous, diaphanous structure floating in the sky, resonating with her voice. The melody spread across the mountainside, growing louder with each measure, churning and building among the globes until it sounded like a stadium rock concert at full volume, ringing through his flesh, his bones, the earth itself.
Cassie’s face bloomed with surprise and glee. She took a deep breath and redoubled her effort.
The goblins screamed and held their ears.
The elves sang along, building the song to greater heights.
Touching her back, he could feel her little body straining.
Far above them on the mountainside, something broke loose. An avalanche of rocks thundered down, too far away to threaten them, but it came sliding and crashing in a cascade of earth and boulders. What lay revealed by the falling rocks was…beyond comprehension.
An eye.
But the eye stretched the equivalent of several city blocks. A hundred yards, at least, across the great, reptilian pupil.
But the tremendous volume of the song had distrac
ted enough of the elves that the bear’s prison regrowth slowed. The bear burst through the wall, roared with triumph and bloodlust, slew a shocked bright elf with a single swipe of his paw, and stormed up the slope toward Stewart.
The elves scrambled to catch him. Thick ropy vines sprang from the remnants of the enclosure, entangling the bear’s legs, trying to drag him back into his prison. His claws tore up great furrows of stony earth.
The huge eye, high on the mountainside, blinked, and looked down at them.
The sight of it, so vast, so intelligent, so wise, dashed ice water through Stewart’s legs. In that eye dwelled stars, planets, nebulae, the vastness of eternity, the birth and death of suns.
The entire cliff face, before which they had been camped, shuddered. Rocks and boulders dislodged and fell with a booming clatter.
The bear slashed at his bonds, scratching at the ground, breaking loose from more vines than could regrow to seize him.
Beyond the nearest mountain peaks, beyond the face of the Cosmic Tortoise, the sky was beginning to pale with the coming of dawn.
The ground heaved and shook, knocking Hunter off his feet. Liz gasped in pain.
Goblins swept up toward the elves, firing their crossbows with their gnarled little hands, eyes gleaming with desperation. The bolts glanced from the elves’ armor, but distracted them from imprisoning Pooh. Royal Guards charged the goblin skirmish line on scarlet unicorns, obsidian horns out-thrust.
The cliff, all twenty-five hundred feet of its height, the whole mile of its length, rose into the air with a rumble like thunder.
Behind it lay not a cavern, but a mouth, filled with a great, coarse tongue and bony ridges.
Stewart knelt and hugged his daughter. “You did it!”
Her eyes were the size of big, blue golf balls, staring up at this wonder of the universe. “I did?” she breathed.
“You go back and sing to Mommy now, honey,” he said.
“That was my first concert, Daddy!”
He hugged her again. “And it was amazing.”
But just then, the bear ripped free of his bonds.
A line of unicorn cavalry set their lances and charged the bear.
Pushing Cassie gently away, he picked up his battle-axe and squared himself to the oncoming beast.
The mouth started to close.
“You must go!” Claude shouted from Liz’s side. “Hurry, Stewart! We cannot follow you!”
“But—!” He couldn’t leave Liz like this. He couldn’t leave his children to face that monster.
The bright elf cavalry crashed into the bear, their lances splintering against its impenetrable hide. The concussion of their charge bowled Pooh onto his side, but his thrashing claws sent unicorns and elves flying.
It was a hundred-yard run to reach the cave. The cliff—or rather, the Tortoise’s upper lip—was closing.
“Go, Dad,” Hunter said, clutching his sword. “We got this.”
He gave them each one last look, then said, “I love you all.”
Then he took off running. He used to be able to run a forty-meter in football practice in five seconds, not professional speed but plenty fast. His throat was thick, his breath huffing as he ran up the slope toward the immense cavern.
He didn’t dare look back.
The bear roared. The goblin drums rattled their tattoo. Elven trumpets rose in chorus, fewer than before.
He leaped between jagged boulders thirty feet high. They weren’t boulders at all, but the Tortoise’s stony lips. He fell at the foot of the mile-wide tongue as the mouth clamped shut behind him.
Part IV
Chapter Thirty-One
Stewart lay in two inches of squishy moistness, the floor of the Cosmic Tortoise’s mouth, his eyes full of blackness, trying not to think about exactly what he was lying in. He had just seen so many incredible things all at once, had just used magic for the first time, had seen his children do incredible things, had seen Liz on the brink of death, and then left her.
It was a lot to process.
His breaths shuddered in and out as he wondered how he would be able to live with himself if he’d just left his wife and children to die.
Then again, maybe he wouldn’t live long anyway, given where he was headed.
The vastness of the cavern around him staggered his sense of scale. He could sense its immensity as he lay there on his back, listening, breathing. As his eyes adjusted to the pitch blackness, he thought he could see motes of light above him, drifting, swirling. He reached for them—and they came.
The motes of light were the Source, and here in the blackness of the Tortoise’s mouth, he could see them. Why he could see them so easily here and not outside was beyond his understanding. He still didn’t know how the magic worked, only that it did. Bob and Hunter had told him to trust his intuition, so he would try, maybe for the first time since he was small.
If the Cosmic Tortoise’s body was in scale with its mouth, he might well have a twenty-mile hike through the Tortoise to reach the Dark Realm, and then, who knew how far to wherever the Princess was being held? Then again, maybe he shouldn’t ascribe too many rules of Penumbral reality to the situation. The Light Realm had already proved such things as time and distance held less meaning here than in the mortal world, the Penumbra.
“Penumbra” made Earth sound alien, scary, and weird. Maybe it was, to creatures from other realms. It was pretty scary and weird to its natives, too.
He stood, coming out of the moisture with a slimy squelch, and collected himself. He still had his battle-axe and diamond mail doublet. He still had the shoulder pouch containing the oil and the baseball. What was he supposed to do with a baseball anyway? Claude had said he could use it to stop time, but how? He hoped his intuition would let him know. In his jeans pocket was the pocket watch Claude had given him.
As he gathered more and more of the Source into himself, he used it to infuse the head of his axe with light, not unlike how the bright elves had created the light globes. He held it high, as bright as a car’s headlight.
Right beside him was the Tortoise’s enormous tongue, like a massive, living hill. It looked like a grayish-pink boulder that moved with its own life, coarse surfaced, larger even than some of the rock formations and plateaus around Mesa Roja. But unlike most rock formations, this thing was contiguous.
Climbing up the side to the nominally horizontal upper surface took him several minutes, but when he reached it, he had to pause and wonder at the vastness of the creature’s mouth, so deep and high and vast his light would not reach the interior’s limits.
It would be easy to get lost in such a huge, dark space, with no landmarks to orientate him, but the great tongue had striations that all pointed the same direction—down its gullet. So he walked, guilt and urgency at war in his tread. Guilt for leaving his family in danger. Urgency to reach the Dark Realm, save the Princess, and thus, everyone else too.
Unfortunately, amid the frenzy of battle, he had not thought to grab any food or water before lunging into the Tortoise’s mouth. He remembered well the warning against eating or drinking anything in the Dark Realm. How long he would be able to survive there without any food or water, he had no idea. Physical reality took liberties in the magical realms.
And then the lumpy hillock of tongue lurched and flung him high. Yelling incoherently, limbs flailing, he arced so high his light wouldn’t reach what was below. He came down in a spongy mass of phlegm at the back of the Tortoise’s throat.
It was like swimming in Jell-O that smelled like a reptile house at the zoo. When he finally reached more solid ground, he couldn’t help but laugh. It bubbled out of him in a guffaw at the absurdity of it until tears streamed down his cheeks.
The Cosmic Tortoise had just swallowed him.
When the laughter subsided, he moved on into the immense tunnel of the creature’s esophagus. His light would not reach the ceiling or walls, but a trickle of moisture ran down the concave center, marking his path.
He jogged until he tired. Then he rested.
For a while he walked along the shore of a vast, dark ocean, its waters lapping at its edges. Occasionally he felt the breath of wind, neither warm nor cold, moist nor arid, but just an impression of air moving, but then he considered that it might be simply his idea of air, his notion of reality within this gargantuan creature, a construct of his mind, when it might be something else entirely. Things moved in the dark, fathomless waters. He could hear them leaping, splashing. He caught glimpses at the edge of his light of pale, scuttling things that fled before him, some of which were small and nonthreatening, some of which made him glad he had a weapon.
He thought several times that he heard the flap of great leathery wings, too high for his light to reach. The roof—the sky?—was utterly black, but distant cries tormented his ears, unable to grasp their nature or distance, cries so alien he couldn’t imagine what sort of creature would make them. He dared not sleep, fearing what might come upon him, so he kept going. Without sun or stars, he had no sense of time. He knew only that he was weary and had to keep going.
From the ocean’s edge, he reached a ropy bridge that stretched ahead into nothingness, just wide enough for him to cross, above a bottomless chasm. It lacked any sort of handhold, so the slightest lurch or a good gust of wind might send him spinning into the abyss. But his intuition told him this was his path. So he went forward. The bridge swayed and flexed with his weight, but its surface was rough enough for solid footing.
As he went, however, he imagined the soles of his shoes growing bony crampons and soon noticed that his tread felt surer. And there they were, inch-long spikes growing from the rubber soles of his hiking boots. “I could get used to this magic stuff,” he chuckled into the abyss.
Below him, he heard wings, and perhaps sloshing, like great breakers against a shore.