by Jack Heckel
Speaking of monstrosities, I had arrived at one—McKinley College, my home in those rare instances that I am not studying or working. McKinley College is a seven-story block of prestressed concrete that looks like a very tall cheese grater onto which someone has unartfully pasted what have charitably been described as cubist interpretations of randy seraphim in flight. The place radiates despair. I stared at the building and imagined a smoking crater. Maybe the campus could be improved by some selective demolitions.
I had managed to escape recognition thus far, but peering through a window into the lobby I saw that the front desk was being manned by an acolyte in my year who was most definitely a prick. I thought briefly about trying a side door, but was too tired. I pulled out my student ID, took a deep breath, and stormed into the building on a head of steam I hoped would see me straight past him and into the stair with no questions asked.
Again, my concern was misplaced. He never looked up from whatever book he had his nose buried in, proving once again that hiring students to serve as monitors of anything is like asking a two-year-old to pilot a jumbo jet. You might save a lot of money on salary, but the death toll is enormous.
I skipped the elevator and six flights of stairs later found myself, at long last, at my door. With a sigh of relief I grabbed the handle, gave it a twist, and it came off in my hand.
“Really?” I muttered. “Away for three months and it’s still broken!”
I was home.
Chapter 2
ELDRIN
Let me be clear at the outset, the handle falling off was not another exotic prank by some mischievous classmate. My door had been broken for the better part of two months—five months now.
For us, by which I mean my roommate and me, fixing such a thing was quite out of the question. I am an evolutionary subworld sociologist. My roommate is an etherspace physicist. Practical magic is not something we do. Nor do we have any skill with screwdrivers, hammers, or, well, anything practical. Adding to our general uselessness is the fact that, as the result of a series of unfortunate and nearly unforeseeable circumstances, we could not call a maintenance wizard. And so, the handle was and would remain broken.
I pounded on the door. “Eldrin, open up.”
There was no response.
“Eldrin, I know you’re in there. Get up and come open the door. It’s me, Avery, your roommate, remember?”
There was a sudden burst of noise from the far end of the hall and a group of six adepts spilled out of a room in a haze of noxious blue smoke.
Damn.
The last thing I needed was for the reprobates in my dorm to see me in my Dark Lord gear. I would never live it down. You see, I live in the worst housing college in Mysterium University. Drugs, illegal conjurations, and vile necromancies are part and parcel of life in my building—especially on my floor. My roommate and I tended to avoid our “colleagues,” and had survived in McKinley by keeping the door locked and avoiding the common areas. It was while contemplating the puzzle of the handle and my impending humiliation that it suddenly dawned on me that this might all be part of one of Eldrin’s elaborate practical jokes.
First, he ashes my clothes so I’m stuck as the Dark Lord, and then he strands me in the hall for maximum exposure. Bastard.
It all made sense. It was perverse and evil, but it made sense, or would have if he had ever pulled a prank on me before. Looking back I can see that I was being paranoid, but at the time it all fit together so neatly, which is characteristic of paranoia, I suppose.
Frantically, I jammed the handle back onto the door. I glanced down the hall; of course the mob was coming in my direction. If it weren’t for the narcotic fog of smoke that surrounded them they’d have seen me already.
I mouthed a prayer and gingerly turned the handle. The latch finally drew back and I slipped inside. I caught a brief glimpse of six shocked faces as my floormates passed by, and then I slammed the door closed and threw the dead bolt into place. Maybe they hadn’t recognized me, maybe they were too stoned, or . . .
The slow soft drawl of my roommate’s voice broke my train of thought. “Hey, Avery.”
I glared across the room at him. What can one say about Eldrin Leightner? To start with, he’s from the innerworld of Hylar . . . which I realize means nothing to most of you.
It means he’s elfin—you know, oddly elongated ears, delicate features, prone to making flower chains and writing bad poetry. He, like me when I’m not wearing six-inch platform boots, is of average height and build, but that is about the only similarity in our appearance. While my hair is cut short and night-black, his is shoulder length and of an incandescent chestnut, and while my eyes are of a faded blue, his are dark, like a pair of onyx jewels shot through with floating specks of blazing silver that comes from staring into etherspace for too long. He also has that maddening kind of shimmery bronze skin so common to his race, and so popular with the ladies. What can I say—he is objectively gorgeous and I am not, not that I would ever admit that to him. Despite our differences, we are two of a kind, which is probably why we have remained roommates the last three years. I’d like to say he’s a prick, but he’s not.
Having said that, in the moment I was not being nearly as charitable, and not just because I suspected he had ashed my clothes, but also because he was indulging in one of his most odious vices. He was seated on the floor in the middle of our tiny room, his head bent low over an enormous parchment map covered in a kaleidoscope of multicolor hexes, the vast majority of which had been filled with stacks of impossibly tiny wooden circles—some white and some black. He was completely consumed in fishing more of these little pieces out of a box and did not even bother to look up, so my glare and therefore my anger went unnoticed.
I tapped my foot on the floor and said, “Well, aren’t you going to admire your handiwork?”
He didn’t, instead carefully straightening the little stack of black circles between his fingers and, with maddening precision, placing the stack on one of the few unfilled hexes on the map. Only when this task was complete to his satisfaction did he look up. There was a moment’s pause as his eyes traced up the leather platform boots, along the death-shroud cloak to the macabre make-up, and then a big grin stretched across his face. “A little dramatic for a Friday night, but I am nothing if not open-minded.”
“Don’t play innocent with me,” I spit. “I know damned well that you had a hand in burning up my clothes, and it isn’t funny.”
He cocked his head to one side and considered me for a second. “No, not funny at all.”
The answer doused my anger a bit, but then I remembered my favorite T-shirt had been in that wardrobe and rallied. “So, you deny it?”
“It’s not really my style,” he said patiently as he picked more of the little pieces from the box. “I won’t deny I considered playing a prank on you, but my plan was to alter your transport circle to filter out your clothes and then have it chain transmit so you would appear stark naked in the magi lounge. But, to be honest, I didn’t think you be in the joking mood when you returned.”
At that moment there was a loud sucking noise from the corner behind Eldrin and a section of the wall disappeared. A chill passed through the room as the cold night air rushed in. After about thirty seconds the wall reappeared, the noise vanished, and the breeze died away. Neither of us reacted to this extraordinary event, but by mutual and unspoken agreement we suspended our conversation. Eldrin used the time to lay down another stack of black pieces, and I used it to consider the implications his prank would have had on me. I blanched.
Right about now some of you may be asking yourself, What just happened there, Avery? And why were the two of you not freaked out when a chunk of your wall disappeared? Remember those unfortunate and unforeseeable circumstances I mentioned earlier? Well, to be completely honest, my roommate and I had attempted a bit of extradimensional remodeling early in the school year and had melted the reality lines in one of the corners of our room. As a result,
a three-foot section of the exterior wall kept phasing in and out of existence. If someone from Mysterium Facility Services ever found out we’d be sure to lose our deposit. So, rather than dealing with the problem, we pretended it didn’t exist.
Whether it was the wall (which always depressed me) or the lack of any gloating on Eldrin’s part, the anger had gone out of me. It’s hard to have an argument with someone as mellow as Eldrin, and I didn’t have the energy to carry the whole thing off myself. I sat heavily onto my bed, unhooked the cloak from around my neck, and started yanking at the massive boots. When at last I was free from wearing the Dark Lord’s clothing, I threw the lot of it into my wardrobe and pulled on a pair of boxers. It felt amazing.
I sat back down on the bed and crossed my legs. Eldrin had stopped what he was doing with his game and was staring at me. I gave him a few seconds to say something and then asked, “What?”
He closed his open mouth and said, “I missed you. I mean . . . how did the experiment go?” With a shake of his head he turned back to the board and began moving the little pieces about again. “You’re seventeen days early, so it must have gone well.”
A colorful curse leapt through my mind. He’d either been charting my return the whole time, or he’d done the time calculation in his head in the millisecond between the “you’re” and the “seventeen.” Sometimes I found his competence really irritating.
At my growl of disgust he looked up and peered uncertainly at me through the fringe of his bangs. “It did go okay, right? I see you’ve lost some weight.”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know,” I mumbled.
I now had Eldrin’s full attention. He sat up and fixed me with his star-flexed eyes. “Spill it, Avery. Something’s wrong.”
“It went fine,” I said, which was true, but oddly felt like a lie. “Gristle will be happy. Can we talk about something else? I’m tired of thinking about Trelari. What have you been up to?”
A frown crossed his face and he looked back at his board. “I’ve been in the etherspace observatory for the past two weeks watching an outer subworld going nova. Fantastic explosion. Wonderful colors.” He punctuated this statement by simulating little firework bursts in the air with his wiggling fingers.
A shiver went down my spine at the thought that he had been happily watching the death throes of a world much like the one I’d been inhabiting. I decided to change the subject again. “What’s the game?”
He said nothing, but became suddenly fascinated by the state of his nails. This lack of an answer immediately piqued my interest, because there is nothing that Eldrin likes to talk about more than his hideously complex games, which he insists on calling simulations. “The game?” I asked again.
He cleared his throat. “It’s called the Fall of the Dark Lord. It simulates the rise and fall of . . . of, well, of you.”
I stared down at the board and saw that it was true. There were the mountain ranges and plains and forests of Trelari reproduced in miniature. “How did you . . . ?” I asked.
“I was experimenting with subworld scrying.”
“You spied on me?”
“Only a little bit . . . at the outset,” he said quickly. “If I had observed you the whole time it might have biased my simulation.” He tapped one of the black pieces on the board with the tip of his finger. “Out of curiosity, how did the Heroes stop Morgarr?”
“I disintegrated him,” I said with a depressive sigh.
“Oh!” He looked back to the board. “That explains a lot. According to my results the forces of good should have taken longer to win. I didn’t expect you back till tomorrow. I was going to grab some of that tea you like from the magi lounge in the observatory. Anyway, if you’re up for it, I’d love to go over a few points of my simulation with you.” He pointed at a thick tome sitting next to him.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Your rule book is longer than my dissertation,” I said flatly. “And it’s about a subworld I’ve been stuck in for the past three months Mysterium-time.”
Something about my tone must have convinced him I was serious, because he sighed deeply and went back to his game.
What I didn’t say was that seeing the map of Trelari and the pieces aligned against each other was bringing back unwanted memories of watching the final battle from atop the battlements of the Fortress of Despair. The undulating lines of black and white as the two armies clashed, the screams of the dying, the smell of blood and burning flesh. I felt my hand begin to tremor in my lap.
I had to get out of this room and clear my head. What I needed—what we both needed—was a night of frivolous diversion. The problem would be getting Eldrin to come with me. His idea of a perfect night would be the two of us listening to music, playing his game, and talking bullshit together till dawn. Even if I refused and he had no chance of playing his game, he would still sit there and set out those pieces for hours, stare at them, and then spend most of the day tomorrow putting them away again. Like I said, it was an odious habit.
I determined to overwhelm him with brute enthusiasm. I braced myself and then said with authority, “We are going out tonight and see if we can’t find some girls to flirt with.”
His body seemed to deflate at the idea. “Not tonight.”
I made my way to my wardrobe and began digging through my clothes for something decent to wear—sniffing and discarding the worst. Between shirts, I asked, “And why not tonight?”
“I thought the two of us could hang out,” he mumbled. “Besides, I’m busy with—”
“With that bloody game?”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” he asked.
Finally, I found a long-sleeved gray sweater that was relatively clean. I pulled it over my head before answering. “First, I lived through it and, frankly, am not anxious to relive the experience. Second, and more importantly, you know all that will happen if we stay is that you’ll spend the next two hours finishing the setup, then you’ll stare at the board for fifteen minutes doing . . . whatever it is you do when you stare at those things, and then you’ll take it apart. Besides, you said you’ve already figured out how it’ll turn out.”
He raised his chin in defiance. “I enjoy setting up games. And I haven’t completed all the scenarios. I even found one where you won . . . kind of . . .”
The thought that there was even a remote chance that Morgarr and the Dark Lord might have won made my head swim. “I . . . I don’t want to hear another word about your game.”
“But—”
“No buts. You should be at a bar hitting on girls. Dammit, Eldrin! You’re a Hylar. Women love the shimmer of your skin, and your accent, and the way you’ll unselfconsciously recite poetry to them—even if it is in a language ninety percent of them can’t understand.”
He shrugged, which had become his go-to response whenever I broached this topic. It was genuinely puzzling, because before we met he’d gone out a lot and even managed to maintain relationships with one or two women long enough that they began calling themselves his girlfriend. Since we’d moved in together, all I got was a shrug.
“A shrug won’t cut it tonight,” I said. “Give me one good reason you can’t come celebrate my first night back with me.”
“I don’t have any money,” he whined.
“I’ll pay,” I said, overriding his nascent rebuttal as I finally managed to pull up my trousers.
His mood brightened considerably at this offer. “You’ll pay?” he asked, already standing and smoothing his hair. “Is dinner included?”
I sat back on my bed with my shoes in hand and studied him. Lack of money was a problem we shared, because he, like me, got very little support from home. This inevitably led to a lack of food, particularly toward the end of the semester. Without my own paltry funds to bolster his, it must have been a very lean couple of months. It was entirely possible that he had not eaten in a week or so. He was Hylar and could get away with it for a while, but not forever. Being hungry w
as also something we didn’t talk about.
“Fine,” I said in mock seriousness, “dinner first, but you better put out.”
The tips of his ears turned bright red. I laughed. “For a Hylar you can be such a prude.” I jumped up and clapped my hands together. “All right, if that’s settled, let’s go.”
He shook his head and grabbed his toiletry bag. “I need to get ready.” I sat back down on the bed with a groan.
If you don’t understand my reaction, then you’ve never had a Hylar roommate. Thirty tortuous minutes, two shirt changes, three different colognes, and both a brushing and a combing of his hair later we were ready to go.
I paused at the door and smiled back at Eldrin. “I feel lucky tonight. Nothing is going to get me down.”
I grabbed the handle of the door and turned. It came off in my hand. Eldrin stared at me and cocked his head to one side. “By the way, did you want to go out looking like that?”
I turned to the mirror. A hideous reflection stared back at me. I still had the Dark Lord make-up on. There was a loud sucking sound from the corner of the room and a blast of frigid air rushed in.
Defiantly, I restated, “Nothing is going to get me down.”
Chapter 3
A HOLE IN THE WALL
Forty minutes, three boxes of tissue, and innumerable expletives later we were finally on our way, marching through the crisp night toward a well-deserved drink. After several outfit changes, Eldrin had settled on something light, loose, and flowing. Just looking at him made me cold, but then he had the elvish habit of paying heed to neither weather nor fashion sense. I shivered and buried my hands deeper into the pockets of my trench coat.