by John Corwin
Thinking in terms of destruction, creation, and stasis removed the good-evil element from the equation. Each had their merits. Sometimes it was necessary to tear down something old and to create something new. A new creation could be used to tear down an old one.
I'm overthinking this, as usual.
My inner ramblings were only making a decision that much harder. It was so much easier to take a black-and-white approach, declare something evil, the other thing good, and make the decision based on absolute morals. Unfortunately, this wasn't a long time ago in a galaxy far away, and things weren't so clear cut.
Staring at the three possibilities, at the tornadoes of energy cycling the aether around and around and around, the correct decision suddenly hit me in the chest. It felt so right, I knew I had to make it immediately.
"Justin?"
Something stung my face. I jerked awake. David's concerned eyes hovered a few inches from my own.
"Ouch," I said, rubbing my cheek. I felt woozy and disoriented. Looking around, I saw the plain gray walls of our prison.
"Where were you?" my father asked.
"Wasn't I here?" I said.
He tapped a finger on my forehead. "Not exactly. Your mind went somewhere far away."
I told him about the vision.
"Sounds a lot like the other ones you told me about."
"It started the minute I entered the Gloom." I told him about the time Shelton and I had nearly been sucked into a Gloom rift. "It felt like something was calling me to come here." I shrugged off an uneasy feeling. "It's like I'm supposed to be here."
"Talk about lousy accommodations," he said.
"After looking at everything from all angles, I realized that maybe there's a fourth alternative."
His eyebrows pinched. "Really? What is that?"
I met his gaze. "I want to have my cake and eat it too."
His eyes brightened. "A man after my own heart. Must be your demon heritage."
I shrugged. "Why can't I choose all three? I feel like if I don't do something soon, I'll go crazy."
"Let me tell you a little secret," he said, looking at the snoring Arcane for a moment as if making sure the man wouldn't overhear. "As your mother may have explained to you, Seraphim naturally side with the light or the dark once they near a certain age. Your mother told me she often dreamed of diving into a lake of pure milky white, a clear indication her affinity was with the Brilliance."
"Mom had these dreams too?"
"From what she told me, all Seraphim dream about their affinity when the time is closing in and are driven to it."
I stared blankly for a moment. "In other words, they don't have a choice about which side they want to choose."
"Exactly."
"Then, why do I have a choice?"
"Here's another secret you might find interesting," David said. "Demons also have an affinity for either side."
"What?"
He nodded. "It's true. Our affinities are far more complex, however. Where the Seraphim see white, black, and gray, we see all levels."
"So color matters?"
He snorted. "Hell, no. Color is a way of translating a very complex subject into very simple terms."
"What other levels of creation and destruction are there?"
"How much power someone has."
I raised an eyebrow. "Like a level ten warlock versus a level one troll."
"Exactly. There are those who can create life itself. Those who can destroy worlds. And then, there's the vast majority of us in between who can do little things." He steepled his fingers. "Let's just pray the ones at either end of the spectrum don't ever come knocking on our door."
My stomach clenched at the thought. "Do you think I'm making the right decision?"
"I can't answer that. What I can say is you need to make a decision or your Seraphim abilities won't properly manifest."
"Is that why I can't channel?"
"You might want to ask your mother."
I blew out a breath. "Get me out of here and I will."
"If you'll remember, we were working on your dreamcasting skills when you decided to wander off into la-la land." He pursed his lips. "Ready to give it another go?"
"Yeah." I ran a hand down my face and made myself comfortable. "Let's do this."
It took some time to quiet my mind because I had trouble not thinking about my vision and the choice. When I finally got past those thoughts, I found the void again and pretended I was drifting weightless in space. It seemed like an instant later Elyssa came to me in my dreams—her warm skin, her lips, the way she smelled when I pressed my nose to her neck and drew in her scent.
I'm dreaming.
I looked at Elyssa and sighed. Just a normal dream.
Open your eyes, my conscious mind commanded.
My eyelids felt heavy and unresponsive. They trembled and finally opened. Gray aether formed a ghostly figure in front of me. The shape took the hourglass form of my girlfriend. The gray paled until it resembled her fair skin. Smoky tendrils darkened to form black hair while her face and other features molded themselves. I maintained a crystal clear image of Elyssa until her doppelganger stood in front of me, every detail exactly as imagined.
"How do you feel, Justin?" David asked.
I looked at him, my sense of detached calm giving the scene a surreal quality to it. I wondered if that was a side-effect of the meditation, or of the concentration required to maintain a semi-dream state. "Weird," I said. My voice sounded hollow.
"It's natural to feel out of sorts the first few times." He examined Elyssa. "Can you make something besides your girlfriend?"
My head nodded, seemingly of its own accord. Aether fog gathered next to Elyssa, forming another figure. I felt my lips curl back in a snarl as the details took shape. Within minutes, Maximus stood next to Elyssa. He wore wraparound sunglasses. A close-cropped goatee hugged his chin. He smiled, revealing long fangs.
Another shape formed next to him, that of a tall thin man with unruly black hair.
"Vadaemos?" David said, stepping back.
Yet another form, and another, and another took shape until the cell was crowded with people. Shelton, Elyssa, Bella, Stacey, Maximus, Vadaemos, Maulin Kassus and more stared at each other from either side of the cell.
"Justin, you can stop now," David said, squeezing between the opposing forces and standing by my side. "In fact, you need to stop, or your imagination is going to kill us all."
I gazed dully at my father. His words made sense, but there were more people to create. Where was Underborn, the notorious assassin? Where was Daelissa?
"You son of a bitch!" The replica of my friend, Adam Nosti, gripped Maximus by the collar of his leather jacket. "You tried to turn my sister into a vampling. I'm going to kill you!"
Maximus shoved Adam. Adam whipped out a compact rod and flicked it into a full staff.
Maximus snarled. "How about I kill you next, Arcane?"
Adam shouted a word. Searing heat rippled from the end of his staff and charred Maximus's face.
All hell broke loose.
Chapter 20
Vadaemos roared. His body rippled, growing into a demonic beast. Cold steel flashed in Elyssa's hands as she met a thrust from the towering demon spawn. Bella took out her staff and blasted Maulin Kassus before he could throw a first strike at Harry Shelton who was busy combating Mr. Bigglesworth, the shape-shifter who'd killed his father.
"Justin, stop!" David slapped me so hard I staggered back and tripped over the unconscious Arcane on the floor. My dream state vanished. The replicas of my friends and enemies went still as statues. A beam of white light from the end of Shelton's staff hung in mid-air, inches from the face of Maulin Kassus.
"What—huh?" I said, feeling my eyes go wide at the bizarre sight in front of me.
"I knew you had an overactive imagination, but this is ridiculous." David walked around the clones. He peered at the beam of light coming from Shelton's staff. "For a minute there, I
thought he was really casting magic." He reached a tentative finger toward the light, seemed to reconsider, and spit on it. It sizzled.
"Wow," I said. "It's real?"
"As real as it needs to be," David said. He whistled. "You are something else, son."
I couldn't stop a grin from reaching my face. "You mean that in a good way?"
"Heck yeah." He touched Maximus's sunglasses. "You need to learn control." A grimace crossed his face as the sunglasses began to dissolve into goop.
It was hard to watch my friends melt away even though I knew they were imaginary constructs. Maximus and the others could rot in hell for all I cared.
"Do you remember how you controlled them all at once?" David asked.
I tried to remember. "Everything kind of happened on its own. I didn't consciously control anything."
"Your dream took over." He walked away from the melting figures. "Still, it's a good start. You just need to practice switching into that lucid dream state and you're set."
"I'll keep practicing."
David nodded. "Good idea. No telling how long we'll be waiting in here, and you might as well keep trying."
Pushing back my excitement, I sat back down and went back through the exercise. It took longer this time thanks to my mind reliving the battle I'd started. Thinking of the fake spells I'd made the clones cast led to another train of thought. If I could make them do that, what kept me from using a similar method to cast my own spells?
After a time, I managed to slip back into the lucid dream state. This time, I maintained a firmer hold on my imagination to prevent the previous chaos. The detached, surreal feeling came over me. I forced my eyes open, and stood. This time, I imagined a fireball. An orange sphere formed in my hand. I let it grow to about the size of my head and directed it to fly across the room.
It streaked across the small space and poofed against the wall, leaving a black mark where it hit, though it didn't otherwise damage the surface. A small voice in the back of my head told me it wasn't powerful enough to break through. My conscious voice tried to override my subconscious, explaining that a fireball could indeed damage the wall. Concentrating, I imagined another fireball. This one would destroy the wall. It would leave a huge hole in it.
My subconscious slipped from my grasp, and with it, my lucid dream state. I let out a frustrated grunt.
"What happened?" David asked.
"If I try to control my dream state too much, it fades."
He nodded. "Just like a typical lucid dream. The subconscious mind is sometimes more powerful than we give it credit for."
"Then I'll have to convince it."
He chuckled. "Good luck with that. It's a primal force all of its own." He examined the stain on the wall. "That was still very impressive."
I yawned. Grogginess weighed down my brain. Putting a part of myself to sleep and waking it back up sure was tiring. I paced around the room in an attempt to stay awake. I heard a snort of surprise and looked back to see the Arcane waking up. His eyes filled with fear when he saw us.
"Who are you people? What do you want with me?"
David held out his hand in a placating gesture. "Easy there. We're prisoners too."
"Prisoners? What did I do? Am I accused of a crime?" The Arcane pushed himself up and looked around the room. By now, the clones I'd made earlier were nothing but goop on the floor. A foggy gray steam rose from them as they presumably turned back into aether. "What is that stuff? Where are we?"
"We're in the Gloom," I said, stifling a yawn. "There are people who live here and have a device that allows them to kidnap people who are traveling via Obsidian Arches."
"Impossible," he said, eyes hardening with disbelief. "There were no Gloom cracks when the arch activated."
"It doesn't work like that," I said. I gave the man a brief rundown of the ripper and our experiences thus far.
"The Gloom is a place where dreams take shape?" he said. "Inconceivable."
"You'd better believe it," David said, his patience obviously wearing thin with the man's obstinacy.
I couldn't blame the Arcane. It was a lot to take in. Heck, I still had trouble believing half of what we'd been through.
"I'm Justin, and this is David. What's your name?"
"You've probably heard of me. My name is Gregory Wax."
His name didn't even sound remotely familiar to me. "Uh—"
The Arcane reached to his side and found his staff. "They're going to regret not taking this from me." He flicked it out to full length, aimed it at the door, and—his brow scrunched.
"Remind you of the time you came through the arch and you couldn't cast any spells?" David said.
"Casting doesn't work in the Gloom," I said.
"No, this cannot be." The Arcane tried again and again to produce magic and failed miserably. He even withdrew a wand—as if the staff might be defective—and tried it. Same results. "Margaret will be so upset when I don't show up with the new spell scrolls I promised her." His wand clattered to the floor, and the man buried his face in his hands.
"I tried to tell you," I said.
I watched the poor man groan in misery and wondered what Serena could possibly want with Arcanes and vampires. Supernatural abilities barely worked here, and casting spells seemed downright impossible. That pretty much made Arcanes and vampires useless. Then again, I might be thinking along the wrong lines. Dreamcasting was the big thing here in the Gloom. If there was anything I knew about casting spells in the real world, it required the ability to concentrate.
Shelton and Bella made me run through meditation exercises when I was just learning how to fill my aether well. Simply filling my well had been difficult to learn. Once I got over that hump, I had to actually cast spells. Although I could blow things up real good, my fine control was awful.
Any Arcane worth his or her salt wouldn't even have to think about those basic things. They'd simply flick a mental switch, draw in aether, and cast the desired spell, or start the ritual for a spell of more complicated design. This meant Arcanes could possibly adapt to dreamcasting much faster than other supernaturals. From that standpoint, kidnapping them made sense.
But why vampires?
Timothy hadn't demonstrated any supernatural abilities, which drove me to the assumption vampires wouldn't have preternatural strength in the Gloom. While he had been able to create a velociraptor and ride it—something any nerd could appreciate—the vampire hadn't conjured an army or done anything to dazzle us with amazing dreamcasting. Timothy had also been trapped in the Gloom for quite some time and hadn't developed his dreamcasting much beyond Gloria Richardson.
Maybe his ex-girlfriend had put him through too much psychological trauma. Maybe other vampires exhibited excellent dreamcasting skills. I had a feeling if we survived long enough, we'd eventually find out what Serena wanted with blood-suckers.
I explained my theory to David.
"Makes sense," he said. "She probably brainwashes them into serving her, then adds them to an army of dreamcasters."
"But, why," I asked, "in the world would anyone in their right mind want to build an army of dreamcasters in the Gloom? Not only is it more depressing than Seattle, but the population of real humans can't be very high. If this Serena person wants to rule the Gloom, she can have it."
"Did you say a woman named Serena is running things here?" Wax said, looking up from his pity party.
"That's what Jarvis told us," I said.
"Is she short and blonde with a sharp tongue?"
"We haven't met her," I replied. "Why?"
"I was on a research team assigned to the Gloom Initiative. Jarrod Sager put an Arcane named Serena Thain in charge. When he pulled the plug on the project, she and a handful of loyal researchers vanished into the Gloom and were never heard from again." He shuddered. "This place is driving me insane, and I've been here less than a day. I can't imagine how insane that woman is." He groaned. "She was already difficult to deal with, even under the best of circ
umstances. She used to steal my yogurt from the cooler though I'd clearly marked each container with my name." He blew out a breath. "The nerve of that woman."
"Do you think she'll recognize you?" I asked. "Maybe she'll take it easy on you."
His eyes flashed wide. "I certainly hope she doesn't recognize me. My negative evaluation of the way she handled the project was instrumental in causing Sager to pull the plug."
"Actually," I said, "Sager had to pull the plug because he was using his own Arcane consulting company to run things, and Cyphanis Rax found out about it. Apparently, it made for a huge scandal."
The Arcane's distant gaze told me he hadn't heard a word I'd said.
The cell door slid open, and one of the pale sentinels walked inside. The Arcane screamed as the thing came for him.
"Help! Help!" Wax backed into a corner until he had nowhere to go. "The Gloom monster is going to get me!"
Jarvis guffawed, holding his belly and crying with mirth as he watched the poor Arcane possibly soil himself. "It isn't going to hurt you if you shut your trap, moron."
"Calm down," I told Wax. "Do what Jarvis says and you'll be okay. He's the man in charge around here."
Jarvis's chest puffed out. "That's right."
"His name is Gregory Wax," David said, sidling up to Jarvis like an informant.
The stocky man nodded sagely and sneered. "Keep showing me this kind of loyalty, and things will go good for you."
The sentinel dragged the gibbering Wax from the cell and the door closed behind him.
I extended my senses to be sure Jarvis had left and made a gagging noise. "If I have to suck up to that man for much longer, I'm gonna barf."
"I might conjure up another crawler and have it bite his head off," David said.
I gave him a pleading look. "No more decapitations, please."
Several minutes later, the door opened, and the willowy form of Theresa entered. She placed trays with bread and cheese on the floor. I thought about making a break for it, but noticed a sentinel standing outside.
She stood and regarded us with sad brown eyes. "How long have you been in the Gloom?"
"A day or so," I said. During the kidnapping, the woman had seemed uncomfortable with the Gloomies' mission. I wondered why and if we might exploit it. "How about you?"