Not wishing to involve the security team, C.K. Transported himself to his magnetic room and then back to the front of the palace arch to meet Peter and Jesse. The arch guardian eyed C.K. with suspicion, but that was usual even after all these years.
C.K. Transported the three of them to his lab and explained the failsafe procedures to Jesse, who would have responsibility to bring them back. He had created a magnetic Mobius strip with Magic on one side and Essence on the other. It was difficult to look at since it was an impossible construct, but only imagination and will limits magic. C.K. had both, in excess, as well as an unlimited power that he could tap from both Magic and Essence.
He stood between one of the loops of the strip while Peter stood in the other. C.K. showed Jesse how to invert polarity to send them on their way, and how to revert to normal if they had not managed to return within an hour of their own accord. C.K. gave a nod to proceed, as did Peter when Jesse looked at him. She activated the controls and watched with apprehension as the two loops shrank towards each other while the two experimenters seemed to diminish in scale. The Mobius shrank to a singularity point, then inverted to its previous size and presented empty loops.
~o0o~
C.K. floated in a warm sea and mindlessly watched iridescent streamers of pastel colors as they wafted and swirled, sometimes in patterns but mostly not. Up-wind, just at the edge of hearing, he caught snippets of laughter and joy. These sounds slowly resolved into myriad tiny fairy-like beings that flittered in and out of groupings with the same frequency with which they flickered in and out of sight. As the swarm drifted near, they descended upon C.K. and poked, pulled, and tickled in delight. He laughed despite the irritation, but they soon moved on. Their minuscule attention span was too short for even simple conversation.
He had no sense of the passage of time but gradually noticed large dark-gray storm clouds gather by the contrast against the colorful sky around them. There were three huge masses, each with a distinct personality superimposed as a face on their fluffy surfaces. They hurled insults at each other while their angry words echoed from within their thunder. Each accused the others of attempting to steal their babies and hurled lightning bolts when winds pushed them too closely together. Two of the behemoths eventually engaged in a raging fight, while the third snuck up behind the smaller and inhaled its substance. It grew large and heavy while the victim shrank and shredded to fog.
The cannibal cloud shuddered, and as it drifted directly over C.K., released a downpour. Rather than the expected raindrops, he was engulfed in tens of thousands of fist-sized water babies. They resembled cherubs rather than newborn infants, but were translucent and rebounded like gelatin as they bounced off him and each other.
Their sheer numbers and weight forcing C.K. to cover his head with his forearms. He fell down a now slippery hillside, but the water babies’ elasticity cushioned his fall. The majority of the tiny hominids burst asunder on impact with the ground, and their watery innards turning into a flash flood that carried C.K. down into a lake.
He tried to swim away from the main mass of water babies as they gurgled while their hungry little eyes sought him out. He put a few yards between them and himself, but he was at least half an hour’s swim from the nearest shore, given his doggy-paddle skills,. Before long, he floated on his back to rest. Out of the quiet, he heard a plop, followed by two more plop-plops.
The water babies suddenly screamed and cried and splashed around in panic but were too uncoordinated to make any progress. They swirled counterclockwise as a whirlpool opened beneath them. C.K. ducked his head underwater and was just able to make out a giant anthropomorphic head that sucked the babies into a toothless mouth. When a watery eye twice his height rolled its gaze towards him, C.K. discovered he was actually quite capable of overhand swimming and made the shoreline in five minutes.
He collapsed on a sandy beach, but immediately found the strength to run several more yards away from the frightening lake. The water line resolved into a huge hand and smash his body as it grabbed and tried to pull him back into the lake. C.K. fought forward and fell across a boulder while the wave collapsed and retreated. He remembered where he was and why, and tried to relax both his body and his mind from the constant onslaught of strange experiences. He was only partially successful as his consciousness deteriorate into a series of photographs, each moment of his life as immediate and valid as the previous. All his memories intermingled and gave him no anchor on which to attach his perspective.
The Wizards had warned him that time did not exist here, but the reality was more terrible than he could have imagined. His focus, as it were, randomly shuffled so that he never knew exactly where or when he was, a paradigm phrase that had no meaning here. He knew he had to get a perspective on this experience in order to remain sane. Perhaps he had already lost his mental equilibrium, or was that yet to come?
At some point in the discontinuity, a school of mermaids half his size attempted to molest him. They dragged him back down into the water and tore at his clothes. He evidently had not drowned during that even because “now” he was sat on the peak of a mountain and discussed history and philosophy with the craggy face. A collection of boulders had assembled to form a particularly frightening rock-montage mouth, which spoke with the sound of grinding gravel.
The mountain was curious, as it had never met anything like C.K. before. It had sprung forth near the beginning of all things and appreciated any novelty. Through the ancient mountain, C.K. learned many things, mostly concerning the recurring theme that life survived by consuming life.
In this Realm, all of nature was alive and contained various intelligence, at the very least enough for a sense of self, from mountains to streams to air currents and storms. Every plant, rolling grassland and grand forest thought for itself, from deep, long rumbling cogitations to momentary incandescent flitters, each according to their own preferential enjoyments. Life sprouted and became both appreciative audience and participants in the warp and weave of imaginative exuberance.
At the very beginning of all things, as the mountain related the history, Magic and mobility coalesced into fey shapes. Each was unique though shared basic forms that sprouted from the minds and personalities of the elementals. The Mountains were first to develop ambulatory children. Deep thinkers and philosophers, the mountains were limited to their closest neighbors for communion, so sent their progeny upon the land by the millions and lived vicariously through them when they returned.
Families, then tribes and finally societies that became independent of their progenitors and soon forget from whence they came. Wizards suddenly appeared, the when as meaningless a question as the how, and became leaders and parental figures in place of the elementals and mountains. Wizards saw themselves as the ultimate expression of creation and had no respect for their elders. The mountains in particular grieved over this defect as they knew this would bring the Wizards to a bad end.
Wizards assumed all other forms of life were beneath them, and ultimately useful only as energy for them to absorb. C.K. later learned from the many local Wizards he befriended that they saw the Human Realm as a giant buffet. C.K. knew they must be stopped, or that he would stop them, or that he had already stopped them. With an abrupt wrenching, he was back in his laboratory.
~o0o~
Peter screamed. He was surrounded by metallic spires and spikes and shards and geometric outcroppings haphazardly canted in every direction. Lightning arced from thin edges and leaped with imposing energies. Ball lightning occasionally formed, floated and gaining force until they burst in massive explosions. Essence was so thick the atmosphere resembled a treacle fog, in a state between gaseous and liquidity. The bubble within a bubble of magic and Essence that protected him in the lab failed and collapsed. Essence diluted and transmuted Peter’s Magic based physiology and painfully transformed his being into something different .
The process was completed by the time the last echo of his scream faded away. He su
ddenly relaxed and took the time to notice the beauty of his surroundings. He felt drawn to a small pool of silvery liquid Essence, the edges frothed with a lacy, low-level electrical discharge. He tentatively cupped his hand to dip into the pool, and brought the liquid to his mouth. He sniffed and smelled a pleasant, fresh bouquet that tickled his nose. He took a sip and let the fizz trickle down his throat. It satisfied his thirst, filled his belly, and energized both mind and body.
Now ready to explore, he circled a triangular obelisk and followed a path that climbed upward over progressively larger metallic blocks. He reached a plateau and looked about. The structures below seemed randomly geometric, but there was no doubt intelligence constructed them. A vast city lay in gleaming splendor that stretched from horizon to horizon. Arched metallic roadways wound around, between, and sometimes through an endless array of unique buildings. Obviously deserted, the hard structures gave no clue as to their age. They may have last been inhabited yesterday, or eons in the past. Most striking to Peter was the differences compared to his native Realm.
Here, everything was angular; straight lines and sharp edges the rule. At home, everything was rounded and flowing, the very embodiment of organic. From his present location, he had no frame of reference to judge the possible size of the previous inhabitants, or any clue to their shape. He determined to investigate and took his next step, then felt a twist and was back in the lab.
Peter immediately felt something was not quite right, a thought confirmed by the intense look on Jesse's face. C.K. stepped over and put a worried hand on his shoulder, and stumbled through him when his hand met no resistance. C.K. did feel a slight tingling as he fell through the slightly purple radiance that surrounded Peter’s body, but Peter was insubstantial as empty air.
~o0o~
C.K. worked without rest as he tried first to define the changes in Peter’s physical state, and then to find a cure. Interestingly, it was only humans and human-Realm animals that could not interact with him. Wizards, although they felt repugnance when touching the purple field, seemed unaffected otherwise. C.K. worked around the clock, but couldn't sleep anyway because whenever he closed his eyes he slipped into vivid, horrifying nightmares from his experiences in the Magic Realm.
During sleep, his experiences were more than realistic dreams. He was concurrently in both Realms, trapped for an eternity without beginning or end. The human mind was not built to live outside of time. Peter understood, but lacked empathy as he begged C.K. to restore him to his original state of grace.
For Peter, the experience of timeless time was equivalent to immortality. Without sequential time he had always existed, and therefore, always would. He felt cut off from his former self, mortality more frightening than his current inability to touch or to be touched, or his new habit of ingesting Essence. He now needed the presence of Essence to use Magic, a turn of events that C.K. found most useful. Jesse, of course, stayed always at his side, ready to give her brother any support she might.
~o0o~
When C.K. had been awake three straight days despite feeling tired and hungry, one of his lead engineers unexpectedly irritated him. C.K. had trouble following the long technical rationalizations for a series of failed experiments. In frustration, he grabbed both of the underling’s shoulders so he couldn't pull away from the coming diatribe. To both of their horror, blood droplets oozed from the engineer’s skin and slowly floated across to cover C.K. in a thin red sheen. He dropped the shriveled, desiccated body and backed against the wall. He tried to wipe the warm blood off his arms, only to watch the droplets disappear into his skin.
Equally disturbing, the body was not quite the corpse he expected. It mimicked every exaggerated motion C.K. made in weak, uncoordinated movements, like a puppet on elastic strings. The eyes, however, were very much alive and begged for release. Peter looked on dispassionately, but Jesse stepped in to soothe C.K.
"Easy C.K., try to relax, it will be all right. You and Peter just got mixed together some, that's all. This is normal for wizards. It's just the way we feed."
"I, I don't understand!"
"In our Realm, life exists by consuming life, just like here, only more… directly."
"But he's still alive!"
"You need to break the connection. Pretend you've taken a large bite of your favorite food and imagine swallowing. It might help if you close your eyes."
C.K. gagged on his first attempt, but was determined to stop this nightmare. Rather than hide from the horror, he stared into his victim’s eyes to maintain his motivation and metaphorically swallowed. The remaining blood seeped into his skin, and the corpse let out a rattling sigh, now truly dead. C.K. felt energized, if a little nauseous. It felt as if he had just finished the most restful sleep of his life, had a satisfying meal, and then exercised to the point of invigoration. He felt strong and alert, at peak performance in every way.
Peter, on the other hand, could not eat what he could not touch, but got along just fine when he drank Essence, which literally recharged him. They had made no real progress towards a cure a week later when the Queen commanded them to attend and report.
~o0o~
The Queen received them in the feather room, a fairly intimate setting she reserved for family and those particularly in her favor at the moment. The walls and ceiling were covered with an array of iridescent bird wings, each attached at the humorous bone and slowly flapped to form hypnotic waves of color as well as stir a pleasant breeze. Her throne was woven from live peacock tail-feathers that opened and closed along the oversized arched back. No one knew exactly how many thrones she owned, or whether she simply created them at need, but each was specifically unique and exhibited a magical and fashionable flair.
By tradition, no other wizard sat on anything while in the Queen’s presence.. In their personal chambers, which the Queen never deigned to visit, Wizards allowed themselves exotic materials and ornate designs, but never based them on one of the Queen’s in case she ever did.
The Duchess of Fire stood next to the Peacock throne with her secondary attendant, raised to the position ever since the Queen suborned C.K.to Essence investigation. Peter bowed and Jesse curtsied but C.K. simply stood at attention since he was not a Wizard but was familiar with protocol.
"I understand that you have traveled to our home Realm, and returned, at least in some ways, as one of us. Unfortunately, Peter seems to have suffered his own side effect from his journey. Have you made any progress towards his restoration?"
"We are, your Majesty, following a promising line of inquiry. We have Called a few lesser species from the home Realm by using Red fruit during the transubstantiation…"
"How delightful! We never thought of trying that. Train someone directly so that I may enjoy a menagerie from home."
"Of course, your Majesty, as soon as we are dismissed. To continue, I performed the same procedures that Peter and I underwent, except we used the other Realm’s fauna in conjunction with a local animal. We duplicated the effects we both experienced and are very near a breakthrough."
"In my experience, very near can be a long way indeed. Care to be a little less subjective?"
“By encouraging the afflicted Magic Realm subject to, um, mate with its human realm opposite, all effects reversed to normality."
"And? Is that look of distaste because you and Peter must mate? No. What aren't you telling me?"
"Shortly thereafter, they both exploded, We are fairly certain it's due to their low intelligence."
"Well, we can't have one of our favorite Attendants exploding, now can we? I expect you will continue working diligently on the matter. In the meantime, we have had a high feast prepared. Let us repair to the banquet hall."
C.K. had never before been allowed to attend a feast so was not quite sure the invitation included him. He followed them all into the Queen's anteroom and through the open door and figured a Guardian would confront him if not.
He had become somewhat blase about the wonders he h
ad seen and experienced since he entered the Wizards’ service, but the enormous size and stupendous population of the banquet hall stunned him. The Queen's throne (this one seemingly created out of negative space, a blackness so dark it sucked in light that caused her to blur around the edges) presided in the outside radial center of a horseshoe-shaped table. There were no place settings, and most of the wizards stood along the empty table tops, but there were stools for the Royal peers. A Paige led C.K. to a smaller matching table half step below reserved for the peers' attendants, close enough to call upon if their masters had need.
A series of long tables branched off in an arc that spread out from the throne in a semicircle. The pattern repeated seemingly without limit and provided seating for more than one-hundred-thousand Wizards. The Queen’s party was among the last to attend, and with her arrival, the din of voices subsided to an eerie silence. When everyone other than the Queen was seated or in place, she raised one arm and all the doors disappeared. As she brought her arm back down, the ceiling retracted and revealed the most horrible sight C.K. had or ever would see.
A rope descended from above every dinner guest head. A trussed and gagged human tied by their feet came to a stop just before their heads touched the tables. The Queen was the first to feed. She placed her palms on either side of her meal’s head and slowly absorbed droplets of blood into her Carmen-colored hands. The room immediately filled with a cacophony of voices as the Wizards all heartily joined in. C.K. was both horrified and repulsed, but a deep hunger welled up from within as his hands moved by their own volition and he softly cupped the cheeks of the teenage boy that dangled before him. C.K. tried to stop the process, but as the first crimson drops caressed his fingers he mindlessly gave in and fed. Peter automatically reached out, but his insubstantial purple-tinged flesh simply passed through his intended meal.