Chapter 13

Frigid metal on my naked body made me restrain a twitch. A long exhale as I laid back into this metal coffin. A mechanical whirring as the glass tube clamped shut, airtight, casting a filmy glaze between me and the metallic roof where various tubes inserted like mechanical intestines.

Pearl stood at the control board several feet away, face gauntly lit from beneath, a disc jockey in the shadows. “Now comes the elixir. Just relax. Breathe it in.”

“Easy for you to say.” My voice was muffled by the thick glass as the green liquid rushed in and gurgled around my ankles. “You can breathe underwater.”

 The elixir rose, felt like syrup on my skin, but letting it pour into my nostrils and down my throat was far stranger. The cold pressure in my lungs made me kick unconsciously but then finally I went still and my body only felt like some strange dead fish that I was sinking on, consciousness becoming liquid.

Sinking on.

Sinking on.

I sank.

Far far down a watery darkness until my limbs rested at the bottom of the vast, empty ocean, liquid darkness.

A faint light rippled far above. I remembered the water pressure, its concept, and my body was mangled by the unimaginable weight of the sea. Bones snapped like firecrackers, flesh imploded, bubbles stormed around my last breath. Helplessness pulsed through me, then my mind turned to mud around my remains.

Hours passed as my mangled corpse was half buried in silt. Bizarre glowing fish began hovering around me, biting at my flesh, one with the serrated mouth of a tin can lid, nibbling my bones clean.

The tug of unconsciousness was irresistible, turned still more titanic by the ocean’s weight, but the sliver of will that remained in me clung to a shred of awareness. A panic, a memory. I had to dream my way out of this, or it would all be pointless, a waste.

My will swept a current of water onto what remained of my bones. With a malformed liquid hand, it carried these remains through the shades of ocean dark, past corals where a shadowy mal in a blue collared shirt was banging on a rundown house’s front door, in the distance a car driving steady over darkness, a massive whale, all oblivious to me and this strange ocean, some other dreamers’ creations. A giant clam pried its chitinous mouth open and the current swept my bones into it. The massive shell clamped shut.

All was silence. All was dark.

My will. My will still existed. The scraps that remained of my bones dug into the oyster’s tongue-like flesh.

Days passed.

Mineral deposits began coalescing around the bones, invisible hands assembling them like a child solving a jigsaw puzzle. Light. A glimmer. My consciousness was spherical, shining, even in this watery dark. I was a pearl.

The pearl necklace on the rich femna bobbed as she walked through the store. Her daughter not more than 10, walked with her hand in hand. They were both dressed in satiny dresses, crisp wool coats, ornately braided hair. The femnavi eyed me as I passed by, following my own mother's purposeful steps. I must have been staring. It was not common to see non goblinkin in this store. People of means even less. I didn't recognize the femnavi either. I was 2 or 3 years younger at most, would have seen her at school.

My mother walked in silence. She was a tiny, thin wahira, carnelian skin, straight hair that curved just above her shoulders, wore thick weave pants instead of a skirt when it was still seen as strange for a femna to do so, flat shoes, a plain Thriftson’s blouse tucked under her belt. As we paced through the isles, a display at the end of one made me stop. Stacked thin wood boxes with glass lids, so that through them you could see untold treasures: General Rahul Fortenbrass, sculpted in plastic glory, his trimmed dragonmal beard exuding grizzled might, gold pauldrons on his uniform, a huge cutlass in one hand and an ensorcelled pistol in the other. In the next box: Nebloseron Black, feared assassin, decked in sleek shadow, a dagger in one hand, a sniper rifle in the other.

“Maeh, maeh, look.” I pointed at these, the greatest artifacts known to sentient beings, whose wielders were endowed with the ability to wage the greatest of wars imaginable, judge life and death with the touch of godhood, a promise of holy bliss unending. 

“Don’t start.” Her small fist pleated my shirt collar, yanked me to keep up with her pace.

“Please—”

Her glare fixed on me, big eyes, thin brows, mouth firm, rooted me to the earth and I went silent, then followed after her as she carefully groped kitchen wares.

“Kasena?” a femna said, recognizing my mother. She was another wahira but she wore her hair stacked on her conya in large loops fixed with some kind of angular brooch, her dress a light lavender on her purple skin, lashes real sharp and darkened. They talked of indecipherable femna things. My eyes drifted, my tiny leather shoes followed.

Staring down at those treasures in the wood boxes, war’s distilled glory, precious idols, desire writhed in me like a nest of worms. Cold adrenaline ran through me. I glanced both ways. I had a blade in my pocket. It was as mighty and powerful as the Yannovec blade, Flamebane as it was called in the West, the icy sword which slew the the ancient wurm Ryl Deghyrec and in this great deed founded the Empire of Ruthenia, but in the world's eyes it would have only been a tiny folding knife with a black plastic handle. Its tiny blade sliced through a hard plastic band, pried a metal latch apart. My heart drummed like I was in the middle of secret murder. The box opened with a wooden pop.

I couldn't get lost. I couldn't get lost in memories. I practiced dreaming for years in the Stalls. For days on end, it was my only mind’s escape from the twisting madness of solitary darkness, the cold concrete angles of my cell. Cross legged, standing, lying on the hard bed, the meditations tested my patience to the brink of madness, but even with the brand obfuscating my Mage mind, I began to feel once more the various shapes the mind takes. The waking mind’s cubist tendencies, the dreamless mind’s torus center, the lucid dream mind’s spherical nature.

With enough practice, I reached lucidity often—what a mercy those escapes were. Had this journey in the dream chamber been a mere hedonistic escape, it would have been easy, a mouthwatering toe curling glide it would've been. But my aim was not to dwell in the waters of the subconscious, but to plunge through them, to escape out of the prison of the bodybound mind entirely. This was inherently difficult, and was made even more so because there was a force, a quasi-conscious force that prowled the dream plane for runaways.

“Hey!” the store clerk shouted. “You lil’ boochino!” He was a bony old Hobgoblin in an apron. Receding gray hair that curled back like small flames. A long nose, deep lines on his face in a permanent frown.

 I dropped the box and even so his steps banged through the store as he came closer. My mother joined him with a belt in her hand, my father with a broken bottle swinging with the paunch under his half buttoned short sleeve. They rushed toward me with ominous precision.

 My shoes smacked the vinyl floor. I ran. I ran with knife trembling in hand. Ran through the store, went barreling past the wooden door out into the Philamonvia sun.

Familiar streets with confusing details altered. Instead of a stop sign there was a spear impaled in the ground, a skull atop it. The grassy hill that should have held a red brick apartment building now held a red brick prison. A car that drove through an intersection in the distance was on fire. 

I ran and ran into the brush that bordered a ravine, the adults no matter how fast I fled were behind me, more of them, a mob, impossible to lose. Up ahead a well.

Feeling its stone on my hands I hopped onto its rim, skinny red knees scraping, stared down at the endless black. The adults were getting closer, more ominous than ever, their stares trembling with otherworldly malice. I jumped.

 I fell forever. The butterflies of falling turning into an ecstasy of dissolution as I plunged into water again.

Water. The sea. I was a pearl again. A pearl dreaming within a dream.

Ribbed, chitinous ceiling faintly lit by my own luster, safe enclosure, soft mollusk flesh for a bed. Sweet repose.

No. I had to move. The trip in the chamber wouldn't last forever. I couldn't just stay here trapped within this shell at the bottom of the ocean. My will stirred. The will that had once been arcane, that had once bent reality. I could do so once more. My pearl body began vibrating, a strange ringing emitting. The oyster shell shook and soon the whole ocean was trembling as I emitted some strange frequency turning everything black, black as a night sky. And that's where I was. A pearl now floating far above the Hybrid Earth, the cloudy blue planet like some marble in the distance and me glowing resplendent with reflected sunlight.

 I gazed at the Sun and was in awe. Sol! King of planets! Ruler of the black heaven!

But for all its majesty, I couldn't stay here in this dream sky, a fake star. I needed a body. Not one made of imagination but made of true astral light. My awareness roamed. There. There. Below. The hybrid earth. Where else were bodies born?

Stars streaked as I plummeted through space, cold vapor sluicing off me, forming a gaseous, luminous tail. I was a comet plunging, plunging down to the earth. Heat glazed around me as I entered the atmosphere. 

My comet tail slithered, became some strange translucent flesh and now I found myself swimming through some watery tunnel with veiny walls, lighting them faintly as I went. I pushed on. Up ahead of me an egg suspended within a membrane chamber, gelatinous, tiny seed particles floating within it. Gathering strength, gathering power, my tail flickering, my sight imploded the membrane, pierced its wall. Plunged inside it. A light sparked.

Out of darkness, I rotated, a wriggling pink bean. I was a fetus, limbs only suggestions, head elongated in an alien shape but ears already beginning to point, tiny organs within my translucent flesh pulsing. More willpower. More. Limbs began elongating. Veins pulsed. I grew, a bulb pushing from my face into the beginnings of a nose.

Murmurs vibrating through the flesh walls.

“End it.” A muffled, echoing voice. A femna voice. “End it.”

Twisting within the seminal fluid I turned toward the sound, attention rapt, dents for eyes, mouth rounding mutely.

“End it.”

Gazing down at my belly there was a long flesh cord protruding from my gut. 

“End it.”

The walls of the flesh burrow leading to my seminal nest shook and warped, expanding. A light shone, revealing the particles floating in this amniotic fluid. The light was cone shaped, seemed to be searching. Someone was coming for me. I tried to shake free but the umbilical cord had me trapped. I exerted will, growing more defined flesh.

“End it.”

The searching light latched onto me, near blinding.

“End it.”

Through the searchlight’s blotchy quivering, I saw its wielder. A doctor in a sea foam colored surgical gown, which bobbed with the weightlessness of the amniotic fluid. A mask and a cap covering his entire face save for his eyes slanted in wrathful determination behind his glasses. A gleaming scalpel in an outstretched glove, his other caught in the impossibly tight flesh tunnel he was contorting through like a wet, desperate rat.

“End it.”

I flailed. I tried to shout but it only came as a faint gurgling, mouth only a gummy indent.

His bent elbows plodded onward, dented the flesh walls like he was some demented soldier clearing a tunnel. Tiny amniotic bubbles swirled around his scalpel, inches from my bulb toes.

Will. Will—Will!

He drove the scalpel into me.

A sharp clink. My flesh had hardened, hardened into a shell, bony flint segments. I was a turtle. I swirled in a half twist and snapped my ancestral fossil jaws. He recoiled, eyes blazing with pain as at the end of his wrist was a bloody stump now.

My fins kicked and I went rushing up, swimming through this tunnel which was some kind of widening underground cave. I went shooting out into open sea depths. At their top was a rippling light.

The surface. That was it. The surface.

Turtle flippers turned to dolphin fins. I rushed through the water which was turning a lighter blue. I rushed on, now becoming some kind of merfolk, my upper torso that of my Hobgoblin self, the lower half a huge fishtail. I swam and swam and then finally broke the water’s surface.

“Aaaanngh!” I gulped air as silvery water trickled down my face. Then a moment later I realized that I didn't need it, that I was neither dreaming nor sleeping nor waking, but somewhere else entirely.