Monthly Archives: April 2013

The Hollow Half – Chapter 15

Binding the physical world to an ethereal world of nightmare faerie magic is the kind of thing that they’d probably insist I avoid doing if I decided to join the FBMA. So, in a way, it was good that I was entirely untrained at the task before me.

“What are you doing?” Nell asked.

“Getting the pieces for the World Gate together.”

“It’s helping”, she said. I could see the tears had stopped and she was standing up straighter.

In destroying the statue that served as the guardian of the Shadow Court’s Heart of Power, Way had weakened the Heart itself. Then I had started ripping it apart for material to work with and that had weakened it further. So, in comparison to how it had appeared previously, the room was looking almost cheerful. I might even have been able to work in it for a full ten seconds if Nell stopped supporting me.

“Here’s where it gets difficult again.” I told her. As far as I knew most of the difficulty would be on me for the next phase, but I had no idea what Nell’s limits where or how much backlash she would receive if I got blasted by the forces Jenny would be knitting together.

“The flames are getting closer.” Heather called out from the doorway. I looked at the collection of threads that I’d cut from the Heart of Power. It wasn’t enough. I needed a hundred times the material to work with and a thousand times the knowledge. I didn’t have either though, so I picked up two of the threads and got to knitting.

As I brought the threads together my vision broke apart. The Dreamlit world’s reflection of the Shadow Court’s realm had been horrifying the first time I saw it. Glimpsing it from within the Heart chamber was terrifying in a different way. The eldritch terrorscape that I’d seen earlier was simply gone. What little remained was the space around us, the edges of which were shrinking inwards as the black flames devoured them.

The Shadow Court hadn’t abandoned their bodies and taken over the heroes out of malice. Malice was a side benefit. They’d been fleeing for their existence.

Beyond the edge of the flames I heard a vast roaring. Something knew they’d escaped. Something that sounded a lot like the nameless giant.

“Got to work faster.” I told myself in the Dreamlit world.

I looked at the outline of threads that Jenny’s fingers were spinning together. In the Dreamlit world I saw the shape of the final gate like a ghostly outline overlaying the work that Jenny was doing. Pieces of the outline filled in as I focused and tried to imagine what each of the glyphs and whirls might mean. Meta-awareness helped, providing insight into the importance of each element that I studied. Rather than letting me complete the task faster though, the added knowledge only made it clear how far off the mark I was.

Jenny could spin a glyph in about a minute, working at a breakneck pace and trusting to meta-awareness to guide the way. That would cover about an inch of a doorway that needed to be at least ten feet high and eight feet wide. We had five minutes on the outside before the last scrap of the Shadow Court’s realm burned up.

“We’re not going to make it.” I admitted to myself.

“No. You won’t.”

Something stepped out of the fire at the edge of the world. A suit of empty armor, burning with the black flames that surrounded it. It had the same dying galaxies for eyes that the nameless giant had and it spoke in the same voice.

“What do you want here?” I asked, hoping to stop it with words since I didn’t think anything else I could do would work.

“Nothing.”

The armored figure stopped at the edge of the flames. It traced a hand through the air revealing a shield that was resisting the advance of the black fire.

“Then why are you here?” I demanded.

“You misunderstand. Our desire is for nothing.”

“That’s why you’re burning this place up?”

“It is an atrocity.”

It was true. If ever a place deserved to be lost to the black flames it was the Shadow Court’s realm. I’d wanted to burn it myself and had set Jessica and Nell to do just that. Something about the black flames made the way they were destroying this place seem wrong though.

“Ok. But you tried to burn up the police station too.” I protested

“Again you misunderstand. It is all atrocity.”

“What? Everything? Why? What’s so bad about the real world?”

“This world is as real as the physical realm we last met in.”

“It’s a faerie land founded on the principal of pain and loss. That’s not what the real world is like.”

“It is corrupt. In no atom of its essence can the touch of a benevolent creator be found. It is an aberration of chaos, a fundamentally flawed conception that can only end in suffering. It is exactly the same as your world and all other worlds in this reality.”  The armored figure’s voice was low and intense. It echoed from every flame that surrounded the dying remnant of the Shadow Court’s realm.

Standing inside the influence of the Shadow Court’s Heart of Power it was difficult to argue with him. Nell’s support made the pain the Heart broadcast bearable but even so it colored my thinking. I knew I wasn’t going to give up on getting back home but forming complex counter arguments for a philosophical debate was more than I had the brain power left for.

“So you’re going to destroy everything that is then?” I asked.

“Only from the void can a new reality be crafted.”

I wanted to tell the figure he was insane. Trying to destroy everything, ever, was so over the top it practically defined “megalomaniacal super villain”. Usually that type of threat wasn’t much to worry about from what I’d read. Villains that went that insane didn’t tend to retain enough coherence to tie their own shoes much less pose an actual danger to the world.

This one had annihilated 99% of a realm that had stymied the most powerful heroes on Earth for decades though. And I was the only one who was around to stand against him.

I wanted to run.

Pen was way more knowledgeable than I was about the Dreamlit world and everything that was going on and he hadn’t lasted more than a minute against this guy. Way was vastly more powerful than I could hope to be and she’d been cast out as useless to him. I knew the Shadow Court’s Heart was still influencing me, but I couldn’t see how I was supposed to stop a universe destroyer.

“Is everything ok?” Nell asked.

In the Shadow Court’s realm, I was crying my eyes out. As Jenny, I wanted to live too.

“No.” I admitted. Nell was trying harder than anyone else and I hated telling her the truth, but I couldn’t lie to her either. She deserved better than that. All of them did.

“We’re out of time here Blue!” Jessica called from the alcove they were huddled in at the bottom of the stairs. The passage leading up, just behind Patches, was gone, or rather engulfed in the black flames. They were going to be forced into the room and the Heart was still strong enough to rip their minds to pieces.

Way was down, slumped into Minnie’s arms. Jessica and Heather were looking like the Heart was already getting to them and even the former Queen had a look on her face that I could only read as trepidation. There was no choice left. They had to enter the Heart’s chamber.

“Can you help them?” I asked Nell.

“Yes. Now I can.” she said and tried to pull me towards the others. With the weakening of the Heart’s power she could afford to protect more than just one of us at a time.

“I’m staying here. The gate’s not ready yet.” I told her.

“You can’t. I can’t protect you if we’re not together.”

“I know. It’s ok.” I wasn’t planning to throw my sanity away. I figured I could escape to the Dreamlit world if the pain grew too intense. That was a bit of overestimation on my part.

I knew roughly how bad the pain would be when Nell let go. My meta-awareness was all too happy to give me that warning. What it failed to mention was the effect that would have on Jenny’s body.

Jenny was tougher than Jin, but she had her limits too. I felt my crochet hooked fingers spasm and curl inwards as the pain hit. I nodded for Nell to go to the others as the pain continued to build. She was halfway across the small room when the tremors started.

The glyph that I was working on weaving together ripped apart. I had to draw my hands away from the partial outline of the gate that I’d woven before I destroyed anymore of it. I couldn’t continue on the glyphs and I knew in a few moments I wouldn’t even be able to stand. Then I’d barely be able to writhe. Then I wouldn’t be able to breathe. Then, one way or another, by pain or by flame, I simply wouldn’t be at all anymore.

But I had a few moments.

As Jin in the Dreamlit world, I reach out and put my arms around Jenny. I’d hoped that by sharing the pain with both of my selves I’d lessen the effect on Jenny’s body. The good news was that worked. The bad news was that as Jin I had even less resistance to the pain than I did as Jenny.

“I will face the dark flames.” I heard the former Queen state as Nell tried to draw her into the room.

“No.” I croaked out. I needed to get her home too or the others wouldn’t believe they could be accepted. The idea was a little crazy I admit but, in my defense, I was on thin ice in the sanity department as it was so clinging to a few crazy ideas was somewhat inevitable.

“You would command me still? What is there left of you to pretend to royalty?” the Queen demanded as the flames began to lick away the the glamour she was wearing.

“While there is breath in this body, I remain who I am.” Jenny said, rising to her feet defiantly.

Without a word, Patches reached down, hoisted the former Queen in his arms and carried her across the threshold into the Heart’s chamber. She could easily have stopped him, or killed him for the affront, but apparently my words had gotten through to her.

As she entered the room, I saw what she had been afraid of. The moment she crossed the threshold, her skin burst aflame with the purple fire that we’d seen throughout the Shadow Courts realm. Rather than rising upwards however the flames were drawn towards the center of the room. They fragmented into sparks and were caught in a kind of whirlwind that drew them right into the Heart.

Meta-awareness filled me in immediately. Despite being deposed, the former Queen was still a vessel for the Shadow Court’s power. The Heart was desperate to resist the black flames and was calling back all its power. That was another reason the Shadow Court hadn’t stayed to fight for their domain.

The added power sustained the Heart for only an instant. For all her frightful speed and strength, the former Queen carried only the smallest measure of the Court’s power. The encroaching flames were pushed back a few feet and then surged forward as the Heart exhausted the extra force it had gained.

“We’re all going to die here.” Jessica mumbled in numb denial as we watched the flames enter the Heart’s chamber at last.

“There wasn’t enough time to make the gate.” Heather said. She looked crestfallen and it occurred to me to wonder what would happen to her. Could the flames affect a ghost? Would she burn here too, or would she be left floating alone in the void?

I slammed my hand against the floor and screamed in the Dreamlit world.

“Give yourself to the flames. Join with us. Become nothing and be the architect of everything in the pure world to follow.” the armored figure commanded.

“Why?” I asked struggling to buy even another second for us.

“Because this imperfect world must end.”

“No. You misunderstand me. Why are you asking?”

I forced myself to my feet in the Dreamlit world.

“Why would you ask when you’re going to destroy me either way?” I asked the armored figure who had gone strangely still. Even the flames weren’t flickering.

“Why have me give up? Unless there was some chance, some way that we could escape and you wanted to make sure I don’t notice it.”

My gaze fell on the Dreamlit world’s version of the World Gate. In my meta-awareness fueled imagination, it was complete. A perfect template of the gate that Jenny had been frantically working to build.

Jenny couldn’t weave anymore. Her tremors were too intense. There was one thing she could do though.

“Everyone! Touch the gate! We’re leaving!” I said to my companions. There was no argument, they all grabbed onto the few thin threads that made up the physical version of the World Gate. Jenny then stepped forward and with shaking hands grabbed hold of the Heart directly.

In the Dreamlit world, Jin held onto Jenny tightly with one hand and with the other grabbed hold of the Dreamlit World Gate.

The power of the Heart surged into Jenny and then into Jin. Feeling the pain in stereo almost obliterated my consciousness, but my gamble paid off before that could happen. From Jin, all of the pain and power from the Heart flowed into the Dreamlit World Gate which exploded with a brilliant pink light.

There was a howl of incoherent rage from everywhere around the remnants of the world. The armored figure smashed the shield that held back the flames like it was made of paper thin ice and began to charge the World Gate.

He was too late though. I had control of the gate, and I knew where I wanted to send us.

Home.

The Hollow Half – Chapter 14

I was far from home. Farther than I’d ever been. Seeing the Earth hanging in a starry sky through the Shadow Court’s Hedge Gate I wanted to rush back to it as fast as my feet would carry me, but I knew I couldn’t. The winding path that led out from the gate, the path the Shadow Court had left open, offered only death to those who tried to follow them.

“How hot can you make it in here?” I asked Jessica.

“Hot enough.”

“Good. Burn this place then. Don’t leave anything for them here. They’ll be able to remake everything, even their bodies, but it’ll take a long time if they only have ash to start from.” Disgust and horror at the contents of the red garden mingled with my fears over what the Shadow Court would do with the heroes that had come here. I wanted to deny that anything truly bad could happen, but everywhere I looked all I could see were pots filled with proof to the contrary.

“Should we get to the Gate first?” Heather asked.

“No. We can’t take that way.” I said.

“It is a most fatal lure.” Patches agreed.

“How do you know all this?” Jessica demanded.

“Your gift is fire. This is mine.” I told her.

“Then I definitely don’t trust you.” she replied. I couldn’t understand why until I caught the barest whiff of brimstone and my meta-awareness filled in the details. Her powers were inherited, but they weren’t due to a mutation. No, her fire was more supernatural in origin. I’d mistaken her for a human, but that was only partially true. Her mother had been something else entirely.

That was something she kept hidden away from almost everyone. If I pursued it, I suspected she wouldn’t be happy and would express that unhappiness in a very hot and painful way. That meant if I wanted her trust I had to earn it the old fashioned way. By deeds not words.

“You don’t have to, but this place needs to burn.”

“Are we to burn with it?” Patches asked.

“No. We’re going to get home safely.” I said it with force, trying to will it to be true despite the nature of the realm we were in conspiring against the very concept of safety.

“Some of us are already home.” the former Queen said. She could only have been speaking of herself but her gaze swept over Patches, Nell and Minnie as well.

I saw them look to me for confirmation of what she was suggesting. That the time they’d spent in the clutches of the Shadow Court had changed them beyond recovery. That they weren’t human anymore and could never really go home.

Without my meta-awareness I might have wondered that too. I’d read too many stories of children being “saved” from the Shadow Court and other fell faeries only to be revealed later as monsters in disguise. The common wisdom was that beyond a certain point you were unrecoverable because the faeries would have twisted all of the humanity out of you.

Jessica and Heather were still within the “safe” period, but Nell, Patches and especially Minnie had been lost to the Shadow Court for far longer than anyone would believe they could have survived. If I’d met them yesterday, or any time before I gained my meta-awareness, I would have assumed the children they’d been were long lost and all that remained were monsters biding their time to strike.

Looking at them in the red garden though I could see the truth so clearly. They were still people and they always would be. Whatever they looked like on the outside, however they were changed by their experiences among the faeries, at their core they were human and they deserved to be treated as such.

“This isn’t where you belong.” I fixed my gaze on the former Queen and fixed my thoughts on one thing. She’d been human once too.

The former Queen was a monster. She looked eerily perfect, but that was only because of the glamour she wore. Underneath it, her form was the same grey, inhuman horror as any of the Shadow Courtiers that lay “dead” in the red garden. My meta-awareness could see through her magics easily enough, but even with that it was hard for me to see her as anything other than a destroyer of children. By all rights she should have burned with the garden, but I knew that would be wrong too.

No matter what she looked like, no matter how she’d been changed by her experiences, she was still human.

She looked confused and annoyed by my claim but I could see the others kind of got what I was saying. If even the former Queen didn’t belong here, then they certainly deserved to go home too. I wasn’t sure they believe me of course, but at least they knew where I stood on the matter.

“Fine. Get back then.” Jessica said, calling up flames in both her hands. I would have had Way help her again but I could tell the poison had done too much damage. Way looked like she could barely stand anymore. If she was going to make it, we desperately needed to escape the Shadow Court’s realm soon.

Nell stepped up behind Jessica without being directed to this time and placed both her hands on Jessica’s right arm. Together they unleashed a storm of hellfire on the garden that set wide swathes of it ablaze. In response to the threat to their realm, the bodies of the Shadow Courtiers began to rise, slow and ungainly.

“The spirits have fled but duty still compels.” Patches observed. He turned to one of the nearer pots and drew a thorn as long as his arm out of the body that was pincushioned there.

“Minnie can you help him?” I asked. The magic that animated the Shadow Courtiers without their spirits left them as slow as a shambling zombie but far more difficult to destroy. Fire would do the trick, but it would take more time to render them to ash than we had.

“I think so.” the minotaur girl said. She was feeling the compulsion of duty as well, but unlike the lifeless Courtier zombies, she could choose to resist it.

“What can I do?” Heather asked. As a ghost she wasn’t in any danger from the zombies but she also wasn’t in a position to help hold them back either.

“You’re with me.” I answered. “You know how to look for weak points in the briars. Help me find ones that lead to the room below this one.”

“What’s below this room?”, she asked.

“The Heart.” the former Queen answered.

“The Hedge Gate is the Shadow Court’s connection to other worlds and other parts of Faerie, but it takes a lot of power to control. The Heart is what provides that power.”

“How does that help us?”

“The Shadow Court has the Hedge Gate locked open to Earth, but it’s lined with spells so that only they can pass through it. If we disconnect the Heart, I can try to weave us another Gate that will take us out of here safely.”

“You can weave World Gates?” the former Queen asked suspiciously. The truth was Jenny had some vague ideas of how they worked and the broad framework of how she might piece together the outlines of one. It was similar to tasking someone with making a wedding gown because they knew to start with white cloth and a pair of scissors.

“Watch and see.” I replied.

Heather slipped into the floor of the garden and we repeated the trick we had performed with carving a path through the briars to reach the garden. The Heart was defended by the best wards the Shadow Court possessed. It was the dark center of their power. Unfortunately for them they weren’t home, and in leaving they’d taken a huge amount of their power with them. That left all sorts of weaknesses in their defenses.

Heather and I ripped through the ground of the garden, detonating threads of magic at one weak point after another. After the struggle through the briars it was almost effortless.

“Can we leave yet, something weird is happening here!” Jessica called out as I carved another ten steps down for the spiraling staircase that I’d cut into the red garden’s floor.

“We’re almost there!” Heather called back.

“What do you mean weird?” I added. We were in a garden of horrors in a realm of evil faeries being attacked by zombies. I was both curious and certain I didn’t what to know what might qualify as “weird” under those circumstances.

“The fire’s starting to burn black.”, Jessica called back.

My blood turned to ice. I reached out with my meta-awareness and, predictably, didn’t notice anything amiss. Sprinting back up the stairs though I saw that Jessica was telling the truth. At the edges of the garden, the fires Jessica and Nell had been replaced with an all too familiar black flame. Something else was destroying the Shadow Court’s realm.

I turned to ask Way if she could sense their source and had to choke back a cry. She was laying collapsed against one of the pots, eyes closed and terribly still.

I ran over to her and felt my heart start beating again when she stirred at my touch.

“I’m ok.” she said without opening her eyes.

“Of course you are. Stay with me though. I might need a hand.” I told her, helping her up and putting her left arm over my shoulders to support her while she walked.

“Ok. We’re leaving. Everyone, follow me down the stairs.” I called out.

“Be with you in a minute!” Minnie called back as she smashed a trio of burning zombies. The impact of her blow knocked them off the feet and flung them a dozen paces backwards into the fires that were rapidly closing in on us.

Patches staked a zombie into one of the garden sculptures and casually dusted himself off before turning to follow us, making sure that the former Queen, Jessica and Nell were ahead of him, in that order.

“Just find us the fastest way down.” I told Heather, no longer concerned with setting off any alarms or traps. If my guess was right what was behind us was far worse than anything that Shadow Court could have left for us.

The path that I carved down to the Heart wasn’t pretty, or stable, or easy to move along, but it got us to the Heart’s chamber ahead of the black flames which was all that mattered.

The chamber was a surprisingly simple affair with a surprisingly simple defense. The nature of the Shadow Court was the pain of loss and the fear of helplessness. There was no way to set foot into the room without experiencing the raw, undeniable truth of that.

I flinched back as I breeched the final outer wall of the chamber and brushed against the power coursing through the room. I would have collapsed entirely except that Way caught me in time.

“This is bad. There’s still too much power here. I can’t work through it.” I said. A mere brush against the Heart’s power had almost incapacitated me, prolonged exposure would leave me a crippled wreck.

“I can help.” Nell offered quietly.

“Are you sure?” I caught a glimpse of what aiding me would cost her and could tell it wouldn’t be pretty. Neither would burning in the black flames though.

She nodded silently and took my free arm in her hands.

“Wait here, unless you see the black flames come down the stairs.” I told the others.

“What do we do then?” Jessica asked.

“Choose the manner of horrible death we prefer.” Patches suggested.

I didn’t have a better alternative to offer, so I just shrugged and turned with Nell to enter the Heart’s chamber.

The overwhelming feeling of loss and helplessness ripped my breath away as we stepped over the threshold of the chamber but I was able to stay on my feet. I’d expected Nell to cry out or collapse in my place but she only grasped my arm slightly tighter as we moved into the room.

The Heart rested above what looked at first to be a burned out tree stump. I would have said that it was a dark purple jewel, except that is pulsed with life and there was a sheen of wetness that suggested a far more organic nature.

As we walked closer, I saw that what I had taken to be a tree stump was a sculpture of a woman. It was so gnarled and bent that her resemblance to humanity was only barely visible. Her empty, twisting arms reached upwards, towards the Heart but forever falling short of it.

From the base of the sculpture, thick roots lead off into the walls, carrying the Hearts power out to the rest of the realm. The root leading to the Hedge Gate was easy enough to guess, it was one of the thickest ones.

“Now where’s my white cloth and scissors.” I muttered as I looked around for some material to begin weaving the new gate from.

There wasn’t any. The room was empty except for the Heart. I’d lead everyone to their doom. Nell’s strength couldn’t hold out much longer and then the Heart would blast our minds apart. My companions would be consumed by the black flames, except maybe for Way who would either die from the poison or drift alone for eternity.

Nell gripped my arm tighter and the Heart’s influence subsided. She was crying freely now, but she was still by my side. We weren’t lost yet.

If the only thing in the room was the Heart and I needed something to build a new gate out of then I knew what I had to do.

“This is going to really hurt.” I warned Nell and glanced from her to the Heart. She nodded her agreement so I got to work.

Scratching threads off of the Heart made my head swim. Even with Nell pressing her whole body against mine and lending me all of her strength I could only stand to touch the Heart for a few seconds at a time.

I thought it was the pain and the disorientation that made it seem like the sculpture under the Heart was bending and shifting towards us. As I scraped away more threads though the sculpture began to move more quickly.

I stepped back, pulling Nell with me, just in time to see the sculpture unfurl and stand on it’s misshapen legs. There was nothing human in the sculpture. There never had been. It was a tribute to humanity though, a monument to the first mother driven mad by the loss of her young.

I stared up at the living statue as it drew a blade of thorns out of its chest. Driven by the Heart’s power, the thornblade was singularly deadly here. Its touch held the agony that fed the Shadow Court and the statue would be able strike as fast as they could once it was fully awake.

Defending against that sort of assault, while the Heart leeched away at our strength, would be all but impossible. I wasn’t that fast at the best of times and while Nell’s power was able to shield me from the Heart’s influence on my mind, I knew she wouldn’t be able to ward off something as solid as the thornblade.

I backed away from the statue, trying to find a chink in it’s form, someway that Jenny’s quick fingers could unweave it. I wasn’t sure I could find the center of its power though. I wasn’t a mother. I’d never lost a child. There was something intensely private and at the same time undeniable about the pain that drove the statue.

I flinched as the statue drew back the thornblade to deliver its single fatal blow. The blow never landed though. Before it could, a bolt of golden light speared through the room. It blasted a hole through the statue and disintegrated its blade.  Way stood in the entrance I’d carved into the room with Minnie supporting her and Jessica’s fire driving back the Heart’s light. As the statue toppled over I found the chink I was looking for.

I wasn’t a mother and I’d never lost a child but I knew what it was like to lose someone I loved.

I thought of my Dad. I’d lost him during the last invasion. The heroes hadn’t been able to save him. That hurt worse than anything else I’d ever known, but looking back on it, I wouldn’t give up a bit of knowing him. Not even stacked against all the pain his loss. Not one single second.

The pain of losing someone doesn’t make the love we feel for them any less precious.

I thought of Mom, and James, and even James’ Dad. I had people who loved me. I might lose them, but I would never regret knowing them. They’d helped me more than I could ever say. What words might not be able to convey, actions might though.

We were getting home.

The Hollow Half – Chapter 13

The worst thing about the way that I think is how my first reaction after feeling the surge of hope that the heroes had arrived was to immediately starts imagining all of the things that might go wrong.

In this case it didn’t take that deep an imagination. In the heart of their domain, the Shadow Court had all of their powers and allies to draw on. Unless the hero task force had brought a lot of metahumans along they could easily be overwhelmed. Worse, even if they did win, they wouldn’t necessarily be on our side.

Faerie magics are powerful and well adapted to concealing identity. From the heroes’ point of view, we were more likely to be allies of the court or even Courtiers in disguise than legitimately in need of help.

Then there was the issue of my companions. Minnie, Nell, Patches and Jessica could all go back with the heroes pretty easily in theory. In practice, a minotaur, a lightning shaper, a cat boy and a fire elemental were going to encounter some trust issues if they were found in this realm.

The ghost, oddly, would probably encounter less of that prejudice, but would be more likely to be barred from returning to the living world by her very nature. Maybe. I wasn’t really sure how that worked.

The former Faerie Queen on the other hand was exactly the kind of thing the heroes would be right to be worried about. She really was a Courtier in disguise, and she really wasn’t a nice person. Sending her back back to Earth seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. The only reason  I was even considering it was that leaving her here seemed like an even worse one.

Then there was Way.

I’d named her and that had almost destroyed her. I had no idea what to do with her either, but I knew I couldn’t abandon her.

None of that was going to matter though if we couldn’t make it to the Hedge Gate.

“Come on folks, I know a shortcut.” I said and turned to the briars that walled off the path.

“Famous last words if ever there were ones.” Patches commented brightly.

Meta-awareness had suggested the spot that I chose but it was Jenny’s knowledge of spinning that helped me pick out the weave of brambles that needed to be cut away. The Shadow Court are too chaotic to have uniformly solid wards throughout their realm. Two snips on a weak branch set off a chain reaction that opened the beginnings of a new path through the briars.

“We’re leaving the path?” the former Queen asked.

“Paths are for wimps. We make our own.” Jenny answered her, using my voice.

Generally, leaving the path in Faerie is a catastrophically bad idea. Path’s represent order and safety, both of which are fleeting commodities in Faerie. In the Shadow Court’s realm though the normal rules are inverted.

There is no safety there, only easier ways for the Court to play their games. Conforming to their wishes, moving along their paths, was about as far from safety as you could get.

Through my meta-awareness I could sense them moving, en masse, all heading towards the beachhead the heroes had carved into their realm. If we stayed on the paths the Shadow Court favored we wouldn’t stand a chance at avoiding them, and if we encountered many more we wouldn’t stand a chance at getting home. So cutting holes through their walls was the best course of action. Plus, having burned down one of their prisons, I found I kind of liked destroying their stuff.

The others filed past me into newly carved path with Way coming through last before I twisted a trio of branches back together to seal the new path away from the old.

“How are you feeling?”, I asked her, noticing that I’d also sealed away from the golden light of the burning prison.

“Cold.” she admitted. The exertion of fighting the Shadow Courtier had accelerated the poison’s effect on her.

“We’ll be out of here soon.”, I promised. She nodded, but whether that because she believed what I said or just agreed that it was a nice idea, I couldn’t tell.

I slipped past the others to get to the front of group. As I passed Jessica an idea occurred to me.

“Can you make some light, this purple glow isn’t healthy.” I asked her. In response she held up her right hand and it burst into flame like a torch. A very hot torch. The brilliant light was worth the searing heat though. None of the purple shadows lingered in its presence.

I backed away and turned to open the next section of path. It was slower going moving like that, but I wasn’t the only one who could sense the necessity of it.

“They’re moving.” Minnie said. Her voice was clipped and tight. “They’re calling to me.”

“Me too.” Nell nearly whispered.

“They’re calling for all their little pets.” the former Queen chuckled.

“You. Are. Not. Their. Pets.” I insisted.

“Ah, so you would claim their vassalage?” the former Queen asked?

“They are no one’s vassals. They own themselves.” I shot back.

“So you would free us all then?”

“No. Not you.” I told the former Queen.

“You’re her bitch.” Patches added in.

I’d back talked the former Queen because I was mindful of the requirements of the role I was playing over her. I hadn’t lost the sense of how deadly she was though. Even with that awareness keenly in mind, I was still surprised  by how quickly she turned on Patches. There was no movement. One moment he was smiling behind her, the next he was dangling from her raised hand, his feet at least two feet off the ground and his throat caught tight in her grasp.

“As am I.” he squeaked out through the chokehold she held on him.

I had no idea why he would name himself my vassal, but the mere fact that he could had saved his life. The only response to an insult the former Queen could make was swift and deadly but it wasn’t her place to destroy a toy her liege might desire and so her wrath was held in check. She would never forgive him of course, but then she would never forgive any of us for seeing her in her current state.

“Let him go.” I instructed her calmly.  Behind the former Queen I saw Way watching us carefully. I wasn’t sure how she would react if the former Queen tried to turn on me, but I knew it would be over quickly one way or the other.

I turned away and heard the former Queen drop Patches to the ground unceremoniously. With no audience to play for, or at least not one she cared about, she had no need for any further theatrics.

Finding weak spots in the briar became more difficult the closer we got to the Hedge Gate’s room. With the twists and turns we were forced to take it took all of Jenny’s experience and all of my meta-awareness to guide the path in the right direction. Even with that I had to fight to keep my vision focused on what I was doing, otherwise I would catch flashes and glimpses of the Dreamlit world and the unreal horrors that mirrored the Shadow Court’s realm.

Way had said earlier than I could be impossible. Pen had mentioned something similar too. As I hurried ever faster to unweave the briars and forge us a path through I began to question if that wasn’t literally true.

The Shadow Court was on their most alert, most aggressive, footing but even so they couldn’t sense that we were penetrating the heart of their domain. They couldn’t conceive of someone making it to the Hedge Gate through all of their wards without them knowing of it. They knew their realm. They knew that doing so would be impossible. Looking back at our progress, at the traps and tricks that I was disarming in seconds, I had to wonder if they weren’t correct.

Jenny had never worked at the fever pitch that I was working at, on spells of the complexity that confronted me. My meta-awareness was amazing, but it had been misleading before. It didn’t make sense that I was guessing so much of what I was doing, or leaning so heavily on knowledge that I was at best only partially in touch with, and somehow not making the kind of mistakes that would seal us in the briars forever. There had to be something else at work.

I knew whatever it was it would be important but the need to escape drove me on.

If only Pen were here, I thought. I suspected whatever was happening to me was the kind of thing he’d be very reticent to talk about but it would still be comforting to know he had my back. Thinking of him did help me focus though. For as unbelievable as it was given that I was trapped on an alien world and pursued by a race of homicidal inhuman monsters, I had bigger things to worry about.

The nameless giant might think I was erased or whatever, but he had Pen and Pen held the key to the extinction of life on Earth. So however much it sucked, while the nameless giant might be willing to leave me alone, I couldn’t afford to extend him the same courtesy.

“Where are you taking us?”, Jessica demanded when the next section of path curved away at a ninety degree angle from the direction we’d been traveling.

“She’s taking us to the Hedge Gate. And past all the guards.”, Patches replied.

“What the hell is taking so long then? Why do we keep going the wrong way?”, Jessica’s fire got brighter and hotter.

“Sorry, I’m picking the most direct weak points, but the wards around the heart are very strong.” I said.

“Why don’t we just burn our way through then?”, Jessica approached with both hands aflame.

“We can’t. That will trigger the defenses they have set up.”

“So what?”

“They’ll flood the briars. If they were in a good mood they’d use water. Given the day they’re having though they’d probably use nerve poison.”

“They can do that?” Jessica asked, backing away from the briars.

“They can do worse.” Nell said. We turned to look at her but she shrunk back away from the conversation.

“I could check ahead if that would help?” our friendly ghost offered.

“Are you sure?” I asked. I didn’t have any meta-awareness sense of what her capabilities were.

“No problem! I just need to know what to look for.” she replied.

“I’m not sure I can describe it.”

“That’s not problem. Just gimme a sec, and don’t freak out ok?” she said before she stepped into me.

For a split second we were joined together and we could see glimpses of each other’s whole lives (and afterlife as it turned out). Her name was Heather. She was excellent at math. She was going to skip a grade and enter high school a year early but she’d been killed in a bus accident when she was twelve.  She’d worked out how to possess people in order to save her best friend from the Shadow Court. Being a ghost wasn’t as bad she’d been afraid it would be. Almost inviting even. Before I had a chance to “freak out” or even understand what was happening we were blown apart and both landed on the ground stunned.

“What…what are you?”, Heather asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to pull my head together yet again.

“You’re not really a goblin.”

“Of course not. She’s the Queen.” Patches cut in.

“What did she do to you?”, Jessica asked Heather. Apparently a ghost looked more trustworthy than a goblin. Objectively I could kind of see her point, but it was still a bit irritating.

“We don’t have time for this now. Did you get what you needed?” I asked Heather.

“I think so.”

“Good. See if you can find a breakthrough spot into the Hedge Gate’s garden then. Maybe if we work from both ends we can get there faster.”

“Right!” she agreed and stepped into the briars.

I’d only unraveled another ten feet before Heather returned.

“We’ve got a problem. They’re dead!” she said.

“Who? The heroes?” I asked, feeling my stomach sink.

“Heroes?” Jessica asked.

“No. The Shadow Court! Hundreds of them!”

“What do you mean heroes?”, Jessica demanded.

“Superheroes, agents of the FBMA, there was a task force being put together. That bell we heard a few minutes ago was them arriving. Except, I don’t think they could have killed that many Shadow Courtiers that quickly. Something’s not right here.”

“Cut a path through this way and you’ll be able to see. It’s only another twenty feet I think.” Heather said, stepping partially into the briars and indicating the weak point I should focus on.

Twenty feet later, the briars gave way at last to a vast open area that was bathed in red light rather than purple for a change. Where plants should have stood though there were pots filled with things that I could only hope had never been human.

Jenny saved me from vomiting. She had never seen anything like it either, but she was tougher than Jin by a country mile. Instead of focusing on anything in the garden of the Shadow Court’s delights, she watched my companions.

Minnie, Jessica and Heather looked as horrified as I felt. Nell looked horrified too, but not surprised. She’d spent time here already. She already carried this horror with her.

Patches didn’t show any horror at the garden, but he wasn’t looking at it either, whereas the former Queen simply looked bored.

Way had her eyes closed, but it wasn’t because of the garden. The poison was sapping away too much of her strength, too quickly, since we were so close to the center of the Shadow Court’s power.

That galvanized me to face the garden and the Shadow Court. If there was any relief from the tableau of the red garden, it was that those responsible for it were scattered all over it.

Laying across every patch of floor, drapped over every wall and surface, were the bodies of the Shadow Court. At first glance it looked like cosmic justice had caught up with them all in one terrible instant but I could tell something was wrong with that assessment.

The bodies were still and lifeless but none of the ones I could see showed any sign of trauma.

I thought of Way’s battles with the Shadow Courtier’s we’d encountered. I thought of the black flames the nameless giant had wielded against me. I thought of the Shadow Courtier dissolving when the former Queen had slammed it into the briar thorns.

If the heroes of Agent Haffrun’s task force had done this, they would have needed to possess more power than Way, the nameless giant or the former Queen. That or there was a much more chilling possibility.

They hadn’t beaten the Shadow Court at all.

“When the Shadow Court travels to Earth do they take their bodies with them?” I asked.

“Only if there are no Earthly bodies available for them to ride along in.” Patches replied.

I looked at the Hedge Gate. It was still open, and beyond it I could see a pathway leading off to a blue and white planet hanging in a starry sky.

The Hollow Half – Chapter 12

The eye are the window to the soul. So what do you see when you look into the eyes of someone without a soul? Gazing into Way’s eyes, I couldn’t answer that question. I only saw her.

It was little worrisome when she closed her eyes, wrestling with some internal struggle that was shielded even from my meta-awareness.

It was more than a little worrisome when she brought her left hand up, wreathed in golden fire, to the level of our faces.

I watched as the fire grew hotter and brighter and wondered if I’d read things very wrong. I could have dived away, or wrestled her back into the manacles. Being a goblin at the moment, I was stronger than I’d been as a human. Instead I looked to the tiny flicker of faith I’d found and waited.

The fire in Way’s hand grew brighter still before shooting outwards in a flash. I didn’t have time to move or even flinch as the tightly focused bolt passed over my right shoulder, across the room, through the bars and through the Lake Lurker who had returned to watch us again.

The Lurker gave a pained gurgle as Way swept the bolt upwards. I didn’t see what happened as a result of that, but I didn’t have to. He wouldn’t be getting a belly full of me any time this side of never.

“Thank you.” I said as I stepped back to let her rise to feet.

She remained quiet, watching me as though I was somehow more dangerous than the Lurker.

“I know the Bramble Paths through Faerie. I think I can find the way out here.” I explained. Jenny wasn’t familiar with the paths within the Shadow Courts domain but she had a guess where the main thoroughfares were and how to navigate towards them.

“Ok.” Way said simply as she stood to join me.

Way’s bolt had burned one of the bars in two. She could have cut us out of the cell easily without the manacles shackling her power. Instead she hung back and let me work on the doors lock the way I’d worked on the manacles.

The door lock was less complicated than her manacles had been but it had a few tricky knots that would serve as alarms if anyone entered or left the cell. My arrival hadn’t triggered them for some reason though.

“How did I get here?” I asked. Jenny’s memories suggested that she’d be heading to the Silent Bazaar when part of the bramble path she was taking a shortcut through cracked and left her tumbling into darkness.

“They captured us. The Unwelcome set snares for us after they ran away. As soon as you tried to world walk they reeled you in.” Way replied.

I thought back to the two binding circles that I’d seen in the Dreamlit world while trying to flee from the nameless giant. The Unwelcome, or the Shadow Court as I knew them, wasn’t holding back if they were casting their net that wide.

“So why didn’t they leave more guards?” I asked.

“Escape is impossible. That one…”, she gestured at the remains of the Lake Lurker, “was no guard, just a spectator that wanted a bite.”

“Escape is impossible and yet we’re escaping.” I snipped the last locking thread to allow us to leave the cell without setting off the alarms.

“You are impossible.”

I honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. It didn’t seem likely or in character for her, but who knew.

I stepped into the hallway. We’d been imprisoned in a special cell in the hedge maze of the Shadow Court’s central prison bulb. The hall outside the cell ran, in twists and turns, around a number of other cells. Odd branches in the path led either no where or two traps of various levels of lethality.

As I looked over the path we were on for a way out I recalled something my meta-awareness had shown me before. There were other prisoners here. I tried to think what I could do for them. Release them certainly, but could I protect or even hide a bunch of other people? Could I get them home?

“It’s gone.” Way whispered.

She was standing near the corpse of the Lake Lurker with her hands extended. It wasn’t the corpse that was bothering her though.

“What’s missing?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

I thought she was refusing to answer me, but looking at her I could see that wasn’t it. I’d seen her holding her hands like that before.

“Your scythe? You don’t have it anymore?”

She was silent.

“What happened to it?”

“You did.” she said, still looking at the Lurker’s corpse.

I almost asked what I had done, but it was clear. Her scythe had been tied to the emptiness in her. With my meta-awareness able to sense her, I was able to understand more about what she had been before too.

“Your name. I broke your connection it by giving you a name?”

“Yes.” she whispered, not looking at me.

“I’m…Are you going to be ok without it?”

Way let her hands settle to her side as she turned to me. Her eyes were glassy with tears that weren’t able to fall yet but her lips were set in a small, brave smile.

“I don’t know.”

If anyone who’d seen the destroying angel of emptiness that she’d been could have seen the girl that was standing with me at the moment, they couldn’t possibly have recognized her.

I folded my arms and leaned back with a smile.

“You don’t know? Well I do. You’re still Way Too Powerful.”

Way’s smile turned genuine at that.

“And you’re not alone.” I added.

My timing, as ever, was dreadful. No sooner had the words left my mouth when a pair of horrors rounded the corner of the briar path that connected the cells.

Shadow Courtiers.

They moved so fast I barely saw them. Like in the parking lot, all I caught was a quick blur of teeth and metal bright talons in a grey blur. That time Way’s beast had saved me. This time Way herself was with me and she was faster than her beast. Much faster.

A blur of grey forms met Way’s black clad, golden hair blur. The fight lasted maybe a whole second. Way settled against the wall, steadying herself with her right hand and covering an injury on her right arm with her left hand.

The Shadow Courtiers didn’t fare quite that well. Bits of grey goo were splattered over the entirety of the hallways leading away from us. Some of the goo wwas burning with golden flames, the rest would make a fascinating study for a blood splatter expert probably.

“Way!” I called out a warning that was roughly three seconds too late for a two second encounter.

“I’m ok.”, she assured me.

“Let me see your arm.”

A path of purple and green briars wasn’t an ideal first aid camp in the best of conditions and the Shadow Court weren’t exactly “neat freaks” when it came to their prisons. Mold, refuse and old stains that I didn’t want to think about littered the ground. Jenny had worked in worse though.

“Lovely. Poisoned.” I explained, tasting a drop of Way’s blood. It was kind of gross to do, but Jenny had seen wounds like this before and had a remarkably discerning palate. “It’s a slow one though and it’s fed by the lights here. If we can get you out all we’ll need is some water to clean the wound and you’ll be fine.”

Shadow Court poisons were weird. They were as much a menace to other Faeries as they were to humans. Jenny was familiar with them as a result, more than she wanted to be.

I thought again of the prisoners. Spending time to get them out would mean letting the poison advance in Way’s system, leaving them here though was intolerable. Meta-awareness was all too happy to show me what sort of agonies they’d suffer in the Shadow Court’s hands.

I tried to balance that against the task force of heroes that I knew were on the way. It was a gamble that I’d be able to save Way and myself, moreso without her at full fighting speed. With prisoners in tow we’d be slower, harder to hide and more vulnerable. If I left them here, the real heroes would be showing up to save them. Right?

Meta-awareness didn’t offer any precognition for that. There were too many paths. The heroes might save them, but time flowed oddly in Faerie. What might be an hour in the physical world could be a year in Faerie. A year for them to suffer while the task force gathered and fought their way in. That was assuming the heroes won too. There were plenty of paths where that didn’t happen.

On the other hand were the paths where the delay meant we didn’t make it out. Or where Way succumbed to the poison before we could escape. Or where she fell in battle because it had sapped away just enough of her strength.

“Can you do something for me?” I asked her.

“What?”

“Burn this place. Light it all on fire.”

“We’ll burn with it.” she observed.

“That’s a risk, yep.”

“Then why?”

“The poison in you feeds on the ambient light of this place. Your power left the Shadow Courtiers burning gold so your flames will wash out this purple light. It might be enough to starve out the poison entirely and if not it’ll at least leave you in better shape for longer.”

“Is that the way poison works?”

“Only if its this one.”

I went over to the nearest cell and began working the lock. From the outside it was much easier to manipulate. I saw how this would appear to the Shadow Court as I severed the links that held the cell shut.

Their prison would be in flames, with none of the alarms on the cells ringing to say the prisoners had escaped. That would suggest a failed assault, and all of their captives dead. Way’s flames would burn hot enough and long enough that they wouldn’t be able to look for our burned bodies before we could manage to get safely away.

As plans went it sounded excellent. So it was doomed to fail. I still liked it though.

In all there were six other cells that held captives. I worked through them as quickly as I could while Way began setting the prison ablaze, starting with branching paths farthest away from us.

The first cell held a minotaur. She wasn’t manacled. Instead there was a circlet of faerie gold locked around her head. Jenny recognized it as a binding spell to hold the girl’s mind imprisoned. My meta-awareness recognized it as having an additional property. It was changing the girl. She hadn’t been a minotaur when she arrived.

She was one of the children the Shadow Court had kidnapped. They’d needed a guardian and Minnie had amused them. Minnie the Minotaur. That had been all it had taken to provoke their cruel fancy.

I gently lifted the circlet off her head and caught her as she collapsed into my arms. She was much larger than me, but Jenny was pretty strong.

“The labyrinth? Where am I?” she asked. After the night I’d had I could more than empathize with the confusion that was written on her face.

“You’re with people who will help you.”, I told her calmly. The prison was going to burn down around us in a few minutes but she needed at least a moment or two to adjust.

“The labyrinth you have been trapped in was a magical lie, but it has affected you. We’re not safe here, so I can’t answer your questions yet. I will when we’re out here though so please, come with me.”

“Who are you?” she asked, still bewildered.

It was the most dangerous question she could have asked. I’d read that names have power. My recent experience with Way had shown me I didn’t know the half of it.

“A new friend.” I said, knowing I could commit at least to that being true, “The fire will reach here soon though, we have to move.”

That got her attention and without further prompting she rose and followed me out of the cell. I fiddled with the circlet that she’d been forced to wear. Part of me wanted to have Way melt the hateful thing down to scrap. Another part, Jin oddly enough, told me to hang onto it. The image of crushing a Shadow Courtiers head to fit within it was bloodily appealing. I was really starting to hate them.

The briar path was lit by a mix of purple and golden light. At the far end of the path, Way was casting arcs of fire into the cluster of empty cells that made up the cul de sac where one of the branches ended.

“How are you feeling?” I called to Way.

“The light is helping.” she called back.

“Good, I’ll try to make this as quick as I can. Minnie could you help her? The purple torches need to be put out.”

“Oh, uh, sure.” Minnie said and headed down towards where Way was working.

Having figured out the lock for Minnie’s cell, the next one proved even faster to disarm.

The occupant of the second cell was asleep and naked aside from a thick covering of red fur. Patches was like Minnie, another child captured by the Shadow Court, except he’d been captured long ago. He was as much cat as he was boy from what my meta-awareness could discern. Even his original name was lost.

“Patches, you need to get up.” I said, nudging his shoulder.

He yawned and looked at me with curious amber eyes.

He’d been sent to the cell for the crime of being too nice. He’d wanted to play with a mouse that was given to him rather than tear it to pieces. The mouse was in the next cell over and I knew already that she was grateful for his kindness even if the Shadow Court wasn’t.

Patches looked me up and down, stretched and then lazily rose without speaking. I wasn’t sure if he could anymore or if he had simply learned not to. Either way he looked content to follow me so I continued on.

The third cell held the mouse. She was still human in form, but her spirit had begun to change. Not through magic alone either. The Shadow Court were gifted psychologists in their own way. They knew all sorts of techniques to break spirits, minds and hearts. That Nell, the girl in the cell, had any courage left at all was almost unbelievable.

When I opened the cell the girl was sitting with her back to the door. She turned to face me and I saw electricity crackle off her. Her eyes were what caught my attention though. The iris and the pupils were gone, replaced by a pattern of circuits with tiny pulses of blue light racing through them.

“Nell, we’re here to help!” I said quickly. If she wanted to she could have thrown the electricity she was leaking. As a lightning bolt it would have been on the weak side. As a heart attack inducer though it would have worked just fine.

“Who are you?” she asked, as confused as Minnie had been.

“A new friend.” Patches answered. I’d been wrong, he hadn’t been sleeping and he had much better ears than I’d guessed at first.

“I’m getting you all out of here.” I told her and helped her up as her electrical aura died away.

I couldn’t place why she would have electricity coursing through her veins until meta-awareness slapped me with the idea. Words. The Shadow Court and faeries in general were drawn to words. So Nell was their mouse, as in rodent pet, but she was also being formed into a mouse, as in computer controlling peripheral. Despite the medieval trappings, the Shadow Court did understand the modern world.

I was thinking how much more dangerous they were than I’d ever imagined when I opened the next cell and found a Shadow Courtier waiting inside for me.

“Why isn’t this charming.” she said.

The shadow courtier was wearing a glamour. To my eyes she appeared as a tall woman of mathematically perfect proportions. Her skin was a rich shade of tan that suggested lustrous warmth but even from across the small cell I could feel it radiating an icy chill.

I knew her form, and the simple black dress she wore, were all magical artifice. I didn’t need meta-awareness to tell me that what really stood before me was the another of the grey horrors that Way had destroyed minutes ago.

“Charming’s a prince. I’m not him.” I replied, playing on the words as quickly as I could. I didn’t have a plan, but stalling for time made for a good reflex as it turned out.

“Indeed not. So what might you be then?” the Shadow Courtier said. She tried to walk over to me and came up short. The glamour had covered the manacles, but I could see she was chained to the wall like Way and I had been. I breathed a sigh of relief. Not an ambush. Another prisoner.

“Can’t you tell?” I asked. It was a challenge. Even chained, the Shadow Courtier could be insanely dangerous, unless I could bind her in words.

“Not a goblin, I see. Something more.”. She was enjoying the game and confident she would win it. In her vision, she was walking out here inside of two minutes, or ten if she decided to play with me a bit first. After all, how hard could it be to outwit an escaped slave, which I clearly appeared to be?

I smiled back at her. Even with Jenny’s strength and talents I was no match for a Shadow Courtier physically. I didn’t need to be dangerous physically though. Not in this game. For this I just needed words and my meta-awareness gave me a deadly edge there.

“Are you sure? What if I’m something less?” I baited her.

“If you were something lesser, we wouldn’t be speaking would we?” That was the key I needed. She couldn’t bear being wrong. Once she made a claim, she couldn’t rescind it.

“No we wouldn’t Your Majesty.”

I hadn’t expected meta-awareness to give me that bit of info but I could tell there was some truth to it beyond the Shadow Courtiers own delusions.

“Ah, you recognize me.”

“I recognize the Queen Who Was, the Queen Who Has Fallen, but not her authority, unless you would rule the realm bounded by the walls of this cell.” I said, dodging a trap she’d laid for me. Recognizing her authority, in this context, would have given her authority over me.

“And if I would?”

A chill went through me. She was far more desperate than I’d guessed. To even hint at that suggested a willingness to abandon all of the dreams of royalty that propped up her ego in a play to escape this place. For a creature like her, that was a lot to be give up, pretty much everything she had in fact.

“Then we would contest for your realm.” I told her, letting the flow of meta-awareness guide my words.

“And by what right would you lay your claim to my realm and person?”

The Shadow Court only acknowledged one “right” for rulership; the right of power. That path was lined with innumerable perils though.

“You would have me claim both your realm and yourself?” I asked.

“Do you think you could you claim the one without the other?”

“Yes.” I said, staring directly into her eyes. My word left open either possibility. She could have cast the game wholly onto control of her cell and perhaps even won her freedom from it, trapping me there in her place. That wasn’t in her though. In or out of the cell, there was no escape for her.

The Queen Who Has Fallen was allowed to exist for only one reason; to prove the power held by the Queen Who Reigned. I had insulted the rest of the Shadow Court beyond forbearance. They had to hunt me from here onwards. That was exactly how it would be for the Fallen Queen if she left her cell. The only difference is that the Fallen Queen knew exactly what depths of malice the rest of the Shadow Court would sink to in devising punishments for her.

People mistake immortality for a blessing. For the Fallen Queen, it would be a nightmare beyond human comprehension were she to become prey to her former vassals.

“And what quality would you name that could wrest the title of Queen from my lips?” she asked.

“Mercy.” I answered.

She laughed a cruel, biting gale devoid of mirth or joy.

“Mercy? There is none in me and none that I may claim.”

“Breath and tell me what approaches.”, I said.

The Fallen Queen looked at me puzzled for an instant. I’d caught her off guard and we both knew it.

“Flame? Fire approaches? Here?”

“Yes.”

“Never have these thorns burned before!”

“At my command they do now.”, I assured her. Privately I was surprised too. Meta-awareness confirmed her claim. These thorn bushes were warded against every sort of flame and fire spirit. Every sort except Way it seemed.

“The briars will burn, your realm will burn and so will the Queen Who Was.” I said.

“You offer the mercy of ashes then?” the Fallen Queen smiled, pleased at the cruelty she saw in my words.

“No, I offer you power.”

“What power could one such as you give me?”

“The power to choose. You can cling to your title, your prestige and accept the peace the flames will offer. Or you can lay down the burden of your royalty and come with me.” Meta-awareness drove the words. I’d been looking for whatever I could offer her that would convince her to come with us while at the same time chaining her into doing us no harm. Meta-awareness delivered, it found the lure she couldn’t resist taking, but in offering it I made a huge mistake.

“Very well. Only one may rule. I shall do as you bid. My Queen.” she said, savoring each syllable as she spoke them. I felt her words close on me like a vice.

She had accepted my offer, she had sworn herself to me and in doing so, she had passed her title to me. I’d been so sure I was winning. Damn tricky faerie. Damn stupid me.

The Fallen Queen would leave this cell after all it turned out. The problem was I had become the bearer of that title. The moment I stepped outside the cell’s boundaries, I would be carrying the mantle of the Fallen Queen onto forbidden ground. I would have all of the hatred of the Shadow Court with none of the perks of royal power and the former Queen would be free of any obligation to her former Court. She was my problem instead of theirs.

Fine then, I thought, let’s play the game that way. I smiled sharply at the former Queen and sliced off her manacles with a practiced flick of my fingers. I then turned and walked out of the cell without showing any concern.

She thought she’d trapped and damned me. In the Shadow Court’s eyes I was already far beyond damned though so I’d lost nothing in practice and in return I’d gained a vassal.

I had a brief vision of commanding a horde of monsters, each more terrible than the last.

“Gotta catch ‘em all.” I murmured as I strode over to the next cell.

Along the briar path, I could see that Way was getting close to where she and Minnie could rejoin us. On the other side of her, the briars were engulfed in golden flame.  Minnie was working to one side of Way, ripping out the last of the purple torches that had lined the walls of the path.

“Who’s this?”, Nell asked, pointing at the former Queen as she emerged from her cell for the first time in what might have been centuries.

“My Queen.” Patches said with a slight bow. I thought he was referring to the Shadow Courtier, but he was facing me.

“I am the Queen’s servant.”, the former Queen stated, her words weaving a shield around her. Even if the Shadow Court reclaimed her, they would do no more than play with her. They’d probably even be delighted with her.

That was a problem for another time though so I put it out of my mind and focused on opening the next cell before the fire caught us.

I was halfway through unlocking the cell door when a ghost walked right through it.

“I’m sorry.”, she said, “I didn’t know when it would be safe to come out. Is it ok if I come with you?”

I was speechless for a moment. I hadn’t been expecting a ghost, but with the night I was having, sure, why not?

I checked with my meta-awareness. She wasn’t native to here, and she hadn’t died here. What the Shadow Court wanted with her was also unclear.

“Umm, why were you in there?” I asked.

“I thought that was the last place anyone would look for me while I figured out what to do.”

That made as much sense as any other answer I could imagine her coming up with.

“Silly question but are you evil, malicious or intent on hurting us in any way?”, I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

Meta-awareness didn’t say she was lying so I shrugged my shoulders and went with it.

“Probably best to tag along with us then. Nice to meet you!”

“Thank you! Oh, and you’ll want to get the girl from the last cell too. They just brought her in yesterday.”

“Were you spying on us?” Patches asked with a purr in his voice. Turning to the ghost I noticed her shocked expression and discovered something new. I hadn’t known ghosts could blush.

I turned to work on the lock for the last cell and had it open just as Way and Minnie joined the growing ensemble. The lock was the same as all the others, the Shadow Court not being big on creativity outside of torture techniques it seemed, so I was able to disarm it in seconds. Once it was safely disposed of  I opened the cell to find a smoking hot girl waiting inside.

I don’t mean she was beautiful, I mean there was literally smoke rising from her glowing red skin. The other odd bit about her was that she looked like she was a little older than me, which meant the Shadow Court hadn’t kidnapped her as one of their usual prey.

“Let me out of here or I will burn this place to ground you bastards.” she screamed at me.

“We’ve already set it on fire, and we’re here to get you out.” I told her and moved in to undo her manacles.

She was human still. The fire that raged within her was none of the Shadow Court’s doing.

“Don’t touch me!” she demanded, fire, again literally, burning in her eyes.

“I need to get those manacles off you.”

“Give me the key.” she growled.

“I don’t have one.” I said and wiggled my finger tips in front of me to show what I was going to do.

“What the hell are you?”

“A new friend.” Patches called out from behind me in the doorway helpfully.

“Also a Queen of Faerie.” he added a moment later. The former Queen burst out laughing.

I barely had time to dodge the gout of fire that the girl breathed out at me.

“Ok this is ridiculous. Stop trying to hurt me. I’m here to help.” I said.

“A Faerie Queen? You think I don’t know who you are? Goddamn Shadow Court. I will burn all of you.”

I started to protest that I wasn’t part of the Shadow Court but then checked myself. Denying the title I’d “won” from the former Queen could have unfortunate ramification in terms of my ability to command her. The last thing I needed was to unleash yet another monster on the world.

On the other hand, being fried by someone I was trying to help wasn’t appealing either.

I checked with meta-awareness to see if she could survive the coming flames that we’d set. It would be kind of cowardly to leave her behind but it could save a lot of people from a trip to the burn ward if the girl’s temper was as bad as it was looking to be.

Of course things couldn’t be that simple. The girl was certainly fireproof. So were the Briars though. Way’s flame wouldn’t have any more trouble roasting the girl than it did igniting the briars. Leaving her behind was a death sentence.

“Right. How about a deal then? Faeries love making deals don’t they. Here’s what I’ve got for you. I need a fire elemental to burn up a bunch of my enemies in the Court. Come with me and help protect the people here and in return I’ll lead you back to the physical world. No strings, no tricks.”

“There’s always a trick.” she said warily.

“True. The trick in this case is we’ve just set fire to their prison, every Courtier wants me worse than dead and getting out of here is in no way guaranteed.”

“That’s a terrible deal.” she complained, but I could see her rage had subsided to a more manageable level.

“What’s scarier in faerie; being offered a terrible deal or one that seems perfectly fair and balanced?” I asked.

She paused to consider that for a moment.

“Fine. Get me out of these things. But don’t touch me. Seriously, I will burn you.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time tonight.” I muttered.

“What?” she asked.

“Just whining. Here, can you stand ok?” I asked, having the manacles unlocked before she even noticed I’d begun working on them.

“Umm, yeah.” she said. She didn’t offer her name, but meta-awareness told me it was “Jessica”. The extent of how powerful of a talent I possessed wasn’t lost on me. Knowing the name of people or things in Faerie was a close cousin to having total dominion over them. On the hand, I’d just gotten spanked at a game of words vs. the Queen of Failure, so somehow it wasn’t too hard to keep my ego in check.

“Good. We definitely need to get moving then.”

“Yes.” Way agreed, moving to stand beside me.

“Ok. We need one more burn. Our passage is on the far side of that wall. We don’t want the briars just on fire though, we need them ashed before the rest of the flames reach us. Can you handle that?” I asked.

Even with the golden light of her flames holding back the poison, I could tell Way’s wound was sapping her strength.

“Yes.”

“Burn this place down? Just try to stop me!”, Jessica added.

“Everyone else, stand back and let them work then.” I ordered. I wasn’t a natural leader, but with a group this size I could see that trying to put things to a vote was not going to work.

The outer shell of the prison was a noticeably harder challenge than the interior briar walls. Neither Way nor Jessica could afford to unleash their full power in the cramped quarters that remained but I could tell they would manage with at least two or three seconds to spare before the flames overwhelmed us.

That was until fire lizards showed up.

Dragons are interesting creatures from what I’ve read. They come in as many varieties as there are people to imagine them. The abominations that came leaping through the flaming briars bore as little resemblance to anything a human had dreamed up as the Shadow Court bore to the humans they’d once been.

“Minnie!” I called, but she was already reacting.

The two creatures reared back on legs that divided into a dozen spike-tipped pincers as Minnie charged them. She’d crossed her arms in front of her, so they took the brunt of the burning poison the fire lizard spat out. Before the corrosive spittle could do any damage she flung it off and crashed into the beasts, bearing them both to the ground.

Under other circumstances I would have wagered on Minnie taking both of the monsters out before they had the chance to do any serious damage to her. The fire we’d set wasn’t our friend though and with the fire lizards added heat it’s progress along the briar path had accelerated.

Where Minnie and the fire lizards fell was covered in flame and smoke an instant later.

Lacking any common sense whatsoever, I plunged into the conflagration with only the barest hint of a plan in mind. I blamed Jenny for that since I’m pretty certain Jin had far more self preservation instinct than that.

“Your cell!” I screamed to Minnie through the smoke, scrambling to the first door I’d opened.

I wasn’t sure that my intention was clear enough until a moment later when I felt a whoosh of air as a large mass sailed past me. I couldn’t see what it was through the smoke but from the sound of it crashing into the far wall of the cell it was clearly hefty. A second later another whoosh of air and crash within the cell suggested that Minnie had understood exactly what I meant to do.

With both fire lizards secured inside, I slammed the cell door shut and blindly fiddled with the lock. Fortunately they were designed to secure things easily so resetting it didn’t take too long even blinded as I was. Just long enough for me to catch a lungful of smoke and grow too dizzy to walk.

As epitaphs went, “she wasn’t smart enough to stay out of largest, obvious fires” wasn’t exactly the one I was hoping for.

“She’s here!” I heard a ghostly voice call out as my knees buckled.

I blinked and for a second saw double. On one side of my vision there was the burning prison in the Shadow Court’s pocket of fairyland. On the other I saw something out of an eldritch horror’s nightmares.

The Dreamlit world!

Pen had said it bordered everything that was real within the context of my world. The Shadow Court was certainly real and so their realm had a shadow in the Dreamlit world. A grotesque and terrifying shadow, as befitted the nightmares that they were, but somehow still a comforting thing to discover. It was a nightmare, but it was my kind of nightmare.

My vision snapped back into singular focus as we exited the smoke. Minnie had pulled me into the small bit of the Briar path that remained free of fire. She looked noticeably worse for her encounter with the fire lizard, red welts already forming on her hands and face from where they’d struck her. For some reason though she was smiling at me.

“We’re not going to make it through the Briar wall in time.” I coughed out.

“Perhaps if two were to become three?” Patches suggested.

I looked at him, trying to guess what he meant. He was looking past me though. At Nell. Who was looking at me for permission? I kicked myself mentally. I hadn’t asked the mousey girl to help so she thought she wasn’t welcome to. More proof that I definitely wasn’t a natural leader.

“Absolutely. Nell, can you help them?”, I asked and moved aside to open a path to where Way and Jessica were working on carving through the briar wall.

I’d expected her to start throwing lightning bolts to complement the streams of fire that Way and Jessica were pouring forth. Instead she approached them both and very tentatively touched each of them on their backs. Way and Jessica’s fire streams didn’t grow hotter or larger in response to the touch. If anything they became smaller and more focused.

Where they had been carving through the wall with the equivalent of two flame throwers, with Nell’s assistance they punched straight through it with laser beams.

It took less than a minute for them to complete the task and we all piled out into the adjoining pathway a full twenty seconds before the fire engulfed the last of the prison’s briar path.

The Shadow Court’s domain had been grown to their liking. That mean the walls of the path around the prison were riddled with poisonous needles. The floor bent and twisted at all sorts of odd angles too. Perfect for hurting anyone who walked on it and didn’t possess inhuman grace. Which meant half the people in our group, myself included.

We’d been “lucky” inside the prison. It had been less “artistic” and more given over to form and security, which Jenny knew was only due to the geometries required for the binding spells it held. The less secure prison bulbs, of which I realized there were dozens, were quite a bit more horrifying.

I took stock of our position and saw that the path we had escaped to wrapped around the perimeter of the prison and led to an artery into the Shadow Court’s “play rooms”.

We were fortunate in one sense. We were near the heart of their realm, inside the dead bough of a failed World Tree. That meant we weren’t all that far from a Hedge Gate, one of the natural portals that joined together the shifting domains of the Fey. That also meant we were near a center of the Court’s power so the chance of avoiding them was minimal.

“This way.” I said and began leading the others down the path running counter clockwise around the burning prison. In the distance I could hear ululations of mad joy. The Court had discovered that their prison was ablaze. I’d expect rage would follow but that wasn’t the way their alien minds worked. Something was being destroyed. They couldn’t help but be delighted. The same way sharks are delighted when blood is spilled in the water.

“What’s that?” Nell asked. She’d never heard the Court laughing before.

“We need to go. Be careful but move as fast as you can.” I said.

“Running isn’t going to save us.” the former Queen sing-songed. I threw a glare at her but kept moving. There wasn’t time to argue and we both knew it.

We made it to the first branch of the path that would take us beyond the prison bulb and into the greater gardens of the Shadow Court before the first Courtiers caught up to us.

One moment we were walking along, the next Way was several dozen yards down the path, bits of flaming Courtier raining down around her. The former Queen had also intercepted one of the Courtiers and was locked in a silent and nearly frozen struggle with it. They were evenly matched and it was clear the struggle would only end with the death of one or the other.

Before any of the rest of could think to move, Patches stepped up behind the alien Courtier, broke off a poisoned thorn the length of his hand from a nearby section of bramble and rammed it through the Courtier’s left eye. The monster twitched and spasmed for a second before the former Queen used its weakness to slam it into the wall of thorns, impaling it a hundred times over.

A shiver of delight rippled down the Queen’s entire body as the alien Courtier sagged against the wall and began to dissolve. Patches meanwhile regarded the scene with unfeigned disinterest. He turned to look at me as though wondering why we had stopped at all.

“Damn.” I struggled to collect myself, images of what would have happened if there had been three Courtiers rather than two dancing in my head. I was leading us deeper into their lair. We had nowhere else to go but even so it seemed like an insane course of action.

From somewhere deep in the heart of the Shadow Court’s realm, a single pure bell tone rang out. It wasn’t ear splittingly loud but I could feel it reach through the entirety of their domain. Something had crossed their Hedge Gate. Something uninvited that didn’t carry the taint of their horror. My heart leapt into my throat, hope surging within me.

The heroes had arrived!

The Hollow Half – Chapter 11

Even in chains, Way looked as beautiful as ever.

“I’m not who you think I am.” I told her. It seemed like a fair guess that she’d mistaken me for someone else. The last time she’d seen me, I hadn’t been a squat, blue skinned goblin with crochet hook fingers.

“I know exactly who you are. Namer.” Way replied. She did not sound pleased to see me.

“You recognize me? Like this?” I asked, amazed. Jenny Nine Stitches body wasn’t an illusion. I really was her, at least according to my meta-sense. There shouldn’t have been any details or clues that would connect the two of us.

“I will always know who you are.”, she said.

“How?”

Way glared at me silently. She wasn’t in the mood for playing twenty questions it looked like. That seemed fair since I hadn’t answered hers.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened before.” I told her.

“Why did you speak to me. Why didn’t you keep running?”

“I didn’t want to fight you.”

“Why?”

“Why would I?”

“Do you know what I am?”

“No.” I admitted, my awareness caught something in her question though and I added “Do you?”

Again, she only glared at me in response.

She was angry, but it was the sort of anger that came from fear. Her fear of me was a tiny thing compared to whatever fear actually drove her. I was here though which made me an easy target.

Was it good that she was chained, I wondered? Would she be trying to blast me to pieces with her golden bolts or chop me up with her scythe if she was free?

“Why did you want me to run?” I asked, trying to confirm what my intuition had told me during our aerial race.

Silence, but this time she looked away. Meta-awareness told me I was right. She had been holding back. She’d been trying to spare me and she’d suffered for it. I couldn’t tell how exactly, but she lost something when she’d gained a name.

I blinked in belated surprise. I could sense her! I remembered the end of the chase, just before she’d exploded with power, I’d been able to sense her then too but after I burned up I’d lost her. Naming her, even as unintentionally as I had, had given her more than a name. She had a presence, a reality, that she lacked before.

“What happened to you?” I breathed, quietly stunned at the enormity of change that such a simple action had precipitated.

“You named me.” she replied, as though that explained everything.

“How? By saying you’re way too powerful? It can’t be that easy or someone would have named you ages ago.” I protested.

“People don’t speak to me.” she said. Her voice was flat, but the anger was still there and this time I got a glimpse of what was behind it.

Kids are afraid of the dark because they know Death lurks in it. Way was what Death was afraid of. In that one instant, I glimpsed what she had been. Where death marks the end of a life, the emptiness in Way held its revocation.

I thought of the Shadow Courtier that Way’s beast had torn apart. Way’s purpose wasn’t to destroy monsters or heroes. Destruction wasn’t enough. In her hands what was once real became nothing. Not real, not even a dream.

I felt my anger stir as my meta-awareness filled in a detail I’d missed. That was what the nameless giant had tried to do to me! The black flame wasn’t meant to burn me. The nameless giant wanted me more than dead. That should have scared the hell out of me. Jin probably would have been terrified, but Jenny Nine Stitches was cut from a meaner cloth.

And anyways he’d failed. I spat on the floor at the thought of him.

“What am I then?” I demanded. Way didn’t deserve my anger, except she had set her beast on me, and chased me, and burned me to death.

“I don’t know.” she admitted quietly. Her fear was there, echoing my own.

I flipped between Jenny and Jin. Two different people, two different lives. It wasn’t a question of which was real. They both were, and they were both me. There was more to me than could be summed up in a single truth. Just like Way.

I saw in the purple torchlight, not the destroying angel, but the girl that she also was. An idea was there, meta-awareness and intuition were trying to pound it into my head, but I had to hear it from her.

“So we’re two of a kind then?” I asked.

She looked back at me silently. She didn’t need to answer that question.

“Do you want to go back to what you were?” I continued.

“Yes! I’m broken like this!” she lied.

“Will you destroy me if you have the chance?” I asked.

A look of confusion passed over Way’s face and she looked away again.

“Probably.”, she nearly whispered the word. Was it a confession? A regret? It didn’t matter, either way, that was a lie too.

I paused for a moment and wondered how sure I could be of the idea I was putting together. I knew she was lying thanks to my meta-awareness, but that same meta-awareness hadn’t even registered her existence earlier. I could be deluding myself but if so I was doing a damn good job of it.

I smiled at her and tried to stand up. I wasn’t able to get fully to my feet due the chains that bound me to the floor. They were woven from strands of spider silk, so light I hadn’t noticed them at first. When they went taut though I felt the strength they held me with. The silk was stronger than steel and there were Winter enchantments on them which would leech away any strength used to break them. Jenny was familiar with them, though she’d never stitched one herself.

I heard someone coming outside the cell and sat back down before a creature with grey, bulbous skin and milky eyes slithered forward to peer in through the bars of the cell. It was hunched over but still at least twice as tall as I was. He was a Lake Lurker, Jenny knew, not part of the Shadow Court but one of their allies.

“What’s this? A bit of flotsam get caught in the tangle trap? What are you doing here Blue?” the Lake Lurker asked. Its voice was wet and sloppy, as though each syllable had to force its way past a mouthful of thick goo.

“Walking the Bramble Path to the market. What of it?” Jenny answered. The Bramble Paths were the roads that led from one Faerie realm to another. Jenny’d fallen afoul of the Shadow Court’s trap while she was traveling in-between the faerie worlds.

“Picked the wrong night.” the Lake Lurker made a noise that passed for a laugh among its kind.

“You’ll let me go if you know what’s good for you, fishsticks!” Lake Lurker’s, for as disgusting as they looked to me, were a delicacy among some of the more degenerate fairies. Jenny was spoiling for a fight, and Jin had no idea how to handle a Lake Lurker so Jenny got to call the shots.

“You’re a rich one you are. Guess you’ll make fair bait too.” the Lurker said intending to be enigmatic. Meta-awareness had already shown me the score though.

Way was here as bait for the nameless giant. The Shadow Court hadn’t been intending to capture me, that was just a lucky (or unlucky from my point of view) fluke. Still, since I had enough similarities to Way and the giant to be captured by the trap meant for them, the Shadow Court would be happy to use me an additional lure.

“Come in here and say that to my face.” Jenny taunted him.

“I don’t need to say nothing to bait. Just got to watch you squirm when they string you up.” the Lurker’s smile revealed a set of irregular serrated teeth.

I sniffed and turned up my nose at him. Being Jenny was kind of cool. I knew I would feel that way right up until his teeth tore into my flesh and I started screaming.

I shook my head at that burst of meta-awareness. That part of the script needed to change.

“Squirming like a worm on a hook and they’re going to have you on so many hooks Blue.”

I looked back at him but stayed silent. I wasn’t going to be able to lure him into entering the trap with us so there wasn’t any need to goad him into staying around.

I glanced over at Way and found she was studying me. I couldn’t tell what she saw in me though. Did she see Jenny? Or Jin? Or someone else?

I smiled at her. She frowned back, confused.

“So many hooks.” the Lurker taunted again. I continued to ignore him. Sure he was dangerous. If this had been Jenny’s story, she would have wound up stuffing his belly if she wasn’t careful. That wasn’t the way it was going to play out though. I didn’t need meta-awareness to know that. I just needed to look inside for a tiny bit of faith and across the room for Way.

Seeing that I wasn’t rising to the bait, so to speak, the Lurker grew bored and turned away. He shambled down the hallway to check on the other prisoners the Shadow Court had collected. When he was far enough away I turned back to Way.

“I’m getting out of here.” I told her as I unraveled the manacles. It was Jenny’s special talent. She wasn’t a spellcaster but she could fix or break almost any kind of woven spell with her crochet fingers. The Shadow Court’s trap wasn’t meant for a goblin like Jenny, so undoing the silk manacles took only three twists and a snip.

Way shied back as I walked towards her, so I stopped first where the silk chains were lashed to the floor and began undoing them from there.

“What are you doing?” she asked warily.

“I don’t want to leave you here either.” I said.

“You bound with me a name. What else are you going to do to me?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want you to be trapped here.”

“I’ll hurt you.” she warned. There was truth to that. She would. Of her own volition or not, with malicious intention or not, if I set her free she would hurt me. What she didn’t see was that not setting her free would hurt me too. I’d had to live with abandoning someone to the nonexistent mercies of the Shadow Court. I hadn’t been able to do that with Samantha when I thought didn’t have the power to rescue her and I couldn’t do that with Way when I knew that I did.

“Will you?” I asked as the last of the threads came loose from the floor.

Way raised her still manacled hands and gestured to the cord I held that had anchored them to the floor.

“You’ll hold me leashed for your safety.”

I took her left hand in my right and set to work on her manacles. It was trickier removing them from her and took much longer than three twists and a snip. Way sat quiet and motionless as I worked on them, not even breathing until the first manacle dropped away.

“I will hurt you!” she warned me again.

“Is that what you want?” I asked as I took her other hand and began working on the other manacle.

She was silent again, watching me work. I was almost done when she put her free hand over mine to stop me from undoing the last manacle..

“No.” she said, shaking her head.

I smiled back and took my hands away, severing the manacle’s last thread as I did.

“No bindings. No compulsions.” I said.

I saw golden fire begin to gather in her hands and her eyes harden.

If she burned me up again, I thought, I’d just wake up in my body.

My body that was trapped in a collapsing building.

My body that I couldn’t sense at all anymore.

A flash of panic swept through me. I couldn’t sense my body anymore! Was I dead? Had I fled to Jenny because there wasn’t any Jin left to be? My meta-sense couldn’t tell me. I couldn’t sense anything about the physical world at all.

Strangely that was comforting. Maybe because I couldn’t normally sense the physical world while I was dreaming, the thought of being cut off from it wasn’t as terrifying as it could be. I knew this wasn’t a dream, or the Dreamlit world, so it seemed even more reasonable that my dual perception wouldn’t quite be able to span the distance.

Whatever was happening with my physical body though, I was pretty sure that if I burned up here it wouldn’t be good.

I looked into Way’s eyes for any sign of warmth and felt the heat radiating from the flames in her hands begin to rise.

The Hollow Half – Chapter 10

There’s a distinctive sound to a collapsing building. Hearing it in stereo from the inside of the building is not an experience I recommend.

I managed to take all of three steps away from the nearest wall that was falling in towards me before I saw that being in two places at once was not helping me. Merging my dream and physical selves together was instantaneous.  That saved me from a pitching forward into one of the rents in the floor and impaling myself on jagged edges of the tear.

I was fully in the physical world, so when the wall that I fell against warped and exploded I was hit by purely physical shards of wood that tore into my uncovered arms. I didn’t remember losing my coat but I couldn’t remember having it after I woke up downstairs either. A little fabric and winter lining wasn’t going to save me the next floor up crushing me but it would still have been nice to have.

Throwing myself off the wall, I scrambled to think of someplace, any place, where I could find safety in the next two seconds before everything collapsed. Meta-awareness was faster than thought, giving me the answer so quickly that my feet were pushing me towards the conference room before I understood why I was headed in that direction.

Agent Haffrun had used the room for an interview with someone who could have been a supervillian. It had to be reinforced. Maybe some technomagic warding as well. Even if the entire building collapsed, that room might stay in one piece.

Two seconds might have been enough in the Dreamlit world. I could have flown there which would have cut the travel time down, but that would have meant leaving my physical self behind and nearly motionless. I might be able to survive dying in the Dreamlit world, but I wasn’t eager to see what would happen if I died in the physical world instead.

I was no more than five feet from the door to the conference room when buildings superstructure gave up it’s battle with the inexorable force that was bearing down on it. I felt the floor spasm and shatter into pieces away beneath me. I tried to fight for my balance but there was nothing to balance on.

The fall lasted less than a second but the pain from the landing was another story. Agony in my arms and left leg was all I had after the cacophony of the buildings destruction subsided. I tried to move away from the pain but I couldn’t. Weight was pressing down on me from all sides. Weight and darkness. I couldn’t tell if I was blind or only cut off from all light.

I listened, afraid that the giant might crush the building even further, but I couldn’t hear anything except for the sound of running water. Not even cries for help.

“Pen!” I dream spoke. I had no idea what he’d be able to do, but all I could think of was how badly I needed someone to rescue me. I didn’t want to die, crushed and bleeding, alone like this.

“You survived? Good. Then I will have my answer after all.” the harsh voice of the giant replied.

If my legs had been free I would have kicked myself. Instead I dream shouted again.

“PEN!”

“He is ours now.” the giant said. From above me the sound of an enormous mass being shifted away drowned out any other real sound I could have heard.

The rubble above me was cleared enough to let in the lights from the city through a few cracks in the debris. I saw in the dim light that the four walls of the room on the first floor that I landed in were still standing. I was laying awkwardly on a pile of debris with bits of wall and masonry from the second floor covering my arms and legs. The door frame from the conference room was propped up around my head by some debris on either side which gave me a small space above my head and upper torso that wasn’t buried.

The giant was shifting through the rubble that remained on the second floor but it was only a matter of time before he brushed off the junk above me. At that point he would either see me looking like a fish in a barrel, or the rubble would fall in on me and finish the job for him.

I struggled to move again and gave up before I’d twisted more than a millimeter or so. My leg was broken and both arms were punctured. The giant didn’t need to do anything. I was as good as dead as it was.

That’s when I heard moaning from the other side of the wall I was laying against. Someone else was alive! I swung from joy at not being alone to terrified concern. Whoever was on the other side of the wall didn’t sound like they were in any better shape than I was. If the giant was present in the physical world, no one was going to be able to get in and rescue either one of us.

Even if a team of super heroes could show up and drive the giant off, the fight would take long enough that the people trapped inside could die of shock before it finished.

I couldn’t do anything about that. I was useless. In the physical world.

The dreamlit world flooded over me as I projected myself outwards, rising from the rubble on the second floor.

I cast a look back at my body. I could feel it was fading. Separated like this, I felt my body giving in to the pull of sleep. That wasn’t a good response to shock, so I fought to stay awake, pitting the weariness I felt against the pain in my limbs.

The giant loomed over the police station in the Dreamlit world, standing at least a hundred feet tall. He, or it, was made of the same night-sky-colored fire as Way’s scythe blade had been. Where a pair of eyes should have been there where swirling lights, like galaxies dying. Lines through the flames gave the sense that they made a heavy suit of armor adorned with spikes where jets of fire shot out of the giant’s form.

He’d crushed the upper floor of the police station and left most of the first floor intact. I couldn’t tell how much of that was intentional and how much was due to the extra warding on the holding cells of the first floor of the police station in the real world. In either case it left me some hope that there were other survivors in the ruin of the building.

“What do you want?” I yelled at the giant in dream speak. I tried to match the coldness that I’d heard in Pen’s voice but I didn’t come close.

“You damaged a tool of mine. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.” the giant replied.

With a jerk he extended his right hand and ropes of black fire shot out towards me. I’d been too slow to escape the building. That was in the physical world. The dreamlit world played by different rules.

I was in the air before the fire had crossed half the distance between us. The flames disintegrated the spot I’d been standing on when they struck. In the physical world, I saw red-orange flames spring up on the destroyed second floor. Shock was no longer the most likely cause of death I’d have to look forward to.

“So you’re saying your tool is broken? I hear a lot of old guys have that problem.” I was scared enough to be angry and rude, and the joke just came to me at the right moment. I’d blame my meta-awareness for it but that bit of insanity was pretty much all me.

“No.” he said, clearly not willing to be taken in by banter. The rest of his response came in the form of more of that death fire or whatever it was.

I shot straight upwards to get away from it. This time the fire didn’t shoot straight through the point I’d been standing. It curved to follow me upwards instead. I pushed myself for greater speed to escape the pursuing flames and left an explosion of sparks behind.

Wings of flame unfurled from the giant back and he rose into the air to follow me with the force of a Saturn rocket leaving the launch pad.

The survivors in the building would stay safe from him for as long as I could keep him busy so I turned and fled like I had from Way, looking for any cloud cover I could use to hide my escape (because that worked so very well the first time).

What I found was a wall of force.

I hadn’t been able to see before hitting it but afterwards it was brilliantly visible, lit by the glow from a circle on the ground inscribed with mystic symbols. The circle was huge with walls that reached upwards as far my eyes could see. Another circle lay beyond it, invisible to everything except my meta-awareness. He’d created a trap to take no chances with, it circled not only the police station but everything within a half mile of it as well.

Running away horizontally wasn’t an option so I took the only direction that was. Straight up.

The stars above me burned dazzling bright in the Dreamlit world. They weren’t the same stars from the physical world, but they inspired the same sense of awe. In both planes of existence whole other worlds lay beyond the dark of the sky, here though I felt like I could reach them if I really tried.

That’s when the sheet of black flames blazed to life above me. They cut off the light of stars and forced me to check my flight speed.

“No escape.” the giant’s voice called out behind me.

My meta-awareness told me that the flames weren’t there, but I knew I couldn’t trust it in this case. It couldn’t see the giant either, at least not distinctly. There was a general sense of “wrongness” though, similar to what I’d felt from Way’s beast.

I spun away from the giant’s path of ascent, looking for a building I could hide behind. If I couldn’t get him completely away from the police station, I could at least keep him distracted to buy time for the survivors to be dug out.

The area around the police station wasn’t as deserted as the old manufacturing center in the South End though so nothing jumped out at me as a safe spot for cover. I could probably lose the giant by flying among the tenement buildings around the police station but there was nothing to say he wouldn’t knock those down too looking for me.

I considered trying to bluff him, but given how quickly he’d seen through Pen’s attempt at that I couldn’t picture anything I could come up with that would yield any better results.

I had to looped upwards and twist painfully to get out of the way of his next blast. I managed to avoid getting burned, or disintegrated but I knew it was just a matter of time. I had to dodge every attack he threw at me. He only need to hit once.

I thought of avoiding Way’s attacks, and then of Way herself. Was she the “tool”, the giant was speaking of? Had my naming her “broken” her somehow?

Both of those seemed likely. There was clearly some relationship between Way and the Giant. That both of them used the same sort of fire and assaulted me without provocation was too unlikely to be a coincidence.

Pen had been trying to keep information from me, but if there was a standing “burn you to ash” welcome wagon for new dream travelers I’m pretty certain he would have mentioned it.

The commonalities between the giant and Way hit a snag in my mind as I dodged more black fire by a smaller margin than ever.

The giant was using anti-fire or whatever black fire should be called. Way had used that on her scythe but when she was blasting at me her beams had been brilliant gold. I doubted that was a personal affectation, but I had no idea yet what it could mean.

“What I need is some super lasers of my own.” I mumbled to myself. If it was possible to wish things like that into existence in the Dreamlit world though I clearly didn’t know how yet.

The next blast of fire came in so fast and was twisting so wildly that I had to risk cutting past the top floor of an apartment building to escape it. The flames exploded on the side of the apartment, dissolving the wall away as they consumed everything, including themselves.

In the physical world, my awareness told me the wall shattered inwards covering an infant’s room with broken glass and sheetrock. The family was out at the movies. The infant was with her grandmother. I had gotten very lucky.

I soared higher, giving the giant a clearer shot at me, but avoiding the chance that a missed shot would damage any of the buildings inside the mystic circle.

“Tell me why you’re doing this!” I demanded. I was still afraid, but anger was holding that at bay.

“No.”

“You have no idea who I am.” I said, my voice doing a better impression of Pen’s absolute zero tone. It was true too. He hadn’t said my name. In fact he’d claimed he hadn’t known how I’d named Way.

“You have no idea what I’m capable of.” I stopped flying and stared him down. That was true too, though it was more accurate to say neither of us knew what I was capable of. Even Pen had seemed surprised by some of it.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“You’re wrong. Give me back Pen and leave here. We didn’t ask for any of this.” I cast my meta-awareness outwards. I had power, almost certainly more than I knew of yet. All I needed was to find something useful in it. Someway to smite this jerk.

My awareness touched on the police station. My physical self had fallen asleep for a few minutes while I was dodging the flame blasts in the Dreamlit world. I roused myself as best as I could and opened my eyes. Flames had covered the top of the police station and were starting to work their way down the walls of the room I was in. I didn’t have much time one way or the other. Nor did the rest of the survivors.

Outside the circle rescue teams were mobilizing. My awareness lit on one of the fire crews. They would arrive well after my room was engulfed in flame.

I cursed. If the giant wasn’t here I could help save people. With my awareness I’d be able to direct the rescuers right where to go to get everyone who was still alive out.

There wasn’t any way I’d be able to get past him though and no way, I guessed, that he’d relent on his assault.

“You don’t matter.” he said.

“If that were true, then why would you go to all this trouble?” I asked, gesturing to the circle of power that surrounded us.

His answer was a column of black flame that struck down on me from above.

I couldn’t dodge it, not by flying.

I tried to shift my dream self over to the physical world and escape the flames by avoiding their reality entirely. That didn’t work quite as planned.

The pain of the flames was intense but brief. One instant I was floating in sky of the dreamlit world and the next I felt blinding, soul-severing agony. I shoved myself away from the sensation as hard as I could and felt my world turn inside out. On the plus side, the pain vanished as quickly as it had struck.

I blinked and found myself in a cell made of dripping red thorns and dark brambles. There was light in the cell from a gnarled torch that burned with cold purple glow. The cell was spacious, probably as large as one of my classroom, though most of it was lost in shadows.

I looked down at my arms and body, surprised that I still had them after the flame hit me.

My skin was blue and my hands ended in fingers shaped like crochet hooks. My name was Jenny Nine Stitches and I was a Spinner for the Free Fairies of the Lost Oaks.

I shook my head. I was Jin Smith still, but I remembered. I’d dreamed about being Jenny Nine Stitches several times after I’d gotten a book of Fairytales from my Mom.

Somehow she was real. Like Molly.

She was real, she was me and we were captured.

By the Shadow Court.

My meta-awareness hadn’t gone away. I was still Jin after all.

They’d been waiting. I was the least of their worries, but I was at the center of an event that was destroying the foundation of who they were. They couldn’t let go of me regardless of how much they might want to.

The second circle had been theirs. They’d laid a trap around the trap.

Not for me though. Meta-awareness was pulling in details for me as fast as it could.

They’d been trying to trap the nameless giant. To save themselves from it. Because they’d already caught something bearing the giant’s power.

My meta-awareness found one more important piece of information. I wasn’t alone in the cell.

“Why did you do this to me.” Way asked, her eyes focused solely on mine.

The Hollow Half – Chapter 9

“So, was this the stupidest possible thing I could have done?” I asked Pen, each of my selves pointing at the other. I was only half joking. He was looking at me like I was a five year old who was holding a stick of dynamite in one hand and a flamethrower in the other.

“If I say ‘yes’ will that compel you to try to top it?”

“Depends on how hard topping it would be.”

“Not hard enough unfortunately.”, Pen said with a small smile.

“I kind of figured that was the case. Want to just spill the beans and tell me what I’m really seeing here?”

“Want?”, Pen laughed, “It’d take a dozen maps and a team of Sherpas to get from where we are to anywhere close to what I want.”

I was surprised by the bitterness that lay under his words. He was better at dream speaking than I was, more able to mute the feelings that accompanied the thoughts he projected, but even so I could feel that this was tearing him up.

“Why? Why does this matter to you? You’re only going to be here for the three days right? Anything after that is my problem isn’t it?”

“That’s not it.”

“Is it because you needed me to be normal? To be powerless? Am I not a good enough hiding place for you now?” I asked, frustrated at not being able to see what was wrong. Frustrated at the prospect of not being good enough after all.

“No. This isn’t about you.” Pen insisted. He was frustrated too, choking back his words in fear of letting anything else out that he couldn’t take back.

“How can it not be about me? This is me we’re talking about.” I said in stereo, both my dream self and physical self reacting with a flush of anger.

Moving my physical body around took effort when I was projecting myself into a dreamspace but strong emotions made it easier. I’d have to watch for that or it would look like I was having a shouting match with thin air whenever I argued with someone via dream speech.

Pen sighed and paused for a moment, picking out out his words carefully.

“Have you ever killed a planet full of people?”, he asked without preamble. I tried to read his expression. It was a ridiculous question, but he didn’t look like he was joking at all.

“No.” I answered, struggling to work out how that could be relevant.

“I have.”

It wasn’t so much a confession as a cold statement of fact.

“Why?” I asked softly, still struggling to understand.

“For the greater good. That’s all I can remember.” He was still and the glow of his aura had faded away almost completely.

“So you’re trying to protect me to make up for that?”, I guessed. He wasn’t a planet killing monster. My meta-awareness confirmed that. It also said he wasn’t lying. I couldn’t see how both of those could be true but somehow they were.

“I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you can make up for. I’m trying to protect you so you won’t have to do the same thing.”

“I could kill the planet?” That didn’t seem even vaguely possible.

“Not now. Not like this. Knowledge is power though, so if you knew what I did?” he let the question stand between us.

“Even if I could do that, why would I? My family’s here! My friends are here! Why would I want everyone on the planet to die?”

“You wouldn’t need to want it. Just knowing how to do it would make you a target like I am.”

“It can’t be that easy to kill a planet.” I objected.

“You’re right. It’s not that easy. It’s impossible in fact.” Pen replied.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“So is what you’re doing now.”

I frowned, feeling as confused as ever.

“This is just astral projection or something like that isn’t it?”

“No.”

“And you can’t tell me how it’s different.”

Pen smiled sadly and shook his head.

“How much damage will I do by experimenting to find out?”

“Maybe none. Maybe a lot.”

“Then how do I forget this? How do I leave it behind?” I asked. I didn’t want to say those words. It wasn’t that the lure of power was intoxicating or corrupting me. It was the respite from feeling helpless. From feeling like I was a tiny ant in a world of giants. That was the drug that was making a part of me scream to hang onto the one thing I’d found that could make me special.

I’d read so much about the meta-humans of the world and always picked up on how horrible their lives could be. How much of that was seeing the reality behind the glamour and how much of it was sour grapes? Faced with having powers of my own, I couldn’t say.

There were other temptations too. The good that I could do if I kept whatever powers I had. The regret I’d feel if I let them go and something went wrong that I could have prevented. Even just being able to fly. I’d miss that terribly if I gave up my powers.

Balanced against that was the whole of my world. I knew Pen wasn’t lying or exaggerating. He’d done what he claimed. There were humans who would sink to the lowest depths of depravity to acquire a power like that, so I could only imagine what non-humans like the Shadow Court would be willing to do.

I saw what Pen meant when he said getting eaten by sharks was one of the better outcomes if things went towards the worst case scenario. I wasn’t brave at all, but even I’d chose “eaten by sharks” over letting someone kill everyone, everywhere. The trick was, with a lot of the things who would want a power like that, I probably wouldn’t even get the choice. Mind control would be the gentlest way to rip a secret like that from me. The real monsters could do a lot worse.

Taking on that kind of responsibility was too much. I couldn’t trust myself with it much less expect anyone else to. Looking at it like that, it was easy to quiet the screaming need to be special and accept that I had to be the same normal, unimportant Jin I’d always been.

“I don’t know if you can. There might not be any going back.”, Pen said, “Maybe there never was?”

“What?”, I mumbled. Having accepted that I needed to give the powers up, the prospect of being stuck with them left me with a sick feeling in my stomach, “Do you mean this was destiny or something?”

“No, or not in the sense of ‘predestination’. Destiny is what you make for yourself. Anyone who tells you different is running some scheme of their own.”

“Ok, so does that mean that this is my fault?”

“In a way, yes. You rescued me.”

“No good deed goes unpunished?”

“More like ‘everything has consequences’. You have a natural talent for this. I’d guess from a strong imagination. You chose to rescue me. Put those two together and we wind up here.” Pen said.

The sourness in my stomach rose. I couldn’t escape this and I’d brought it on myself.

“I need to know then. There has to be a middle ground between ‘destroy the world’ and ‘blind to everything’.  I’m going to go nuts otherwise. I’m barely holding it together as is stands. If I need to walk around with the chance that I might blunder into killing everyone on Earth I’m going to lose it completely.”

Pen looked at me for a long moment, evaluating not me but himself. He exhaled a slow breath and his features softened. He’d let go of something inside himself that neither my meta-awareness or mundane intuition could guess. The glow of his aura brightened as he looked back up at me, a faint blue fire flickering tight around him.

“You’re right.”, he said, “You were my beacon. It’s time I was yours. Ask away.”

I relaxed a little and marshalled my thoughts.

“I guess the first question is how likely is it that I’ll figure out your ‘destroy the world’ secret? And if it’s that obvious how could it be such a big secret?”

Technically that was two questions but Pen didn’t seem to mind.

“Under normal circumstances? Not very. Knowing alone isn’t enough either. If you really needed to? I have no idea.”

That wasn’t quite the answer I’d hoped for, but it was better than a lot of the alternatives. I’d just have to make sure I’d never need to destroy the world.

“Ok, next question what is this place? It’s not a dream, it’s not the real world, it’s something in between them, but what does that mean?”

“It’s called the ‘Dreamlit World’, but that’s a misnomer. Dreams are the way most people have contact with it but it’s more accurate to say this is the border between everything that’s real in your world and everything that’s not.”

I turned that over in my head and let it sink in.

“Ok, so this isn’t completely real, but things that happen here can affect the real world. Kind of like an echo. That’s what happened when Way’s beast destroyed the police station here. Back in the physical world it was just damaged a little.”

“It happened at the library too. The first time you slipped into the dreamlit world, you broke off part of the fence remember?”

“Oh yeah! So, wait, what about Samantha? If I was in the dreamlit world then, how did I pick her up? Unless she was just dreaming too?”

“No, she was physically there.”

I furrowed my brow. That didn’t add up.

“I’m missing something.”

Pen flashed me a mischievous smile.

“You have no idea how tempting it is to make sure it stays that way.”, he blew out a deep breath and let his smile soften, “The barrier between the dreamlit world and the worlds it borders is no more real than the dreamlit world itself.”

That sounded like the something he’d found in a fortune cookie but it clicked with something I’d already been thinking about.

“Does that mean…”, I paused, frightened by the implications of a positive answer to the question I had in mind, “Does that mean, that if someone can manipulate the things here, they can manipulate the barrier to the real world world too?”

“Yes.”

“But that means…” I felt like I was struggling to close Pandora’s box and keep some hope alive for the world. “That means that the Shadow Court can break down the rules of what’s real whenever they want. There’s no way that the Task Force is going to be able to fight them!”

Pen looked at me askance.

“The Shadow Court? Oh, those guys who chased you at the library?”, he laughed, “There’s nothing to worry about there. They’re not dream shapers.”

It was my turn to look at him askance. If it wasn’t them messing around at the library then who could it have been?

“Then you manipulated the barrier?” I asked.

Pen laughed again.

“No.”

I tried to think who else was there? Samantha? Maybe little kids could reach the dreamlit world more easily? I rejected that idea immediately. If kids could routinely suspend the rules of reality, we’d never have evolved past single celled organisms much less have a functioning society.

Still Samantha might be a special case, the Shadow Court had been trying to grab her for some reason after all. Somehow that didn’t fit though. If she could do that she wouldn’t have needed my help at all. The more I thought about it the more it seemed like it had to be someone else.

“Way.”, I said, “She was there from the start. It even looked like she was hunting the Shadow Court and she’s definitely powerful enough. It was her right?”

Pen smacked his forehead with his palm and left his hand there to cover his face. The way his shoulders started shaking I thought he was breaking down in tears.

When he doubled over I was able to hear the choked “sobs” he was making were actually laughs he was trying to cover up.

“I’m sorry.” he finally said, wiping tears from his eyes as he suppressed a few lingering giggles, “It’s not really that funny.”

And yet he couldn’t stop smiling.

“We should talk about this ‘Way’ though. What do you mean you ‘named’ her?”, he said, changing the subject.

I considered dragging the conversation back to what we’d been talking about, but learning what the story was with Way seemed critically important too.

“I would like the answer to that question as well.” said a harsh and inhuman voice that came from every direction at once.

Pen swore and glanced around us. He wasn’t laughing in the slightest anymore. He was scared.

“Maybe you’ll get it after a proper introduction. What’s your name.” Pen replied in a voice cool as a glacier and as loud as a thunderclap.

“We have none. Pendant.”

My meta-awareness kicked in there. I’d given Pen that name. Only the two of us should have known it. Whatever this thing was it wasn’t playing by the rules already.

“Ah, good. You know my name. That means you know what I do to things like you.” Pen’s voice had returned to a normal volume but had lost none of its frosty edge. “Tell you what, I’ll give you a headstart. How’s a ten count sound? You can start running any time you want.”

The entire building shook as the inhuman voice bellowed out its laughter.

“Once you might have been able to make good on that bluff. Not any more though.”

Pen turned to look me directly in the eyes. He said only a single word and packed so much urgency into it that it hit me with physical force.

“RUN”

Dream self and physical self were moving less than a second later but it was already too late. With a tortured scream of tearing metal and shattering brick, I heard the walls of the police station being crushed inwards. A section of the lounges exterior wall exploded toward me as an enormous finger punched through the shell of the building. My meta-awareness couldn’t tell that anyone was out there though. It was as blind to whatever giant was squeezing the building to pieces as it was to Way or her beast.

I tried to figure out where I could flee to, but the windows on the second floor were blocked by the giant’s hand and the stairs throughout the building would be unusable before I could get to them.  Both my dream and physical selves felt the floor underneath me beginning to buckle and I instinctively knew what that meant.

The police station in the real world was being destroyed the same as the one in the Dreamlit world. I was about to be crushed under a collapsing building and the nearest exit was too far away for even my dream self to reach.

The Hollow Half – Chapter 8

I’d been frightened in a lot of different ways leading up to my handshake with Agent Haffrun. Grasping her hand, I discovered something interesting about being scared though; past a certain point, the only reaction you can have to fear is to laugh.

A crazy little chuckle escaped my lips before I could stop it. Then an equally crazy smile crept all the way up to my eyes. Generalized panic followed.

All I could imagine for a moment was the unpleasantness that might ensue if she knew someone had discovered who she was. That thought banished my laughter.

“Sorry, I’d thought this was going to be weird.” I said, trying to cover up my reaction.

“I hope it wasn’t too bad. People in your position have had a rough enough time; we try our best not to make it worse.”, Agent Haffrun explained. She was also smiling but her’s was kindly instead of crazy.

She escorted me to one of the lounges on the second floor that was set up as a public conference room. It wasn’t being used by anyone else and there was an old TV tuned to ESPN for entertainment.

“I’ll let the desk officer know you’re waiting here. He’ll send your brother up once they’re back with your car.” Agent Haffrun said before continuing down the hall.

I was alone. For a moment I didn’t think of anything. The stress of the day had kind of shorted out my brain. I couldn’t process the notion that I’d just been speaking with someone from another world. Aliens had done horrible things to my Earth. They’d changed it in fundamental ways.

So why had that one seemed so nice?

My thoughts began to move, sluggishly, and some part of me started screaming that I should tell someone there was an alien in our midst. Another part thought of how impossible it would be to get anyone to believe me. The last part, maybe the biggest part even, just wanted the woman I’d met to be real. I wanted her to be “Agent Haffrun, the kindly interviewer” and not “Agent Haffrun the Alien Agent of Judgment”.

My head was still buzzing with my new sense but it in answer to which Agent Haffrun was real it was silent. It had shown me what she was, but it was up to me to chose what to make of that.

So I stood there and let my thoughts untangle at their own pace and in their own way.

There was too much on my mind to sort through it all at once. Agent Haffrun. Way. The Star Runner’s crew. The Shadow Court. Whatever it was that I could do, or that I had become. So many possibilities.

Searching inside, I looked for which one mattered the most to me and cast away everything else for the time being.

Agent Haffrun might be a foe of humanity, but she didn’t feel like one. I’d need to think about her some more but that could wait. Way was the next big issue, but she was too complex to deal with and probably thought I was dead so she could wait too. The Star Runner’s crew? They could take care of themselves, however clumsy Molly might think they were.

The Shadow Court? I was the least of their worries at this point.

Which left me with myself and whatever it was that was really happening to me.

I’d flown, only I hadn’t. I could sense things, but only in a weird way. I remembered Molly’s life, a girl who’d never been real, except that I’d met her friends…maybe.

It felt like the ground beneath me was shifting sand in an earthquake. Each direction I turned I found things slipping away. I couldn’t trust my senses. I couldn’t trust my memories. I couldn’t trust anything. I should have been upset by that, and I was, but in truth I wasn’t even sure the emotions I felt were real.

Things had tried to kill me. I’d died. Kind of. That scared me, but more in the way reading a horror story would than actually living through those events should have. I knew I wasn’t that courageous, so I had to ask if something else was wrong.

I breathed in. I breathed out. I slowed down and observed myself.

I didn’t feel broken. I didn’t feel great either, but with a chance to catch my breath I was able to reflect on where I was. A lot had changed in a little time. I was off balance, and that was natural. I didn’t know what it would take to regain a stable footing but I knew the first thing I needed was some answers. I needed to know what had changed in me before I could figure out how I was going to deal with all of the other curves that were being thrown my way.

If I had to go anywhere to find those answers, I could have just walked out. The police hadn’t charged me with anything after all and Agent Haffrun was done with me. If James came back and couldn’t find me though he’d probably have a meltdown. Also, Mom and Dad would kill me for wandering off when I was conceivably still in danger.

Instead, I sat down on one of the black cushioned couches and put my feet up on the nearby coffee table. If someone came in it would either look like I was watching TV or had fallen asleep.

“Pen. We really need to talk.” I dreamspoke.

It had felt like “thinking loudly” before, but I’d done it enough times that I could sense the subtle differences between when I was thinking something and when I was projecting it.

“Wow! That’s incredible!” Pen said. He appeared sitting on the edge of coffee table,  to the left of my propped-up legs.

“I’ve got a lot of questions for you.” I said.

“I kind of figured you would. Let me tell you the first one you should ask.”

“Ok.”

“I told you there are questions I can’t answer because if I did you’d be in more danger right?”, he asked, inviting me to pursue that line of reasoning.

“Yeah, so why is that? Why would I be in more danger? Anything you tell me should keep me from making stupid mistakes. Knowledge is power isn’t it?”

“Not in all cases. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re floating in the ocean, happy as a clam. Then someone tells you there are sharks swimming beneath you. Sharks that can smell the chemicals released in your sweat when you’re afraid. So long as you didn’t know about the sharks, you were fine. As soon as you find out, the fear starts to build up and pretty soon you’re best chums with Mr Toothy.”

“So if you tell me what I want to know, I’ll wind up so afraid that something will eat me?”

“That would be the one of the better cases if you knew everything I do.” Pen said. He got up and started to pace along the edge of the table.

“I mentioned how I’m a special little snowflake as far as this world is concerned right? Part of that is due to the things I know.”, he explained, “The more I share with you, the more you know about the world that I can see? Well if I’m an ice cream sundae to some of the things out there then you’d be the cherry on top.”

“Bleh.”

“Ok, maybe you’d be more like an extra scoop. I’m not all that I used to be. That’s the other reason I can’t answer your questions.”

“If I don’t know anything though I’m going to go nuts or make some huge mistake. I can’t just pretend nothing has changed. I’ve been trying and it’s not working.” I said. I sounded more frightened than I expected. Maybe the scares weren’t quite as distant as if I’d imagined.

Pen frowned. I couldn’t hear his thoughts, but my meta-awareness came close to telling me what they were. He was weighing the burden of being responsible for something horrible happening to me because I’d made a preventable mistake versus the long term cost I’d pay for knowing what he did.

“Tell me what was incredible.” I asked, sensing that was one of the few paths through his growing certainty that I was better off not knowing.

“Oh, that I wound up with someone like you. Someone talented I mean.”

“Talented?”

“Yeah, I was out of it when you rescued me, but I should have been heading towards someone mundane. You took to dream speaking very naturally.”

“It seems pretty simple, and weren’t you the one who gave me that power?” I asked. Everything weird had started with Pen’s arrival so it seemed plausible that anything unusual I could do was related to him.

“Gave you a power? No way. I’m trying my hardest not to mess up your life!”

“Well if you didn’t give me this dream  speaking, and the hyper-awareness, and the flying, who did?”

“Wait, the what now? And when were you flying?”

“I don’t know? A half hour ago? Can’t you see what’s going on around me?”

“I was tucked away pretty deep. I didn’t want to attract any more attention to you.”

“So you missed all that stuff with Way and her beast and the sky pirates?”

“Who? And the what? And Sky Pirates!? What the hell has been going on?” Pen asked looking horrified.

“After we talked? I was here in the police station and a blonde girl and this giant shadow monster showed up. They chased me and trashed the place and the cars outside and then I had to fly to get away from her, but I couldn’t and then…” I drew a deep breath and shook my head. Recalling the flight from Way was intense. Part of me was still freaked out about the whole “burned to ash” way it had ended.

“And then a ship with Sky Pirates showed up.” I almost called them ‘my crew’.

“This world doesn’t have Sky Pirates does it?” Pen asked.

“No.”

“Huh.”

“They got shot down though. I did too. Way sort of exploded when I named her. Then I got burned up. Then I woke up here.” Dream speaking about what had happened was harder than simply saying the words would have been. I was much closer to the memories when I was dream speaking them. All the emotions that went with the memories were shared too, which meant I was feeling them again as well.

If I’d been in a different frame of mind, it might have been fun to watch Pen’s reaction to the things I was saying. Confusion turned to bewilderment which then became abject bafflement. By the end he was staring at me mouth open and struggling to find any response at all.

“So now do you see why I need to have some answers?” I said.

“No. I mean yes. I mean maybe. Damn. This is not the way things were supposed to go. Why is nothing ever simple?”

“I don’t know. What was supposed to happen?”

“I wasn’t supposed to get you involved in any of this. Three days. I was only going to need three days. I can remember that much clearly at least. Just three days of recovery and then I’d be out of here.”

“Out of my head?”

“Out of this world.”

“Out of this world like ‘Mars’ or like ‘Dino-Earth’?” I asked. Dino-Earth was one of the more ‘popular’ parallel Earths that we’d created a portal too. We hadn’t managed to bring a real dinosaur back yet but people were still trying.

“No.”

“That wasn’t a yes or no question.”

“That’s true, it wasn’t. Let’s move on though. You said a bunch of very worrisome things just now.”

“Like what?”

“Pretty much everything. I don’t even know where to begin.”

“How about this; I’ll tell you what I think I’ve figured out. If its something that I can work out on my own then you’re not protecting me from anything by trying to keep it a secret.”

“Fair enough.”

“Ok. Let’s start at the beginning then. You said you’re the pendant that I grabbed in my dreams.”

“Assuming that’s the way you saw me, then yes.”

“You were a pendant then and you’re a guy now because you were hurt and you’re recovering.”

“Right.”

“Since you showed up in my dreams and you’re living in my head…”

“I’m not…I’m not ‘in your head’ precisely.” he cut me off.

“Can you explain the difference then?” I asked.

“Yes, but it’ll be safer if you work it out, keep going.”

“Ok. You showed up in my dreams and you said you’re recovering in my dreamspace. Now you say that’s not in my head. So my dreamspace is separate from me. But linked in someway.”

“That’s correct.”

“I know some psychics can do stuff in dreams. It’s supposedly really chaotic though. The mind’s a complete jumble during a dream from what I’ve read.”

“You have psychics here?”

“Yeah. They even teach us a little bit about that in school. The Yellow Submarine Defense was my favorite.” I’d been tested for psychic ability back in kindergarten but, like everyone else in the class, I’d hadn’t displayed anything measurable.

“Interesting. This world is…different than I expected it to be.” he admitted without elaborating any further.

“There’s just one problem from what I know; dreams aren’t external to us. They’re just reprocessed memories and hallucinations brought on serotonin breaking down into a chemical state that’s similar to LSD.”

“Even in psychics?” Pen asked.

“Yeah. From what I’ve read one of the first thing a psychic learns to do instinctively is to disconnect their powers while they’re asleep. Otherwise they’d be broadcasting an acid trip to everyone around them every night.”

“So dreams are simply a part of people then right?”

“Right. Except, you’re here. So two possibilities occur to me. Possibility one: I could be hallucinating you. I could have cracked up and everything I think I’ve seen and done is all just a mad fantasy. Or, possibility two, maybe our dreams aren’t entirely memories and LSD.”

Pen looked worried. I was getting close to something he thought could hurt me. I thought of the sharks he’d talked about. They might smell my fear, but being ignorant didn’t mean I was safe either. If I knew they were there I could try to get into a boat, or at least punch one in the nose or something.

“I’ve ‘woken up’ twice so far tonight.” I said, coming at the idea from a different angle. “Both times were right after I’d been through something amazing. Both times there was proof that what I’d seen wasn’t entirely in my head, and both times I woke up right where I’d been at the start of things going weird.”

“Proof?” Pen asked. He was trying to delay me. Hoping I wouldn’t put together the pieces that I had.

“Yeah, I’ll get to that. So, what does that tell me? I’m dreaming these things? It can’t be that. Or at least not only that. Too many other people are seeing bits of what I’ve experienced. These don’t feel like dreams either.” I said.

“So I’m living the experiences for real then maybe? No, it can’t be that either. I burned to death. If that was real then I’d really be dead now. So what does that leave?”

Pen didn’t answer but he didn’t have to. My vision blurred for a second, bifurcated, and an idea started coming into focus.

I tried an experiment. I focused on my feet and wiggled them. I felt them knock back and forth. I blinked to clear my vision and looked at them. They weren’t moving. My meta-awareness nudged me on – I wasn’t seeing everything.

I blinked again and thought of Pen before I opened my eyes. My feet were moving back and forth, wiggling just the way I felt they should be.

I stood up. And I could feel myself still sitting down at the same time.

I jumped and gave a cheer of glee as understanding clicked into place.

“I’m not dreaming, but I’m not awake either. I’m somewhere between the two. This is what I’ve been doing without realizing it.” I said with a smile. It was stunningly clear once I knew to look for it.  The divide in my senses. The way the room I saw while I was standing wasn’t quite the same as the room I’d sat down in.

I tried to refocus my vision without blinking and found it was easy to do. I was sitting on the brown cushioned chair and I was standing on the other side of the table. I could see both worlds at once. The “physical me” and the “dream me” were both “me”.

I waved to myself. The “me” who was standing waved at the “me” on the couch. Physical “me” was too heavy to move a muscle but I could still sense my arms were there. I could still hear through my physical ears too.

I guessed I could force my physical body to move around while I was divided but it would probably be pretty slow. Kind of like a sleepwalker.

My dream self on the other hand? Forget just moving around, I could fly! In fact, I felt like I could do anything with my dream self. Existing in two places at once should been mind breaking but instead it felt perfectly natural. Actually it felt better than that. It felt super.

Superhuman.

A thrill of power ran down to the tips of my fingers and toes. I might be swimming with sharks but I wasn’t completely helpless anymore.

It was a heady rush, experiencing the world in such a new way. The worrywort in me helped bring me back to earth though. Nothing was without consequences. I looked at Pen and saw the trepidation written on his face. There was a lot we still needed to get through.

The Hollow Half – Chapter 7

“Thank you for joining me Miss Smith.” Agent Haffrun said as I walked into the room. She had a tablet computer setup to one side of her on the conference table and a pair of manilla folders open on the other.

“Can I get you anything? Juice? Water? Donuts?” she offered, gesturing me to take one of the seats opposite hers at the conference table. She seemed slightly distracted, but otherwise unruffled. This was business as usual for her.

“No that’s ok.” I answered and immediately regretted it. She’d been testing me. If I was a changeling, the Law of Hospitality would have applied. They would guarantee her safety, for a time at least. I couldn’t tell how she knew I was a metahuman. If she thought I might be a changeling though then she didn’t know much about me specifically yet.

Since I didn’t want her to be worried enough to lock me up, I rubbed my stomach and changed my mind.

“Well, maybe if you’ve got another apple juice? Oh, and donuts wouldn’t be bad either I guess. I haven’t had dinner yet.”

She turned to the table behind her and reached under it into the small fridge. She pulled out a pair of juice bottles and then took the box of donuts off the table itself. After checking to make sure the donuts were ok, she placed them on the conference table between the two of us.

“So you’ve had quite a scare today?” she asked, bringing up something on her tablet. Meta-awareness told me it was the latest forensic information the team at the library had submitted.

“Yeah, this has been pretty intense.”

“Still feeling a bit nervous?”

“No, I’m good.” Which translated to “please don’t break out the thumbscrews and rack, just ask your questions and let’s get this over with as fast as possible.”

I snagged a donut and started nibbling on it, though my stomach rebelled at the concept. It felt like I’d crammed the questions that I didn’t want to think about down into my guts and they’d turned into hungry beasts trying to gnaw their way out. Questions like “So how do you feel about joining us” and “Do you think you have any other choice”. Once again I’d probably read too much for own good.

The Federal Bureau of Metahuman Affairs was charged with coordinating the work of the officially licensed metahuman operatives in the employ of the federal government of the United States of America. They’d made a lot of mistakes over the years and been involved in a bunch of corruption scandals. Most of that was ancient history, but it was still scary dealing with an organization with their history and power. They seemed to be clean these days but then they’d probably seemed to be clean years ago before the old scandals came to light.

I hadn’t been considering them when we agreed to come to police station because there wasn’t a local office for FBMA in town. That Agent Haffrun was here suggested either incredible luck (one way or the other) or that she’d been aware of the events that happened tonight before they occurred.

Normally, government organizations (or employees) aren’t known for having that much foresight but the FBMA had a special advantage in that regard. Precognition isn’t a common metahuman ability, but the FBMA has a few on their payroll. They don’t do field work though, so Agent Haffrun was probably working at their direction if she’d been tipped off that something was going to occur tonight.

Even without being a pre-cog herself, I still thought it was fairly impressive that Agent Haffrun had been able to pick me out as a potential meta-human. From what I’d read even the very best precogs couldn’t make exact predictions about the future and most had little control over what they saw. At best Agent Haffrun would have gotten cryptic and symbolic directions and had to piece things together from there.

I shouldn’t have been that surprised though I decided. Even with limits like that, pre-cogs made a huge difference in the world..

Three years ago the FBMA pre-cogs, along with a variety of other early warning systems, had prepared us for the most recent global invasion. It had been a total disaster for the invaders. Earth’s heroes and military forces had annihilated them in under an hour despite the enemy troops numbering in the millions.

What that meant for me was that Agent Haffrun was probably sent here with a fairly general agenda and was clever enough to put the pieces together without a lot to go on. I could only think of two things that would be on a general agenda like that. She would either want to recruit me, or she’d want an excuse to lock me up. Of the two I wasn’t sure which scared me more.

Being locked up in either a padded room or a prison cell would be terrible for obvious reasons. Joining the FBMA would mean becoming a public super hero though, which was terrible in more subtle ways.

As a superhero, I’d need to be trained in whatever powers I was developing. Trained at a special facility far away from civilian population centers. Trained far away from my family.

The “training” wasn’t for a set duration either. Depending on what a new meta-human’s powers were it could take anywhere from a couple months of study to several years of grueling effort to develop an acceptable level of control over them. Each case was treated differently, but the one constant was that metahumans in training were strictly supervised when interacting with anyone.

Images of sitting at Thanksgiving dinner flanked by guys in black suits with heavy firearms passed through my head.

Beyond that, if I became a licensed superhero, things would never be the same. I would become a public figure overnight. I could wear a mask, but unless my powers let me hide myself really well I’d probably be found out. There would be too many people I’d have to interact with who would know my real identity for the secret to stay hidden forever.

I’d probably have to fight too. Most licensed super heroes are assigned to a city, like Heartbeat and Professor Platinum are for Brassport. They collect a nice salary and have excellent benefits but they’re expected to stand as the first line of defense against all the craziness that the world throws at their hometown.

Giant lizard wanders out of the bay at 2:00am? Army of demonic snowmen attack on Christmas morning? Supervillain with a werewolf ray cruises into town and starts turning people into fluffy murderbeasts? Those all happened in the last ten years just in Brassport and the local super heroes were the first ones to get the call.

The training helps of course. Most of the time the heroes can deal with whatever’s come up, either on their own or by calling in backup. Not all the time though. Superheroes don’t come back from all the calls that go out. And they’re not always able to to save everyone.

I thought of my Dad and the last time I saw him.

“Let me start by thanking you.” Agent Haffrun interrupted my train of thought, for which I was secretly glad. It wasn’t going anywhere pleasant.

“Thanking me?”

“Calling in the report that you did took courage. It’s hard to get involved. Thanks to you though we’ve found clear evidence of a mystical incursion in time to act on it.”

“Oh, uh, it was my brother that called actually.” I admitted.

“I’ll extend the Bureau’s thanks to him as well then. He was the one who found you after the incident right?”

“Yeah.”

“From what he’s said, he didn’t see any signs of the Shadow Court when he found you?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, I think they were gone by the time he got there.”

“That fits their profile.”, Agent Haffrun agreed. Her tone was gentle where I’d been expecting it to be accusatory. For an interrogation, it didn’t feel like she was really pressing me for info. That was somehow comforting and worrisome at the same time.

“Did you say you found evidence they were there?” I asked, curiosity overcoming my apprehension at speaking with her.

“Oh yes. The forensics team is reporting that this is one of the “hottest” sites they’ve encountered. Usually we just find faint residues at locations where an abduction has occurred. In those cases, if we’re lucky, we can get one of our mystically gifted agents onsite before the residue evaporates and we lose the trail completely.”

“This time…”, she continued, “…it’s like we found a superhighway instead of a trail of breadcrumbs.”

“So you’ll be able to help any kids that they caught?” I was relieved to hear that, and also relieved that, strange as the experience had been, at least part of what I’d encountered behind the library was being confirmed as real by other people.

“We’re assembling a Task Force now. From what we’ve been able to determine the abduction attempt at the library wasn’t successful and with a trail this clear we might be able to find out where their real stronghold is. We’ll be paying them a little visit in whatever faeryland they’re calling home.”

Not all creatures use portals to move between the different parallel Earths exist. More magic rich worlds can breed creatures that can shift across dimensions naturally. At least that was the current theory behind what the Shadow Court were.

“In terms of the amount of good we may be able to accomplish based on this, I’d say you deserve a medal for calling it in.” Agent Haffrun commented, making a note on her tablet.

I flinched at the thought of a medal. Recognition was not going to do me any good. The Shadow Court might not risk approaching me again after what happened in the parking lot but there were a lot of things out there that were stronger and worse than them.

“You deserve one, but since you’re still a minor we will be keeping your involvement in this strictly off the record.” she added, answering my nervousness with calm patience.

“You can do that?” I asked, surprised they’d be willing to help hide me. It would be a lot easier to make me join up if I was out in the public eye already after all.

“Certainly. Do you know what our mandate at the Bureau is?” she asked.

“You ‘coordinate and administer the employment of metahuman personnel who are acting as official agents of the federal government in all sovereign territories and in foreign states where they are working as the result of joint ventures or world crisis.’” I rattled off.

“You’ve read our charter, a few times, I see.” she laughed, “That’s our official, legal mandate. We normally focus on a much simpler one. Basically we take care of the support and logistical issues to make superheroes more effective.”

“The licensed ones right?”

“Right. We have no official relationship with unlicensed meta-humans.” she confirmed. I barely needed my meta-awareness to hear what she was really saying there.

Meta-humans came in many different varieties. Whatever the source of their powers though, legally they fell into one of three types; Licensed, Unlicensed and Criminal.

Licensed meta-humans were the ones who chose to register with the federal government and had passed through the required training courses. They tended to either work for the FBMA or in private sector businesses where insurance or governmental regulations required them to be licensed.

Legally there was no requirement to be licensed if you possessed metahuman abilities. Various states had tried to pass laws over the last fifty years to circumvent that or require licensing in the face of the Supreme Court decision that ruled it unconstitutional. They’d either failed to achieve the required votes or been struck down by the state courts as well, but it was still something that came up for debate during election seasons.

Of the unlicensed metahumans, most lead normal lives. Either their powers were minor enough that they didn’t have much impact on their day-to-day existence or they used them in ways that weren’t covered by any regulations.

The were others though who chose to act in secret, for any of a variety of reasons.

These “Masks” were the most contentious point when it came to discussions on licensing meta-humans. There was no oversight for how a Mask used their powers. Technically they were vigilantes, at best. Most had a shaky connection with the law, though the ones who’d operated longer and kept their actions mostly within the law were at least respected if not fully trusted.

Agent Haffrun, for example, couldn’t work with one in her official capacity as a representative of the FBMA except in crisis situations where any and all help had to be accepted. Unofficially though? That was something I’d never thought of before.

“So what does taking care of support and logistics mean?” I asked. I knew what I’d read, but I could tell there was a lot that went on outside of the official channels.

“Logistics is pretty simple. We handle the calls and act as dispatchers for the agents we work with. A lot of TV shows seem to think that we give out our agents numbers to everyone in the world and the agents have to deal with a big red phone waking them up every five minutes. We’ve found it’s a little better to have a staff of trained operators field those calls though.”

“Don’t a lot of problems come up at night though?”

“Yes, but we plan our shifts around that. We try to balance them so that our agents don’t get too worn down. That’s another part of Logistics.”

“So what about support?”

“That takes a lot of forms. I tend to do a lot of the paperwork for the agents I work with for example. That way all the needed records are kept and their time isn’t wasted. When Heartbeat was assigned here, I also handled getting her set up with living accommodations and helped her move in. It’s not the kind of thing that shows up on a job description but it made the transition smoother.”

Living accommodations, agents to pose as her parents when needed, entry to a new school, a credit card and petty cash to live off till her first paycheck arrived; my meta-awareness was showing me a lot more than Agent Haffrun was explicitly saying.

That got me thinking about how much passed unnoticed even in the life of a celebrity like Heartbeat. I’d never thought of her going to school in Brassport. I’d just assumed she had private tutors. It would probably be safer if she did, but I could kind of understand why they’d want to keep her in school for socialization purposes.

“Have you ever thought of joining the Bureau?” Agent Haffrun asked. Her tone conveyed only casual curiosity but the question hit me like a brick anyways.

No! I wanted to scream. I don’t wanted to give up my family for who knows how long. I don’t want to be poked and prodded and “tested” in some secret facility. “Dissected like a frog” was the usual joke people made but at the moment all I could imagine was someone cutting open my head to see how my brain worked.

“We employ a lot of non-powered people after all, about ten for each metahuman.” Agent Haffrun pointed out. She’d noticed the impact her earlier words had on me. She knew what my instinctive panic meant. Knew that it confirmed her belief that I was a metahuman. I might as well have blurted it out, and yet she wasn’t concerned about it either. Instead she continued on, not pressing the issue in any way.

“It’s not something you’d need to decide on for a while, but if you’re interested there are some high school level programs we run to familiarize people your age with what we do. It takes a lot of work to meet our recruitment requirements so we like people to be able to start thinking about it early on.” she explained.

“That sounds…interesting.” I replied forcing the muscles of my face to thaw.

“We try to keep it fun. Otherwise we wind up with a class of teenagers nodding off for the whole week and nobody gets anything out of it.”

“Just let us sleep in past 6:00am and we’d probably be fine.” I joked.

“Is that the time you get up for school?” she asked.

“Yeah, sometimes earlier if my step-Dad needs the car in the morning.”

“Ugh. That’s almost criminal.”

“When do you get up?”

“I work a late shift so there’s only one 6 o’clock in my day and it’s not that one.”

I laughed. On some level I was still suspicious that she was manipulating me, but on another it was so hard not to like her.

“Speaking of the late shift though, I shouldn’t keep you here too long. Especially if you need to get up for 6:00 tomorrow.”, Agent Haffrun shuffled the notes in her manilla folders,

“I’ve read the report the first responders put together. Could you review it and see if you can think of anything they missed or that might be helpful to add?” she asked as she slid one of the folders over to me.

The report was pretty dull. Clipped phrases that could still be parsed as basic English. All direct observations without the embellishments that would have captured how surreal the experience was. Reading the report I got the sense of this being a bland, everyday sort of event, notable only for the potentially serious danger to a minor. Despite that it seemed to cover all the facts that were provably true.

I still wasn’t sure how what I remembered fit in with the real world, so I didn’t feel like I needed to mention anything about that. Maybe after I talked to Pen, if I could talk to Pen, I’d have a better idea what was going on. I could always call and explain things then. Or send an anonymous note or something.

“It looks good. I think they got everything we said.” I told Agent Haffrun as I push the envelope back to her.

“That’s your copy actually. If you can keep it and read it again tomorrow, I’d appreciate that. Sometimes we remember little details once we’re back in a less stressful environment and for cases like this one the little details can make all the difference in the world.”

“Oh, okay.”

“My card’s in there too. Feel free to call me anytime if you remember something. The bureau doesn’t have an office in town so I’m renting an apartment while I’m here. The address is on the card or you can reach me here through the police if something comes up.”

She was giving me her address? That seemed weird until intuition and awareness filled in the blanks. She knew I was a metahuman. She was letting me leave so she probably didn’t think I was a villain in disguise. If I wasn’t going to come forward and register she wasn’t going to pressure me and risk me going rogue.

She’d watch me and she’d make it easy for me to seek her out for help when, not if, I needed it. In her view, working with a “Mask” was much better than alienating someone of unknown capabilities who was reluctant to become a public ally.

My awareness caught something else though. She was alone. That meant she was fairly senior and was trusted to handle things in her own way. I’d been lucky to run into her. There were certainly people in the FBMA who favored more of a “hard sell” approach and looked on metahumans as a resource “to be obtained by any means necessary”.

There’d been stories that had surfaced of the Bureau’s practices years ago that showed what a bad idea that could be and how more than a few villains had gotten their start that way. Some people don’t learn much from history though.

“It looks like we’ll have the Task Force set up to pursue the Shadow Court ready shortly. That should mean that you’ll be safe to leave here within the hour.” Agent Haffrun said as she stood. I got up too, seeing that the interview was over.

I felt stunned in a good way for a change. I’d been dreading the interview so much and it had turned out to be relatively painless aside from a scare I’d inflicted on myself. I’d come into the room expecting to have to defend myself with only the ragged tatters of wits that I had left. Instead it felt like I’d found someone who might be an ally if it turned out I needed one.

“It was a pleasure to meet you Miss Smith.” Agent Haffrun said and extended her hand.

“It was nice to meet you too.” I replied as I shook her hand. Her hand felt normal and warm in mine but something in the contact was different.

A vista opened in my mind’s eye. An alien world of gleaming spires and sprawling civilization. Agent Lynn Haffrun’s homeworld.

The Hollow Half – Chapter 6

“Jin! Are you ok?” my brother’s very worried voice came to me.

I opened my eyes. I was laying on a cot in an unfamiliar room.

In the police station.

Couldn’t tell how I knew that though.

My thoughts were a jumble.

Someone else was there. Someones.

Desk clerk. Seen everything. I’m nothing new. Beat cop with first aid training behind him. Wonders if I’m on drugs. Not. Maybe should be. Wonders if I’m a supervillain. Not. Maybe crazy?

I looked at James and saw a mask. No, that was James. No mask.

“Give her a moment.” the medical cop said. “She’s probably little disoriented.”

He was at my side, checking my eyes.

“Doesn’t look like a concussion.” Minor meta-human power. Could have been a doctor, but his Dad was a cop, so he is too. “Any problem with your vision?”

“No. I’m ok. Just…how did I get here?” I asked. They’d brought me here when I passed out. We’d been at the check in desk and I’d collapsed and the glass doors had shattered. They thought I’d been hit by whatever had broken the doors. James had freaked out thinking I’d been shot, but there’d been no blood.

“We carried you. How are you feeling?” James asked still looking pretty worried.

“Like I passed out for no good reason.” I smiled, masking the cold fear that was growing in me.

I’d never left the police station. But I knew I had. I knew Way and her beast, Captain Rumbeard and the Star Runner were real. My memories of them were as crystal clear as the room around me.

The Sun Runner had been from a dream though. It couldn’t be real.

This was the second time I’d “woken up” from something that seemed perfectly real to something else that seemed perfectly real except this time it was worse. Waking up at the library had been weird, I’d been unsure of what was going on but I’d woken up still feeling like me. Still feeling normal.

This time I wasn’t normal. Not normal for me, not normal for anyone. The meta-awareness hadn’t gone away this time. Maybe my mind was shattering further each time?

“Can any of you hear me?” I thought to the three guys in the room with me, looking them each in the eyes briefly.

No answer.

“I’ll get her something to drink.” the medical cop said to James and the desk clerk before exiting. Getting away from the druggie supervillain before she exploded? No, just getting some apple juice to help with my blood sugar.

“Damn Jin, you scared the hell out of me.”

“Sorry. What happened? I feel like someone hit me with a bat.” I complained, rubbing the back of my head for emphasis. It was a little sore but not as bad as I was making it out. I didn’t want anyone to press me for explanations yet so I went for the sympathy card.

“Some nut shot the bullet proof doors we were near. I guess it startled you enough that you tripped over backwards and clocked your head on the counter.” James explained.

“Don’t worry. Some clowns or another’s always looking to get a rise out of us. We replace that thing about twice a month.” the desk clerk said to reassure me. He didn’t want me to worry that whoever did it was targeting us, or me specifically. It was a lie though. They hadn’t replaced the doors in six months and the timing was too coincidental. He figured whoever did it was after me but didn’t want to risk entering a police station. I’d be safe as long as I was here, in his estimation at least.

They both remembered the events wrong too. I’d dropped first, just a split second before the doors shattered. I’d been unconscious before I hit the ground. I hadn’t felt the impact at all. Or seen James run to the door to see who it was. I hadn’t watched him whirl around when he saw that no one was there and notice me sprawled at the bottom of the desk. I couldn’t have seen that, but it was clear as day in my minds eye.

I felt along my arms and back.

“Hurt anywhere else?” James asked.

“No…no I think I’m ok. Just the bump on the head.” I hadn’t been looking for bruises. I’d been looking for burns. My memories were impossible and reality didn’t match my experience. I was losing it. Or I’d lost it already.

I should have felt happy that I was still around to lose my mind at all though I supposed. The golden bolts had incinerated me. I couldn’t sense Way anymore, but I knew what my last moment had to have looked like to her. Ashes floating to earth.

I poked those memories, expecting terror and desperation and whatever else had been there to come flooding back. The emotions were there but only as a distant echo. Like a fading dream.

The medical cop came back in with the apple juice and a plastic cup.

“Thanks.” I offered in exchange for the cupful of the juice. I sipped it slowly while I tried to put my mind back together.

“How’s she doing?” Officer Smalls asked as he appeared in the doorway.

“She’ll be fine. Just a bit of a scare and a bump on the head. Damn reception desk might as well be made of concrete.” the desk clerk replied.

“Yeah, I’ll be ok.” I agreed.

“Mind if I take your brother away for a minute?” Smalls asked. He needed to know how I was going to react their interrogation and he knew he could count on James to give him the straight scoop. Whatever answer James gave they’d still have to question me though.

“Yeah, no problem. I’m fine.” I told them both. When my words didn’t ease the worried look in Jame’s eyes I raised my apple juice cup and took another sip.

See, the gesture said, just need to refuel, I’m not going to fall to pieces.

“I need to get back to the desk. Gonna be people coming for the door. Can you stay here with her until they come back?” the desk clerk asked the medical cop, gesturing to the departing Officer Smalls and James.

“Sure. Beats doing paperwork!” the beat cop joked. I didn’t seem dangerous but he was still on edge. Too tough to show it though. The guys wouldn’t let him live it down if a puny little, normal, girl like me freaked him out.

I took another sip of juice and retreated into my thoughts.

Was I still normal? Was I still sane? The whole chase and flight and death, had that all been head trauma? That didn’t explain Pen. And it didn’t explain how I knew the things I did.

A complete psychotic break? Sure, maybe. Something the Shadow Court did to me? I felt a ping when that thought crossed my mind. It wasn’t true, but it’s what the cops would come up with as a working theory if I told them anything about what I’d seen.

I probed that. How did I know it wasn’t true? I mean, if the Shadow Court had messed with my mind, wouldn’t they have programmed me to disbelieve it too?

Yes they would, and no they hadn’t. How could I know? Because they never would have given me a memory that made them seem weak or frightened. Their power came from fear, specifically the fear children have of creatures like them. Seeing a Shadow Courtier destroyed like I had? That would have shattered any binding they’d put on me.

Of course my only source for that knowledge was my crazy meta-awareness, which could again be a product of the Shadow Court.  So I couldn’t trust it. I couldn’t trust anything. If I wasn’t crazy before, I was going to be soon.

I took another sip of the juice and fought to keep my inner turmoil off my face. I wanted to break down and cry, or scream, or just laugh hysterically but that wasn’t going to help.

“Hey, Simmons, get your gear. We just got another Class 1” an older officer said as he paused at the door to the room.

A Class 1 call meant a metahuman incident. I knew that one from being a book head. No meta-awareness needed.

“Another one? Damn tonight’s a busy one. What happened?” Simmons, the medical cop who’d been sitting with me asked.

“Somebody blew up half of the old factories out in South End. Then they crashed a boat into one of them!” Waid, the older officer explained. He’d seen worse, but not often and he’d hated every call like that he’d ever gotten.

Wait…a boat?

“Is anybody there?” I asked.

“Yeah, Heartbeat’s already on scene. She’s the one who called it in.” Waid explained. He wasn’t all that eager to leave so answering the question didn’t bother him.

“How do you crash boat into a building? Some ‘roid monkey toss a canoe through a window or something?” Simmons asked.

“Ain’t a canoe. Heartbeat said it was a Galleon. One of them big sail boat things.”

I grabbed the edge of the cot before I fell out of it.

“Woah, you ok?” Simmons asked.

“Yeah. Just a little woozy still. Shouldn’t have tried to get up there.” I said. I hadn’t been trying to get up, but neither of them had been paying attention so it seemed plausible to them.

“You going to be ok? I can get someone else.” Simmons offered. He couldn’t really. The damage to the South End meant everyone was going to have a busy night.

“Yeah. I’ll just rest here and wait for James and Officer Smalls to get back. No problem at all!” I wanted to jump to my feet and bounce around the room like a ping pong ball.

I wasn’t crazy! It was all real! I…I was in mortal peril still.

That calmed me down.

I was in mortal peril, but apparently being burned alive hadn’t been enough to actually kill me. That was good. I could work with that.

Maybe I was invulnerable? Not something I was eager to test and it wouldn’t fit what I’d experienced. It was something stranger than that. My meta-awareness wasn’t filling in the details either. Apparently I wasn’t omniscient in any useful ways. Just in odd ones.

What I needed was to talk to someone who knew what was going on. Pen. I needed to talk to Pen again.

“Hey! Pen! Come on, come out and talk to me.” I thought, really really loudly.

No answer.

Instead, James returned with Officer Smalls. I put on my best face. I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t a delicate flower. They didn’t need to worry about me.

“They still need to question us Jin. Think you’re up for that?” James asked.

“No problem. What about the boat though? Don’t you need to check that out?” I asked Officer Smalls.

“Boat?” James looked at Smalls. For a second I wondered if I’d dreamed up the cops too. That’s how far off balance the night had left me.

“Yeah, we had another call. We’ve already got units on the scene.” Smalls informed James. Specifically James. Huh. That was odd.

“Ok.” James answered simply.

“If you’ll follow me then Miss Smith.” Officer Biggs said.  He’d been waiting in the hallways behind Smalls.

I got out of the cot easily, since I wasn’t actually hurt, and followed Biggs out of the room. He turned away from the hallway that lead to the interrogation rooms. James wasn’t following me either.

“James?” I said, asking “aren’t you coming too?” silently.

“If you can handle it, I thought I’d go with Smalls to get the car. They’re short staffed and you know Dad needs it tomorrow.” he answered.

I turned the idea over. On the one hand I’d feel a lot better if I had someone I could trust at my side. On the other, James was probably safer being away from me at the moment. Whatever was happening had shattered bulletproof glass and then blown up a bunch of buildings.

What had happened to the police cruisers in the parking lot, I wondered idly? I’d seen the door destroyed by Way’s beast, but it had only been broken when I woke up. Maybe the police cruisers were in better shape too? For that matter maybe the factories were too? ‘Half the South End’ had to have been an overstatement of the damage that was done.

If I couldn’t find out tonight, there’d be reports online tomorrow, so I filed those questions away as ones to worry about later.

“That sounds good.” I told James, aware that I’d paused a worryingly long time before responding.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. C’mon, I’m in a police station, its not like the Big Bad Wolf is going to get me here or anything.” I flashed on the memory of Way’s beast coming through the door. Well, it had missed me. Somehow.

“Yeah, I know but it might take a while. You know, if they’re not done with the car yet.” James half stammered. Lied. By omission.

I tried to focus my awareness on what I was missing but I got nothing. Plain old intuition had no idea either. Whatever he was hiding didn’t concern me I guess.

“I’ll be fine. Go. Remember though, you’re the one who has to tell Dad about all this.” I joked, letting him see I was serious.

Officer Biggs led me upstairs rather than to the interrogation rooms. He paused at the door to a small conference room.

“Agent Haffrun, this the witness we spoke of, Jin Smith. Jin, this is Agent Haffrun of the Bureau of Metahuman Affairs. She’s been assigned to your case.” Biggs informed me.

My case?, I thought, Didn’t he mean ‘The Shadow Court Case’?

My meta-awareness filled in the answer. No, he meant “The Case of Jin Smith”. It was my case because Agent Haffrun was here for me. She knew I was a new metahuman. Which meant that the only question was whether she thought I was a superhero or a supervillain.