The huge blue flyer clung on to her as
they fell through the tear, but it was dying, which gave her only small
satisfaction; she was sure that she was dying too. It seemed so unfair – just
as love had lit everything up so brightly.
She didn’t fear death, in fact she felt no fear at all floating in that
strange environment, but she did feel unbearably bereft.
All around her were
blue clouds, each chasing and devouring its own tail. Otherwise it was just a
sky of deep azure, left, right, above and below. The tear that led back into
her world healed almost immediately; she hoped for one last glimpse of Owen,
but even in the its final closing all that it revealed was the grey smudge of
their disappearing room; the room that they had just made love in.
She wondered very
briefly whether it might not be better to close her eyes and be destroyed: she
saw no way that she could survive. But
then she thought of Owen and what had just happened between them. She realised
that she would try anything if it might get her back to him. And then she
smelled magic; a stench so overpowering that at first she could scarcely stand
it. It was all around her, impossible to avoid. Something became crystal clear – this was a
world, perhaps even a universe, made of magic.
She allowed her
witch’s senses to assess the environment.
She needed no spells for this. If
she let the energy flow into her she could somehow survive – there was no
breathing in this strange world, but it appeared that a magical thing, at
least, could persist, if perhaps only for a while, just on the available energy.
The all-encompassing magical charge was raw, however, and it could not be fashioned
easily into anything useful, but it could be employed to sustain herself. It
seemed clear enough, however, that any non-magical being would be ripped apart
rapidly in the magical winds.
There were blue
creatures drifting up towards her, a strange menagerie of beasts, some with
suckers, some with rasping mouths, and some with rows of plates extruding from
their maws, like giant needles on a grotesquely oversized sewing card. Their
shapes were indistinct and protean, but they looked vaguely like fish or
squids, or perhaps giant marine worms. She
knew exactly what they would do to her and now she thought she had worked out
why. She, like John before her, was a source of distilled magic, refined to a
subtle piquancy. It was no wonder that they wanted to feed on her after all
that rubbish that they normally swam in.
All the while she
could sense that the coven was trying to help her. She could feel an extra flow
of refined magic into her, from a metacathexis
she suspected, but the problem at that moment wasn’t a dearth of magic but
an excess. She could feel her magical capacity reaching its natural limit as
the energy flooded into her. She feared
that she might just explode. She had to lose some energy and somehow get rid of
the advancing monstrosities. She smiled grimly– perhaps she could combine the
two? Maybe she could use the covens’
controlled power to vent the excess energy away and scatter her would-be
predators at the same time. She searched around in her memory for a little
spell that she had learned as a student – one intended to allow student witches
to get rid of spell energy when an incantation had failed. She hadn’t used it
very often, but nonetheless it was definitely worth a try.
‘Agorfa’ she yelled. The energy
building up around her rushed out, like oil on the top of a sheet of water. All
the creatures that had been quite lazily drifting towards her were swept away,
rolling down the energy gradient back to where they came from. She smiled
weakly; at least that threat was averted.
She twisted so that
she could survey the whole sky. She stared as hard as she could but she could see
no edges to it. She had assumed that she
must be, in some sense at least, close to the boundary between the real world
and the cloud one. If that were true she couldn’t tell it from where she was
floating.
For a while
everything was quiet and calm, but inexorably the magical charge inside her
began to build up again. Clouds amassed around her and now their behaviour was
changing – it seemed that now she had become their gravity. They began to rain
down on her, a torrent of untamed, naked, magic.
It was all too much –
even with the coven’s help. She vented the energy time after time but she was
becoming increasingly physically exhausted. Her body thrilled with the raw
power, she had never felt stronger, but she also knew that past a certain point
her body would be worn out and then the energy would engulf her and she would
be obliterated, as if she were the centre of an exploding star. Very soon she
would be too tired to vent the magic away. There was part of her that wondered
how it would look to an observer as she exploded. She just hoped that it would be suitably
spectacular. It was exhilarating to have so much power, but that wouldn’t last
very much longer. Very soon she would have to surrender to it.
Without any warning
Boo appeared in her arms. Reflexively,
she held on to the little tree shrew. All the accumulated energy roared into
the tupaia, her huge ears pointing straight upwards, her fur rippling as she
absorbed the power. Boo had come, attracted by the extraordinary conglomeration
of energy that she had somehow sensed, even from the other world.
The space around them,
as far as she could see, had been bled grey and for the time being nothing was
moving in it – no clouds and no creatures. They both fell asleep, exhausted but
intact.
Time stretched out uncertainly. Nothing much
changed in the strange grey space that Boo had created. However, the energy
drain was so huge that it was noticed. There were creatures from the real
world, spindly insect-like beings that lived on the very edge of the void. They
were forever vigilant for the monsters that congregated around the borders of
existence and they had watchers who scanned the boundless sky. Those watchers
saw the empty space almost immediately, and as it was fairly close they sent
out scouts to investigate.
They woke Celia up as
they approached her, but as no sound passed through the Outer Void they were
unable to communicate. Celia was too tired to attempt a fight, and in any case
they were clearly normal physical creatures – they might help her. They had
suits of some kind covering their spindly bodies and from the suits projected
scaly wings. Four of them flew above her
and grabbed hold of her dressing gown with short taloned claws. She held on
tight to the comatose Boo, but could not fight her need to sleep. The other insects kept watch, skittering backwards and
forwards, inspecting every angle for approaching enemies.
Slowly they pulled
the pair through the dead space and back to their pods, habitations half in one
world and half in the other. They located a safe cell as far into Nux as
possible and then left their two unexpected visitors to rest. After that they
called a hive meeting.
No comments:
Post a Comment