Story: Chimera: Class of 666
Part: One "Waking Up"
Chapter: Two "Boots"
Authored by:
Hannah Nyland (The Irreverent Revenant)
All Rights Reserved.
Chimera:
Class of 666
By Hannah Nyland and Jerad
Sayler
The
cold air sings over my face as I step outside. It feels really good right now.
The street is unusually quiet. People all have places to be, seeing loved ones,
traveling the spaces between the cities. On nights like these Beulah seems like
a ghost town. A place of perpetual
winter and silence.
I
head down the street to my left, powder on the driveway crunching under my
boots. The road slopes gently down the hill to a semi-cul-de-sac and then
further down. Christmas tree lights flash and sparkle on every other house. The
sound of snow and crusted ice underfoot is a muffled metronome. That and the slight but ever present North
Dakota breeze are the only sounds that reach my ears.
My
head is still swimming. The air is crystallized and crisp, clear as can be with
a million brilliant stars above. Wait, that actually helps. I turn my head
upwards as I walk through the dark between streetlights. As I walk I focus on
the stars above. They are less busy. Well
that isn’t true? But their paths are
so graceful and gradual. The space between, the oceans of time and distance,
and any minds in the great beyond are too far away to feel.
When
I look back down, nearing the circle of light beneath the streetlamp at the
base of the cul-de-sac, Jack is standing in the center of it. He is wearing a
black P-coat, black leather gloves, blue jeans and those buckled Harley boots
that look so similar to the ones I am wearing now. My pace slows as a spike of
panic takes hold. No foot prints. How did he…?
My
body is buzzing. My senses swim around
him, trying to get a read and get nothing but a generic calm. He doesn’t look
calm. He is smiling but it’s strained. He reaches out a gloved hand into the
air, open towards me, and says something which makes the Earth beneath me
vibrate.
The
spoken and unfamiliar syllables transcend anything remotely approaching mundane
words. They are symbols that almost seem to form in the air of his breath. They
resonate with so much meaning as I watch, transfixed, and my heart beating
rapidly, but their meaning escapes me.
I
feel a pressure, a soft wave of tingling energetic shocks roll over my skin. His voice has a boom beneath it like the low
bass of sub-woofer speakers and then all my unnatural sensory inputs vanish as
he clenches the fist and makes a sweeping gesture with his gloved hand. The buzzing is just… gone.
“There.”
He says with finality. “You shouldn’t be walking around with all those spells
on you, you looked like you were going to pass out.” What he says doesn’t make
a lick of sense but I do feel better. It’s so quiet and calm.
His
face is warm, placating, and almost too sincere. “Sky, it’s okay, just relax
okay? Everything is going to be okay… “After his gesture that tore the energy
flowing through my body in fractal geometries his gentle posture and words seem
contrary.
I
feel the slight pressure again and I suddenly feel a lot calmer. My heart rate drops and my breathing slows
from the brink of hyperventilation slows to a sigh.
“When
did this happen?” he asks.
“.
. . Thank you,” I whisper. Though I’m not sure which part I’m thanking him for
– that my mind is still and quiet for the first time in weeks, or the
revelation that I’m not quite so alone as I thought. Either way, a burden has
just been lifted. The fact that he is actually here, completely impossibly, has
not sunk in yet. Very little is sinking in right now. I’m better, but I feel
numb, almost hollow. Being deprived of my additional senses after so much time
leaves an almost physical emptiness. Having them silenced is a godsend at the
moment, but a part of me already misses them.
Awareness
slowly starts to dawn on me. To my embarrassment, I realize that I look like a
frightened child right now and struggle to fix my facial expression into
something more stoic. Saying I don’t like being seen like this is an
understatement. Weak. Then a second
realization hits; he asked me a question. Silence for a few more moments, until
I’m able to get myself well enough in order to get anything out. He waits
patiently.
“About
a month ago. I mean – that’s when it started.” There was probably a more
eloquent way to say that, but words are not coming easily right now.
My
cousin nods as if he knows very well what I mean. “Has anyone else spoken to
you?” He shakes his head before I can respond.
“No, no of course not.” He smiles sadly “I’m guessing you saw a tower?” He shakes his head again and waves his hand is
a dismissive gesture. “Gods, where to start?”
This
time I wait and after a few moments he starts again. In a way, he seems almost as flustered as I
am.
“Okay,
most importantly, you are not alone. What is going on with you is normal… okay
no, not normal, but its okay. I can help you, I can teach you to control what
you are doing. You have become in-tuned with a higher power. And you are
inadvertently using your will to alter reality itself. You have felt it, right?
You are seeing and understanding things that no normal person can know, the
powers behind everything.” His words
hang in the air like meaningless noise as I try to grasp them.
He pauses before continuing. “Sky…
you have awakened to magic. That means your eyes are open. The rest of mankind
is asleep, just living their normal lives. Your senses are finally open to
perceive the core of truth behind every aspect of the physical and
spiritual worlds. You can see the signals in the carrier wave. You have gained a connection to a higher
plane of existence. Another dimension where of pure and ultimate truth,
the code that sets the rules for all of existence. You can see the code now.
Reality is like a piece of cloth, and you can see the individual fibers that
make up the cloth.”
I
frown, look down at my boots and adjust my glasses compulsively. Buying time.
Because I honestly have no idea how to respond to any of this, and by the looks
of it Jack is having a rough time explaining it. I’m standing here talking
about magic and higher planes of reality with my cousin, who by all logic could
not have gotten in front of me. Magic. Higher
realities. Truth? My brain should have short-circuited by now. It might’ve,
were I not currently already experiencing such a massive disconnect from
reality. Some of it is getting through, but an eerie, numb calm has settled
over my mind. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
A month ago I would have thought he was completely nuts, and even now he
sounds like a crazed evangelical preacher.
He
raises his right hand, his fingers pointed upwards in a cupping motion. “Sky,
you are one of the Wise. You are a Mage. And yeah, we call what we do magic,
altering the forces of reality. Just
like in every major mythology all over the world… and there is a reason for
that.”
“Come
to think of it, I never felt magic was a good name for what we do. Sufficiently
advanced technology could be seen as magic.” He shakes his head. “No, there
have been a lot of scholars on that one and we still call it magic. The name
given by the secret histories and legends. There is perhaps no better word for
its all-encompassing preview. You can
call it whatever you want: reality-hacking, high magicka, ki, sorcery…” He
trails off.
At
this point Jack does a literal facepalm with one black gloved hand. “Fuck, why
this is so hard?” He asks himself. “You’d think with all the things I know, all
the things I’ve seen and done this would be second hand. After a brief pause he seems to realize the
air won’t answer him. He sighs in
exasperation.
“Okay,
I guess there is no easy or gentle way to start talking about this. That or I hopelessly lack the subtlety to do
it.” He turns back, watching me and
gauging my reactions. I wonder what he would do, in a detached sort of way, if
I ran or fainted or screamed.
I take a deep breath, and manage to look him
in the eyes again. Jack is still standing there, looking concerned. Not a
hallucination then. A pause. When did my life get so weird? This might be less
uncomfortable for everyone if I just freaked out. Cried or blacked out or burst
into hysterical laughter. Or even just asked a question instead of staring
mutely.
Feeling
the need to provide a reaction of some kind, I latch onto the first thing I can
think of. Something amusingly inconsequential, considering everything I have
just been told in the last few seconds. “What exactly did you do, a minute ago?
It was like there was all this static in my head, and then it was just gone.”
He
blinks once, twice, then seems to finally accept I am not about to toss my
cookies. Maybe my recent trials have
hardened me from such impersonal statements. He seems to relax visibly,
relieved to switch to something of a lecture.
“Whether
you realized it or not you have been weaving spells into yourself, pulling down
this transdimensional energy and giving it a construct shaped by your focus,
mental desire and design. It’s not as easy as just wanting to do something. You
put the correct images and equations together, the right framework to get
something out of it. They didn’t look
very efficient, but it’s not unheard of to have a knack for the The Sights
right off the bat. You started calling down the power and seeing part of how
the world really operates. It’s almost like we're in a hologram... Okay wait, I
think I have covered too many earth-shattering metaphors and analogies for one
night. And I did not answer your question.”
He
takes a breath, exhaling it in a steamy cloud that catches mistily in the
street light. A car starts to turn up the street, heading on an intercept
course with us, standing in the middle of a snowy cul-de-sac. He stares
intently at it, muttering under his breath, and the car signals right and turns
down another street. His face relaxes.
Jack
turns back to me. “The spells you had cast were too inefficient and you had
overloaded your pattern with them. The body can only hold so much magic at a time
before you start to feel sick. The
exotic energy cannot be held in large amounts inside yourself without feeling
dizzy, weak, or any number of other unfortunate side effects. So what I did was
reach out and dispelled them, tore apart those constructs that your
subconscious had filled with magic.”
He
looks at me appraisingly. “Now you’re
not getting all those data feeds. That's
okay though, even without The Sights, if you pay attention, you will be able to
detect things about the world around you. Magi are especially sensitive to the
supernatural, kind of like Spiderman’s ‘spidey sense.’ If you have only been at
this a month I am impressed you’ve managed that much already..."
He
mutters in that strange language that seems to be at once advanced and primitive,
meaningful but incomplete, muffled and clear. He gestures at us, circling his
hand and clasping a knife at his hip. Suddenly I feel warmer, the cold North
Dakota winter seeping away as the air around us is filled with warmth.
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