Saturday, September 26, 2015

Chimera: Class of 666 | 1.2.1 | Part One "Waking Up" | Chapter Two "Boots"

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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