The Twelfth Hour

Void of stars. How can that be?
I search for a reason. I try to trace the lines back in my memory…
what could I have possibly done to turn the sky black?
The trouble is that I can’t remember.
It seems that I fell asleep.

When I was young and the sky was still littered with stars, the Sorcerer came to visit Yantel. He had been seeking a pupil for many years, and no doubt he visited many other villages and hamlets and perhaps even great cities, all to no avail. There were a handful of applicants for the job in my village and a crowd gathered to witness the trial.
The Sorcerer lined the prospective apprentices up. To each one he posed the same question:

“Who is the great magician who makes the sky blue and the grass green?”

“You are, oh great Askander!” one tried and the Sorcerer shook his head and moved on.

“It must be Philoneous the Second, council to the wise King in Arander.” Tried another. Again the sorcerer merely shook his head and continued down the line.

Various mythic Sorcerers and fairytale witches were named. One somber youth suggested it was the King of the Gods, but all were met with a shake of the head.

“No apprentice here.” The sorcerer announced and the crowd sighed with disappointment.

I laughed and the Sorcerer turned and caught my eyes with his. There were stars in his eyes too, if I remember rightly, or at least there was the fire that burns in stars.

“What is your answer?” he asked.

“Mine? I, I’m not an applicant.” I stammered.

“But you think you know the real answer. Tell me.”

I swallowed, slowly recovering myself.

“The answer is me. I am the magician who makes the sky blue and the grass green.”

“Tell me why you think that is the answer.” The magician demanded.

With a shrug I obliged.

“Well, have you ever had a dream? How do you know that this is not a dream? If life is a dream, if I am a dream, then I am also the dreamer, and if so then I am responsible for giving sky and the grass their color.”

“But life is life, it is not a dream.” One of the flustered applicants informed me.

“Then you have not dreamed as I have dreamed. Nor lived life as I have lived it.” I retorted.

The young man began to object again but the Sorcerer waived a dismissive hand at him and said to me,

“Get your things and come with me if you are ready to learn The Terrible Way and one day become a Sorcerer.”

I did not tell my parents I was leaving, they wouldn’t have let me go, and I did not gather my things. I left the village right then with Askander. I left my family’s land and the sheep it was my job to tend and the girl my parents would have wanted me to marry in a few years. I left my brothers and bread baking in the oven and warm sleepy afternoons watching clouds pass over the hillsides. I asked my younger brother to tell our parents goodbye for me.  With Askander leading the way I walked out of the village and along a lonely road and up the mountain path under millions of stars and a new white moon. There were most definitely stars then, and if the sky was a color, then it was indigo.

I spent 12 years in Askander’s tower doing as I was told each day. There were stars in all of that time. Most often I was told not to do this or that. Do not open that book. If a door appears in the west end of the tower, do not open it. If a maiden arrives and begs for help or sanctuary, do not let her in and do not go out. Do not eat garlic. Do not drink wine. Do not touch my hat.

There was so much that I did not do, but there were some things that I did. Mostly sweeping, mopping, cooking, washing, emptying chamber pots, feeding goats and chickens, weeding the garden. Sometimes, however, I was shown how to do something extraordinary, though I think I occasionally failed to notice precisely how extraordinary they were at the time.

I learned how to breathe as the dragons breathe and walk in the shadow land between worlds. The technique for turning lead into gold was revealed to me but I found it hard to master and was stuck in practice each day. I also learned the names of many stars and looked at them through a magickal glass studying their movement across the sky. Thus I know they were there then, for I was a careful observer of all of their habits and color.

I worked from dawn until midnight each day with time split between chores, basic education, and my more obvious magickal studies and practices. There were never enough hours in the day to complete the tasks given me, and I was always tired when it was time to lay my head upon my pillow of straw. Askander himself was tireless. He worked furiously at his alchemical practices all through the morning as I did my chores, saw to my education through the afternoon, resumed his own research in his vast library as I practiced my magickal work, checking in on me from time to time to critique and adjust my practice, and then when I lay down to sleep he continued his own work all through the night, never sleeping a wink.

In 12 years Askander never slept. I would, now and then, awake in the night and tip toeing from my chamber, observe him on the balcony in his study of the night sky with the magickal glass, or find him creating charts of the stars, or maps of the shadows. Some nights I dared not open a closed door, transfixed in terror of the frightful sounds and voices vibrating through the walls. Other nights I would go down to the garden in the walled courtyard to see the sparks of light showering out of the windows of Askander’s chambers at the top of the tower. Most nights I slept, too exhausted to entertain curiosity.

The night came, I remember there were still stars, when Askander told me that he would sleep. I was now told that Askander would at last take his respite for a period of 24 hours. He unveiled for me a device for keeping track of the time. I was charged with remaining awake as he slept, and awakening him by ringing a bell after the 24^th hour.

He went into his room and lay down on his much unused mattress. I covered him with the blanket and watched him close his eyes and fall almost instantly asleep. Sitting with him for a while my eyes scanned over the titles upon the spines of the walls of books surrounding us. When I was sure that he was asleep I stood and removed one volume from the shelf and leafed gently through the pages before sliding it softly back into place. Askander was truly deeply asleep. It had certainly been a lonely 12 years, but now for the first time in so long I was actually alone.

I went out on his balcony and beheld the constellations blazing bright. I was struck then, by the certainty that each star was a Sorcerer just as Askander and I, and that we drew power and light from one another. In 12 years I had felt cut off from the world and alone with my teacher who was sometimes my beloved father and sometimes an unbearable tyrant as the situation demanded. Now I saw that I could never be alone, that we were multitude, that I was one of a school of stars populating the great abyss.

Lost in thought I nearly did not hear the soft weeping coming from below, but soon it distracted me from my reverie. Peering down I saw a young woman in a torn dress tapping on the tower door. It seemed clear that she had been through some ordeal, so tattered were her garments, so pale her tear streaked cheeks. I hurried down the spiral staircase. I opened the door.

“Please sir, we were attacked by bandits and my father was killed. I escaped but have been lost in these mountains for days. I am so hungry. Can you not help me?”

I invited her in. She was cold so I clothed her, and hungry so I fed her, or rather I showed her to the kitchen larder and she cooked for us both. I had not enjoyed a meal since beginning my apprenticeship as I was the cook, and not good at it. Full and content I sat next to the hearth with her and asked her name. I do not now recall it. She told me that she had seen a bottle of wine in the larder and went to retrieve it. At first I declined when she offered to fill my cup.

“One drink is not vice.” She said as she filled her own cup. I accepted.

 We sipped our wine and watched the flames dance for a while and she began to sing.

It was a beautiful song. One might say, enchanting. It reminded me first of my youth in Yantel, of being a boy watching the grass of the fields sway in the breeze and wondering about the world and the heavens and myself. Then it carried me away to Arander to the white city walls and blue and gold flags whipped by the wind. A princess stood on the wall looking out over the forest, waiting for her father’s return. Inside the forest a starving Cobbler’s son was hunting a golden stag but when the Cobbler’s son drew his arrow the stag saw him and said,

“Spare my life and I will grant you a wish.”

So the youth asked for the hand of the princess. He let the stag go, not really believing his wish could be fulfilled, and left the forest still hungry, but on the road he saw a man besieged by bandits and once more drew his bow. This time he shot true, killing one bandit so the others fled. The man on the road was the King returning from a pilgrimage to the fountain where he had been praying for a worthy husband for his daughter. He brought the Cobbler’s son back to the castle to wed the princess. At the wedding the princess played her lute and sang to her bridegroom with a voice like golden honey. Thereafter she sat the foot of the bed and played for him each night until he fell asleep. On the twelfth night as he was close to slumber, he opened his eyes and beheld an old woman sitting at the foot of the bed, strumming the loot and singing. She was not the fair beauty he thought he had wed, but a gnarled and bent creature with stringy, greasy grey hair hanging limp under her crown. She leered at him with hallow eyes and grinned with a cavernous mouth lacking many teeth.

That was when I realized that my own eyes had shut. Startled, I opened them and found that I sat alone in the darkness before a cold hearth. I searched clumsily in the darkness for a candle and a match. When it was lit I fumbled in my pocket for the time keeping device. Its many moving parts had stopped and the indicator had frozen upon the twelfth hour. How much time had really passed? Full of dread I raced up the stairs to Askander’s chamber at the top of the tower. He was gone. I called out his name. I found the bell and rang it and called for him before I came here to the balcony and beheld the sky. Void of stars.

How can that be?

Even now that I have remembered so much, I am unsure. When was it that I fell asleep? In the field as a child? Have I only dreamed that I was selected to be a sorcerer’s apprentice? Or am I truly the apprentice that failed his master and let all the stars die? My foolishness, my disobedience, my failure to keep my master’s way as it was taught me resulting in disaster. Perhaps I am the Sorcerer himself who is yet to reach the twelfth hour, quietly dreaming of being my own apprentice, letting the fear that he will fail me take sway.  

Or am I really a Cobbler’s son fallen prey to some plot and wed to a witch? Now she sits at the foot of my bed singing me a nightmare of fallen sorcerers and fallen stars. Are any of these dreams more or less dreams than any of the others? More or less real? I search for a reason. I try to trace the lines back in my memory.

What could I have possibly done to turn the sky black?
It seems that I fell asleep, but when?

The Magical Cake

None of the four Plum children ever understood their great uncle Alexander. He kept a great many strange artifacts in glass display cases throughout the house and begged the children to be careful whenever they visited. Running within the house was strictly prohibited. While some of the objects appeared to be quite valuable, others seemed questionable. In one case was kept an ugly wooden goblet which Uncle Alexander insisted  was, in fact, the holy grail, though their mother always pooh poohed this notion whispering to them that he had found it at a garage sale. The same sale, in fact, where she had obtained a rather obnoxious chicken shaped lamp.

In another case what appeared to be a potato sack was nestled between a beautiful ball of solid gold and a ring encrusted with diamonds and sapphires. Nearby this display also stood a shabby antique spinning wheel and a case containing a shoe made of milky blue glass that looked as though it might fit the foot of a 12 year old girl. In one case rested a decaying ball of thread, in another a bejeweled statue, and in yet another some aboriginal instruments adorned with feathers and bones. But of all the oddities preserved within Alexander Plum’s home, perhaps the most unexpected was a cake of unknown antiquity displayed on a solitary pedestal beneath a glass dome in the middle of his library.

While Addi Boo and Baby Ray chased bullfrogs by the pond in the garden and  Buddy  pilfered cigars to smoke behind the garden shed, Tilly Plum  stood transfixed for hours in front of the cake in the library. The frosting was an odd grayish color, which she supposed had once been white and probably would have tasted of vanilla. She would stand there wondering what flavor the cake might have been and what flavor it might still be if one were to taste it now. But most of all she wondered for what occasion it had originally been prepared and why it had never been eaten.

As the years passed and the Plum children aged Tilly continued to visit the strange gray cake in the library, memorizing the contours of the shell borders, roses and drop flowers. She took to cake baking and decorating at home, producing many replicas for birthdays, special dinners, and holidays.
Baby Ray once complained that she always made the same boring cake in different flavors. He, of course, didn’t realize that for Tilly, each cake was a different version of one particular cake whose true nature she could never know for certain. On one occasion Uncle Alexander found Tilly in his library deep in her meditations of butter cream, whipped cream, and royal icing. By this time Buddy was off in college and Addi Boo and Baby Ray had graduated to pilfering cigars to smoke behind the garden shed.

“I see something here has caught your eye.” Uncle Alexander said, coming to stand beside Tilly.
She nodded eagerly.
“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, no touching, nor tasting.” her uncle added.
“Oh no. I know,” she told him emphatically. “I can have cake any other time. I would never touch this one. I just always wonder why it’s here.”
“Oh, well, I have it because it’s a magic cake,” he answered lightly and squeezed her shoulder before taking a book from the shelf and leaving the way he came.

This was indeed food for thought. That brief encounter left Tilly with more, rather than less, to wonder about. In fifth grade she penned a story entitled “The Magickal Cake.” in which a well meaning fairy godmother gave the cake as a wedding gift to a beloved princess. The princess was killed by a wicked witch and the kingdom fell under a dark spell leaving the cake uneaten. Its powers went unused and unknown.
Mrs.Gruber’s comments were written with scathing red ink in the margin, “Why is the cake magical? Why even mention the cake, if you don’t describe what it does? The story did not have the three elements of a story. There is no clear resolution to the conflict. Points deducted for spelling and punctuation. C-”

Naturally, Tilly was incensed. She wrote her own notes in the opposite margin.
“Three Elemints of  A story: 1.The begining: A mysteryous magical cake is made. 2. The conflict: A princes is going to ruin the mystery by eating it. 3. The resolutun: A wich kills her. My story is about a magiCKal cake that survives. Not a stupid princeses weding.”
After re-submitting the story with her own comments on the comments, Tilly was sent to the principal's office. Her parents were called in and the school recommended that Tilly speak with the school psychologist. Her mother, accustomed to accommodating a variety of difficult people since marrying into the Plum family, simply nodded, pursed her lips as if concerned, and indicated that they would consider the counseling. She whispered to Tilly on the way out that Mrs.Gruber had been seeing a psychiatrist for years now, in the same building, in fact, where Mrs. Plum saw a podiatrist for her corns.

For Uncle Alexander’s 106th birthday, Tilly created for him a replica of his magic cake. It was entirely undeniable by this point that Alexander Plum's magic cake had impacted his niece Tilly. After high school and some community college, she graduated from Le Cordon Bleu as a pastry chef and opened a high end cake shop on Colombus Ave.
Now, two years and one lost relationship into the endeavor, her personal funds exhausted, The Magic Cake was closing it’s doors for good. There were some last special orders to fill on Saturday, and then it would be off to the unemployment line and probably Baby Ray’s couch. Nonetheless, Tilly arrived that Friday night, cake in hand, to celebrate her uncle's continuing health and longevity.

Addi Boo was by then married with two year old triplets. Recognizing the impossibility of managing her brood in his makeshift museum, she hadn’t visited Uncle Alexander since their birth.
Baby Ray, recently divorced, came by often to keep the garden in shape, and particularly to care for the pond. He was absent on that particular Friday night, the occasion of Uncle Alexander’s sweet 106th birthday bash, due to an unavoidable trip to Las Vegas with the soon to be second Mrs. Baby Ray Plum. With Buddy in Brazil, and their parents on sabbatical in Florida, Tilly was the only other Plum in attendance, along with Uncle Alexander, and his live-in nurse, Amalia.

Uncle Alexander was surprised and delighted with Tilly’s replica of his cake. Spry as a man half his age, dinner was merry, the wine flowed. Even after Amalia had cleared the table, washed the dishes and gone to bed, Tilly and Alexander talked and drank. On the subject of his good health he chuckled and waved a hand,
“Gads girl, you know, I have the holy grail to drink from if anything ails me. That and more to scare off death.”
Of politic a weary sigh,
“Once you’ve lived as long as I have you’ve seen it all.”
And at last, of family matters, laughter, until Tilly herself was the subject. Then, too intoxicated to censor her woes, she told Alexander all that burdened her, more than she could ever tell Baby Ray or her parents. Who among them could understand her passion, her obsession with her cake shop?  Who could see the loss for what it really was? Not just a failed business, but the end of a quest.
“You know Uncle Alex, I always thought, maybe one of my cakes would end up some day under glass turning pearly gray, a cake too perfect to ever have been eaten, some little cyborg kid or something, wondering how it got there.”
She laughed sadly at herself then, but Alexander sat silent and perfectly still. His eyes had acquired a fiery gleam and his back had straightened. His manner demanded Tilly’s full attention and she felt herself sober up a little as he rose and left the room without a word.
Within minutes he returned carrying the magic cake, the original in its glass dome, and set it gently upon the table near the remains of Tilly’s replica. Tilly stopped breathing. She could feel the goose pimples rise all over her flesh as Uncle Alexander took his seat and spoke slowly in a tone she had never heard from him,
“I have lived so long you know. You kids and your parents knew me as great uncle Alexander, and you wont believe me, but your  grandfather knew me as the same. As many generations as I’ve watched come and go, and because I endure, no Plum has ever inherited one of my artifacts, nor ever shown the slightest interest in them, with one exception, long, long, ago. That makes you the second exception.”
He paused then, letting the weight of his words settle, observing Tilly’s breathless silence before continuing,
“I feel a certain responsibility to protect the items I have collected, not only from damage but from abuse. You’ve read fairytales, I’m sure, and so you must know that the guardian of a magical item can only entrust it to one whom they deem worthy. At least, that is my approach.”
Gingerly he lifted the glass dome, exposing the cake, and set it aside.
“I don’t know where it came from really. All I have found in my research is vague. I do know that it was passed down through generations of Austrian Princesses. This is the cake Marie Antoinette was referring to in her despair, when she cried, 'Let them eat cake!' And yet, even then, it seems it passed untouched. When the palace was stormed, and the royal family failed to escape, somehow, the cake did. It was returned to Austria until world war II, and then it was collected with a great many other artifacts by Adolf Hitler. After his death it made it’s way into private collections, finally mine.”
He pushed a fork across the table to her.
“I don’t know what the magic does.”
Steadying her trembling hand, Tilly picked up the fork. Slowly she brought it closer and closer to the cake she had spent countless hour admiring, speculating about, and endeavoring to reproduce. It was not, she now could see, the most artfully decorated cake. But it was pretty, if simple. She brought the fork within inches of its pearly surface. Everything was still.
She felt, for the first time, the naked strangeness of the house, its contents, her uncle, a strangeness that had always been pushed aside made into something small and silly, but now it loomed, immense, unfathomable, terrifying, and real. Suddenly, against such a backdrop, her cake shop, her financial worries, her failure in the eyes of her siblings and parents seemed inconsequential. It was her life which was silly.

In that moment, Tilly Plum knew that the cake was truly magical, and that true magic shouldn’t be squandered on petty material concerns. At the last moment she withdrew her hand and set the fork deliberately down. She took a deep breath and looked into the eyes of the man she thought of as her great uncle Alexander and wondered at all the strangeness. And he, whoever he was, whatever he was, relaxed back into his chair, his face melting once again into a broad easy smile, and said,
“Good girl.”

Qrelling

I move through the train cars at a good clip, slowing between cars only because these junctures always make me nervous. There is hardly a soul on this train, but it’s enough to warrant my presence here. I can feel that things are progressing too slowly, I have missed my target somehow and now I am moving away from him. Disaster is eminent.
“Still no visual.” I say scanning the car. My voice, transmitted by the nano mics implanted in my hair follicles, reaches Zenith back at mission control as though we were standing shoulder to shoulder.
“Copy that.” Zenith’s voice sounds in my ear. “We’re reaching critical here.”
“I know.” I tell him. And I do, I can feel it in my rising pulse, the dizzying sensation that fills my head. “The third car, the third car.” I mutter under my breath and finally a little louder I announce, “I’m going back to the third car. He should have been there. He must still be there.” I turn on my heel and retrace my steps, jogging as I go, barreling through those doors between cars. Things are really hot when I reach my destination, my head is swimming.
“Ava, you’re running out of time.” Zenith’s voice is anxious. I scan the car. An old woman taking a nap, two small girls playing a clapping game besides a mother reading a magazine, a young man bobbing his head placidly to music only he can hear.
I push into the passage between the second and third car, standing right in that in between space that terrifies me. There is a whistling sound and I notice a maintenance flap that opens to the outside of the train.
“God.” I gasp, though I don’t believe particularly in any God, “He’s outside, he’s somewhere on the outside of the third car.”
I slip through the flap, holding tight to the hand grips mounted to the side of the train. The wind hits me with an icy blast and I find myself clinging to the side of the train, bathed in the pale light of the tunnel. There he is, holding onto the outside of the car just a foot away from me, red faced, perspiring, waves of anguish and fear radiating from his body.
He has a small black beard, closely trimmed. There’s only a brief moment in which he looks over his right shoulder and stares with surprise at the woman clinging to the train beside him. Then I started Qrelling.
All that I need is that moment of eye contact. In that instant I establish a connection, I begin to speak with them in a language beyond languages, I begin to unravel time and reality as though they were strands of yarn in a multicolored scarf. There are many possible moments, this moment is only one possibility, one possible choice.
For this man, for instance, this is a moment in a string of moments that may lead to him detonating a bomb that will wreck the train ending his life and the lives of most of the other passengers. One of the little girls in the third car may miraculously survive. But like pearls I lay the moments out for him, showing him possibilities that lead him away from anguish, away from suffering, away from death and destruction.
Some Qrellers could help this man to get off of this train, but maybe a week, or a year later he hangs himself or takes a rifle into an elementary school. Maybe another Qreller is there to stop him, or maybe not.
I have a talent and it is this: I can lead this man into a possibility where he never harms himself or any other being ever again. It is a matter of being able to see far enough, of holding the attention long enough, and most of all , of being able to maintain the contact with the target in order to take him with me on this journey.
I am showing him the possibilities, leading him through a labyrinthine web of moments, offering him a way that he could not find on his own, not just saving him in this life, but in many possible lives.
Finally we find it, that way, a translucent stream flowing through a perfect array of pearly existence, Ariadne’s thread. I extend my hand and he clamps onto it, tears streaming from his eyes. We are still there when the train arrives at the next station and the rest of the team helps us onto the platform. He grabs hold of my hand again before we part, his eyes are the wide eyes of a man who has seen for the first time to the center of his own being; the heart of the labyrinth of existence.
“Thank you, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I say. There are tears in both of our eyes as we part.

Back at HQ Zenith shakes his head heavy with thick dreads and grips my shoulder grinning wide, white teeth gleaming in his dark face.
“You did it again. That’s a perfect record. 23 Ava, with no loses. No one in this division has ever come close.”
“It was a close one though.” I sigh, realizing finally that it’s over, my work for the moment is done. “You want to stop at the tea garden after operations are tied up here? I could use a warm cup of anything.”
Zenith grins wider and rubs my shoulder soothingly. There is a strange moment in which he doesn’t answer me. He only looks at me from behind that frozen grin. Then he says:
“Ava, there are some people here from Lancre.” We stare at each other.
“What do they want?”
His smile softens and he gives my shoulder another squeeze.

What is this emotion that we are feeling together? Elation. Lancre employs the most elite team of Qrellers in the world. They have access to the best and most innovative technologies and are contracted by the major global players, those whose infra structures reaches from Primus to Bedrock in their territories; the UN, the Tri-American Federation, and The Peoples Republic of Asia.
Sorrow. I’ll be leaving our little project funded by the local government and the team that trained me, the team I’ve grown with. I take a look around at our basement with white tarp functioning as dividers, Zenith’s folding table littered with electronics that look like something raided from an antique store specializing in 20th century home entertainment devices. I look back into Zenith’s familiar dark face finding his eyes again.
“23 Ava....23. With what they have at Lancre, imagine what you can do.”

Lancre is all steel and glass rising through two terra regions and breaking the surface of Primus. Hardly anyone can afford access to Primus anymore with its authentic blue skies. All of that glass takes advantage of the opportunity to flaunt such a rare view.
I am seeing true sky for the first time in this possibility. It is strangely unsettling, like looking at a prosthetic hand, except this is the real thing and what I am accustomed to is a prosthesis.
My guides through the halls of Lancre are a man and a woman in crisp black suits. Her hair is pinned in an immaculate French twist and her skirt is tight, very feminine. She does all the talking, he is silent with broad shoulders and a close haircut. He looks bored.

They have given me a brief tour of the facilities, introducing me to some of the technological advances being employed here, letting me shake hands with some of the legendary names; Felix Kaffa, Nora Al Gi. Now we are in an office of stainless steel fixtures seated at a long table.
Her name is Mia and she has already shown me the figure that will be my yearly salary, a number too large for me to comprehend the impact it will have on my life realistically. A number that simply means I shall not want for anything, ever again.
She has shown me the brochure of the living quarters offered to all Lancre Qrellers. We are free to obtain residence elsewhere if we wish, but the Lancre penthouses are equipped with state of the art equipment and facilities to help Qrellers relax and recharge. They are also above Primus where I will have access to fresh air and sunshine, and one is mine for the rest of my life, once I sign the contracts and become an agent of Lancre.

Mia is laying the contracts in front of me.
“The wonderful thing, Ava, is that you will take no more than six assignments a year, we have enough agents to rotate. You will never be overworked or overtired. And you won’t have to worry how things will get along without you because every agent at Lancre is as qualified as you are.” She tells me, handing me the thin stainless steel pen. “All I need is your signature. Then we’ll go over and select your penthouse or I can take you to meet a property manager I know who can help you find something else suitable. Tomorrow we can introduce you to your team and you can begin conditioning.”
I start to read the contract. And then I see it, the strangest thing.
“Excuse me, what does this mean?” I ask Mia
“Oh, it just means that when you are Qrelling you can’t arrange things too far. You can heal no more than three probable instances of violence.”
“What? A lot of people can’t Qrell beyond three instances. Why would you stop someone who can do more?”
Mia smiles
“Well, Lancre is a private firm. Someone pays us to avert the first three. Someone else will pay us to avert the next three."
I stare at the contract. A cold sensation washes over me. The temptation is not too strong. I feel only a slight sense of loss as I set the pen down. What is being gained is limitless, immeasurable.
“I’m sorry.” I tell her. “I am happily employed by the City States of California.”
Mia laughs a little as if she thinks I am joking. She falls silent as I stand.
“Thank you for the tour. I think you should show me out now.”
Show me back underground where I am needed, where they are wandering blind through the darkened passages of a coiled maze. I can show them the way, a way beyond skies of any color or comfort, or currency. Show me out now. I will show myself out. I will show us all out as I have always done, as I will always do, as I am doing now. Extending a hand, uncoiling a line, traveling to the center and back out again. I think you should show me the way out now, but if you won’t, then I will.

The Orange Guide

Jonas jumped off the worn metal bench as soon as he saw the balloon catch flight. It was a warm breeze that opened its arms, smelling of salt and pink flowers that bloomed in a garden not far away. He had been on the bench for hours, watching toddlers wander through a desert of sand, infants in their strollers electrified by the world above, young mothers pushing swings and sharing weary smiles of happiness with their children.
He sat there waiting, needing inspiration of some kind, an inspiration to do something he could only fail to describe. But he waited, understanding his need. This was where he turned to in times when he grasped for something, and since he lacked the ability to understand what that something was, he came to the place where little creatures acted instead of thinking.
The park was a constant teacher. Crying, young laughter, the tinkling music of an ice cream cart, old tears that quickly turned into shrieks of delight. Those little legs and arms, they all moved without rationalization or intent, it was pure movement released from the invisible binds of causality.
He needed more of what they had, what he had lost along the way from infant to man. He was constantly stuck in his mind, a rotating wheel of four thoughts that shifted in color and shape. Four different thoughts but he understood them to be the same. To escape, he came to the wide-open lawn of soft grass, to the world of sand and slides and swings. He watched carefully, always open to the possibility of newness, of great teaching.
Over the course of an hour he kept a careful gaze on a short dark haired boy in a stripped shirt and tiny tan shorts. The child was barely a few feet tall, but his eyes were of an ancient stone, something created only once in a century. The eyes of the gods looked out from the body of that little boy, searching the greenery of the neighborhood park, looking up into the fluffy clouds of an otherwise clear day, at the other children in various moments of play.
The young boy held onto a nylon string from a tethered orange balloon. From the bench where Jonas sat, he had focused increasingly on the small pudgy hand of the boy that was smeared with chocolate stains. Jonas watched the hand of the child, willing that hand to open, to give him a guide to follow.
Jonas felt a breeze on his back and a slight rustling of his dark shaggy hair, momentarily his eyes diverted from the hand of the child and darted to the left, to nowhere in particular, they just darted away as his body was overcome by the feeling of the breeze.
When he looked back up, the youngster was looking at him. They held eye contact for just a second, and in that time, Jonas saw dark mountains and red trees and rivers that flowed with blue and white foam. He was called back from the vision when the child’s hand opened, releasing the string and the balloon on its leash.
The balloon drifted easily away from the boy, content now with a new task. Jonas gave a quick nod to the boy, knowing that a guide had been sent. He jumped from the bench and walked towards the sidewalk that delineated the park from the street.
The balloon drifted away from the playground and the screech of children skidding down warm metal slides and the watchful eyes of young mothers with bulges below their loose shirts. None of them could see the door open and follow quickly, both because of their physical limitations and the children they were tending, so it was only him that was free enough to move from the worn green bench, him that had not just the luxury of time and open eyes, but the ability to act when a god released its guide.
Jonas followed the balloon in its path down the green lawn, over the stairs and then down the sidewalk. They moved into the world swiftly, he with absolute devotion, absolute certainty that this was the path to walk, that he would be shown things that needed to be seen, that he would hear music and horns and conversations wanting to be heard.
He managed to keep up with it until the edge of the park. There along the street, late morning traffic was moving along at a lazy pace, the hot sun glaring down on windshields and the people that waited behind them for a green light. He looked briefly into a dark blue car, noticing a young woman at the wheel. He wondered where she was going, what she was thinking about behind tinted glasses and frosted lips.
When he looked back into the sky, realizing his deviation, he saw that the orange balloon had befallen the grasp of an old tree on the corner. Or maybe it was resting, he couldn’t tell. The balloon hung onto the very thin outer branches, as if awaiting another signal.
Jonas stared up at the orange guide, and while he did, he sang. His body was straight, his arms were at his sides, his head bent backwards keeping the balloon in his sight, watching attentively until it would be time to move again.
As the song progressed and his heart began to open, his arms started to sway. His head and upper body began to rock gently, the melody integrated with his muscles and he moved like he was the song. It was long, an old ballad his father used to sing every night as he walked the perimeter of their farm and locked all the gates. The old man had once said that his father had sung it as well, walking the same land, tending the same perimeter. And now, travelling through the generations, it was that song which had embedded itself in the heart of Jonas. It came to him in dreams. Came as he walked down sidewalks, when he needed to catch what his hands could not grasp.
Two young mothers pushing matching strollers approached him on the sidewalk. He knew where they were headed, going towards a god they would not recognize. He turned to them slowly as he felt them approach, he turned to them with a smile on his face, the lyrics still on his lips, his eyes overcome with emotion as he saw their moving bodies, the young skin of their cheeks and the infants watching the sky. His eyebrows were dancing as much as eyebrows could, his eyes, dancing as well. He directed the song to them, to the two young women walking towards a god they could not see.
“Solo mi amor.”
When he was a boy, listening to the love songs of his father, he had understood that lyrics were a vehicle for emotions that had no names. And so he looked at them, the two young mothers, letting the words carry his love towards these women who would perceive him as a stranger in the park. He was their fool, their lover, their servant.
The words were not important, they merely gave shape to something else, and he let that something else come from someplace deep inside, move up through his throat gathering conviction and strength, up into his mouth, gathering a bit of sentimentality that spun the notes slightly, adding a glossy sheen.
He sang it for them until they made eye contact, one smiled shyly and the other looked away quickly, diverting her eyes to the ground, a little embarrassed by his attention. He smiled with the song on his lips as they passed. Then he took a quick breath and turned his attention back up to the balloon, which was just beginning to catch a ride on a light orange-scented breeze.

Excalibur

“Do you remember who you are?” said the disembodied voice. It came out of a very dark and long tunnel that stretched out in front of him.
”Do you remember who you are?” said the voice again. This time it lingered inside the tunnel, like a cloud of vapor. He thought that it was surely hiding something malignant within its folds. It had to be.
The earth trembled underneath his feet just then, the tunnel vibrated like a string on a guitar. His heart started to race, faster and faster.
He feared a heart attack, he always had. This prompted him to scream in desperation. But there didn’t seem to be anyone there that could listen.
His scream ended but his lips were still wide open. His mouth had turned into a kind of vacuum, he felt as if he was swallowing the tunnel itself. The tunnel was rushing into his mouth, a big black snake making its way past his open lips.
As the tunnel disappeared underneath his eyes, another landscape was revealed behind the
emptiness that was left behind, something that looked like a room, a familiar room that was proportionate to his body.
The tail of the snake was suctioned violently into his mouth and it disappeared completely. This final step in the process made him jump a bit. Again he felt like screaming. But he managed to keep the scream inside.

He felt something heavy pulling him towards a chair. He looked down and recognized his legs, little by little he recognized his hands. He brought them to his face to examine them and he noticed they were glittering.
As he bent his head to examine his hands, he felt a pain right behind the neck and just below the cranium. He moved one of his hands and positioned it behind his neck, stretching and opening the fingers, massaging his own knotted flesh. In the meantime his head swung slowly on its base from side to side. He wasn’t purposefully doing it, but it was happening nonetheless.
He heard some voices in the background, they became louder and louder as he listened more intently. He balanced his body forward and opened his eyes wider. He managed to stop his massive bold head from swinging and he allowed it to rest on one of his hands.
A moment of stillness, a moment to come back.

The voices were coming from the television at the end of the room. This made him realize he had fallen asleep on a couch, a particular couch that he knew very well.
He discovered his daughter Ada sitting on another sofa. He remembered how before he fell asleep he had been working on something. He also remembered that at some point Ada had joined him in the room and turned the TV on.
Ada was a dark skinny girl, with a disproportionate head that made her look like a gigantic brown ant. She had her black hair rolled behind her neck in a bun. Every so often, she would let her head fall forward while opening her big mouth, allowing a silver spoon to feed her white chunks of melting vanilla ice cream.
He was scanning her with his eyes, trying to remember her completely, allowing the previous events to pass away from the antechamber of his mind as his attention settled on things he could name and track in a consistent timeline.
Then the voices on the TV interrupted him again. The colorful pixilated image of a familiar face was jumping on the screen. The dark, eerie face occupied most of the available space.
All of a sudden the camera seemed to be moving backwards, slowly showing the whole figure of a person.

“Do you remember who you are?” this person kept saying. It was a man sitting in a dark room and wearing a black robe. He looked like some kind of monk, with the black robe and a black hood that produced a shadow over his eyes. All of this made him look somewhat sinister.
The camera then revealed another figure, sitting backwards right next to the talking face. This figure had a shiny bald head, with chunks of white hair on each side.
He realized that the room on the screen was the main chamber of a medieval castle, lit by a fireplace. At the very least, it was a movie maker’s idea of what a medieval castle would look like inside. The reflections from the fire made the entire image jump around in an ocean of shadows.

“Do you remember who you are?” The voice uttered again.
This time the camera moved closer to the person sitting backwards. Like an invisible satellite, it started to orbit the bald head as if caught in its field of gravity.
It was an old, old man, with big black eyes. His eyes were fixed on the trajectory of the needle he was holding between his fingers. The needle was leaving a trail of exes on a long piece of cloth.

“Do you remember who you are?”
The voice exclaimed in the background again, this time louder, more insistently. This startled the old man. His eyes moved like loose balls on their sockets.
He turned his head around. On each side he was greeted by empty dark space.
He exhaled and shrugged his shoulders, then resumed his sewing. He did 3 more exes, and stopped to pick up the pair of scissors that were lying next to him. With them he cut the needle loose from the thread. He tied the thread with his fingers and lifted the black cloth. The cloth rolled down and hung from his fingers. He was slowly turning it into a black robe, sprinkled with silver stars stitched to the hem.
He swung the robe in the air, and placed it over his shoulders. He stretched each arm underneath the long sleeves and allowed the hands to pop out on each side. He used the hands to button the robe closed. While he was doing this, he took a few steps towards one of the brick walls.
He smiled when he finally spoke up to say:
“Oh that’s it! I have finished it! Finally!”
He said it with deep satisfaction. He picked up a pointed hat from a table next to him, and laid it on his shining bald head. He adjusted the hat and rushed to the wooden door and disappeared in the dark hall beyond the door.

The image on the screen changed again. Now it was brighter and clearer. There was a person standing on stage, dressed as a jester. He had a microphone in his hand and he was raising it to his mouth to make an announcement:
“Ladies and gentleman, please help me welcome to the show… the one and only Merlin the Magician!”
As the jester said it, a shower of claps could be heard in the background. The old man with the robe full of stars and a pointed hat slowly made his way onto the stage. He placed himself in the middle of the scene, bending forward respectfully to salute the unseen audience.

“What is it that you are watching, Ada?” he suddenly asked.
Ada had kept her eyes fixed on the television set the whole time, and she kept them in place even as she replied in a rush:
“I am not so sure, but I think it’s some kind of horror movie. Something about a man who plays a magician in a performance without knowing that he is a real magician. Then something creepy happens. I’m not sure yet about it all. But it’s something like that…”
“Ah, a horror movie!” he replied with disappointment. He shook his head and remembered to
keep doing what he was doing before he fell asleep. He had a deck of old Tarot cards laid out on the floor, and a wooden panel right underneath his feet. He had been going trough the deck, sorting them out, trying to decide which ones to stick to the wooden panel.
Ada noticed how quickly he lost interest in the movie and turned around towards him with curiosity.
“What are you doing dad? What is that?”
“Oh I am doing something for the restaurant. I want to place it on one of the walls. You know, for décor, to add more ambience to the place. So I am selecting the Tarot cards that have illustrations that relate to the middle ages, you know, castles, magicians, jesters, etc”
“Ah, cool,” said Ada, and she continued to watch the horror movie and eat her melting ice cream.

The camera zoomed out of one of the windows, and a wooden billboard appeared outside of the house.
“Excalibur Restaurant, Magic and Entertainment”
Underneath the billboard there was a paper flyer pasted on the fake stone wall:
“Tonight’s show: Merlin the Magician! –Starring the Magician himself! Don’t miss it!”
There was a rush of strong wind just then. It lifted up a flock of dead leaves and scattered them over the deserted street. The sound it made was like something you might hear in a movie. As suddenly as it had arrived, it died down and everything went back to being quiet, just the sounds of a TV in the distance and a little boy laughing a few houses away.

“Do you remember who you are?” said the voice.

Tale With A Soul

On the brightest of sunny days, a flying contraption soars on a current of crisp blue wind. Two hundred feet above the earth, an oversized metal bird on a rogue mission. Its speed is overwhelming. It easily leaves behind the flocks of white birds on their yearly migration. It maintains its smooth speed through the aggressive wind that attacks us as if we were its sworn enemies.
I sit upon a wooden bench at the helm, a rickety old fence post, probably stolen from a neighbor’s yard. There is no floor, and my legs dangle loosely over the seat, each new gust of air sends them swinging wildly, like the limbs of my companion.
The machine is small and compact, made mostly of copper tubing, sheets of metal and a huge brightly colored air balloon which keeps us afloat. It looks like a lunatic’s invention, created quickly from a doodle using found scrapes and stolen debris. It has traveled far to make this journey, centuries or more, but there is an excitement that permeates the whole of it, blanketing us in newness and innocence. This is a maiden voyage, clean from any past experience.

“All that you see below, all of it. I want to tell you something about it. I want to clear certain notions from your mind, I want to bypass this, the surface, and go straight for that which lies underneath.”

His words make me think of you. I can’t help it. I remember that day, you know the day I mean? The day I ran over to touch your little feet. They were miniature toes with even tinier nails, you were just ten weeks old, of course you couldn’t possibly remember.

How can I even remember it now? When I can’t even say for sure how I came to be up here.

That day you still looked shocked to be in a world of sunlight, a complex web of sounds that came from all directions, that surrounded you like a hurricane of feathers spiraling towards your eyes.
You looked at me with gray-blue eyes. I had been wearing my glasses all day while working in the bright rays of spring, but as I looked at you, I remembered to take my glasses off instantly. It was as if another well of knowledge opened up, the part of me that knew this was different, that this required contact without barriers, that this required more than I was usually able to give.

We are directly above a city. A potpourri of structures stretches to the horizon in all directions, a striking mixture of large and small buildings, civic plazas, offices, houses, museums, and monuments.
This is the eternal civilization- the one that has spawned countless poor imitations. This is Rome as it could have been. This is the city philosophers have spoken of…the ideal city thought only to exist as a concept.
The walls shine, scrubbed clean and glowing in every possible glory. Their hues are soft and inviting, only the palest shades of marble have been used in their construction.
Under the light of the full sun, everything is immaculate. Stretching to eternity, the avenues are precise and wide, dividing the immense landscape into navigable blocks. They are so clean…so exact. Their possessive symmetry shouts far into the sky and reaches my ears. The best engineers and mathematicians have created these roads and I am breathless in witnessing the precision of their art.
I reach up to touch my face and there are no glasses. These things have been left in the past.

“What you see below, the surface… it is all false, it is an illusion. It is underneath those streets that you will find what is real, what really counts.”

I looked at you that day while your Dad stood still observing our interaction.
I wonder what happened to him? I wonder if he is now in some flying contraption like I am? If he is, he is not thinking of me. I am sure of that. But I surely think of you.
Your lovely father wore you like a precious necklace upon his chest, maybe sensing you then as the tangible creation of his love, worn right above his heart. You wouldn’t know what that meant, you were just a baby, you smelled of milk and newness.
Maybe you felt his breathing, hanging there suspended on his chest. You and I looked at each other until you finally looked away. It seemed that you never would.
You had just come into existence right then. Your material form, your body, your eyes, your crying, your name…none of it was here, there, wherever it was that all this happened. You came from some other elsewhere, from a place I wish I could remember, but now I can hardly remember anything. And yet I can remember you.
You came from a place I wish I could recount in colorful stories that would paint my dreams in infinite dimensions. But is the price of travel paid for in language? Did you maybe come from a place that spoke in other ways, ways I still don’t understand?
Without a shared language between us then, I looked into your eyes and I hoped that you could see the stars that had collided within me. I searched in your grayness for the missing pieces of the sentence.

“Listen to me as you look down there, listen to me but not with your own inner cities, your own shining streets. Let my words slide into the tunnels that multiply under your conscious thoughts, let my words travel through forgotten passageways made of mud and ice.”

You were a piece of that distant earth then, a piece of matter that breathed and cried and slept. You grew inside of a woman and came out into arms that were waiting. Was I that woman? As much as I clearly remember you, I can’t really say. You took a single breath and with that unbidden impulse you began your life, a life I would only briefly touch.
Was it the smallness of you, was that what struck me then, is that what strikes me now? Was it the strange materialization of a new being that was so natural and yet, so completely strange?

“If my words find a way in there, I guarantee that they will change you, in ways that you can’t even begin to imagine.”

You looked at the trees and the faces that cooed at you without judgement, for all judgement would come later. You seemed without character, without personality, an empty vessel which would quickly be filled with words and ideas and thoughts, taught how to count and tell time and speak in predetermined sounds that fit together like Legos. Soon you would be polluted and the smell of milk would fade.
Would you be able to remember why you came here? What you left behind? Would you learn to use your new language to describe your experience coming through the tunnel and filling your lungs with warm free air for the very first time?

How did I find myself up here, in this strange flying contraption? How did I come to sit here with this man that even now looks strangely into my eyes, as if he knew what I thinking, as if he knew that I was thinking of you, you back there where I can’t reach you, you somewhere that I have left behind, maybe in that city that we pass over, maybe in a city we already left behind.

Maybe you come with me. Maybe you fly along with me and my companion. Maybe I will never leave you. Maybe you sit still waiting, waiting for the day when we come down from here, the day when we stop flying. Maybe you sit waiting for the day when we once again take in a single deep breath and open our fresh new eyes, ready to explore, eager to make change, eager to discover together, together as one.

The Little Man And The Map

It was a crisp day, a morning bright with blue light that showered on her from a cloudless sky. The leaves of the dense woods were tinged in varying shades of yellow and orange and the cold air bit at the tip of her nose and left stinging kisses along the edges of her ears. The young girl walked alone along a thin trail that wound itself through the woods in lazy, meandering curves. Fallen leaves crunched beneath her feet and under the weight of her shoe, she left them as small as confetti pieces. The scent of the leaves mingled with the aroma of earthy soil and she inhaled it all deeply, letting the cold scented air fill her lungs with its raw life. She felt more than alive, she felt electric beneath the changing canopy of trees, amid a world were words were useless simulated communication. With each step, she saw more and more, as through each move forward took her deeper into a world of mystery that usually lay beyond her grasp. Now she was here, walking, alive. She saw tiny brown capped mushroom heads sprouting from the ground. A bright green caterpillar inched its way across a fallen twig. An owl interrupted from his nap by the sound of crunching leaves flew overhead, looking for a meal.
In a curve of the path, the little girl saw a large tree, thirty steps away. It looked like all the other trees that surrounded her, only it wasn’t, there was something different about it. Filled with curiosity, she stepped off the path. She approached the tree slowly and saw there was a small opening at the bottom, a little door just big enough to poke her head in. She got down on her belly and pushed gently on the wooden door. When her eyes adjusted to the dim light within the thick trunk, she saw a small Native American man sitting on a tiny stool made of bark.
He looked to her and their eyes held steady and she knew he had been expecting her. Had he waited a thousand years for her to walk the path, to see the owl, to find the tree? She smiled and said hello. He did not move his mouth, his expression did not change, he sat still on his little stool, but the little girl heard him,
"Hello!" he said back enthusiastically.
The tree was silent, he was silent, and yet, he spoke to her and she could feel the warmth of his voice, the tenderness of his heart. The little girl smiled again.
The little girl broke their contact naturally and turned her head to look around the small room. There was a small fire in the far corner which gave off just a bit of warm light. The little man pointed to the back wall. She turned her gaze and saw a map carved into the tree. "Where will this map lead?" she asked her question silently, thinking her thought and then sending it to him like an open letter.
"It is a map to your heart."
The little girl was taken aback
"To my heart?!?!" she squealed.
The small man with tan skin nodded. She turned her head again to the map. A faint blue light came from it.
"To my heart." she repeated.
She stared at the map, letting time fall around her, letting her limbs grow numb, letting the forest continue on its charge towards death and rebirth. She stared at the map, her eyes fixed on the charted path to her own heart, the internal voyage that seemed a world away, an odyssey of a task. The image burned, though her eyes, past the various masks already imprinted on her young body. She let the map burn, moving through her bones, past her personality and past her learned habits and she let it burn itself into her soul. Each line of the map went in, becoming a new vein, a new course, a new path to follow.
The little man handed her a small rock. It was a small cracked geode. She held it tightly and tilted it back and forth, the sparkling center twinkled in the light of the fire and sent sparks of light across her face. She peered through the crack, looking deep, as deep as she had when she saw the details of the forest. She looked and looked and looked some more, and then, she saw it, inside the illuminated center of the geode was a smaller version of the map on the tree wall.
"Take this with you wherever you go,” the man explained. "It will be your Guide.”
The little girl put it in her pocket.
“How can I ever thank you enough?” she asked.
"Use the map. Follow your heart. That is how you can thank me."
The little girl smiled, wider than she ever had before. The sun opened in her face, the world came through her eyes and she held out a finger and touched the tiny man's heart. It glowed blue and she felt the ground let out a slight tremor and then he disappeared. She ran back to her house, clutching the geode in her hand the whole way. In her room, she placed the rock under her pillow, the soft place she kept all her treasured possessions. She was anxious to start the search for her Heart… but first, it was time for a nap.