Doloise stood in the doorway behind us.

“I am your Guardian and Guide,” is all she said to me.

I took a look at her.  It had been a slow transition, but while she was still wearing outrageous heels and amber glasses, something about her outfits had changed.  Instead of sharp (and dangerous!) curves, there were more balanced looks to them, cuts that suggested more conservative considerations.  Was she growing up or changing or (more disturbing) fitting my particular needs?

“Even into the mouth of a Dragon?” I asked.  I meant it to be funny, but she just nodded sharply.

I watched her as she turned around, pushing open the door.  I smiled at Ivan.  “I’ll be in touch.  Don’t sniff the fewmets or get into any arguments with the undead, alright?”  I made it sound like I gave that kind of advice every day and then hurried to catch up with Doloise.

Funny, usually I led.

She walked back to the car.  Nellie was no where to be seen, which, of course, made me temporarily concerned that Doloise had, I don’t know, eaten her.   I looked around the parking lot which seemed somewhat empty for a Saturday afternoon.  Well, maybe they’d have a large dinner crowd.  Actually, for being such a main thoroughfare, Colfax itself seemed kind of devoid of traffic.  Was there a game on or something that I’d missed?

That feeling of oppression, maybe – a lot of people could be sensitive to such, and decide to stay home.  I guessed that was it.  But a lot more people were completely blank to it, so why not have a steady stream of cars out on the road?

I frowned and got in behind the wheel.

“The sorceress would see your bones ground into bread,” Doloise said.

“I bet she tells that to all the fellows,” I replied, mostly on automatic.  Where were people?

A few birds fluttered on the phone lines.  “You are not concerned to become a pastry, I take it.”

“You are what you eat.  It’s only my fabulous metabolism that’s kept me from being slow enough to be dipped in sprinkles.”  Well, I could still go to the gym.

“She is sorceress enough to do it.  I do not understand her…animosity.”

“I am like her husband, waking up things that ought to have died long ago.”  I started the car up.  I wasn’t actually in a hurry to go home, but I wasn’t sure exactly where to go.  I was wound up in a strange way.  I figured I’d just head east and see what interested me on the way.

There are a lot of places for bands to play along Colfax.  The Tattered Cover cast her siren’s song but I was too wired to actually look for books.  Lots of opportunities to buy used goods or get liquored up, but it seemed kind of early and unkind for that.   Maybe not in that order.  I could buy cheap cellphone service at almost every other corner, kind of like the proliferation of sweet coffee places.

“How will I get in touch with a Dragon?” I asked Doloise.

“You call them.”

“I don’t think they’re in the phone book,” I sighed.  I pulled into a drive-through and bought us both some vanilla shakes.   “The Questor?”

“He would know,” she agreed.

“I have a feeling that it isn’t so much of a Quest, yet, though.  Maybe I just find a name and speak it three times.”

“That is a law of Will,” she seemed to be amiable to it.  She slurped a little with her straw.  I chuckled.

“You are not helping.  Are you not supposed to be Guardian and Guide?”

“You merely had to ask.  I would prefer not to do it in your transportation as it may make for discomfort.”  She didn’t set down the shake but I could hear faint harmonics.

“No, no, you’re right.  Need to find the right place and time.  Position of strength, find out what it is a Dragon wants except to grind my bones and make them bread.  Wait.”  I literally hit my brakes – good thing there was no one behind me for a couple of blocks.

“Nellya.  Why hadn’t I seen it?”  I hit the steering wheel with my hand.  “She’s the Dragon.”

No one has ever told me to get lost.  The funny thing about that is, I might be able to… certainly, I wander off pretty far when talking on the cellphone.  I need to pace while chatting, and while I used to be tethered to the wall, depending on who I am talking with I might wander a mile, two miles.

I’m great with maps.  I can fold them faster than Princess Glovebox if necessary.

It isn’t about me, because the magic isn’t about me.  It’s about what you need to find.

The first day I sat at my desk I didn’t know what to expect.  I didn’t know exactly what I had been hired for, although I know I was desperate for a job.  I had a desk calendar and a heavy black phone with actual push-buttons, some odds and ends pens and paperclips.  I figured I’d answer the phone if it rang and do my best to delay folks until they gave me the hint as to what I was doing.

Out of the hallway I thought led to the restrooms came a striking fellow in blue.  He was just under 7 feet tall, and he leaned on a black spear.  His long white hair was bound in the back with black ribbons.

“I seek the Goblin Castle,” he said, standing in front of my desk.

I’d been to a few science fiction conventions, so I figured this was just a great costume.  And the question?  I’d seen “Labyrinth” no less than 20 times, courtesy of my wife and children.

I was about to tell him, “Don’t go THAT way, no one ever goes THAT way,” when something entirely different came out of my mouth.  “You must pass the field of flowers like yellow bones bounded by three roads.  Upon the crest is a bridge of silvered stone.  Three times must you walk across it before they will open the door to the warrior lost, and then three times tested before the King will honor what he owes you.”

My employer stood in the shadows behind me, petting one of the cats who wandered about the place.

The gaunt blue man, (who I noticed had long pointed blue ears) bowed before me, and then stalked back into the hallway.

I got up from the desk and went down the hall.  It kind of had a 1970’s feel with the linoleum on the floor, an aged yellow light, and doors marked “Women” and “Men” on the side.  An exit sign hung askew, fastened by a single screw over a door that claimed to be attached to a fire alarm.  I had not heard any of the doors open.

I peeked into the bathrooms.  They smelled like industrial soap, same scent as at the hospital.  No tall blue men, no one, in fact, inside.

The fire door kept me back the first day.

The second day the calendar and the pens and paperclips were gone.  The phone remained, a silent sentinel.

Three women of varying ages, long red hair on all of them, stood before me.  White ribbons were twined around their wrists.  The middle aged one was in a business suit, the youngest in a summer dress, and the eldest wore something kind of like a kimono and something you’d see at a Renaissance Faire.

“We are looking for the King of Earth and Light,” the youngest said.

“Or his brother of Evergreen,” the eldest said.

“Or their brother Snow,” the one in the middle explained.

I felt the words take form through me.   It was not like an entity answering them, but more like knowledge being poured into my head like some kind of light.

“The Kings share this place.  One has left, seeking in sorrow his Queen.  One wrestles for summer, the other feels his heart grow frost.  They stare at the moon wondering why so few still seek the stars.  Follow the sun for a season and you may find a footprint.  They cannot hide from their mother, and the one with the quick laugh sometimes wears feathers in his hair.”

I didn’t know what it meant, but it sure got the girls excited.  They thanked me and went back through the hallway.

That day I tried the door, and no alarm sounded.  Outside was an alley.  No girls, no blue elves, no signs of anything but a trashcan with some broken down boxes and plastic flowing in the sunlight.  A regular alleyway.

The third day, the phone was gone, and I was called the Questor.

That’s who I’ve been for some time, now.  I don’t know how my employer handles the requests, how they’re brought in and how they pay.  I have faced down the Stormcrow.  I have understood that my employer has motives that may not align with mine.  I suspect she simply isn’t human.  But I get paid via a company, and I go home to my wife and kids and cats and we are happy.

When the Portal Doctor came in, he had been one of the first humans I’d met, and, at that, a fellow with a sense of humour about all this weirdness.  I hated sending him into darkness.

My wife told me I should find him again and invite him to dinner.

I gave Ivan a few minutes to compose himself.   To be completely honest, I would have to say I probably would have wiped away a tear, myself, if I hadn’t been a total jerk.  I mean, I was pressed to fault his logic, such as it was.  I could think of no other reason, myself, to leave my heart in the lands of the dead.

I had doubt, then.  Doubt is an insidious worm at the best of times, destroying what love and faith have made glorious.   The Serpent in the Garden was doubt, I am certain.  Part of it was a very personal doubt, that I would ever love anything so much as to be willing to do something that significant between our worlds for that reason, and part of it was doubt about my job here.

If I closed the gateway, there was only one way for Ivan to be reunited with his heart.

Possibilities flashed before my eyes, and I kept coming to the question: did Nellie love Ivan so much as to have him without his heart?  Was the safety of the Red Poets so much more important than her love that she wanted him cured first, and sacrifice her relationship second?  What would Ivan’s life be like, heartless as it was?

He wouldn’t be the first – it’s practically a fairytale trope (for which there ought be a whole ‘nother Wiki) to hide one’s heart somewhere else.  Perhaps there were support groups.  “Hi, my name is Ivan, and I have hidden my heart.” “Hi Ivan!” “I first lost my ability to care about other people when I traded it for the ability to speak the tongue of the dead.”

I focused after a moment.  I liked Ivan.  He was still in touch with his heart, or he wouldn’t be so likeable, would he?

Was this even my decision to make?  I was hired for a particular job.  I could just “follow orders.”

Yeah, that sticks in my craw, too.

“So?” Ivan turned around and asked.  It was a challenging tone.  “Do your…hocus-pocus, heh.”  He waved his hand as if he had no care in the world.

“Tell me first of dragons,” I said, suddenly.  I looked for Doloise without turning my head, but couldn’t feel her under the pressure of the situation.  Maybe she was behind me.  I wasn’t going to worry.

“Ah,” he said, as if I had suddenly earned a point, or at least some kind of respite.   He sat down again, his enormous frame fitting into the booth with the ease of practice.  He looked at me, squinting for a moment.  His hands moved in a way that indicated something specific, and he made words with the movement of his mouth.  “First, tell me why you ask.”

I felt the spell seize up the air around us.  It both relieved and intensified the oppressive sensation I’d been feeling since before I’d woken up.  It was a lovely privacy curtain, excellently delivered.  Ivan wasn’t just one of the Red Poets, he was at least a middle-weight champ.  I knew heavy-hitters who would have been hard put to do that with so little effort.

(It made me think of spy movies from the Cold War period, however irrelevant to the current situation.  What had Ivan been before he became a cook?)

“It has been weighing on my mind,” I tried to explain.  “Something about the way you referred to Doloise.  Was Artur trying to give me a hint?  The amulet that your Nellya wears.  Some ideas that just popped up in my head.”

He squinted at me again.  “You are a small wizard.”  He made that pinching motion with his fingers one uses to indicate distance.  It was not flattering.  “Andrei has good words for you.”   He leans back.  “And you come with daughter of Dragon to ask questions to one the Dragon has spit back!  You are small wizard, but parts of you are very big!  Hah!”

I didn’t ask him to elaborate.

“There are many routes to the lands of the dead.  I asked a Dragon to take me there.”

Oh.  “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons.  I am crunchy and good with ketchup.”

“Pfah.  Ketchup!”  He gestured at the side of the table.  “We do not use it here!  But point! small wizard.  Dragons do not like each other.  Not even to,” and he made a motion with his hands that left very little to the imagination.  Might be why there’s so few of them left, really.

Ivan continued.  “I spent three days dead.  I spoke with many guardians of that land and ours and made deal for passage.   They were not all fair, but passed them I did.  I thought of my Nellya, and would return.”

He sighed, deflating.  “To return, I said, was part of the bargain.  The Dragon agreed, but wanted to choose his time.  I held my way.  He said he would then hold on to something to summon me at his need.  I agreed.  He took my heart.”

He smiled and pulled up his shirt.  In the middle of all the pasty flesh was something my eyes refused to focus on – I’ve told you, I can’t see gates.  But something from it still smoked.

“Once marked by Dragon’s blood, marked forever.  I do not know how a small wizard like you can fix it.”

I could close it.   I heard the sound, and it was not  a complicated pattern.  I felt the openness, the wrongness of the portal, and I wanted to, I really did.  So why were the words, “I guess that means we need to talk to the Dragon,” what came out of my mouth?

I looked it up, and it’s a fair shake that a tightrope walker is constantly feeling ahead with their feet already.  It’s a terribly contrived metaphor, but I do follow-up on these things.  Apparently one learns first to stand on the rope, and then attempts movement, and then the learning how to turn.   Not that I was feeling like trying it, but wouldn’t it be an awesome kind of magic if you could just read something like that and then do it perfectly? Some kind of physical adept, perhaps?

Alas, sometimes my imagination is bigger than magic, I think.

Doloise followed me in her tailored tie-influenced suit.  The tell-tale hart was probably only obvious to anything that had scoped out my closet, and since the Dragon Princess wasn’t the useful kind of fey (you know, like a brownie who would clean my house or give me a deal on Girl Scout cookies or something) I expected those things to be few and far between, like girlfriends.

Nellie met us outside the restaurant.  “He is inside,” she said.  She grabbed my hands.  “He would not sleep.  He spoke cold words that raised bones in the kitchen, and had them seek life’s blood.  I do not know–” she broke off.

“If you could bind him?  No, better not.  Not if you still love him,” I said, looking into her eyes for a moment.  I knew whatever support I could offer was going to be broken in my next question.  “Who died?”

I had thought over how I would ask it on the car ride, and it didn’t come out as smoothly as I’d hoped.  She broke away from me, and looked any direction but the one I was in.  I sighed, letting my breath out slowly in the humid afternoon.  It was hot, and I could feel a sweat beginning to build.

“You would judge, and you could not know,” she said.

“But you judge without giving me the opportunity,” I fought back, suddenly.  “Look, just tell me if it’s important.  If it’s not, if you know it won’t be part of what keeps the cold inside him, tell me that.  I don’t want your life story.  I want to do my job, get paid, and go home.  If you’re happier after that, great, fine, shiny, but I’m not a therapist, I’m not a real doctor, I’m not some white knight, I’m just a guy who kicks doors closed when he sees them open.”

She looked at me, then, and said something I didn’t understand.  Her eyes glittered black for a moment, and a rumble of thunder followed her pronouncement.

I couldn’t tell if she had prophesied or cursed me.  I just pointed at the restaurant.  “He’s in there?” I confirmed without waiting for an answer.  I didn’t care if Doloise followed or punched Nellie in the gut or if I was walking head on into some kind of obscure trap, I just opened the door with a wide sweep of my hand and waited for my eyes to adjust.

“O! Angel of death, I await you here, heh, heh, heh,” Ivan said.  I could tell from his voice that his “heh”s weren’t up to their usual vigor.  “Do your duty, but Ivan’s neck is thick!  It will take more than one blow from your tiny axe.”

“I am not the angel of death, nor do I play it on TV,” I said.  “What ails you, Ivan the Great and Terrible?”

“Ah, to feel that Ivan again!  I left him behind in the place where the bones clack and play their unhappy songs.”

“Many a man has given something up for wisdom,” I said, slipping into the booth across from him.  “An eye, a drink from a cauldron, their firstborn child.  Does anyone ever come back with more than, `Boy, that was a dumb deal?'”

He slammed a meaty hand on the table.  “You do not make a funny!”

Well, I try, but sometimes I miss.  “Tell Ivan to come home.  His Nellya misses him.”

He lurched over me faster than I thought he could move.  “He cannot.  The veil is there for a reason!  We are not to see!”

“But you did.  And you speak the tongue of the dead.  What do you say to them, Ivan?  What is it that was so important to leave behind your heart?”

“Ha-ha!  Small wizard, you have a point!”  He pulled me by my collar so close I could smell his breath.  “There is only one thing ever worth saying,” I was as pinned down by his gaze as his hand at my neck.  “You tell them you loved them.”

He let me go and I fell back onto the bench.   He turned away from me and I don’t know if I was going to see him cry.

I should really catch up on my recorded shows, but I’m a skimmer.  I took a few screenwriting courses in college which actually spoilt much of my enjoyment of TV and movies for a while as I carefully analyzed them for where the punch would hit.  I had my viewing of 45 minute shows down to between seventeen and twenty-three minutes depending on how much I liked the dialogue writers.  I don’t quite always get the “websurfing” metaphor when it was much more what I did on the couch (futon, yes) that was like riding the crest of a wave before crashing down into what always seemed to me to be a suspicious quagmire of commercials.

(You also get those on the radio – you hit your first button, commercial… then you hit all the rest just to find out that except for the last stanza of “Sweet Home Alabama,” which you’re really beginning to hate as a song for its being overplayed there’s no music on, just one of those points where everyone’s playing an ad.  Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t wield the big guns – I think that if I had control over the forces of the universe I might just change that.  Of course, it probably represents a deal between some forces or powers – “I’ll give needy children the power of love, but when you get a commercial on x, every other decent station will be running a commercial, too.”  Where x is your station of choice.  And this is not just an FM thing – it goes into the AM spectrum, too.  I just have to avoid tuning in in the middle of the day on my talk radio for fear of running into some stinky cheese show hosts.)

I was sliding between plot points and avoiding the Disney channel when I looked up at Doloise, who was busy poking at the one plant I have in my apartment, a very neglected Chlorophytum comosum.  (Random trivia here – did you know that two of the easiest plants to keep are the Dragon tree bamboo and the Aspidistra elatior, or Cast Iron plant.  If they had something called “Warlock’s Tongue” I’d just be inviting spirits of irony, right?)  The spider plant trailed a baby around the pot – it was a cute little ceramic toad with a wide-open mouth that I think Maggie potted.  It was a gift “for luck” from a lady who had a mild case of the gnomes.

“Are you…talking to it?” I asked.

I deserved the look I got.

“If it should happen to hold wisdom that makes my task easier to bear, I shall inquire of it.  What will you do with the dark marked sorceror?”

For a moment I wondered if she had read my Harry Potter books, but then I realized she was being literal-minded again, and I focused back on Ivan.  There was a connection I couldn’t see, but I could feel it.  It was frustrating, like walking an invisible tightrope might be if you were, say, the type of person to walk tightropes and found one become invisible.   The metaphor was stretched, yes.  Suffice it to say, I suspected it to be fine if the tightrope that became invisible was one you were used to and didn’t otherwise change in any fashion, but it would still be disconcerting.  I didn’t know how much tightrope walkers could ‘feel ahead,’ and Doloise was in my computer chair so I’d have to look it up later.

Regardless, I was frustrated.  So I broke it back into some simple steps.  Ivan had wanted to speak to the dead.  This would not likely be a matter of mere curiosity, but of a burning need to talk to someone or something that had died.  He was willing to give up a great deal of his life energy for this purpose, and now the dead have a conduit to him. Fair’s fair, a bargain’s a bargain, but his fellow sorcerors, including his wife, are concerned.

Let’s step back again.  Why do I call them sorcerors rather than wizards?  Because theirs is a magic of ritual, taught into families, and not very prone to improvisation.  They make deals with ethereal beings.  That’s why the half-a-day prep to destroy a city.  So they may have made ritual with each other in some fashion, meaning, does Ivan’s bargain affect them all?  I’ll consider the premise, but I won’t bank on it.

Feeling the dead in her husband, Nellie wants him back whole.  I don’t know if I can do that – once having experience what he had, Ivan will be changed.  That’s the nature of touching things on the outside.  It’s why I can’t have a normal girlfriend or nice things.  Well, I can blame it on Doloise right now, but there’s a like-calls-to-like in here.

Is Nellie jealous of whoever it is Ivan felt he had to speak with so badly?  Could it be an ex-girlfriend?  A mentor?  A lost child?  Find that out, and use that as my anchor to the power it holds over him.

I went back into the room and grabbed the card.  There was nothing on TV, and Doloise was going to bend the spines on my graphic novels if I left her to them.  It was an easy call to make.

I was groggy when I woke up.  I pulled the sheets off and stumbled into my bathroom, yawning the whole way.  Doloise was looking at some books I kept for artistic reference, dealing with anatomy and the way it interacted.  They were too artsy to be smut, and nice enough you could keep them on the coffee table, if you had one.  I didn’t, so they joined the sprawl on the top of where the bookshelves segregated sprawling space in front of the TV and the computer area.

I looked out the blinds to see that, yes, indeed, it was overcast.  That sense of oppression I’d felt in my dream continued unabated by waking.  I was unsurprised; what factors of reality cast their spell into the dreamlands was an argument for those who studied such things.  I know better than to eat artichokes at dinner, but that isn’t because I have any illusions about how they interact with my psyche – the only thing guaranteed to give me nightmares was hauntings, and those could be bound away, their doors to my vulnerabilities closed and locked.  I have too many keys to my psyche floating around to not be concerned.

On second thought, I did occasionally get a strange dream or two from Beau Jo’s pizza, but I consider that a perk, not a drawback.

I went into the kitchen and drew myself a cold glass of water.  I thought about offering one to Doloise, but the irony would be lost.  I wondered if irony was proof against fairy-ies.  You know, really fey fey.  Nevermind.  Maybe I hadn’t woken up as much as I had thought.

Doloise pushed aside the book. “Your pleasures are well-defined, but your indulgence is carefully measured. Why?”

I sighed, finishing the glass of water.  “Let me get dressed before we talk about my porn collection, OK?”

She looked confused. “You already wear clothing.”  She was wearing another of her own designs from my wardrobe.  I looked closer at it.  Ah, it was from one of my holiday ties.  I have a small collection of them I’ve picked up for various festive functions during the long winter season.  This one had a subtle stag print on it.  How apropos.

“There are distinctions in dressing that consider appropriate wear, having put clothes on, and a level of vulnerability,” I lectured from a door half-closed between us.  “I was in the having put clothes on stage, but if we’re going to dissect the wrinkles of my personality I want more clothing.”  If you have to ask, boxer-briefs, mostly.  I also like undershirts.  It’s funny, one of my favourite bits in The Fellowship of the Ring is the bit where Frodo incidentally reveals the mithril shirt Bilbo insisted he take.  Maybe because it’s a light of hope in the darkness of Moria.  Anyway, I do think of that passage when I am busy buttoning my workshirts over them.

Saturday means I call in for a new assignment and wear a T-shirt and jeans.   If I’m alone, that’s all I’d wear, but I need my armour against the Dragon Princess Doloise, as I mentally dubbed her.  My shirt was traditionally geeky, white letters on black.  Something about keeping my shiny, happy, fuzzy reality.  I did the phone call and then wandered back out to sprawl on the futon that doubled as a couch.

“I like my little luxuries,” I said.

Doloise is a stacker.  You know, someone who puts things into carefully measured stacks when they return them.  It ruined the feel of casual chaos.  I wondered about that a little – she seemed fairly constrained.  Rules, remember, power a great deal of, well, power.

“As long as they do not control you,” she said, not looking up from the pictures.  That one was an actual art book – something I picked up at a library sale.

I grunted an affirmation.  “Does it mean anything in guarding me, oh guide?”

“Curiosity has its stigma.  I seek to solve it rationally. You are not what we expected.  I only seek to bind comfort into the geasa under which I work.”

“You are free to go at any time.  I mean it.”

“It is too late for that.”  She looked at me and did not smile.

“It’s too late for Saturday morning cartoons, too, but I live in hope.”  I found the remote and turned on the TV.  Later this afternoon I’d have to do some open-heart surgery, of sorts.  I hoped the morning would be more pleasant.

I know, I said, “At the time,” which is one of those literary allusions that actually drive me batty in books.  It’s like a warning, a “NO OUTLET” sign just before the cul-de-sac, and it really doesn’t flow with anything but a retrospective journal-like piece.

Ahem.

At the time, I figured I just didn’t see her.  Totally true for the reasons why I didn’t panic and managed just to fall asleep.  I won’t say I had anything but a restless night – those dreams were surreal even for me.  I don’t know what your dreaming is like, but mine is often throwing in lots of little visual puns I don’t get until I’m considering them sometime later.  I also feel (despite the research to the contrary) that I remember most of them.  I know it’s kind of boastful, or whatever the psychological disorder is that makes you think that rules just don’t apply (narcissisum?) to you, but it might really be linked to being a practitioner.  Memory as a form of Will has a long history – I really think that not being able to remember a number because you’re used to looking it up in a cellphone would be a great example of the loss of Will in the modern age.

At the time, it was worthy of mention.  I don’t have a huge place – there’s the bedroom, the bath that connects from it, the bit of a hallway, a kitchen that kind of has room for one person, maybe two if they’re friendly and which connects to the other side of the bathroom, and then the front room where I use the bookshelves as a homemade cubicle divider for my office area.

From my corner of the bed, I can see in a diagonal line to the computer.  If both doors are open, I can see into the kitchen, too.  I never unlock the kitchen-side, so I wouldn’t have been able to tell.  She wasn’t within the diagonal, so I presumed maybe she’d gotten up and maybe taken a chance to check out the inventory of my pantry.

But it was worthy of mention in that way your brain suddenly stops and says, “Remember this.”  Remember this moment, because, like so many others, this is part of your life.

You have guessed that she wasn’t there when I woke up. 

I woke up in a panic, maybe a bit of a sweat.  The sky was dark, not in that, “It’s still before dawn,” sense, but in that oppressive, “The sun is obscured,” sense.  We’ve had a lot of rain this summer, but it was more than that. 

I didn’t move for a moment.  I extended my feelings, more.  It’s an exercise that you can learn regardless of your abilities.  You stay quiet for a moment, sensitive, opening up all of those blocks you put up against the relentless pressure of everyday life.  It can be much more to a practitioner, but even for me, I was just checking to see what was wrong.

I was checking to see if I (or anyone else) had left open a door.

Silence.  The beating of my own heart as the adrenaline subsided.  I could feel that the sheets were slightly damp, so bleepin’ dirty words, I would have to do more laundry.  My undershirt stuck to me as well, and we will leave the unmentionables unmentioned.  A faint whir from the fan, the feeling of air as it ran across my leg providing a moment’s surcease from the feeling of humidity.  I could smell the books around me.  Graphic novels really do have a smell of their own, I think.   There might have been a drip of something in the shower.  Will have to call and get that fixed if it was a leak somewhere. 

I extended outward.  I felt Doloise moving in the kitchen.  She felt me.

She walked into the bedroom, a glass of what looked to be ice water in her hands.  She passed it to me.   “Water,” she said.

See, there’s another literary bit.  It looked to be ice water.  She identified it as water.  I mention it because it was important.

I drank anyway.  It was cool and refreshing.

Something wasn’t right. 

“Your wards are in place, but yes, you have come to the attention of the Dragon.”

She said it so matter of factly I hadn’t even remembered to panic before I fell asleep once more.

Her lips tasted exactly like those purple Lifesavers candies.  Seriously.  I licked them again just to be sure.  She giggled.  “Snozzberries,” Gene Wilder said, moving to the white door with pictures of unlikely fruits plastered on the top half.   I held her body against mine with hands covered in furry gloves, and I rested my head on her hair, which was made of gold tinfoil.  The Beatles were singing “Penny Lane” in the background, and my watch was beeping out of synchronization.

This is the point where you know it’s all a dream, because I hate wearing gloves on the best of the days, but for some reason my subconscious wasn’t listening.

I let go of her, and her head fell off.  Mechanical cuckoos with a multitude of different-colored cartoon eyes came flying out of her neck, making noises akin to annoyed magpies until they roosted on the laser beams of a Seal of Solomon around my bed, at which point they began arguing about whether a love for the Clash classified someone as an old school punk, or if there had to be a continuing dress requirement.  I pulled off the gloves and threw them at the birds.  They took off, fluttering through the ceiling.

I looked for the girl’s head, afraid it rolled under my bed, and I didn’t want to look underneath because I wasn’t wearing socks, and you know the monster under the bed is impressed by socks and won’t bother you if you’re wearing even the slightest nylon hose.  Which was a bizarre thought for me, since I didn’t like nylons on my women, let alone the thought of them on my own feet.

The little Buddha on my nightstand offered to look for me, and hopped down in his jade green finest.  “No head,” he said, coming out bright red.  I used the glow to peek underneath, but then remembered that my bed rested on the floor.  I gave the Buddha a hand up and thanked him for the enlightenment.  He told me to kill him if I saw him on the road, but I said that was more Coyote’s joke than Wolf.

I followed the path of golden tinsel, thinking something about fairy gold as it turned into a path of oak leaves.  I was barefoot and the leaves crunched under my feet.  I identified them as oak in my dream, but I wouldn’t be sure what they were in waking.  The trees seemed concerned, and seven black birds (for a secret) followed me as I moved down the hill.

I heard the singing, playful splashes at the river. Three naiads dressed in lilypads blew kisses or raspberries at me.

“What do you believe in?” the first asked.

“The spirit of rock and roll,” I responded.  The first laughed and ducked under the water.

“What is your favourite colour?” the second asked.

“Blue,” I said, too quickly.  She kicked some water at me and then dissolved into a splash.

“Why do you look for the head of the Family?” the third asked.

“I am looking for the maiden princess before the Dragon devours her,” I said.

“Too late, little bird, too late.”  The third smiled, showing gruesome green teeth and then sank beneath the surface.

I ran down along the river.  Powered doughnuts like inner-tubes bobbed along it for an interval, as the river smelled more like coffee than loam.   An owl with a rosette pattern like a jaguar’s landed on a tree in front of me.

“What’s your suggestion?” I asked.  “If you ask me, `Who,’ I’m going to kick you in the beak.”

“Google it,” he said.  “Google-it, google-it,” and he flew back off.

I saw the Dragon’s cave in the distance, past the wooden boxes labelled, “Ceiling wax.”  There was a game of checkers being played at by a couple of cabbages on top of the crates, and all the remaining pieces were king’d.   I snuck around the boxes, looking into the darkness of the cave.  I felt very much like I imagined Nietzsche thought I would, as the darkness looked deep into me.

Do you love her? it asked.

“I love no one,” I said.  “I feel like I might have an infinite supply of love ready to be tapped into as soon as I find the one with the real key.  I have been tasted, but never more than sipped.  I am ready to be drunk.”

“Well, you are looking for some head,” the cabbage remarked, wryly.

Keep yours, the voice recommended.  Do not delve into the dark – it will devour you.

I woke up at that.  The room was still dark.  I looked at my watch, pressing the little function that made it light up.  I had been asleep for less than a couple hours.  Maybe it was the borscht.

Doloise was no where to be seen.  At the time, I figured I just didn’t see her, and I was still tired.  I went back to sleep.

I love the internet.  I hope those technojinxed types are happy with their Archives and their Akashic Records and the like, because, frankly, when it comes to doing some good, solid research, libraries and loa are fabulous, but there’s just nothing like sitting down half-naked (Doloise is here) with a tall glass of ice water and Google (actually, I do like Bananaslug‘s take on it because there’s more poetry to the results, but you’re welcome to use your search engine of choice.)

There is a lot of stuff out there about Dragons.

And, of course, as I was saying earlier, it’s all true.  To someone, somewhere, with the right shiny tinfoil hat with their right arm extended, while they whistle Dixie when eating crackers and covering one eye.   Yeah, I believe in a fairly consensual reality, but I’d like to call it a consensible reality instead.  Everyone with me?

Of course, there’s the flip side of the websearch… everything else you could find out about everything else.  It’s the siren’s call of websurfing.  “I know you’re looking up references to Latvian deities, but look, here’s a page on the anatomy of a bird’s wing!”  I do not consider myself having any kind of attention deficit, but learning is such a pleasure to the brain I sometimes need to pull back my focus.

I am learning about Dragons.

Doloise read over my shoulder, or, at least watched the words on the screen.  I didn’t actually ask her if she could read, and at that if she could read English (or any other language for that matter.)  She would speak it for me because it is a matter of Hospitality, both my ability to provide it and hers to express her part, but she was created to work with me, so I could expect it.  Despite the many books that talk about this law, you can’t always claim it – words have power.  Those things that are willing to verbally joust with you are not unaware of this.  That’s why Doloise speaks a little more freely now; she’s picking up from me some exceptions to her rules.

I won’t say it’s been easy having a woman expressly made for me around all the time, especially as she’s willing to hang out and not bother me while I do one of my favourite things.  Part of me hopes that this self-control (who would know I banged a faerie chick?) is redeemable for “woman-points” later, but another part of me smacks that part for objectifying women.  So I’m getting beaten up and not laid, and really, it’s not fair.

I am not even getting my weekly porn night out of all of this.  (That’s another way the Internet is an improvement over the other methods.)

It’s all part of the job, and I should be happy.  I get to spend hours reading about Dragons.  Eastern Dragons versus Western Dragons versus history versus myth versus modern fantasy stories.  In some cases, like reading of Smaug, it was like visiting with old friend.  Fabulous.  I made a bag of popcorn.

(The rule of thumb on Eastern versus Western is usually in their attention to their purpose or their appetite.  Which is amusing, because I was taught that when it came to magic it was that Eastern sorcerors saw it as an ordinary tool, and Western as a special case scenario.  So Western mages don’t deal with Dragons except to avoid their appetites, and Eastern mages didn’t seek their wisdom because it would be like asking the postman.  A little too simplistic a view, but it kind of orients the implications.)

“That is not true,” Doloise finally says aloud.

“Which?” I ask.  “There’s a lot of stuff here that isn’t true.”

“They speak of Dragons as if they were singular creatures.”

“Are they like you?” I asked, leaning back.  It would explain some of what I had been learning.

“No,” she said, and then, she reconsidered.  “Yes.”

She smiled.

I wasn’t sure I liked were this was going.

“You have a lot less in the way of scales.”

“You have touched me very little to make that decision,” she said, flatly.  I considered for a moment.  She had been made for me, had I been neglecting something in their gift?

If going to bed with a community was strange, I certainly wasn’t getting into bed with a Dragon.

I left a tip anyway, which just meant the extra cash was burning a hole in my pocket.  In a figurative sense, of course.  It was too late to hit the comics shop, and I definitely didn’t have enough time to browse comfortably for some new books, so I just ushered Doloise into the car and headed back to my place.

“The Lord’s House,” I said aloud.  “Not `the House of the Lord,’ because you’re not a church.  Not `the House of Lords’, although maybe you are a parliament.  The real question then is who is the Lord of the Gillikins?”

Doloise did not look at me. 

Unlike a lot of the stuff you read about allergies to cold iron and names of Deity and all that, well, Doloise was first a construct, so although it was definitely of fey energy, she did not have to suffer thoroughly from their weaknesses.  (Which is something to remember if you irritate one of them – they can send all sorts of Renfields at you, if not Tohrus.)   The truth of the matter has to do more with how energy from the Outside interacts with items of the Inside.  If you could condense Truth as a skewer against Illusion, it might be made of iron, and if you’re fighting Illusion, you want at least some amount of Truth in your weaponry.  (Although they’re not direct opposites, if you ask me.  Would you use Truth to destroy Art?  Is Allegory merely a seasoning or a main dish?)

Reality has a lot to do with the observer.  It’s a quantum thing, but it implies something a little scarier, too – truth and reality do not have to be in agreement.  Both are mutable, and often they drift.  My reality freaks me out everytime I go to bed in the dark after turning off the light, and I see the television screen slowly draining its luminescence because it reminds me so much of open doors.  Your reality may never have noticed, may not have cared, might even have admired it from a scientific standpoint, thinking of all the neat things it implies.  But what’s the truth?  That if given enough Will something could use that moment and that energy to go Walking from somewhere else, or that it’s just science on display and nothing to fear?

Both.  Both are just as true, because it’s a matter of Will, and Will is shaped by observation, knowledge, perception, all those bits that make our psyches as unique as possible and thus our particular fingerprints when touching the world(s) around us. 

“A mixture of the physical and ephemeral.”  I did know a little about them, and it was difficult for them to breed without Reality as well.  Not that some didn’t enjoy the related acts as lasciviously as any of the -cubi, but I wondered if the Realm was so far off as to think of independence.  I mean, if it takes a Village, maybe the Village could also be a Child?

Guide and Guardian, she said, but she also had her own volition, her own goals in this.  I wondered if the blueprint showed pretty pictures or if it was a bunch of magical incantations moved to print.  (Written magical languages, outside of runes, are another subject of study altogether.  It all looks like advanced mathematics to me.)  Maybe it was just a big picture of a tree.  I didn’t really need to see it, but I was curious.  It was an opportunity to learn.

“The Lord is a Dragon,” she said, finally, while I was turning towards the parking lot.

I mulled that one over.  In the eternal game of finding where the Kings were in the deck, what Dragons were left were pretty much on top.   Of course, it’s not a standard 52-card deck… you didn’t think we were playing with a full one, did you?  There are Knights and Kings who hunt them, but those don’t come along often, and Dragons have Princes of their own.

Of course, I use the ones I understand with the capital letters.  If her family was in league with a Dragon why did they need a mortal to give a push to a deity?  Dragons ate more gods than I did waffles, or at least, they used to…when we had gods like waffles, and I bought syrup.  (It goes through phases.  Creating gods isn’t a hard thing to do, all told.  Again, why I’m not much for religion.)

What did Dragons mean to Ivan?  I recalled the amulet Nellie had used.  Could you have an undead Dragon?  That would be my next point of research.