The drive to Boulder is always longer than I remember it. There are only a few ways to get there, and the weather and the time of day both have meanings besides how they impact the scenery. There is a lot of scenery. I live in Aurora, which despite a lack of skyscrapers is a pretty generic city in the United States. You go a little west, and there’s Denver, bam! right in your face. Denver lords it over us with its skyscrapers. Really, a city with skyscrapers kind of kicks sand in large sprawling suburbia’s face. Then you head west, and if you draw a little south, it becomes Lakewood, and there’s some larger lots, some horses, some farms, but as you go north, it becomes hills and fields. Very much like the places above Naul’s cavern and the hill Rayya walked me to, if you subscribe to the theory that the worlds beyond are built by the worlds within. I kind of liken it to what I think of as the, “And You Were There,” theory, which, checking my phone, is a legitimate TVTrope. (Really, TVTropes is part of the Akashic Record, and thus I never feel bad when my thoughts are given capital letters by them.)

That said, the side trip to the liquor store was something I’d be still trying to describe for days. First, it was huge. It wasn’t a liquor store, it was a warehouse of ethylated madness, separated generously by type of poison. There were forklifts. Forklifts and alcohol do not mix, but here they did a fragile ballet representing the delicacy of spirit and its presumed proof. It was a shrine to what heat and sand could do, a stained glass masterpiece in a thousand, ten-thousand bottle chorus. It was a labyrinth of inebriated possibility.

I was frightened, truly terrified, of what Nen might do. I hesitated before the doors thinking of what whimsy untempered by consequence meant, combined of course with a generous imagination and too many comic books showing the after effects of superhero dismay. Broken glass was just the beginning, and where broken glass and alcohol were combined, fire was inevitable according to the rules of story.

I pictured the building going up in smoke and flames.

“I’m not a barbarian, speaking the bar bar bar of uncivilized tongue,” Nen said.

“You’re fey,” I pointed out.

“True,” he said. “And not a swamp within miles.” He sighed dramatically. “What a pity.” He said it in just the same tone as Jareth does in “Labyrinth.”

He was still pretty agreeable about wearing the seatbelt. It’s those Small things that matter.

“I’m not ready for this,” I said, but I screwed up my courage (which is to say, I screwed it down into the proper place so it didn’t go scampering off, not that I made a mess of it) and entered the automatic doors with a wave of my hand and a little Jedi shtick.

Nen was actually quite calm and complimentary to various brands and choices, although he apparently had more familiarity with whiskeys and scotch than I did, my budget not being of that calibre. He flirted with the ladies doing the stocking, and joked with the men at the register. I asked him a couple of times about flavours, as I’d learned from living with him that he loved oranges, peaches, and ginger, pretty much in that order of preference. I compared the backs of bottles, and the aesthetics. A bottle shaped like a mythical sea monster would always win over one that looked like it came from a 1940s cartoon.

Nothing blew up, or even shattered. If I came out slightly dazed it wasn’t from fumes, but from a dizzying lack of destruction. No pixies fighting in the aisles, no explosions of gold dust and cinnamon, not even a moment of concern when the forklift seemed to drive straight for us.

Surely, he was up to something.

Or tired. Do fey get tired? I’ve seen them rest. I know that their magic has limits, and that the limits are more poetic than measured, and that those who head the Realms are on a scale I can’t understand. I know that bumping against Reality has its problems, too. This is why magic a la the Jedi mind trick is so much easier than that dropping a mountain on someone that was mentioned. I don’t know if it’s a limit you can blast through with sheer power, or if it’s only best for the subtle ones, like the vampires and their thin weaving Between. I know I was tired, and I only had psychological trauma to blame.

“Only.” I’m such a kidder.

We were quiet while I drove. You can see stars out sometimes. It’s kind of funny, really. I love feeds that give me daily pictures of astronomical marvels, but I forget to look up and enjoy the stars. Truth is, well, I think it was a couple of summers ago. I laid back in the grass and looked at the stars, and I think a girl was involved, probably Maggie if it was only a couple of years, and suddenly I felt like I was falling into the sky. You can’t hold on to the ground. It’s an eerie feeling. Not that I don’t drive into snow in the dark and pretend that I’m in the Millennium Falcon. (No, really, the ship a character of mine captains I threatened to name the “Bi-Centennial Bird.”)

I don’t know what Nen thinks about when he’s looking out the windows. I was a tiny bit curious because of the silence, but after a bit I just turned on the radio. I had lost the ability to be concerned about being overheard while I sang along with some of the songs years ago, and while I don’t have the voice even for karaoke, I can carry a tune with the radio.

Nen spoke up somewhere in the middle of my mangling an 80s song I thought I had known more of the words to with a, “Look there.”

I glanced where he pointed, careful to keep the majority of my attention on the road. I saw that the traffic was at an ebb and so gave it a better look.

It was a unicorn, silhouetted against the horizon. Dark in the moonlight, a flash of silver and shadow, looking much like a deer.

“Huh,” I said. “So there’s one near Boulder? Can’t be a lot of virgins there with the college.”

“Virgo intacta has never been the question. The uninitiated, unconsecrated, of those I suspect you would find many. Those who still have their innocence, the flower and bloom of naivete, those still blessed like children and fools.” He scoffed. “What a ridiculous diet.”

“Diet?” I asked.

“`We Pee Rainbows’ is my Weezer cover band.”

“Has that meme really made it into the fey realms?  Wow.  Funny, but are you saying they actually eat virgins?”

Nen just chuckled.

“No, really.”

He stayed silent.

I think I asked him a few more times. “Hymenatarians? Chastitarians?” He refused to answer, and eventually my brain let it go. Just to save it for later, like some kind of bizarre midnight snack, no doubt. I’d be casually ready to fall into a comfortable doze, and then I’d see horses with horns and shark teeth. Like you do.

Ed’s house was decked out for Halloween, which was an event I was completely unready for, although I quickly decided the costume I came home in was probably relevant. I’d have to pick up some pumpkins and carve them and ask Nen what he thought. I expected he would laugh and laugh.

Ed didn’t have any of the animatronic stuff out that he usually put out on the last day. He and his mom once rigged up a whole bug theme that made all the adults who came up with the kids to get candy start scratching themselves in less than thirty seconds. (On that note, did you know that the average trick-or-treat tends to max out at forty-five seconds per transaction? Never give a nerd a stopwatch.) Just occasional blinking and glowing eyes in the bushes, that sort of thing, to set up the anticipated fear response.

Ed’s mom answered the door. “E, it’s so nice to see you,” she said, giving me the obligatory hug. She did it awkwardly because of the huge knife in her hand. I don’t cook, so I just put it under the term “butcher knife” and figured it was for cutting out the joints of people who hadn’t done their required amount of seeing their friends. You know, because the horses with horns and shark teeth wouldn’t be enough to keep me awake.

She asked our favourite question. “Did you eat?”

I gave her my favourite answer. “I wouldn’t turn down a snack, but don’t worry about it.”

She looked at Nen carefully. “And who is your friend, E?” she asked, reminding me of my duties.

“This is…” I thought about it, but he jumped in.

“I am Adam Neniyi,” he said, offering his hand. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” he said, with all the sincerity that he meant it.

I had a moment of dismay, thinking, “Great, he saved all of his mischief for…” but then I realized something odd.

Nen’s height has varied from about seventeen inches to the aforementioned twenty feet, but I was used to him being about four-foot nothing. Ed’s mom was looking up when she shook his hand. He was still the size I was used to, but it was like he was different, taller, to her. Or that she saw more of him or something. Kind of like how Sir Darius was an eight foot troll at the same time he was a short blue man who smoked too much, I guess.

Ed came from down the hall, wearing an open red flannel shirt over some jeans. He looked good, actually. It wasn’t quite the lumberjack look it could have been. He came up and gave me a half-hug, one of those manly arm clasps and a pat on the back kind of things.

“Hey, Doc,” he said. “And Adam, nice to see you,” he fist-bumped Nen, but his eyes weren’t in the same place. He did the same thing his mom had, as if Nen were, I guessed, almost six feet tall.

I shook my head. It was weird. And where did that name come from? Adam, for the Namer, no doubt. Probably some sick kind of fey pun somewhere. Rayya said words could score points. I’d have to get a scorecard.

Ed took the bag and gestured for me to follow. He lived downstairs, mostly, although they had a library and gaming room upstairs. “C’mon,” he said. “Zach texted me and said rehearsal was starting late, so he won’t be home ’til closer to eleven.”

“Oh good, because I’m sure we can be sloshed by ten thirty,” I suggested.

“You’re making a night of it?” he asked.

“You still have that awful blue couch?” I asked. I nodded as we got down the curve in the stairs and I saw it under the pile of video games. “Yeah, and ‘Adam’ can do whatever it is he does for sleep.”

“That is truly an awful blue,” Nen noted.

I actually loved the couch – it had a single cushion that I think his mom has had to re-stuff some seventeen times. (That number doesn’t come completely out of the blue – it’s been about that long since I left high-school, so once a year…) It has a dark wood frame and rounded arm rests. But it was really an awful muppet blue.

The room was otherwise picked up and neat; I saw the pause screen for a game I didn’t have on his big monitor.  He might run a successful extermination business, and he might have employees and even a small office, but when it comes down to it, there’s a chance that Ed’s the guy who lives at home with his mother and plays video games in the basement.