It took me a few minutes to orient myself, a few minutes that, had I been in some kind of crisis situation would have had me shouting, “Game over, man!\u00a0 Game Over!”\u00a0 However you want to measure the luck I had, I wasn’t in a crisis situation.\u00a0 In fact, I could sit down on the step leading up to the door and take a bit of a breather while an amalgam of a whole bunch of crazy fey stood and watched me patiently.<\/p>\n
I guessed it was “patiently,” given that she hadn’t picked me up by the virtual (or literal) scruff of my neck and tossed me inside.\u00a0 She just watched, eyes shaded by those amber sunglasses, as a hint of moon passed over the yard.\u00a0 I taught myself again how to breathe, think, and otherwise handle myself vaguely like a functioning human being, and then stood back up, ready to take on whereever the house led us.<\/p>\n
This was going to be tricky.\u00a0 See, now it was my turn to do something kind of like Doloise was doing on the road, following it and yet not following it.\u00a0 In this case, I was needing to enter the shell of the house, and then follow it through to the realm it touched, without actually worrying about hallways and doors and all that good stuff.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Let me correct myself a little to try to explain.\u00a0 I had to enter the home without being distracted by the things of the house.\u00a0 A home looks different to all those who live there, whether they’re corporeal or not.\u00a0 The view of your house from the mouse in the pantry is a much different view than that of the salesman who comes in by the front door.\u00a0 Ever gone back to a house you lived in as a kid and thought, “This was a lot bigger then?”\u00a0 It’s much the same principle.\u00a0 You were trying to enter the place you used to live…not the house that exists in the now.\u00a0 Great, now I complicate it with time travel, right?\u00a0 No, it’s all about perception.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Any practitioner should be able to tell you that next to sympathetic principles, perception is the biggest key to power.\u00a0 It’s why vision is important, even to things that don’t see the way we do.\u00a0 (Blind practitioners are actually not all that uncommon, even if they always make me want to ask if they’re trying to compensate for something.\u00a0 Yeah, I feel dirty.)<\/p>\n
So having opened the physical door, my being a physical being, I reached over with my concentration and that access to the thing I call my talent, and opened the door again, this time to the place the whispers and desires and darkness called home.<\/p>\n
Um, when I say, “Don’t try this at home, kids,” I mean it.\u00a0 Closing cupboards is one thing; opening gateways is something else entirely.<\/p>\n
This time it was easier, almost as if the house breathed out a sigh of relief.\u00a0 Doloise moved behind me as I took a step into the darkness.<\/p>\n
She conjured up a wisp of purple from the hand she had kept in the fire, luminescence slowly being drawn back into a small fiery ball of light.\u00a0 It was…enough to see shapes by, at least.\u00a0\u00a0 A lot of the fey had cat like ears and eyes: maybe it was more than bright enough for her, but I predicted sore shins and foreheads.<\/p>\n
From the inside, things expanded.\u00a0 This back door led directly into a small space where doors would have been found to the basement and the garage, before opening up into the kitchen.\u00a0 In this skin of the house (like an onion… or an ogre) there was a bit of kitchen, and a huge gaping pit towards the basement.\u00a0 It was the last place I wanted to go, which meant I looked for Doloise’s nod before I headed that way.<\/p>\n
The pit portion was rounded and the stairs were stained with more darkness, this kind almost wet.\u00a0 I saw that my hands were stained as I felt my way down towards the deep.\u00a0 I saw the cheese crumb stains on my pants in this almost ultraviolet way, but while they would wash out, blood would take more work.\u00a0 I tried keeping my hands away from my body once I got my balance so that I wouldn’t make more trouble.<\/p>\n
There were noises, howls mostly, as we moved that directions.\u00a0 Once or twice, there was the ghost of a photographer’s flash, and faces on the wall would appear and disappear like a set of family photos in three dimensions.\u00a0 I ignored it the best I could.<\/p>\n
See, I had only opened the way.\u00a0 I was darned if I was going to attune myself to the truth of the way.\u00a0 I was a passerby, not a visitor.\u00a0 An innocent bystander, not trying to get myself trapped into the story being played out.\u00a0 Trying not to add my redundant fear to the mess, really.<\/p>\n
I turned at the bottom of the stairs into further darkness, waiting for Doloise and her purple flame to illuminate things.\u00a0 She took this as a chance to take the lead, and I was just fine with that.\u00a0\u00a0 I couldn’t do this blindfolded; the magic wouldn’t work that way…but it wasn’t a dream.\u00a0 I didn’t have to watch the murder being performed a thousand times until the spirit was no longer willing.<\/p>\n
There are a lot of ghosts.\u00a0 I’m no ectomancer, but we have a couple of tricks in common.\u00a0\u00a0 I know there are a lot of different kinds of ghosts, and only the ones with real will have a choice – the rest are but echoes trapped in, well, darkness.<\/p>\n
We walked through the scene of the crime, chilled to the bone and maybe even deeper, and came out into a halfworld of shadows.\u00a0 Doloise stopped me.<\/p>\n
“Make the bargain, and we will be able to see the gate.”<\/p>\n
The bargain, yes.\u00a0 See, in order to fulfill the promise of the portal there, I had to help make the bridge.\u00a0 Which meant using power, but only enough to touch, not enough to solidify the circumstances.\u00a0 I couldn’t bring this side through to the reality I knew, or we couldn’t “slip through the fingers,” such as it were.\u00a0 I could not have a safety net of us-versus-them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You know, half the time, I think I\u00a0don’t really believe in magic anyway.<\/p>\n
I could close my eyes for this.\u00a0 I opened the path we were standing in, and it hurt.\u00a0 It hurt like cold hurts, not a bracing blast of frost, but the cold of joints that don’t really want to move, deep into the bone.\u00a0 An ache, a memory of pain.<\/p>\n
I made a silent promise.\u00a0 Now that I had been here, I would work to exorcise this.\u00a0 No child should feel this, dead or alive.<\/p>\n
“Let us through, pass us through, hide us from sight, and deliver us into light,” I muttered, holding my focus.\u00a0 I could feel the ghosts gathering around us as I focused on Doloise.\u00a0 She was my key, and I was going to the door.<\/p>\n
I drew the echoes in, and drank a sip of them to taste the power and flavor the magic.\u00a0 I knew how to do this on an instinctive level; I could use rituals, but this was me and the worlds interacting.\u00a0 I could feel so many places wanting to reach out, wanting to touch us.\u00a0 I trailed my fingers across the worlds for a moment, feeling so much possibility, but all of them discordant, all of them not matching the key the fey realm sang.<\/p>\n
Until… yes, that one.\u00a0 “Bring me through,” I told it.<\/p>\n
A rush of white I could hear rather than see, and then, we stood blinking in the sunlight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had only opened the way. I was darned if I was going to attune myself to the truth of the way. I was a passerby, not a visitor. An innocent bystander, not trying to get myself trapped into the story being played out. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-two"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}