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Sangrelysia
by Vivian Darkbloom
Rolling hills
I woke up on fire.
Burning and sweating with the fever.
"Water!" I cried out, trying to sit up, an effort which sent
stars shooting across the blackness where the room should have
been, needles of agony darting through my brain.
"Ouch!" I collapsed, defeated. When the constellations began to
clear, I saw a worried-looking Sylvia sitting beside me on the
bed, and realize she was clasping my hand.
"Are you going to be OK?"
"I think so. Just give me a minute to rest."
"Do you want me to get some water?"
"Yes, that would be fabulous."
She was gone for a moment, an incredibly long moment. As I heard
her step into the adjacent bathroom and turn the faucet, I
thanked my lucky stars (and the ones shooting across the room
from the pain) that we lived in a world with indoor plumbing.
In some of these pseudo-medieval fantasy worlds, you'd have to
trudge all the way outdoors and lower a bucket into a well, haul
it back up again, then carry it all the way to where you wanted
it. This is a fact commonly whitewashed by your typical fantasy
author. Hey -- do you ever get to see what goes on in Hobbit
bathrooms? Good cause to tremble in terror, let me tell you.
Around here, you just turn a faucet, same way as you do in the
mundane world. (or the parts of it with indoor plumbing).
Difference is that, here, unlike in the mundane world, the water
coming out is always pure and refreshing. From what I hear, most
of the streams and water supplies in the world-without-magic have
been silted, polluted, or poisoned with industrial waste,
rendering the water undrinkable unless they run it through a
bazillion filters or pour in even more icky chemicals.
Poisoned streams, poisoned bloodstream, our Sangrelysian empire
increasingly poisoned by the plodding, unimaginative, conformist
thinking so typical of those sodding mundanes. The rage welled up
within me once more to be greeted by splotchy fireworks across my
visual field.
Sylvia returned, bearing a crystalline glass filled with
sparkling pure water.
I drained it entirely, then handed her back the glass. Then I
cursed my foul luck. "If only that damned dart had fallen a tiny
bit lower, it would have simply glanced off my boot, and I would
be perfectly fine right now. Is it that God wants me to suffer?"
She shrugged. "It hit you instead of me."
I didn't want to make her feel guilty. She was going through
enough, as it was. "I think we need to see Delphia," I said.
"You mumbled something about that yesterday. Who's Delphia, an
ex-girlfriend?"
I laughed. "Listen to you! Not quite. See, Delphia is about my
age, and she likes little boys your age, if you get my point."
"Oh."
"Anyhow, Delphia is not the type of person I would want to
disturb unless absolutely necessary."
"Why not?"
"She's not. . . well, let's just say she doesn't exactly have the
most winning personality in the world."
"Raging bitch?"
"Can be. Not always, though. She's blind, just so you know."
"Oh. More water?"
"Yes, please."
I spent the moment while Sylvia was gone hating the fact that I
was so helpless.
"Here," she said, spilling a few drops as she offered me the
glass. Our fingers touched lightly as I took it, and once more
drained it.
"Much better," I said. "But I don't think I'll be going anywhere
for awhile."
"Did the books say this would happen?"
"More or less. The interaction between arcynine and the
counteracting spell is nearly impossible to stabilize, so the
venomous effects come in waves."
"Did you see anything about a cure?"
"Dragon's blood, was all I could find, though I remember from
long ago seeing something scrawled in a margin somewhere about
it. Oh. . ."
Living up to its reputation, the fever kicked in, exerting its
recrudescence for a minute or two. "Thing is," I continued
through the pain, "There aren't any reliable accounts I can find
of anybody ever actually surviving being poisoned with arcynine.
In all known cases, death occurred before the protective spell
could be invoked."
"We'll find a cure," she whispered. "We've got to."
"In the meantime," I said, "You may as well go out and play.
"I'll be alright, and there's no point having both of us being
stuck inside here."
She brightened. "I'll go to the rolling hills, and learn to fold
space!"
"OK now, wait a sec. When I said run out and play, I meant
hopscotch or something. I should be with you when you go to the
rolling hills, to make sure you know how to avoid the sinkholes.
You could get into serious trouble out there."
She turned away from me and tilted her head in a way that I knew
meant she would not be heeding my sage advice.
I sighed, knowing that any further admonitions would only
encourage her. Well, it would hardly be the first time an
apprentice needing rescuing from the sinkholes of the rolling
hills. It was an arduous process, requiring a hundred or so
metres of good solid rope and a fair amount of patience.
Best to leave her to make her own mistakes, otherwise how could
she ever learn?
"Could I ask a question?" she said.
"Certainly, my love."
"You know the butterflies, the messages we sent out?"
"Yes."
"How do the people they're going to, know how to reply?"
"When the recipient finishes reading, the single sheet turns into
two, the one with your message on it for them to keep, and the
other blank for them to write on. The blank sheet has
instructions at the bottom: when they're done writing, they tap
the bottom corner and it automatically folds up and flies away."
"Wow," she mused. "How does all that happen from such a simple
spell?"
I sat up to answer, feeling a surge of strength from the rage.
"Excellent question, Sylvia. Quite topical. See, what happens is
that the simple incantation I showed you invokes a much more
complex sorcery residing in the supernatural metasphere of this
world."
"The super met a what?"
I was starting to feel rightly pissed off. "This is precisely why
we have got to stop Elwrong, the sooner the better."
"Why? I mean, she's an evil wicked person and all that, but what
does that have to do with the super. . . whacha thingie?"
"The supernatural metasphere, the supernal metasphere. Because
all the magic in this world is based on the spells engraved into
the metasphere, in eons past. Starting long ago with the
love-based spells of the Ancient Mother, maintained and
embellished by all of the wizards and practitioners of magic
since, down the generations.
"The reason the mundane world has no magic is that. . ."
"Its met a sphere has no spells in it," she finished.
"Precisely."
She frowned. "So does that mean Elwrong could mess up the spells
in there?"
I nodded. "If she unlocks the access key our supernal metasphere,
and starts tampering with the foundation sorcery, she could turn
Sangrelysia into a living hell, literally speaking. Much like the
dimension where she learned magic herself, I'll wager."
"Where are the keys?"
"Well, there's a copy here and. . ."
"And?"
I did not want to worry her. "Another in my tower, back home."
"Protected by a talking lion's head."
"Well, yes."
"So how do we know if she's been messing with those spell
thingies."
"I'll be able to sense it, I hope."
"Then what?"
I sighed. "Let's just try to find a way to stop her, before she
does."
"And we also have to find a way to make you better."
"Very sweet dear, but that's less important. I'm just a single
person, and honestly I'm not afraid to die. Saving all of the
people of Sangrelysia is much more important than my tiny little
life."
"But. . . I like your tiny little life. And to me it doesn't seem
so little."
I laughed, triggering another showering twinge of sparks across
my visual field, causing me to cave in once more in a fit of
feverish perspiration.
"Are you OK?" she asked.
"I'll be fine, I just need to rest. Why don't you run along and
go play hopscotch?"
Saying nothing, she sat watchfully as I imploded once more into
fitful sleep punctuated by dark dreams of volcanoes and sinister
sulphuric subterran fires, burning with horrible phosphorescence
in the dreaded darkness.
____________________________________________________________
I awoke thinking of rope. Panic crept across my mind as I
realized that we probably didn't have any around currently. A
memory of `lending' it for the cause of tethering a series of
boat hulls together in order to transport large blocks of marble
and alabaster across the lake for use in constructing a temple to
Aphrodite, a project conceived and implemented by a lovesick poet
whose name I have forgotten.
I listened for the Princess.
Silence.
The light through the quartz skylights above me told of late
afternoon. A rush of realization that I would need to do
something soon, should she need rescuing. I forced myself to jolt
into sitting, fumbling around on the floor for my robes and
sandals.
"You're awake," spoke a quiet voice behind me."
Startled nearly out of my skin, I turned to see that she had been
quietly reading the whole time.
"Did you go fold space?" I asked.
"I just got back a little while ago. I fixed them."
"You what?"
"The sinkholes. I fixed them. At least, the three that I found."
"Excuse me. You what?!"
"Fixed them. Someone had folded the intrascopic vertex inside
out, and it got tangled with the next fold, distending the
terrain."
"Whoa. What's with all the long words all of a sudden?"
She shrugged. "Been doing some reading. Anyway, I just inverted
the erroneous vertex, and the formation sprang back to normal."
I was stunned. "This I've got to see. Nobody has ever done that
before. Those holes have been there longer than I can remember,
for hundreds of years in fact! How did you figure out the vertex
thing, anyway?"
She held up the book she was reading. Elementary Principles of
Magic was the title. It was a thin volume.
"Really? Where?"
"Page 9427132, under the heading `folding space, common mistakes
and their correction.'"
"How did you find that?"
"I looked in the index."
"It has an index?"
"Right here in the back." The rustling sound of thick leaves of
paper turning. "See, you just touch the words and it opens to
that page, like this." Sure enough, it did.
In my mind, a light flickered into existence, though better of
it, then went out again. Magical book, of course. An index sure
would have helped me save time finding things in it, wouldn't it?
Why had I never thought of that? No, don't ask.
"I don't believe this," I insisted. "You have got to show me
where you repaired the sinkholes." Secretly, I just wanted to be
sure she hadn't inadvertently created some even more hazardous
situation, which I didn't want to hurt her feelings by saying.
She shrugged. "You may want to get dressed first. I guess you're
feeling better?"
I stopped to consider. "Yes, for now at least. Thank you for
asking."
____________________________________________________________
Together we stood in the sunlight of a late tropical afternoon
atop a soft verdant grassy hilltop beneath an elm tree, slowly
rising and falling with a familiar motion akin to the rolling of
ocean waves.
I recalculated my bearings once more. "Yes, I think this was one
of the places there was a hole. I can't really be sure."
I thought harder, digging for the memory of a rescue from long
ago. Wasn't it in the valley next to that hilltop with the oak
tree that grew with an odd double-trunk? Was that it over there?
"How about this one?" I mumbled, half to myself as I strode
across the rippling surface.
"Watch out!" she said, as I noticed the ground below me giving
way with rubbery pliability, sand and loam yawning beneath me,
opening into a deep crack as I fell, swallowed by darkness,
tumbling amid dirt and debris, struggling to right myself and
arrest the plunge. The sense of weightlessness was exhilarating
and terrifying. A few seconds later, after what seemed like an
eternity, I landed with a thump on a spongy rough earthen surface
in the gloom.
The panic that had earlier crept so shyly through my mind, now
got up and broke into a screaming gallop. "Where on Earth are we
going to find rope?" I demanded of the darkness.
"Are you OK?" called down the princess from about 20 metres above
me, as a rain of dust and gravel fell on my head.
The sole light descended feebly from an uneven crescent of sky
carved in the darkness above me, interrupted by threadlike
strands of loose roots. I could discern no features of Sylvia's
distant face, only the small silhouette against the heavens.
"Yeah, I'm alright," I called back. "A little bruised maybe. But
it's going to be getting dark soon!"
"I didn't fix this one," she called down. "It's a little
difficult to see."
"Yes, I figured that out," I called back, feeling a healthy dose
of humility coming on. "Sylvia, we've got to find some rope!"
"Just a second," she said.
I contemplated wincingly the prospect of toning down my smug,
self-assured, irritatingly nonchalant attitude.
As I hung my head, flush with excitement, injury, and
embarrassment, I thought I noticed the light increasing. For a
few seconds, I dismissed the sensation as simply my eyes
adjusting to the darkness. I must have really been hitting on the
carrots, though, for the eye-adjustment to progress so quickly.
Looking up, it seemed like the opening above me was larger than
it had been. No, I was just imagining. I rubbed my eyes -- but
since my hands were covered with dust, everything got blurrier
for a minute. Great.
Once I had succeeded in clearing my vision, I looked up again.
No question, the aperture was growing -- actually, it only seemed
to be expanding because it was getting closer.
I watched in amazement as the opening of sky swelled gradually
larger and larger, and then in one swoop engulfed me, and I found
myself in open daylight again, on a smooth grassy slope sitting
next to Sylvia. The sinkhole was gone.
She was engrossed deeply, eyes closed, in intense concentration.
After a few heartbeats, she opened them and looked at me. "I
fixed it," she said sheepishly.
I realized that my mouth was gaping with dumb astonishment, and
closed it. I stood up and walked away, facing the sun that was
about to set into the mountains beneath the fleecy clouds.
"I'm such a klutz," I fretted. "What am I even doing, trying to
help? I'm only in the way."
I felt her warmth nuzzling forgivingly beside me, felt her arm
gingerly encircling my waist. "You saved my life, remember?" she
whispered. "That's how you got poisoned."
I sputtered with exasperation. "I mean, look at this. Next to
you, I'm just a moron, fumbling in the dark."
"Without you, I wouldn't be here right now."
The sun touched the top of a dark mountain peak in the distance.
Sylvia caressed my back gently.
"I guess each of us has something the other needs," I said.
"Maybe that's why we're friends," she said, smiling up at me.
"Sorry about the fragile male ego," I said.
"No harm done."
"You know that I love you."
"And I love you too, no matter what!"
We embraced deeply, profoundly, celebrating our mutual commitment
to sharing and compromise for the sake of maintaining the
paradoxically frail yet powerful connection of affinity and
affection that we call human relationship.
"Good. Now let's have sex."
Chapter 18
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