He was again surrounded by darkness. Being stared at by the same pair of bluish flames, taunted by the same sharp-toothed grin. This time, however, he felt it start to move towards him.
Before he could back away or the thing could advance on him, he felt a pull again. Not like the one that brought him back to the world of the living, though. This one felt less instant, hesitant. But soon enough he landed on his ass on a stone-cold floor.
"Are you incapable of staying on your feet or what? Nek' mi se Had smiluje…"
It was a weird thing to think about, given how little they had interacted so far, but he recognized that voice and that exasperated tone right away. He looked up.
"Maggie!"
She had her arms crossed, scowling at him like he was a turd left behind by some rat. She hissed as he said her name.
"I warned you not to get comfortable with my name! It's "You" to you, git! Now get your ass up before I whip it."
He shivered at her words again, for a reason he didn't know and didn't care to know, as the feeling was then overwhelmed by anger. After what she had tried pulling on him, he wasn't having any of her shit. He got up.
"Oh yeah, totally fair, you tried to get a corpse to kill me twice on the same day and YOU'RE the one who gets to be pissed off here?! Fuck you, ok?!"
He regretted those last few words for a second, as she advanced on him, but he held her murderous glare then, defiant. She raised a twitching hand, most likely ready to murder his already-dead self, yet lowered it and turned away, sighing.
"If it wasn't for the old hags, you'd be in the deepest depths of Tartarus now, getting fucked over by every possible torturous fate, ti šupčino."
He rolled his eyes, somehow knowing she could sense it.
"And there you go again, speaking in riddles."
She rounded on him as the room shook. Her eye was now a blood-red blaze, her hair the color of it, as her entire skin turned as dark as her clothing, and her voice boomed like the roars of a million lions.
"DO YOU EVER SHUT THE FUCK UP?!!!"
He fell back on his ass as tremors swept the room, both of their breathing now ragged and labored.
By all accounts, he should have been shitting bricks at the sight of her. But it was not fear what she invoked then.
It was awe .
As in, awesome . And also awful .
It triggered something. A far away memory, not from his mind, but his soul . A memory of… something. Someone . For whom he felt both contempt and… love .
He screwed his eyes shut, trying to clear the fog impeding that memory of coming to the forefront of his conscience, but it was no use. It slipped away just as it came. He cursed.
She slapped him in the face hard, back to her normal self.
"OW! FUCK!"
"GET UP! WE GOTTA GO! HOLD ON TO ME!"
She was clearly panicked, which, from what he knew of her thus far, seemed very uncharacteristic. He didn't care to ask what was wrong or follow her orders, though. If she thought she could try to sign his contract with the Grim Reaper in his blood, drag him to whatever dank dungeon they were in at the moment and boss him around, she could kiss his ass!
He crossed his arms then, and, seeing that he would not obey, she seized one of them and forced his hand to squeeze her shirt. Right around her right breast . He was glad she was too distracted to notice his face turn the color of his hair, despite being a soul and all.
He resisted the primitive urge to keep ogling the thing under his fingers at that moment and to squeeze it more, which would have for sure meant his third death. He focused instead on whatever voodoo shit she was invoking with her hurried hand gestures.
Her face was one of serene concentration, though he still caught the subtle twitch of her forehead veins. He wanted to ask what on Earth she was doing, but knew not to break her composure, as whatever it was, that inner voice let him know it was of utmost importance she performed it to completion.
So he waited…
And then he became aware of the increasing drop in temperature around them and the faint clopping of hooves outside the room, approaching.
A feeling engulfed him, not dissimilar from the one he experienced right before the corpse had drained him of his life. But infinitely more dreadful.
Whatever was coming towards the room brought with it a fate incomparably worse than death.
Something within, not even the voice, more innate still, warned him that, at the moment, bringing attention to what was out there, verbally or consciously, would mean his doom.
So he focused on her again and more specifically where his hand was on her, trying his damnedest not to think about the thing, ask about the thing or worry about the thing. FUCK!
He was sweating now, about to tell her to hurry the fuck up with whatever ancient ritual she was performing, when she made a gesture with her arm bent in front of her face imitating an elephant's trunk.
With the thunderous trumpeting of an elephant resounding in his ears, they were gone.
…
To accurately describe how the journey where they currently stood had been, would require a language suited for concepts pertaining to a higher dimensional plane. Not four dimensions, five dimensions, six, seven or eight; rather infinitely many .
The closest analogy he could think of was imagining your body becoming a rubik's cube, being scrambled ad infinitum and then solved in a single move in an instant. And that still did not even begin to approach anything resembling what the actual feeling had been.
The place itself would also be impossible to explain, even if he used every possible combination of every possible sound in every possible utterance of every possible length in every possible language, stretching beyond infinity.
All he could say was that to stand there was to stand everywhere and nowhere all at once. Every part of him made contact with every single surface all at once, and yet no part of him made contact with anything at all.
But no matter how alien this plane of existence was to him, he felt no disorientation whatsoever. As if he had adapted to the rules of the environment right away.
However, he could tell some elements morphed to accommodate his limited senses. He saw a floor beneath him. There were walls and a ceiling, though it all meant nothing. He was not just standing on the floor, and he wasn’t standing on anything at all.
The whole place began to exhibit pink hues, contrasting with the dark blue void outside of that space, which was also inside. This place had no end, and thus had nothing outside of it, and since it had no beginning either, there was nothing inside as well. It altogether resembled those synthwave images he had seen ad nauseam online over the last few years.
On one of the corners of the room, one of infinitely many, and also on no corner whatsoever, for there were none, he spotted several plushies. He could tell they belonged to his dimension of origin and not this one. They were arranged in a neat row on top of a dresser.
A hedgehog; a pink dinosaur; an armadillo; a polar bear; a dolphin; and a parakeet. And behind them, propped up on a little stool surrounded by sunflowers, there sat a teddy bear dressed as a King’s College London alumnus.
Above the dresser, pictures of people hung on the wall that was and wasn’t there.
A guy wearing shades at night dressed as a mafioso; a freckled ginger girl laughing, while eating a slice of cheese; a pair of girls wrestling, the blonde throwing in the towel as the brunette had her in a chokehold; a woman trying to wriggle out of bubble wrap restraints; another enthralled on a romance book, sitting amidst piles of them; a girl scrambling to find her glasses in a kitchen covered top-to-bottom in butter, while another tried to wipe said butter from her hair; and yet another pair sat upon thrones, adorned in regal robes, one surrounded by hedgehogs, while the other seemed to inhabit some kind of purgatory.
Throughout all of these photos, he could tell something, or rather someone was missing. Not like they had been removed, but just kept unseen somehow. He wondered if they had something to do with the presence he had been sensing in the room with them from the moment they arrived.
Maggie’s yelling startled him out of his contemplation.
“GREG! Stop hiding, You know I know you’re in here, and you know I don’t have much time.”
He looked in the direction she did, and there was a shift in the environment. Everything suddenly felt truly solid, pieces falling into place. The whole room turned a bright pink and became opaque, as he now stood on a tangible surface for the first time here. The presence he had sensed with them revealed itself, taking the form of…
A disembodied pink elephant head. Wearing a fancy tophat.
“Uhm… what the fuck are you?”
He knew he was being rude, but his brain was so bamboozled that that was the only question on his mind.
“Shut up, Nerd. I’ll do the talking here.”
He’d have sneakily given her a middle finger, if it wasn’t for the literal elephant in the room taking all of his attention. He finally spoke, in a British accent to go with the tophat.
“M-Maggie! G-Good to see you again so soon!”
“Cut the crap, Greg. You know damn well why I’m here. Do it quick and I promise to maybe not bother you ever again.”
Being in his domain, Jessie was made fully aware that Greg, in terms of power, was a god next to Maggie. He could erase her from existence without her even realizing it. And yet, despite the universe of difference in their abilities, he seemed to cower in her presence, even sweating a bit with frightened eyes. He wondered if Greg was, in contrast to his nigh-omnipotence, perhaps a bit naive.
“Maggie, you know t-that if I do this, the council will be after me, along with the Fates a-and-”
Greg gulped and glanced at him for a second, as if stopping himself from revealing too much in Jessie’s presence, though it still made next to no sense to him. He knew the Fates from Greek mythology, sure, and hearing a godlike being allude to them all but confirmed their existence now. But what did they have to do with Maggie and him? And whatever this council was, did it pertain to beings like Greg? Were there perhaps more of these godly floating pink elephant heads?
“Yeah, yeah. I know, I know , trust me. But you know I can’t do it, for whatever reason. The odds are already stacked heavily against me, so I’m just trying to turn the tide in my favor a little bit, you get me? Tell you what, if he turns out to not be the one and I’ve just been wasting my time, I’ll personally answer to the council about my request.”
Greg stared at her for a bit, looking anxious, as if wanting to say something, yet hesitant to do so. But, finally, he asked,
“You already know you are not wasting your time with him, though, don’t you?”
She seemed flustered at the question, and replied through gritted teeth,
“No, I don’t know, Greg, whether I’m wasting my time with this git or not-”
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
“Hey!”
“- ,so, can you just…?”
She gestured wildly for him to do whatever she wanted of him, though it looked involuntary.
If Greg seemed anxious to say anything before, between her fierce tone and even fiercer glare, he now looked positively terrified, his pink coloration paling a bit. Yet he braved through once again, even more soft-spoken this time.
“But you do know, don’t you?”
If she wasn’t monochrome, he supposed she would have blushed right then, despite her still-menacing tone.
“Stop.”
“You would not be coming to me in the first place if you didn’t already know-”
“Stop it.”
“-, so, you are sure of it, but choosing not to be.”
“GREG! Just… help me out… please . You know there’s no time to be dilly-dallying here.”
The way she had to choke the word out, he would’ve thought it had killed her to do so, and he supposed it did, in a way.
“Maggie… He should know about the pro-”
“SHHH! Not. A. Word. Of. It. To. The. Git.”
“I’m literally standing right here, y’know?”
She hissed at him before turning back to Greg.
“Do it. Now. I don’t need to be lectured by you. He’ll know if he’s worthy and that’s still to be decided. Capisci ?”
He could tell Greg was hurt by the words. The pachyderm simply looked at her with a sad expression. It was clear that he wanted to give her a rebuttal, but then shut his mouth in the end.
With the roaring trumpeting of his trunk, Jessie’s body was fully reconstituted, putting an end to his second time as a soul.
As soon as it was back to him, all the hairs on it stood up at once. The feeling he’d had when that thing had been approaching the room they were in before came back. But if the thing from earlier made him feel like he would spend an eternity being subjected to the most heinous ills anyone could suffer through, this made that prospect feel like salvation.
He was compelled to look back at the pictures on the wall. There was now a new one hanging farthest to the left of the dresser.
It was impossible to discern what was shown in it, as it looked… corrupted , like a computer virus had infected it. He tried squinting in hopes of seeing anything in it that could be the cause of the overwhelming dread enveloping him at the moment, but he could see nothing. Still, he could swear there was a person standing behind all of that scrambled mess. However, he knew that was not the cause of his foreboding.
The thing from earlier had made him aware that he shouldn’t bring attention to it. This, on the other hand, wouldn’t even allow him to do so . The impulse to warn the other two of its presence kept dying out before it ever reached his lips.
So, he refocused on the conversation.
“-take you there so you can be safe to-”
“No, Greg, that’s enough. I already made you interfere way too much and caused you a lot of trouble. Besides, this is my mission to carry out, at the end of the day. I’ll find a way to get him there, don’t worry.”
“I just hope you’ll heed my advice sooner rather than later…”
“Goodbye, Greg.”
With sorrowful eyes, he once again roared from his trunk, and, for a third time, darkness surrounded Jessie.
…
Next thing he knew, they were back at the clearing. He momentarily lost his balance upon landing and fell on his ass. Again.
He just heard her sigh and got up embarrassed.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
Still, she suppressed a smirk.
“Oh fuck off.”
She quickly turned serious then.
“Look. It’s clear we despise each other just based on first impressions.”
He raised a brow.
“No. Let me make things clear. I despise you based on the impressions you have given me so far. I’ve given you no reason to despise me.”
She scoffed.
“A daj jebote, git. You’ve been acting like nothing more than a pathetic whiny asshole, throwing a fit, cutting me off every two sen-”
“Because you’ve been a fucking psycho bitch this whole time, terrifying the shit out of me, saying a bunch of cryptic bullshit, and leading me to die not once , but TWICE ! So, I’m so-rry if I don’t fancy being nice to a crazy killer!”
His chest heaved with all his frustration at her deranged games up to now spilling over. She tutted, rubbing the bridge of her nose, before taking a deep breath with her eye closed. There was a beat of silence in the clearing before she looked at him with a determined stare.
“Listen, we don’t have to get along for this to work-”
“Est dīs grātia…”
She glared at him, letting it known that another interruption would make her rip his nuts off.
“ Anyway , all I ask is that you cooperate on this mission of mine.”
It was his turn to scoff.
“And what? Get killed by another one of your “tests”? No, thank you. And also, why would I cooperate with you on anything? Cuz if this “mission” is about allying myself with you on something, then hell to the no ! I ain’t cooperating on shit!”
She groaned, as if talking to a stubborn child. The audacity .
“Look, gi-... Nerd . I can’t tell you too much about my mission until I’m absolutely certain that you are the right person for the job. But , I can tell you it basically boils down to us having a fight. That’s it.”
Huh… This was new. Up until this point, she had been nothing but puzzling with all of her riddles and allusions to the supernatural. But he could always sense that there wasn’t a lie amidst any of it. Except for what she just said . The voice was adamant in telling him not to believe a word of it. He recognized the feeling from somewhere distant… a past event.
Despite his utter disinterest in her supposed mission, he decided to play that card, if only to irk the shit out of her. His tone was bored as he next spoke,
“A fight, huh?”
“Yes. But before we can get down to it, I must be one-hundred percent sure that you are supposed to be my opponent and that you have what it takes to face me.”
“Uh-huh, and you’re lying to me because…?”
For a split second, her face grew flustered again, before the smug smirk returned and she gave him a slow round of applause.
“Well played, git. I guess you do listen, after all. And you’re right, I already know you are the one who’s meant to oppose me. Greg kinda forced my hand on that one, unfortunately. I was just hoping you weren’t paying attention after all. But yes, I knew it from the moment you decided to come back to life right in front of me, which, fine, I admit was a little bit impressive.”
Even when he thought he had scored a win against her, she managed to just confuse him even further.
“That’s not what I… Also, I didn’t… You know what, nevermind.”
He began to walk away from the clearing.
“Where are you going?”
He replied without turning back.
“I’m going home, bitch. Fuck you straight to Hell.”
She snorted then.
“What home exactly, if I may ask, Nerd ?”
He did turn around at that, confused.
“What do you m-”
He stopped, as a cacophony of police cars, fire trucks and the commotion of panicked people filled the clearing.
“-happened?!”
“It all just… blew up out of nowhere!”
“Wasn’t this Jessie’s house?...”
“Was he…”
“Perhaps he’s still…”
“Maybe ran away with that chick…”
“You think this was planned out?...”
“I heard he hated the landlord…”
“Stay back, y’all! This area is off-limits at the moment!”
“Captain, the fire has been subdued. But we were not able to locate any survivors.”
“That’s enough, Murphy. We’ve done all we could for the time being.”
“Sir! We’ve discovered human remains scattered about into pieces, burnt to a crisp.”
“Leave it. The coroner will come over and deal with it along with the forensics guys.”
Where they currently stood was very far from the part of town he lived in, so she must have been amplifying all the sounds coming from all the way over there.
So that’s what had happened. He had blown the whole place up. After saying the word in Latin to the invading corpse, the only thing he felt next was being back in the dark place. It had only happened a few hours ago, but it felt like a whole week had passed since then.
Wait . That didn’t feel right either…
He looked up and saw how the sun was still not high enough behind the trees for it to be later than 7 AM. And judging by everything he heard going on over there, the emergency services had arrived just a while ago, and now had the situation under control. Therefore, it couldn’t be that long after at the moment. Perhaps only half an hour max had elapsed on this side while he had been on the other. Did time move faster in the places she took him to?...
Well, truth be told, he was certain that the pink elephant’s “room” had no concept of time to it at all…
He was snapped out of his thoughts, quite literally, by the snap of her fingers.
“Ej?! I asked you something.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t “huh?” me. What do you say?”
He was just so lost with every word of hers at this point.
“Say what?”
“Luciferu podari mi strpljenja da ne zadavim ovog idiota… you really are just that dense, huh. You see now why tagging along with me is your only option, right? You heard them just now. Your old life is over, git. Everyone thinks you’re either dead as shit or on the loose for destruction of property and first-degree murder, with a chick as your accomplice to boot.”
She gave him a triumphant smirk.
“It may not exactly be the way things played out, but we can spin that theory into a reality, don’t you think? So, again, I ask you. You in? Not that you have a choice, really.”
She thought she had cornered him with that stream of logic, but he wasn’t gonna give in to a madwoman’s terms without exhausting every possible escape route. He recalled something she had said about the way she killed those cops back during their first meeting.
“ They're not dead, you git, they're back at the station along with the cars and with no recollection of ever coming here in the first place. Everyone who witnessed it, sans you, has also forgotten seeing or hearing anything. ”
That was it!
“Can’t you just erase everyone’s memories of it, revive the landlord and restore the house to how it was? That way I get my house back, my sweet old granny back and my freedom back. Plus I don’t ever have to see your bitchy face again, hopefully.”
Her response was to laugh uproariously in his face. Of course .
“Oh, unholy hellhounds, you’re past dense now, you’re straight up a dumbass. First off, no, I can’t, for several reasons that are far too intricate to get into right now. But second off, even if I could, why would I ? You’d just walk away and I wouldn’t be able to fulfill my mission. I’d rather use it for leverage to get you to tag along with me, with a false promise to do it once I got what I needed from you. Alas, I have no such advantage, but you are all shit out of luck, so you best accept your fate and-”
He was already walking away again.
“A jebote! Are you seriously just gonna give yourself up?”
“Nope. I’m just gonna keep wandering through the forest until hopefully an animal mauls me. And even if you bring me back again and again, I’ll just keep on marching towards death, because I’m so fucking done with life at this point. Congrats, you got me homeless, petless and freedomless. I hope you’re happy.”
“Well, good luck. You’re gonna need it.”
“Eh, black bears are a-plenty round these parts, I’m sure at least one will want to have a taste of me.”
“No, I mean it, good luck. The way Greg brought you back, I asked that he make sure that there ain’t anything killing you short of another explosion on the level of th-”
“Perī.”
“...”
“...”
“Anyway, you ain-”
“Perī. Perī. Perī! PERĪ!!! ”
She was laughing, the bitch. He tried screaming it as loud as he could, like he did to deal with the rotten pile of meat, but it didn’t work this time. Fuck!
When he finally stopped trying after over a hundred times, she was bent over in hysterics, her face hidden behind a raven-dark curtain. Cunt .
She straightened herself up, eventually. Once again, if she wasn’t monochrome, she would have looked like a tomato right about then.
“Un-un-unholy Circle of Hell. Oh, fuck, you-you, you looked so-so fucking stupid! Fuck, I can’t breathe. A nek' mi se Lucifer smiluje… ok… ok, I’m calm now… pffff”
She lost it again not even within a second. He just groaned and mumbled a rushed “ fuck you ”, feeling him blush for some hellforsaken reason, as if the current situation wasn’t embarrassing enough. Great, he had just found out he had cool magic powers, and then they left him just as quick, right when he needed them.
She at last composed herself for good and immediately taunted him.
“Aww, you sad cuz you couldn’t take the easy way out? Sucks to suck, Nerd. But I guess that settles it then. You coming with me.”
“I haven’t agreed to any of this still, bitch.”
“Now now, you stay here while I go get some things ready. And don’t even try to off yourself cuz you know it ain’t gonna… work…”
She seemed to look beyond him for a second before her face lit up.
“Oh, great, he should keep you distracted while I take care of things. Be right back.”
She disappeared in an instant, as he stared at where she stood a moment ago, bewildered.
“Quid…”
He looked behind him, and the sight before his eyes won the award right then and there for the most bizarre thing he witnessed that day. And considering everything he had laid eyes on so far, this was a hell of an accomplishment.
“Tatae…”
It was a creature he recognized reading about in the writings of Gāius Plīnius Secundus. The achlis. Just like he wrote, it looked somewhat like an elk, and could probably pass for one if it wasn’t for one big difference. Literally . Its upper lip was so large that it was grazing backwards so it could get anything in its mouth. The sight of an animal moonwalking was quite uncanny, to say the least.
While observing the creature, he thought back to his college professor talking about how Plīnius was pretty imaginative, or in his own words, “full of shit”, when it came to his reports on zoology. When the man wasn’t writing about ordinary creatures of the ancient world, he was swinging towards the other extreme and inventing the most unbelievable cryptids of lands over yonder, talking about unicorns and big-lipped elk, as if anyone was supposed to believe in any of those. Well… If only that same professor could be standing right next to Jessie right now. It seems Plīnius had the last laugh after all.
The puzzling thing about this sighting, aside from, well, everything, was that, according to Plīnius, this was a creature that inhabited what is modern-day Scandinavia. So what on earth was it doing here on a different continent altogether? He chalked that up to supernatural shenanigans that he simply did not yet understand.
The creature then stopped, noticing him as they stared each other down. Having the creature facing him, he supposed it looked pretty docile. Keyword being looked.
Because right the next second, it charged straight at him, with a speed that was most definitely not elk-like.
“Meherculē!”
He somehow barely dodged it, feeling his feet gain a lightness as if he were walking in the air. But as he landed hard on the ground, a huge throbbing pain overtook his senses, indicating that he didn’t come out unscathed.
That’s when he saw his left arm. Or rather, where his left arm used to be, while the actual arm lay several feet ahead of him. He was ready to freak out about having lost it, when it suddenly jolted and flew back to him, reattaching itself bone by bone, nerve by nerve, muscle by muscle, and skin by skin. He was awestruck, wondering how it could be, when Maggie’s words came back to him.
“The way Greg brought you back, I asked that he make sure that there ain’t anything killing you short of another explosion…”
Regeneration . That’s what the pink elephant had given him. Cool. So at least he knew there wouldn’t be a risk of him dying to this beast. But he had to slay it still, lest it keep tearing him off limb by limb. Or potentially do the same to other creatures or people later on. This thing might as well be a pest, given the geographical discrepancy, so he was gonna exterminate it.
He barely had time to get up before it came barrelling towards him again. He was ready this time, however. He just hoped his powers worked this time.
“Expellātur!”
Right before it hit him, the creature got blown back several feet, smashing against a tree and falling on its side. His acne felt very itchy, but he barely noticed as he quickly ran behind another tree to hide before it got up again. He tried to remember what he had read about the achlis and how to effectively kill them.
Aha ! He recalled that because its back legs had no joints, it was forced to sleep standing up or leaning against a tree. This gave hunters an easy way to catch them. Chop halfway through a tree and wait for the achlis to come rest on it. As it would put weight against it, it alongside the tree would fall onto the ground. When it fell, it could not get to its feet fast enough to… get away…
He peeked behind the tree right as it got back to its feet. Damnit . Ok, whatever, he could deal with it the old-fashioned way, he supposed.
He lay flat on his stomach and whispered at the base of the tree.
“ Scindātur… ”
Just as he had hoped, whispering made the effect a bit weaker, as the wood was only cut about halfway in. Perfect. Now he just needed to sneak away from that tree and lay low behind another one and wait for the achlis to come near it.
So he waited as the beast seemed to have forgotten about his existence entirely, now roaming around the clearing and decidedly staying away from any trees. It needed a little incentive after all, so he grabbed a branch nearby and threw it towards the one tree he had marked. Thankfully, it worked, as the beast got curious about the noise and approached the tree. He spoke low next, hoping the effect would travel even from this distance.
“ Quiēsce… ”
The achlis stopped and then, very slowly, it began to lean against the tree at last. As soon as it put its full weight on it, they both collapsed. He could see the achlis now struggling to get up fast enough, as he walked towards it, taking his time still and savoring the job well done.
As soon as he got to it, however, he wasted no time in finishing it off. He made a gesture with his finger as if slicing through its neck.
“Caput praecīdātur.”
Its head was severed cleanly at that, falling a bit away from the body as it finally sagged, its limbs thumping against the ground. There was an absolute quiet in the clearing following that, as he stared at the creature’s head and its soulless eyes.
“Well, would you look at tha-”
“HOLY SHIT!”
He nearly jumped up a tree at the sound of her voice, he was so startled by it.
“It’s just me, git, relax. Kvragu.”
“Don’t just- oh fuck…”
She just raised her brow at him.
“Okaaaaay… Well, while you were having your fun killing this one, I got our method of transportation ready.”
She summoned a small petasus, and set it down in between them, summoning also a mina, which she threw into the petasus. The coin landed on the hat, and right away sprung from inside it a small indistinct figure, which appeared to be made of clay. It nonetheless spoke in an adult male voice.
“Ἰδού αἱ διᾱκονίαι Ἑρμοῦ ὁδοιπορικαί. Ἥκεις δὲ κατὰ τί;”
She tsked.
“Sranje, zaboravila sam da operira samo u staroj Grčkoj... Trebala sam dalje vježbati…”
“Ecce operae Hermae itinerāriae. Quārē tamen venīs?”
She looked at him in surprise.
“You speak Ancient Greek?”
“No… no, I don’t…”
“But you just-”
“I, I don’t know, it just… came to me, right away…”
“Right… Well, can you tell me what he just said then? In English?”
“Lo, Hermes’s travel services. What do you come for?”
“Tell him to take us to where two worlds meet.”
He figured he would know exactly what that meant in due time, so he complied without any question.
“Tē rogō, o diactore, ut nōs eō dūcās quō duo cōguntur mundī.”
The small figure nodded then at the request.
“Ἔνθ’ ἄξω ἔνθα τὼ κόσμω συλλέγονται. Ἆρ’ ἑτοίμω εστόν;”
“Yes. You ready?”
She simply rolled her eye. And then they were off, feeling like they were snatched suddenly by someone passing by them quickly. The world became a blur for but a second, and then they landed. Thankfully, he didn’t fall on his ass this time.
They stood on a small town square, with everyone around now staring at them, as a silence lasted for a few seconds, being finally broken by an old homeless-looking fellow wearing an eyepatch, who shouted for all to hear.
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Here's the glossary of all the terms and phrases used in this chapter:
Nek' mi se Had smiluje… - Croatian: May Hades have mercy on me...
Ti šupčino. - Croatian: You asshole.
A daj jebote. - Croatian: Oh, come the fuck on.
Est dīs grātia… - Latin: Thank the Gods...
Ej?! - Croatian: Hey!
Luciferu podari mi strpljenja da ne zadavim ovog idiota… - Croatian: Lucifer grant me patience to not strangle this idiot...
A jebote! - Croatian for "Oh for fuck's sake!"
Perī. - Latin for "Die" as a command.
A nek' mi se Lucifer smiluje… - Croatian: Oh, Lucifer have mercy on me...
Quid? - Latin for "What?"
Tatae... - An interjection in Latin expressing bewilderment. Roughly equivalent to English's "What the...".
Meherculē! - Latin: By Hercules! An expletive used in classical times by men only, to express a whole range of emotions, ranging from elation to ire. Somewhat equivalent to the English "Fuck!" or "Damn!"
Expellātur - Latin: Be expelled.
Scindātur - Latin: Be cut.
Quiēsce - Latin: Rest. As a command.
Caput praecīdātur - Latin: Be decapitated.
Kvragu - Croatian: Damn. Literally "To the Devil."
Sranje. - Croatian for "Shit" as an interjection.
Zaboravila sam da operira samo u staroj Grčkoj... Trebala sam dalje vježbati… - Croatian: I forgot he only operates in Ancient Greek... I should have kept practicing...
Ἔνθ’ ἄξω ἔνθα τὼ κόσμω συλλέγονται. Ἆρ’ ἑτοίμω εστόν; - Ancient Greek: I will take you there where two worlds are gathered. Are you two ready?
“Our wild child is back! And she brought company!”