I have a moment to grasp at the liquefying pillows before I slip beneath the swell of the kitchen table. And the world turns dark and blue as I’m swallowed by freezing water. Bubbles swarm around me as air giddily escapes my lungs and my vision blurs while the chill burns my skin. I kick wildly, and for a second, manage to claw upwards, then the last of the air makes a break for it and I drown.
My body settles on the oceans floor with a dull thump and I wake up. The surface churns silently an impossible distance above me, the sunlight struggling through the water and arriving pale and sickly. I suck in a breath and my diaphragm fails and spasms against the weight of water in my lungs. I cough and claw at my throat until the fact that I’m not dead filters through to my brain.
I tentatively give not breathing a go, which goes reasonably well – I would have expected it to be harder. By the time I manage to get to my feet, I’ve mostly forgotten that I need to. I hope it’s as easy to pick back up.
My clothes billow around me and I have to swing my arms every few seconds to keep upright, but totter forward nonetheless. Every time I move, I can feel my lungs slosh inside my chest. All in all, it’s uniquely uncomfortable. I don’t know how fish put up with it.
The sand stretches for miles in every direction, disappearing into the gloom as the sunlight tires and stops before properly reaching it. Dark shapes roil just beyond the light and I elect to stay exactly where I am. Nearby, clumps of coral and kelp break up the monotony in isolated clumps, but all told, the sea is cold, barren and pale.
I try shouting and feel my larynx strain against the water. My words are swallowed by the sea and even the closest coral probably only heard a whisper spread over a million tonnes of ocean. I’m about to give it another go when the ground starts to rumble. A patch of sand a stone’s throw away quivers and something starts to rise. After a few seconds, an enormous craggy dome emerges, dwarfing everything around it, and casting me in shadow. It splits open, and an impossibly big eye rolls around to look at me.
The monster’s stony eyelid slides down with the rumbling of a mountain and it blinks slowly as I back away. A distant set of lungs sends the ground tremoring with what could have once been a chuckle, and I’m struck by the dreadful certainty that I’m standing on this thing’s body. And even worse, that I probably couldn’t not be.
“Hello?” I hazard even as the word is lost to the sea.
The ground starts shaking again as another eye breaches the surface behind me and splits open to stare at me. The divine flounder stares cross-eyed for a moment, then the ground begins to fall away as it opens its enormous mouth.
The currents whip past my ears, howling with a watery gale, catching at my clothes and dragging me in. I try to step back and trip, and immediately get swept into the rush of water as the god swallows me whole. The world turns black as I tumble around in the maelstrom of sand and water into the inky depths below.
After an eternity, everything stops, and I come to rest, floating in complete blackness. I don’t even know which way is meant to be up and it takes another minute to realise that the water’s disappeared as well. I’m left floating in a void, distance falling away to infinity and not a speck of anything in sight.
I hang there in silence, waiting for something to happen. I think I’ve reached saturation point in terms of stress and animalistic fear. There’s only so much godliness the mind can comprehend before it all flatlines into a state of numbness. Of course, the sentiment falls apart when a bright orange fish pops into existence in front of me and I scream.
It does a flip and bubbles happily, probably in revenge for sticking it in a bottle all day. Without any water, the bubbles are just slowly rising blurs of air, buzzing in the void. I take a breath and calm my imaginary heartbeat.
“Alright, what do you want?” I ask, folding my arms and glaring. The fish right back glares and I sigh. “Your grace.”
It gives me a magnanimous nod, then jumps up and dives into the ether with an elegant splash. How any of that is possible, I don’t know. Honestly, it’s giving me a headache just watching it happen. The splash ripples through the surface of space, smearing light and colour across the void. Just as the fish’s head resurfaces, the blackness resolves into a dimly lit room, against the wall sit three figures.
“I spy with my little eye, something beginning with c,” Evelyn says, her voice muffled as if underwater.
“Chains?” Abbey asks while Emmet just looks confused at their stupid Earth alphabet.
Thank the gods, they’re not dead. The taste of creeping bile in my throat evaporates as I sigh it all out. I look expectantly at the fish and the picture dissolves and reforms into a new one. Another room, this one extensively lit with braziers and torches. A dozen scribes scuttle across the floor, carving a runic array into the marble tiling. One of them brings their chisel down into the intricately muraled nose of some former emperor, and I know this is serious. The blood slowly seeping from a pile of bodies near the entrance only makes that clearer.
The door creaks open – the sound of clashing steel echoing in the distance – and Reynard stalks in, wiping his sword with a handkerchief. He observes the array with the air of a manager who’s not quite sure what they’re looking at, but sees a satisfactory amount of complexity going on nonetheless, and nods quietly.
He mutters some instructions that I’m too many dimensions away to hear properly, then settles back to watch the proceedings. The vision starts fading and there’s just enough time to read a fragment of the runes before it disappears in a mess of ripples. But even a single rune is enough to recognize the array – especially since I’d shot a firebolt at it this morning. For whatever reason, Reynard is recreating Sable’s summoning circle.
Why is he doing that? Isn’t that thing meant to be ‘step three: summon a god’ in Sable’s fifty step plan to topple the Empire? The question of which god Reynard would want to summon flickers grimly in the corner of my mind. I turn to the fish and rub my temple.
“Alright, so how do I get back?” I ask, but the fish shakes its little head. “What do you want then?” I rub my eyes as I’m extorted by a goldfish. It gurgles smugly and spits a mouthful of void into the nothingness. Space ripples and another scene resolves itself. This time it’s a vaguely familiar church adorned with amateurish statues. It’s not until a tram trundles past that I recognise it as the church in Kismet. “You want your church back?” One set of bubbles. “And you want Reynard stopped?”
The fish nods and the scene returns to Reynard standing over his scribes. I follow his gaze and come to rest on a statue of The Mother, her blank marble eyes staring out over the array. I feel the fish watching me expectantly and I stifle a groan. I’m not sure how much it’s actually thought about this, or if it’s truly capable of understanding what it’s asking. Maybe it just wants its church back, and doesn’t care what I need to do to make that happen. Maybe it does know and it doesn’t care. In the end, the difference really doesn’t matter.
“You’ll send me back if I do this?” I ask, and it nods. “You’ll send Evelyn and Abbey back too?” It keeps nodding and I place my trust in its walnut sized brain.
Like a bottomless cliff, I creep closer to considering the task and my stomach roils. Behind me, the idea of just staying on this world and drifting downstream beckons, and I take another step towards the edge. For some reason, it’s decided to ask me to do this, to stop Reynard from summoning The Mother and take back its slice of the faith pie. In some facet of its divine demented mind, it thinks it’s possible.
“Alright, lead the way,” I spit through gritted teeth, and a spire of water shoots me skyward.
I jerk awake to meet the grey light of dawn and stand up. Then I stoop as the all the bruises from yesterday jerk awake as well and make it hurt to breathe. Definitely have to find Emmet soon. Something cold and heavy clunks at my feet and I look down to see my guards armour in a neat little pile. I take a fleeting moment to consider it before pulling on the boots, piling the rest on the table and laying the knife in front of it. Lucas can enjoy it if nothing else.
I grab the fish in its bottle, pad silently towards the door, and deliberately do not look on top of the fridge. Then I open the door and set out into the morning chill.
For a task that starts with crossing dimensions and ends with unseating a god, the next step is remarkably clear.
“Alright your majesty, we need to find Sable. Make yourself useful and point the way.” Miraculously, the goldfish swims a circle then points its head down the street. I slowly turn the bottle, but its head stays fixed and steady in the same direction.
A plan is slowly unfolding in my head, and as long as I don’t dwell too long on the details, I won’t throw up. When it comes to disrupting Reynard’s ritual, I’m still fairly confident about my chances. I step around a group of sleep deprived suits and take the next corner as the fish turns. If we count the cave in Weld, this is going to be the third dimensional ritual I’ve catastrophically sabotaged – I’m an old hand.
No, it’s the next step that’s causing the existential dread. As far as I can see, the only way to fulfil the desire my patron has so glibly bubbled, The Mother is going to have to go. A wonderful idea, it tickles the ego just right, but strikes me as a tad bit delusional.
Luckily, I know someone who specialises in that – and, as far as I understand it, this was basically his original plan anyway.
I round another corner and the fish points itself resolutely at a squat building with a coat of arms on the front. Crests don’t seem terribly in fashion with the surrounding buildings, so good money’s on this being either a noble family clinging desperately to relevance, or a government building. The fact that it’s entirely made of muddy grey bricks suggests that I’ve found the guardhouse. Though it’s the people milling around in the same uniform as yesterday that actually clinches it.
I wait for a group of guards to pass before I slide in, eyes to the ground, and head towards the receptionist. She looks up at me after I stand there in silence for a moment, then squints her eyes in a way that I feel is entirely unwarranted. I haven’t done anything yet.
“Hey, you’re the one from Easy Al’s yesterday, right? The Larper.” She points an accusatory finger at me and it takes me another few seconds to recognise her as the one of the guards who took Sable away. “We’ve been trying to reach you all day, the number you gave us was for a Thai restaurant.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” I mutter. “There should be a two on the end.” She shrugs and stands up.
“Whatever, follow me.” I must look lost because she pauses. “You’re here to pick up your friend, right? We’ve got him in the drunk tank. We’re glad to be rid of him, he’s miserable.”
She leads me through a set of doors and into a room split in two by a set of bars. The smell of stale beer and fresh urine fills the air and Sable is sitting stiffly in the middle. I step forward, put my head to the bars – not touching them, because that’s disgusting – and beckon him forward. He glares at me, all sorts of hateful promises flickering behind his eyes, but he acquiesces.
“How’s the hand?” I smirk. He pivots hard and heads back to the wall. “Wait, wait, I need your help.” He pauses and unsubtly snaps his fingers of his good hand – the other is cradled at his side.
“What more could you possibly do?” He asks dully and I start to sympathise with the receptionist. Luckily, trying to take over the country disqualifies you from sympathy.
“Reynard’s planning to perform your ritual again.” A look of confusion wriggles across his stony brow. “The one who was leading the knights against you.”
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“The paladin,” he sneers, but resolutely stifles the fragment of emotion in his voice. “Galling, obviously, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to me.”
“The whole point of it was to summon a god, right? He might be trying to summon the Mother. I’ve met her and I’m pretty sure the outcomes would fall on the dicey side of apocalyptic.”
“Let it all burn,” he sneers, his burnt side pulling tight against his cheekbone.
“Look, help me and I can get you out of this prison and back to our world,” I say. “You’ll probably even get to do some of your original plan too. Get rid of the Mother, or whatever you were trying. Better than nothing, right?”
“I was to become as a god.”
“You were about to be popped as a pimple.”
Something approaching that moment of self-awareness he so momentarily experienced on that platform pierces the egomania and he gives me a long look. Then he nods and steps back to let the guard swing the door open. He walks past me and towards the door, his fist clenched and bone white.
The guard approaches us with a pile of parchment that look dangerously administrative, but she’s distracted by a passing colleague just long enough for us to slip out the door. Sable pauses to stare blankly at the alien landscape that he’d been too rabid to process yesterday, but I prod him in the back to keep him moving.
I look to the fish and it does a little spin before pointing itself across the street. Sable’s face comes back into view as I turn back around and I swallow a shudder. It might take a bit of practice to stop flinching at the sight of him, and I’m not sure I’m interested in sticking around long enough for that to happen.
“Alright, I’m going to need to know your original plan with the ritual. In detail,” I say as I push through the crowd. Sable scowls and slowly follows after me. The fact he hasn’t booked it – or tried to finish what he started yesterday – is honestly a little shocking.
“Unbelievable,” he snorts, “you turn up, time and again, to inconvenience me and you don’t even know what you fought against?”
I resolutely don’t take the bait. He’s the one with the master plan that apparently fell apart to our random flailing. He seems to know it too, because he clicks his tongue and turns away.
“Hey, I can just leave you here, you know?” I shout as he stalks off. “I turn that corner and you’re stuck here forever!”
He stops and glares at me. I’ll admit, it is an intoxicating feeling to finally have the upper hand on him. I almost carry on, but stop myself before he snaps. I need him too. A vein pulsates under his eye and he takes a ragged breath.
“I’ll spare you the details, as ill-equipped as you are to fathom them,” he sneers as he begins following me again. “The ritual was indeed designed to summon a god – my lord,” the fury rushes back to his face at the memory.
“The one that was about to kill you,” I say, not being enough of an ascetic to resist. Sable grimaces but allows his head to nod a fraction of an inch.
“Yes. I expect it wanted my life force.” He pauses as he no doubt starts doing the math as to how many sacrifices it would have taken to avoid that fate. “Regardless, once it was summoned, we would march on the capital and wrest the seat of divine power from The Mother.” The fervour creeps back so I cut in.
“The seat of power, what is it? Emily told us something about there being a source to The Mother’s power.”
“No one God could by themselves create the power that She wields,” Sable says. “The being you know as the Mother is a conglomerate of hundreds of Gods, each placing their powers into a vessel. That vessel holds the collective power of those Gods, but also the power generated by the faith of thousands. To the peasant, the vessel might as well be The Mother, the being the presiding over it could be anyone.”
He keeps going, but he’s already said enough. The fish and I share a quick glance and I shake the bottle before it gets any funny ideas. The key is that vessel – steal it from The Mother and she’s powerless. Something dangerously close to excitement begins bubbling in my chest as everything starts to approach looking possible.
“So how do we get to the vessel. It’s real right? Like tangible? Not metaphorical?” I cut in. Sable scowls at me and falters.
“My liege was to reveal the specifics on the moment of his summoning,” he grits out after a long pause. “It was under his direction that the ritual was conducted.”
“That rotting fist told you how to do everything?” I ask, appalled.
“Directed our path,” Sable insists, obviously to save face.
“And summoning all those people from Earth?” I ask. “You just kept it up until you got the power you wanted?”
“He knew what he sought,” he says defensively.
“So you don’t actually know how to find the vessel? Why did I let you out of prison then? We don’t have time for this.”
Ever since the vision, and especially since Sable came back into the picture, the pressure of the home had become real and tangible again. Separate from it, it had been easy to sit back and drift, but now the minutes seem to slip by as Reynard puts into motion whatever his insane plan really is. The others are still in the middle of it, and more than likely going to be an unwilling part of it.
Just as I’m about to blow my top at the delusional cult leader, the fish throws itself against the glass and nudges the bottle to the right. I follow its motion and stop in front of a tall, red-brick building. Faded paint flaking at the edges and a few decades past its prime. The fish points decisively forward.
“Apparently we’re here,” I sigh. Sable looks over the crumbling façade with a curled lip. He gives me a look and I waggle the fish in response. His majesty glares with bulbous eyes at the lack of faith and huffily points forward. Careful Sable, you might catch up to me with the all these gods you’re personally offending.
“This is your way back?” He sneers, peering down at it. He’s about to say something snide, but seems to recognise something in orange sardine’s dead eyes and stops himself. Years of cult leadership has readied him to recognise godliness wherever it might crop up. Personally, I have too much self-respect to give that much credit to a fish.
“So, this is the power that has allied against me,” he mutters.
“Sable, it’s a goldfish.”
“It’s a God you cretin, its true form is beyond comprehension.”
"Then it’s a continental flounder, we’re wasting time.” I step up and push the door decisively forward. It groans in pain and almost falls out of its frame and I give it a break. The interior is hardly any better than the front, though at least the mouldy red carpets looks like it had at one point approached tasteful.
The bottle jerks in my hand as the fish points us up a set of stairs. I’d been trying to hide the fact that I’m following a fish when we were in public, but I mostly give it up as the thing taps impatiently on the glass. There’s a receptionist in the corner who is probably meant to keep random passer-by’s out, but is studiously ignoring the pair of weirdos following a goldfish.
Once I hit the next landing, the bottle jerks to the left. It leads me down a hallway, numbered doors lining the sides, then it spins around and goes the other way. We get a few steps back, then it jerks us towards the next set of stairs. Sable growls behind me, but the presence of a god seems to have given my plan a little more credit than it otherwise would have.
The fish’s nostrils flare as it sniffs the water, then it surfaces inside the bottle to taste the air. It leads us up another flight, then glances around. I feel stupid, but I unscrew the cap to let more air in. It almost nods in thanks and its nostrils flare once more, before it dives below and pulls us down the hallway like a dog returning home for dinner.
We pass a door and the fish jerks us around, pointing at it like a slimy compass. Unlike the rest of them, this one has yellow and black striped ribbons across it. There’s bold text emblazoned on it that I can’t read, but even an idiot could translate it to ‘keep out’ – must be our stop.
“Do you smell that?” Sable asks, breaking our reverie. They’ve both got to be fucking with me, but I take a discrete huff anyway. I mostly get mouldy carpet and damp, but there’s a hint of something else in the air. “Magic – there’s a leak somewhere,” Sable says, pressing his face against the door. “The dimension must be thin here; you can almost smell our world.”
I take his word for it and glance down at the fish. It nods smugly and shakes, ushering us forward. Unfortunately, the door’s locked.
Sable immediately twists his good hand in a complicated pattern and clicks his fingers. Of course, nothing happens and he growls menacingly at the petulant wood. It would be funny, but my hand is halfway through casting a firebolt. I add a few meaningless finger waggles to make the spell seem as complicated as his, but he doesn’t notice.
As he clicks his fingers with mounting frustration, I try to engage my keen problem-solving intuition by twisting the door handle. It doesn’t shift in the slightest, though I wasn’t really expecting it to. My next plan is to underestimate how difficult lockpicking is for a complete novice, but I only get as far as realising that I don’t have a lockpick before I notice that the door doesn’t even have a key hole. How is anyone meant to get in? It can’t be a magic signature.
Someone comes clomping up the stairs and I glance down the hallway to see a guy in a scrappy shirt reach the landing. He pauses as he takes us in, and his gaze immediately snaps to the floor as he hurries past us with hunched shoulders.
Sable pays him no mind, since he’s obviously used to making people uncomfortable, but I watch him hurry to a door and start scrabbling around his pockets. After a few seconds, and some muffled swearing, the man produces a card and swipes it by a black box mounted onto the wall by the door. It beeps, blinks green and the door cracks open. The man rushes inside, pauses to give us a loaded look and disappears.
I look to our door as Sable tries kicking it, to see a similar black box –must be a keyhole of sorts. With that in mind, I poke it and it immediately falls off the wall, exposing a mess of strange components and leaving the box dangling from a mess of tubes. It looks about as complicated as the inside of an engine. Why all of this is necessary to open a door, I’ll never know.
As Sable stubs his toe against the wood and begins cursing, the comparison to an engine reminds me of something Evelyn had said back in Kismet. On the third day when I’d gotten the engine stoker job, I’d had to explain how I’d gotten the money, and convince the others that I hadn’t mugged someone. When I got to the point of explaining that the engine starts freezing if you leave it too long, Evelyn had started spluttering something about how ridiculous and impossible that was. She explained that engines on Earth get hot because of explosions, or sometimes electricity, but it quickly became clear that she didn’t really know what she was talking about.
Regardless, the important thing is that it’s not magic that these things run off, it’s electricity – or maybe explosions. I tentatively prod at the tubes, and it doesn’t look like it was built with explosives in mind – it did fall off the wall because I poked it. So, it must be electricity, which is actually something in our wheelhouse. If we had any magic.
I feel a tapping on the bottle and glance down to find the fish gesturing up at the lid. Unscrewing it, the fish swims up and lodges itself on the lip. A fin waves at me and I bring it up to my face. I stare deep into its bulging eyes for a moment, a strange intelligence glistening in those inky depths. Then it spits a ball of glowing mucus in my eye and I drop the bottle.
Somehow, the fish manages to get the lid back on, and I scrape the lump of snot off my face. I’m about to kick the bottle down the hall, but the smell of it catches at my sinus. Not the cloying scent of dead fish – though that’s still there – it’s the tang of ozone sparking in my brain. The snot glows on the tip of my finger and sends sparks down my arm. Sable stops everything to stare at the ball of magic, spitting angrily at the dimensional fabric around it, a world unused to its presence.
It’s a thimbleful of magic, barely enough to glow on its own, hardly enough for a real spell. But nevertheless, I slowly grasp it at both ends, terrified that it’ll disappear, and pull it like toffee at a fête. It stretches, hisses at me, then pops into an arc of electricity between my hands. I slowly bring it to the black box, and touch it to the cold metal shell.
There’s a crack, the black box drips to the ground in a heap of slag, and the door pops open. The air fills with acrid smoke and we shoulder into the room before anyone else on the floor stops us.
“Couldn’t you have done something like that earlier?” I ask the fish, but it bubbles faintly from the bottom of the bottle. “Wait, are you going to be okay to send us back?” It nods vaguely and I let it be.
The door leads to a single room with a bed in the corner and a kitchen off to the side. I’m immediately reminded of our apartment in Kismet – which should make this house the cheapest available in the city.
We pass through the entrance and I notice images like those from Lucas’ picture box lining the walls, and I feel myself drawn to them – I almost recognise the man in them.
Sable marches to the middle of the room, nostrils flaring, and runs a hand through the air. It ripples around his fingers, as if flinching around a bruise. Like stretched fabric, the air itself seems thinner in places and bunched awkwardly in others – the bedpost behind it looks warped as if we’re looking at it through cheap glass.
The smell of ozone gets stronger and I can feel the faint prickle of magic leaking from the battered reality in front of us. It’s like what Sable had said earlier, the dimension is thin here. Already torn open and having healed wrong. It’s then that I recognise the person in those pictures.
The blonde hair and veneer of confidence stare back at me from a face that, last I’d seen it, had been melting into the grass as my necromancy kept the rest of the body shuffling forward. I guess Evelyn was right, Rhapsody had been plucked from Earth - right from his bedroom by the look of it. Clumps of paper are stacked in the corner, no doubt containing a collection of equally terrible theatre productions.
“How many did you summon?” I ask while trying to ignore the wooden flute left lying on the bedside table. Sable glances up, irritated at my distraction.
“Dozens I expect,” he answers eventually. “Worthless, the lot of them.”
“What happened to them?”
“If they could be convinced to join us, we let them. Otherwise, we left them on the roadside.”
A sigh of relief leaves me, largely involuntarily, and I join him at the dimensional stretch mark. I’ll probably have to account for those wandering idiots, won’t I? Though maybe it’s just bad luck if they’re don’t there to get sent back when we deal with the Mother.
The fish spins around in the bottle and directs us with its fins. We shuffle into the centre, mindful to not actually touch the scars – you never know how stable those could be. Then its eyes start to glow and reality whimpers as the air starts to hum.
Space splits down the middle and an immaterial wind howls as the rent begins sucking us forward. The dim sparkle in the fish’s eyes fades away and it promptly dies, floating to the top of the bottle. The edges of the portal turn white like the knuckles of hands, straining to hold the realities together.
Sable gives me a nod and we dive through the portal just as it snaps shut behind us. The last thing I see is the dimensional wound, scarred and weeping magical pus as we shove our way through it. That room is definitely going to be haunted for at least the next decade.
The entire rainbow flashes through me – then a few more colours pass by for good measure. Every nerve ending fires and I feel nothing except for the taste of cinnamon. Then everything stops and I’m dumped on a cold cobblestone floor.
Rothmore looks up at us from his corner of the cell and blinks in shock. The portal collapses above me and I feel the magic buzzing back to my core. It’s good to be home.