The ceiling fan creaked with every swing as it spun. Victor sat under it with crossed legs, letting the wind cool him. He took deep, slow breaths. The school year had started and meditation couldn’t be more necessary.
He focussed on the feeling of the cool air flowing down his body. Using his imagination, he could feel a small waterfall relieving him and carrying his worries away in it’s current.
The rough texture of the carpet beneath him turned to grass. Each time he exhaled, the grass waved with the blowing of the wind.
The creaking of the fan was blurred by the imaginary sound of running water.
His tarantula piercing... well, he couldn’t imagine that away - he wouldn’t. That was a part of him now. It clung to his chest as if to a wall. Its legs pinched him each time he inhaled, but the water carried that pain away as well.
His home was dough for his mind to play with. Home was a world separate from the real one. Victor could be what he wanted to be and wherever he wanted to be in his home... and something was rolling in his direction to destroy it.
A dark cloud; a black horizon. Purple bolts of lightning danced in the harrowing storm as it came for his safe space. The waterfall retreated like heavy rain crawling back to the clouds, trying to take Victor’s soul with it and save him from what was coming. The grass turned grey, shrivelled up and died, poking Victor’s skin like needles. The safe space wanted to run away.
Victor felt the small blunt spikes at the face of a powerful pulse, like rippling water. The spikes grew sharper, shot out faster and more aggressively. A nightmare had come to invade the dream. Victor lost his rhythm. His breathing sped up and his eyes clenched.
He felt weightless, like a wave lifting him off the seafloor. A surge of unimaginable energy ghosted through him. For a few seconds, he felt pins and needles and started to sweat. Then the wave dropped him and a chill struck him.
Victor opened his eyes. He exhaled the fear that filled him. He stood up and put on his shirt, turned off the fan and flicked a spark into the fireplace. His phone started ringing and he answered it with shaking hands.
“Hello?” he greeted. He looked at the clock - 15:29.
“Did you feel that?”
“Mhm.” He walked to his kitchen and turned on the kettle.
“Well so did the whole fucking pocket dimension. That came from your side of the gate. What was it?”
“No idea.” He put two teaspoons of coffee into a cup then leaned against the counter with an arm across his chest to keep warm.
“Well I hope you’re planning to check it out.”
“I’ll get to it this weekend. School’s started. I don’t have the time in the week.”
“Do what you need to do Jones, just make sure you get on this before Leech or anybody else does.”
“It’ll be fine. I don’t think Leech is crazy enough to go after what or whoever has that energy.” Victor poured the steaming water into the cup, stirred, and took it to his bedroom.
“You’d be surprised what addicts will do to get another fix and chase the first time. She is crazy enough.”
“She’ll die trying.” He sipped.
“Maybe... What are you going to do once you find out what made it?”
“If it’s an object, I’ll destroy it. If it’s a person, I’ll fight it.”
Victor walked to the corner of his room where his desk was. He unsheathed his sword that laid next to his desk and looked down the blade, checking how sharp it was.
“No offence, but I don’t think you can take on whatever that was.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Start a team, lone wolf. Just leave me out. I don’t want a part of this.”
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“I don’t trust anybody else with getting close to that much power.”
“Well if some dumbass tries to take that much energy, you can take them out. It’s like giving a rifle to a man with no arms.”
“More like giving warheads to a genocidal maniac. Listen, let me check out what this thing is before we start making plans.”
“Ja ja okay. Just don’t get yourself killed. You’re my best customer.”
“Just a customer?”
“Oh I’m sorry my best man.”
“Don’t bring this up again.”
“Victor do you even know my wife’s first name?”
Victor put the sword down and paused to think. “...Kiara,” he said, but it was more a question than a statement. There was no answer. Victor took the phone away from his ear to check if Matthew hung up.
“Lucky guess,” he said, “Listen, my point is that you’re too focussed on these global Easter egg hunts. Not only did you stop making friends, but you’ve shut your best one out.”
Victor looked through the open books and journals on his table. The giant map above it had pins, colour coded to mark various locations of interest.
“Forget about treasure for a while,” his friend said, “Try and ground yourself. Stop dancing in the realm of magic, come back down and join us humans down here. It’s not that bad. Come live a nice human life.”
Victor took a few steps back from the table. In this little corner of his bedroom, he saw the hours of his life that he spent there. “Think about it,” his friend said and hung up.
Victor felt something soft rub against his leg and looked down at his cat, Lesley.
“You agree with him?” he asked Lesley.
The cat jumped onto his table, sat on one of his open books and looked at him.
“You’re supposed to be on my side,” Victor said.
Lesley blinked.
“Whatever. Go sleep on the couch or something.”
Lesley stared at Victor for a moment before jumping down and running to the lounge.
Victor walked back to the table and checked his map, looking for the locations of gates. He suspected the source of the surge to have come from beyond one of the gates, but it didn’t make sense. If something that powerful had come from the other side of the gate... Why did it surprise anybody from that side?, Victor thought, Something as powerful as that must give off a strong presence, but even they didn’t see it coming.
Victor thought about it. But presence doesn’t just... discharge like that. Whatever that was, it just got here... A birth energy. There was one time a presence was discharged: at birth. For those not mindful of their greater senses, it was impossible to feel. Every child born let out their energy of presence to let the world know that it now existed, but no child was born with a presence that could expand so far. Even if that was halfway between here and the nearest gate, that’s impossible. What demon’s baby can make that happen?
Victor refused to believe that a child had just claimed the planet. Whatever it was, it wasn’t born - it couldn’t have been. It arrived. Victor looked at his sword. He wanted to head for the source, but that presence was gone. It arrived and receded. A god had just stepped down to Earth from heaven or crawled up from hell and vanished with no trace other than the fearful memories of the people who could smell its stench. He wanted to move on and just accept that it was an anomaly, but he couldn’t help the feeling that something terrible had begun. Something was out there, and once anybody knew what it was, it would be too late.
Victor put on shoes and went to the lounge. He looked down at the spot where he sat while meditating. He faced the front wall of his home and the storm slanted in from his right. Lesley sat on the couch and watched Victor get his bearings. Victor walked out of the house and turned right. He was headed towards the richer residential areas. There wasn’t a guarantee that he could find out what the source was, but if he could walk in the general direction he might get a clue.
It was kind of funny.
People walked on the pavements, unbothered. People drove on the roads, unfazed. Children played in the parks, joyfully. Students stressed over the start of school. All around him, life moved on. Right under everybody’s noses there is a different life taking place. In the same location, but in a different space, a different world was just disrupted. And yet, life went on.
Victor stopped and looked around. He felt something. There was some kind of leftover radiation. It was like the heat rising off a dead fire, but instead of it rising off of a surface it was three dimensional and in the space around him. It was stronger in one direction. Victor looked both ways before jogging across the street. The power was immense. Each step was a spike in the energy he felt and it just kept getting exponentially stronger the closer to the source he got. Some people saw how panicked he was as he quickly walked along the pavement.
It was kind of terrifying.
Life went on. People ate their meals like life was normal. Children played in the parks like life was normal. People moved around like life was normal, but here Victor was standing at a crossroad in the first sign of a coming destruction that nobody could see.
To the world, Victor was simply a man standing at a crossroad. In his mind, he was standing on a black spot where the first purple bolt from the storm struck, right in front of the world. Out in the open, out in public, but nobody could see what Victor stood on. As life moved on around him, his world stopped on this scorch mark that existed on a different plane.
He felt its energy slowly fade. Whoever put it there was long gone. Whoever put it there was somewhere out there with a destructive power. Whoever put it there has simply joined the rest of the world in living normally, but he or she was a ticking bomb and nobody would be prepared for the explosion.