As the interdimensional crowd continued their cheers; “Hail, Eryk, Knight of the Cuke!” and “Long live the Pickle Sovereign!” Eryk felt his vision go a little fuzzy. The onyx bird in his hand was humming, vibrating with a strange warmth, and suddenly, the entire cosmic arena wobbled, like someone had pressed the universe’s reset button.
Around him, space and time started twisting, collapsing, and reforming with wild, neon-colored lights and orchestral sound effects that seemed to blare straight from a 1980s sci-fi movie. Eryk blinked, but each blink only transported him further from the arena and closer to memories he hadn’t touched in years. The onyx bird pulsed in his palm, like a detonating star, and suddenly, he found himself falling… back into darkness
***
The gray stone walls loomed over him once again, now animated, shifting, and watching him with suspicious, beady eyes. Each stone had a mouth, whispering, chanting, asking, “Who are you? What are you?”
White, blue, and silver banners flapped furiously as a whirlwind tore through the hall, rattling everything within. In an instant, the storm coalesced into a gigantic ghostly version of his father; Lord Bertel himself - floating three feet off the ground, his armor gleaming in the light like a disco ball with anger issues.
“FATHER?” Eryk shouted over the gale, his voice coming out in a cartoonish echo that bounced around the hall, warping and stretching in bizarre ways.
“Yes, SON! IT IS I!” Lord Bertel bellowed, with a voice that seemed to rattle the heavens and every forgotten jar of pickles in the pantry. “DO YOU NOT KNOW? YOU ARE A MYSTERY, A MARVEL! MY MAGICAL MISTAKE!” His laugh echoed, booming with exaggerated bass, vibrating the walls so much that several portraits fell off, clattering to the ground in surrender.
Eryk’s head was spinning. He clutched the onyx bird for balance as a surreal parade of knights and servants distorted and monstrous, as though seen in a funhouse mirror filed into the hall, chanting, “Not from here! Not from here!” as they pointed at him with exaggerated, rubbery fingers.
“W-what are you talking about?” Eryk stammered, his voice now a squeaky echo.
Lord Bertel’s gigantic head descended from the heavens until it was only a few feet from Eryk, his mustache twisting and curling like a pair of enchanted cobras. “I SUMMONED YOU FROM A WORLD WITH NO MAGIC! YOU ARE THE LOST SOUL OF A WORLD WITHOUT WONDER! I MADE A PACT WITH… THE DEMON OF MISPLACED SOULS!” As if on cue, thunder cracked, and the walls briefly turned into jiggling Jello-like structures that wobbled under Lord Bertel’s booming words.
A swirling portal opened at the center of the hall, and from its fiery depths emerged a small, rather unimpressive demon with a clipboard and horn-rimmed glasses, looking more like a demonic accountant than a lord of darkness. The demon squinted at Eryk, flipping through pages on his clipboard with a sigh of bureaucratic exasperation.
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“Let’s see here… Lord Bertel,” the demon said, not looking up. “You asked for your firstborn back, and instead… you got…” He adjusted his glasses, examining Eryk like a tax receipt. “This one. A soul from a world of… taxes and coffee machines. The land of nine-to-fives.”
Eryk looked down at himself in horror, his past life as mundane as beige carpet flashing before his eyes, he saw rows of cubicles, coffee mugs that said “World’s Okayest Human,” and the soul-crushing sight of an unchangeable Outlook calendar. He nearly gagged.
“Yes,” the demon said with an unholy chuckle, “I placed you here instead, a perfect replacement. But as for the matter of my payment…” The demon’s eyes glowed with a sinister flame, and the room shifted, darkening until the walls were draped in otherworldly shadow.
“ON YOUR TWENTIETH SOLSTICE, I SHALL COME FOR YOU!” the demon thundered, as another portal opened, revealing a calendar marked with “Eryk’s 20th!” in red, with confetti and balloons scrawled in the margins.
Eryk screamed, his voice echoing with about a hundred distorted pitches as the onyx bird in his hand suddenly expanded, forming a cocoon of light around him. His memories blended with the chaotic energy of the Great Hall, spinning faster and faster until he was catapulted back to the present, where Dill was poking him with growing concern.
***
“Creator! Eryk! Snap out of it!” Dill was jabbing him repeatedly with a small stick, apparently picked up as a makeshift “revival tool.”
Eryk blinked rapidly, the onyx bird still hot in his palm, as he took in the arena around him. Cosmic beings were still wandering, occasionally nodding his way with some mix of awe and pity. He’d just been through an entire fever-dream-level vision, one that had just clarified nothing and somehow everything all at once.
“I… I’m from another world,” Eryk mumbled, still dazed, as the vivid echoes of his past and that absurd ritual collided with his current reality.
Dill tilted his head, concerned. “Yes, we’ve covered that, remember? Magicless Man Summoned by Mustache Dad to Cheat Death. You don’t bring it up much.”
“No, I just…” Eryk was trying to process the insanity of it all. “It’s just… Father, he made a dealwith a… paper-pushing demon?” He looked down at the onyx bird, which now looked suspiciously back at him, as if it, too, was fed up with the dramatic complexity of his past.
“Ah,” Dill said, nodding with sage understanding. “Well, we all have our baggage. For some, it’s unpaid cosmic debts; for others, it’s our dad bartering us away to demons. Happens more often than you’d think.”
As the reality of his cosmic role sank in, Eryk squared his shoulders, feeling both the absurd weight of his lineage and the gnawing reality of his demonic fate looming on the horizon. He looked out at the multiverse, which seemed more than willing to throw another outrageous crisis his way.
“Well, Dill,” he said, taking a deep breath. “The multiverse isn’t going to save itself. We’ve got about three months till the demon shows up with his invoice. Until then, we ride.”
Dill gave an enthusiastic little wiggle, preparing for whatever ridiculous battle lay ahead. With a final, heroic adjustment of his sash and a parting salute to King Cuke (who was now giving an impromptu lecture on the intersection of quantum philosophy and pickling), Eryk stepped forward, ready for the next cosmic absurdity.
As they disappeared into the ether, Eryk could almost swear he heard his father’s booming, overly dramatic voice somewhere far off in the multiverse:
“REMEMBER, SON! DESTINY IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR… MANAGING DEBT!”