Another grey hair…
Leo regarded his reflection in the crowded bakery’s glass façade; a young man, barely in his early-twenties, watched in kind. His beard was a patchy and scraggly mess; his sides blown into tangled curls and his bangs swept back in a tidal wave of dirty blonde hair. He reminded himself of a young Einstein, with none of the genius and all of the wacky-hairdo.
In summary, he was the personification of a grooming way overdu-.
The morning’s winter chill sent a shudder down his spine and stopped his introspection short. Leo took that as his cue to hurry inside - lured in equal measure by the scent of freshly baked pastries. Artisanal bakeries were, simply put, his guilty pleasure. Wonderful, warm places, filled with inviting scents and chock-full with the most delicious baked goods one could ever ask for.
Leo made himself comfortable in the queue. Accustomed to a monday morning's crowd he tuned out the droning of empty pleasantries - the: 'good mornings' and 'how are you-s'. Tilting from one leg to the other he shed the last shivers out of his system. Precious minutes had passed and then it was his turn.
Bee sting cake, pudding bretzels, donauwelle and a board of gold-crusted bread rolls, covered in assorted cold meats and cheeses, ogled him seductively. However, a look at the growing pouch he was developing and a mental calculation of his food-related spendings had him reconsider. Subsisting on ready-made goods was a lifestyle more conducive to the… circular body shapes, not the semi-fit look he had going on.
Ahh... Fuck you too, subconsciousness.
In the end he decided on a falafel wrap with mixed veggies - viva globalisation -, an everything bagel with a delicious pesto spread and 3 nut wedges for throughout the day. He rationalised that someone at the office would like one of the latter, though he knew in his heart of heart’s, he’d much rather eat them all himself.
Equipped for another eight hours of mind-numbing back office, order management and co-workers teetering on the edge of incompetence, Leo went on his way.
Past the door and hit by the first cold breeze on his way to the office, his phone rang. He weighed the decisions of all decisions pertaining to sudden phone calls: Should I answer? Rolling his eyes, he decided on yes.
Jamming and squeezing his breakfast, lunch and dinner between armpits and elbows he fished out the buzzing offender - in an act of incredible coordination he let not a single item drop.
The number registered as unknown and his brows furrowed. Not a coworker then.
His phone kept on buzzing.
In less than a second the slack and sleep drained from his face and Leo readied his salesmen personna. Whoever was on the other end of the line didn’t matter to him. If they went through all this trouble to call him in the early morning, he might as well hear ‘em out.
Leo put the phone up to his ear, expecting either a): Somebody he knew, b): Some poor, naive sales trainee processing a twenty page phone list and him being just another name to tick off, or c): Somebody dialed the wrong number.
Or... d): Static?
Any other day he would have scoffed, rolled his eyes and put his phone back, but something within the constant crackling gave him pause. It was purely instinctive, a knee-jerk reaction that forced him to listen. So he listened, intently.
It was less the familiar white noise of old-timey cathode TVs and more a continuous rustling, that is to say, it sounded natural, good. He heard leaves falling from gnarled branches, waves breaking on a white shore, a home filled with a thousand voices with a hearth merrily crackling away. There was a certain hypnotic quality to it, addictive some others might say, and all Leo knew was that he felt compelled to stay on the call.
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People walked by, a bus drove past, a bicyclist reared an admonishing fist his way, and Leo stood rooted on the spot, phone still in hand, teeth clenched until they felt like breaking.
A fizz, a pop and all of a sudden Leo knew, felt it deeply in his bones, someone was on the other end.
"I ask for help but I have nothing to give in return. I… beg of you who listens. Help us."
The voice was scrambled and faint, as if it had been spoken from miles away, yet it carried - for a lack of a better word - intent. Leo understood right away. The message was for its lack of context an entire novel in his ears: From the plight to its solution, a hundred different ideas and thoughts carried over within those two sentences.
Numbed, or possessed perhaps, by whatever supernatural phenomena was taking place, Leo nodded along and let his own words leave him.
"I... don't know how you got this number, but I mean… sure, sounds fun. What do you need?" he answered the stranger.
Silence was his answer. Until...
The bottom beneath his feet opened up in a maw of ruptured reality. Stars glittered and met worn cobble at impossible edges, nebula streaked in non-linear manners all around him and his quilted jacket, the entirety of a cosmos opened up in a space smaller than 20 square feet. Before he knew what was happening, he was falling and a dome of truly cosmic proportions closed above him.
Leo heard the voice speaking to him about... something, alas, he couldn’t hear it over his pitched screaming. Maybe from sheer shock, lack of oxygen or the abrupt inversion of gravity that tugged him this way and that, Leo blacked out soon after.
+++
Mid tumble he started awake, witnessing himself rolling down a hill, ass over tea kettle. He only had enough time to tuck his chin into his chest and brace. His sight swapped between sky, grass, dirt; sky, grass, dirt and back and forth and back and forth. Every bump drove the air from his lungs and every curse was swallowed by dull pain.
The moment stretched, thoughts bumped around inside his head, until the steep incline flattened out into a plain and his misadventure came to an end. Momentum bled away in a final dive that sent him sprawling.
Leo laid there on the earth, spreadeagle and simply breathing - and focused on only breathing. He inhaled the fresh air in great, needy gulps and rested his face on the grass - against the ember of curiosity that goaded him into exploring.
“What the fuck…” he groaned into the dirt.
His brain was pounding against his skull, his limbs flopped uselessly at his sides and a sense of nausea seesawed between his guts and his throat. A whiplash induced hangover was no way to start the day.
Beyond that, though, he was fine, better than he should be after presumably slipping into a crack in spacetime. None of his bones seemed broken - not that he could identify such an issue in the first place - and feeling and aches returned to his body with every labored breath.
Reluctantly Leo worked himself back up, careful to work the kinks and knots out of his joints. Some protesting came from a contused ankle, which took a backseat to the foreign view.
He found himself in a pastoral flat. A plain of grass, every inch a healthy shade of green and dotted with colorful flowerlets, stretched far and away. Not to be outdone by such a balming sight, the sun shone golden God rays from between fluffy cloud cover. Birdsong came from the rare tree here and there and scattered trails of smoke lazily rose in the distance.
Leo jumped in shock, landed on his feet at an odd angle and bit back a snarl.
Then there was the smoking ditch of archaic symbols charred into the ground and climbing all the way to the spot he dropped at.
It reminded him of a fantasy-fied meteor impact site. Blazing blue fulgurites ran alongside a tail of impossible, vitrified symbols - some whose strangeness left other non-euclidean shapes feel like a third graders art project.
They writhed under his gaze, dancing and winding over and past one another, all fluidity and motion. Alive. They looked alive.
The runes moved like animals, prowling and stalking him, doing everything inanimate object shouldn't do.
Leo ran a hand over his neck and his hairs rose against the touch.
Alarmed and way out of his comfort zone, he failed to realise the runes' growth. Before his eyes, with every passing moment, they spread and distended. A moment of inattention had the entirety of his vision covered in menacing script and scrawls. It was like watching a pile of snakes consuming one another and turning into engorged wyrms. Leo had the foreboding that those sigils were just as dangerous, his arms were covered in goosebumps.
Dread iced the blood in his veins when light began to ignite the runes. Blue like the ocean, almost black like the nightsky.
What had been hypnotic and perplexing became a vortex hungry, nay, starved for attention. The pull was irresistible, overwhelming in its need to devour his focus. Everything else fell to the wayside, nothing else mattered! Time and place became foreign concepts.
Frightened, Leo pulled back with every bit of his will, his mortal, puny will, only to find his body unresponsive - locked in a full-body rictus. Panic like stones weighed on his chest.
Darkness crept along the edge of his vision, slowly darkening his sight like marching black clouds. The sound of a brewing squall roared and echoed in his flesh. Thunder pound in his ears with every one of his staccato heartbeats. His nose picked up on petrichor and loam, raw, feral, and his mouth tasted static in the air. Cataclysmic lightning struck at his soul.
A storm gathered!
At once Leo fell forward like a puppet without strings. Although he caught himself at the last moment, he felt faint, weakened, and a twinge burning on the back of his left hand.
“This-…… what…. is even… happening!?”
“Fucking... fuck! What the actual shit is happening today?” His part said, he retched and wiped the spittle from his mouth, but the day was far from over. And where did he leave his food?
“GET HIM!”
Oh God, what now?!