I think love might be a river
Gradie looked up and saw the sky above the clubhouse dripping with stars. Night had come out of nowhere sometime during the hazy peak of his drunkenness. He wasn’t sure when he’d passed out, but he knew lucidly that he was no longer awake.
“C’mon kid. Time to go back,” Philip said.
Gradie looked over and saw them all standing there. They were not of this earth.
Their faces were lit by a hidden light, like an old silent film, and they floated like gravity had taken a nap. Philip had on a black metallic overcoat over a dull silver jumpsuit. Lindsey looked like an elven ranger, all wool and leather. The pinstripes on Luke’s three-piece suit panned and jittered like TV static. EP wore a short tunic with black lace and silver accents, pulled tight with a chainmail belt. Sam was dressed as a sci-fi fighter pilot. Black vinyl jump suit and mirror visored helmet. Gradie looked down at himself.
Old t-shirt and sweats.
“Shit, let me change.”
“What for?” said EP. She walked to the edge of the pool and a strange shimmering light rolled across it. When he was able to tear his eyes away from her, he looked down at his clothes and willed them to change.
The cloth rippled and dissolved, giving way to a black silk outfit complete with boots and gloves. He stood up and walked toward the pool. Philip shook his head at him.
“Too dark. Rookie mistake. I can barely see you. Girls in the Allclub will ignore you even more than usual.”
Gradie looked at his clothes again, dark as a starless night sky, and got an idea. He reached out to the impossibly bright and colorful stars and smeared some onto his hand. He ran his hand through his hair, dabbed some of the glittery brilliance on his coat buttons and shirt, then clapped his hands together and let the rest fall to the ground.
“Better?” he said. Philip rolled his eyes.
“We’re not really going clubbing. There’s work at the office.”
Gradie’s stomach rolled, until the sparkling door-covered office Michael had taken him to replaced the other one, with quality reports and staff meetings, in his memory.
“Do you remember the hallways after the gas station, Gradie?” said Michael. Gradie hadn’t even noticed him. He looked like he had stepped out of a space opera. Polished black armor plates over grey cloth, and a dark blue cloak draped across his shoulders.
“Yeah,” Gradie said. “The ones that looked like a big hotel.”
“That was my own personal exit route, you could say. The Hardworlds and the Otherworld have their own kind of gravity, and the Spirit needs help reaching escape velocity. The hallways act as a mental buffer, allowing you to conceptualize leaving the Hardworlds.”
There was a loud splash and Gradie turned in time to see the top of Philip’s Head disappearing beneath the prismatic shimmering surface of the pool. Sam cannonballed right behind him.
“Wait, I need one of you to guide him out,” Michael said.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
No one volunteered. Gradie felt like a little brother tagging along.
“I’ll do it,” EP said without looking at him.
“Good. Meet me at the Office.” Michael and the others jumped into the pool until it was just the two of them standing at the edge of the glowing water. The way the colors moved reminded Gradie of what he saw after pushing on his eyelids with the palm of his hand; formless and ethereal, but able to become identifiable shapes if he focused on one spot long enough.
EP grabbed his hand.
“Ready?”
“Yeah. What do I need to do?”
“Just hold on and don’t fight it.”
“Alright.” Gradie let the smile slip into his voice and EP sighed.
“Three, two, one.”
She pulled him by the hand and they stepped off the edge. The glowing surface rose up to meet them, and for a moment was the world, then shined above him in the light of an orange sun. The water was warm, like a tropical ocean (so he imagined, having never been in one) and a strong current pushed them along. EP let go of his hand and shot up past him towards the surface, where a slab of shadow moved across the light. He got the briefest glimpse of her legs shining under her billowing skirt before she disappeared above the water.
He kicked after her and popped up in the middle of a wide river rushing under an orange sky, streaked by threads of pink and purple neon clouds. Dense jungle foliage draped over the far banks, and EP kneeled in a dark wooden canoe.
“Get on.”
He struggled to pull himself up as the water moved him sideways. EP watched him with sapphire eyes, and he remembered this was the Otherworld. He pulled himself up and onto the boat in a gentle floating arc.
“Look behind you.” He did, and saw the river stretching back for half a mile before snaking behind the trees. He tried to see whatever it was he was supposed to be looking at, but there was only jungle, river, and sky.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. You just need to show your mind that you’re actually somewhere else.”
“What?”
“You have to put mental distance between yourself and where we were before, so your Spirit can break free of the Dreamworlds and get to the Otherworld.”
“Is that what I did with the hallways?”
“Yes, but that was Michael’s Dreamworld. I prefer a river. The momentum helps with the transition.”
Gradie watched the jungle fly by and let his hand down into the foaming refracted starfield below the boat. While the hallways had felt like Michael, a convoluted landscape with a childlike mischievous energy, this world was EP all the way through. A focused river of violent white water, snaking around where it had to and rushing straight where it could. Dark unknowableness pressing in at the edges, protecting it. The current, an unstated desire propelling it along. The orange sunlit air, a warmth just out of reach. It felt like loneliness.
EP’s frown and tone reminded him he had been staring.
“See that waterfall ahead of us?”
About a quarter-mile downstream, the land dropped away and gave a heart-quickening view of the horizon.
“Yeah.”
“Falling also helps with the journey. We’ll drop through the mist and come out over the office.” She held out her hand without looking at him, and he took it. It was cool and soft, glowing like moonlight against his suntanned hand.
A wind came and blew her long, white-blonde hair straight back, exposing the gentle profile of her face and the soft skin of her neck and chest. She frowned at him, and he realized he had summoned the wind with a thought.
“Here it comes!” He braced himself for a jump and looked ahead at the waterfall, still twenty yards away.
“If you say so,” EP said. The boat rocketed forward like a bass boat and skipped across the water.
“Shit!” Gradie fell back in the hull. EP kept hold of his hand, and looked down with a smug smile as he rolled to his feet. It was too much for him.
She was standing on the boat like a surfer, her curves silhouetted by the golden sunset. Wind whipped her orange-tinted blonde hair into a frenzy around her catlike smirking face. Her soft little hand held his with impossible strength. Overcome by the electric sensation squeezing his chest, he smiled at her and saw hers falter.
As the boat sailed out into the air, he pulled her by the hand and caught her in his arms. Gravity returned with a vengeance, and they dropped down towards the white mist headfirst. He held her just for a moment, as the cold water spraying them violently, accentuating the warmth of their bodies, before letting her push him away.
Her eyes flashed a warning as she disappeared in the mist. He rolled over and over in the endless glowing grey and lost all sense of direction. Suddenly, the sensation of falling left him, and he was floating in a familiar black void.
The glowing crescent of the Allworld slid into view, but EP was nowhere to be seen.