Suddenly, we were in a void. A quiescent place; a nowhere too rudimentary for darkness. There was feeling, but no sight. Sound, but no touch.

“You…” A voice spoke. “Who are you?” it demanded.

“I—”

“—No,” the voice said. Ileene’s voice. “I know you. You’re the heretic. The doctor.”

“I don’t really appreciate your tone, Ms. Plotsky,” I said.

“What is going on?” she asked. “How am I here? How are you here? Where is… here?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

A light-like presence filled the space, filled with the sounds of all the colors. Somehow, I knew it was Andalon. “Mr. Genneth,” she said, “you’re in Miss Leen’s memories.”

“So, it worked?” I said.

“What worked?” Ileene demanded.

I sighed. Apparently that was still possible, even in nowhere. I wanted to scratch my head, but I didn’t have a head to scratch, so I just imagined that I did—and, surprisingly, that made it feel better.

“Talk about taking ‘plumbing the subconscious’ to a whole new level!” I muttered.

Immediately, Ileene’s presence became… barbed. She curled up into a feeling like a ball of thorns. She spoke firmly, almost too firmly. “Leave me alone, demon,” she said. “I won’t let you mock me.” It was like her words were all that held her together.

Her thorns pierced me. It was like having a splinter jabbed into my foot, only I didn’t know how to pull it out, because I didn’t have any feet.

Andalon’s words came rushing back to me:

“Wyrmies are supposed to help the ghosts,” Andalon said.

“What? How do they do that?”

She looked up at the glass ceiling, at the gold of the fading day, and then looked back down at me.

“Uh…” she sniffled, “by makin’ stuff and keeping the ghosts safe.” She gulped. “Keeping them out of… Hell.”

Making stuff? I suppose she meant thinking stuff. Like I had in Gregworld.

With a groan, I picture arms—big arms; big, gorilla-arm-wrestling arms—and ‘pushed’ away the thorns with a mighty heave of willpower.

Somehow, I instantly knew I’d pushed too hard. Ileene wasn’t in control here. She had no power over me here.

I’d overshot, and the effect was spectacular.

Ileene’s awareness of my awareness rocketed away from me at supersonic speed, a bullet flying through the nothingness. It tore a shaft of vision into the void, like doors swinging open. Light flooded out, and I found myself back in a body.

— — —

We were elsewhere again, Andalon and I, in a room in a home.

Ileene’s home. The house she’d grown up in.

Information poured into me.

It was a little small for a living room, but it was rich with the warm hues that shone from the old sconces on the walls.

Ileene was gesticulating wildly. Mom was in her formal dress, bellowing like a mad cow. Her necklace glinted in the light, as did the coating of sweat that glued the necklace to her chest. Dad was calling for quiet in the stupidest way possible: yelling himself hoarse.

No…, I told myself, it’s not me. It’s her.

Ileene’s memories were seeping into me. And yet, none of the Plotskies had noticed me.

In a fit of rage, Ileene smacked a pillow on the couch. Startled, her mother yelped and stepped back.

There was nearly as much yelling in the living room as there were furnishings. Faux-antique tchotchkes and forced smiles, framed and picture, filled up nearly every space. Purses and coats had been thrown on the hardwood floor. Pietistic religious self-help books littered shelf-space with their vapid, supercilious guidance. The room was a glutton for candles, whether as candlesticks or candelabras. They lingered seemingly everywhere, almost always unused. And, hanging crooked above the mantelpiece, an icon of the Angel presided over the scene, flanked on either side by the framed scriptural passages, calligraphically rendered.

Ileene’s mother yelled. “I’ll stop once she stops!” Babs flicked her head toward her husband. “Once you stop!”

“You made such a scene,” Mr. Plotsky rebutted, “both of you!” He drilled his gaze into the two women. “You know I can’t tolerate this kind of embarrassment!” Raising his arms, he raged. “Imagine if it had been at Church!”

“Everything I do is wrong!” Babs groaned, slicing her arms through the air. She glared at her daughter. “Nothing I do is ever good enough for you!” She turned to her husband. “Or for you. Or for my family. No! You all think I’m a wreck!”

“The—” Ileene sputtered. “—The fuck did you just say…?” She wiped the spit from her lips on the back of her hand, leaving dark tracks on her skin.

She liked thickly layering her lip-stick. It helped emphasize its glossy, mutinously black hue.

“Ileene!” Jed Plotsky’s face twitched. “Don’t say that to your mother!”

“This isn’t about you!” Ileene shrieked. “It’s about me!” She pressed her fingers together and pointed her hands at her heart. “It’s about my hopes, my dreams—my fears, dammit!” She stomped her foot onto the floor. The wood shuddered. “Mom, Dad: I’m afraid. I’m fucking terrified I’ll turn out as mediocre as you two have always made me feel.” She made a V with her fingers and thrusted them in the direction of her parents’ eyes. "I’m never going to have a place to belong.”

Andalon hid behind me. She huddled close and put her hands over her ears. “Make it stop,” she whimpered. “Please, Mr. Genneth, make it stop.”

“And this,” Ileene yelled, “this was my one out! My only fucking sturdy footing. And you!”—she stabbed her finger at her mother—“You took it away from me. Marine biology was all that I had—that, and a half-hearted faith that I learned from you two master hypocrites, and you took it away!”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Marine biology? How does that factor in here?

“Ileene,” Babs said, “you heard your grandfather; it’s… unbecoming of a woman. If you want to be a mother, be a mother. If you want to be a hot young thang on the loose, get a job you can afford to have. But you don’t go down the middle.” Mother shook hand at daughter. “That’s how you drown!”

Leaning forward, Ileene gripped both her hands on the back of the sofa. Its dried leather was cracked and crinkled. “You know what drowns someone?” she said, with a glower, “Forcing them to scrape the bottom of the barrel with too many jobs and too much loan debt, trying to pay off college tuition when their parents have a surplus of literal millions that they’re withholding, and, for what… to appease your father? To make some fucking point about self-reliance and Polovian hamlets?”

“You…” Babs howled, deep and throaty. “Don’t you talk to me like that! I’m your mother, for crying out loud! You don’t get to judge me!”

Ileene stepped back. “Eyvan was right!” She lashed out with her arm. “You’re all corrupted, and I’m corrupted too, for being stupid enough to believe there was a way to get through to you. Well, no more!” Ileene made an X with her arms and then sliced her hands through the air on either side. “I’ve had enough. It’s time I Choose the Right!”

And choose, she did. Ileene chose to storm out of the room, down the hall to the front door, out into the misty night, with only the clothes on her back—a plain, brown dress—and a purse slung over her shoulder.

Mr. and Mrs. Plotsky raced after her, calling their daughter’s name, but they weren’t quick enough. Ileene glimpsed them at the front door right as she slammed Eyvan’s car’s passenger side door shut. The dinner had been so awful, she’d called her boyfriend and asked him to come while her parents had been driving her home. Then the engine revved. Wheels screeched on asphalt as the car sped away, carrying Ileene with them.

Darkness swept across the home, whisking us back into the void—but I wanted to follow them.

And then, I did.

— — —

The journey was a lengthy one; a winding ride through forgotten mountain roads. And Ileene was not alone. They traversed the mountains on the wheels of a tarp-backed military transport so old that no one cared that it was missing. It was a steep climb up the rocky road, and the transport’s agèd, decrepit engine was hardly cut out for it. The machine coughed and wheezed from its labor, hawking fetid plumes out its exhaust pipe. And we traveled with them—Andalon and I.

Little portholes dotted the tarp, letting the midday sunlight slice its way through. The vehicle’s dark green metal frame drank in the heat, as did the corrugated plastic lining on the transport floor. Dry winds buffeted the tarp, breathing pine-scent over everyone’s faces. There were benches on either side, and the handful of people gathered in the vehicle was enough that the benches were full, and some had to sit cross-legged on the floor. Ileene sat on the floor, as did Andalon and I. We’d been plopped down at the edge of the space, with our backs to the road.

“What’s going on, Andalon?” I asked. “Where are we?”

“You know how Miss Leen is inside your head?” she said.

I nodded.

“Well… you’re inside her head,” she said. “Inside your head.”

“So these are Ileene’s memories…” I said.

“Yeah.”

So, score one for Team Neuropsychiatrist! I had infiltrated Ileene’s psyche. I just needed to get my bearings.

“Am I still in my body?”

“Yes,” she said, after a pause. “You’re just moving really, really, really slowly.”

“What happens if someone walks into the room and sees me like that?”

Andalon smiled. “It’s okay. Everyone else is moving really, really slowly, too.” She tilted her head. “Or, you could go not-slowly and have the other Mr. Genneths do stuff with your floppy-flop.” She wiggled her arms.

I nodded.

So, what is it that she’s remembering?

Turning around, I stuck my head out through the back of the truck, tightly gripping the edge. Andalon immediately followed suit.

Again, she gasped.

“Wow…” Her voice was soft; awe-hushed.

Andalon drank in the mountain vista like it was magic. Red pines rivaled skyscrapers; rock towered where the earth’s skin pinched and rutted.

And when Andalon turned to me, there were tears in her eyes. “Mr. Genneth…” She looked out of the transport. “What is this?”

“We’re in the Riscolts.”

I didn’t need my knowledge of Ileene’s memories to recognize the Riscolt mountains when I saw them. My thoughts flicked back to bygone days, over a decade ago.

A Howle family road trip.

There were many ways to get from Trenton to Polovia, even to Northwest Polovia, on the other side of the Riscolts. As the crow flies, a commercial aerostat could get you from Elpeck International Aeroport to the city of Golmicz in the West in about an hour. You could also take the Expressway south, skirting around the Riscolts. Both those routes were far quicker than the old mountain roads, but neither—not even the aerostat flight—could match the mountains’ grandeur.

I reached for my console, intent on looking up the pictures—only the device wasn’t there.

But it didn’t need to be.

Just by thinking it, the images came forth. They unfurled mid-air, even as the mountains rushed by. They were photos Jules and Rale had taken with my old Ultraseven hand-held camera. Their fingertips intruded on many of the images’ edges. And, more than once, they’d turned the cameras on one another.

Angel’s breath… they were so small back then.

It was a vision of another life.

One of the most impressive images in our collection was of the sight of Shadowfort in the distance, in the shadow of the Godsdial. Rale had taken the image as we’d approached the town from Expressway 5.

The Godsdial was this absolutely massive rock formation that extruded from the side of a stretch of the Riscolts. It was thousands of feet high, and miles long. Its shadow swept across the mountainside and the forested valleys below. For as long as anyone could remember, there’d been a settlement at the base of the Godsdial. The thing was a geological anomaly, far older than the surrounding mountains, and stubbornly resistant to erosion. The caves worn into the surrounding rock were a goldmine for archeologists; they’d been lived in for eons.

“What are risk-colts, Mr. Genneth?” Andalon asked. Her words brought me back to focus.

“The mountains,” I answered, pointing at the rocky precipices. “These mountains.”

“Moun-tens?”

“All the tallness around us… that’s what mountains are.” I pointed toward the porthole. “These are the Riscolt Mountains.”

Andalon whispered. “They’re so… tall…”

On one of our trips through the 5, we’d stopped in Shadowfort to visit the Painted Caves of Shadowfort. By the Angel, they were magnificent. Horses, bison, lions, great drakes, stonebacks, even extinct species of dinosaurs—crest-heads and clubtails—rendered in charcoal and fat-pigments by human hands nearly forty-thousand years before.

Images of my cave delving tour passed before us, making Andalon gape in wonder.

There really was something magical about that place. Something… magnetic, beckoning prehistoric man to the depths of the earth.

It was easy to see why the mountains inspired awe. In many ways, they still did. Mountains were the teeth of the gears that turned the world. They counted the years in the multiples of millions. Like a great forest, or the open ocean, they had the power to shrink you down by showing you how small you truly were.

Gullies, barrens and rocky plateaus festooned the wilds clung or stood on either side of the winding road around us. Thin, patchy undergrowth covered it all like hair. Tall, fangsome megaliths stood upon the barrens. Some were out in the open, ready to bite at the sky, while others lay hidden within stalwart pine groves or buried in overgrowth and time.

“Harrow stones,” I muttered.

The land of Trenton was a broad peninsula at the far end of Daxon, separated from the rest of the continent by the Riscolt Mountain range, save for the southern pass into Polovia. History itself wasn’t half as old as the legends that wound around these mountains.

The harrow stones, as they were known, were records on the far side of memory. The tradition was older than dirt, and lived on in the modern use of harrow stones during Shrovestide festivities, though the true age of the practice hadn’t been fully appreciated until the discovery of the Painted Caves nearly two centuries ago.

There’d been harrow stones in the depths, bearing strange, abstract carvings—swirling wave-forms. According to legends recorded at the time of the first crusades, the pagan traditions that once ruled these lands asserted that the harrow stones created a connection to the divine. The ancients would sleep in their shadow, and in doing so, their gods would supposedly speak to them through their dreams. The practice ended not long after Angelfall; apparently, the ancient gods had ceased to speak—perhaps even disappeared altogether.

To believing Lassediles, the harrow stones were the teeth of the Hallowed Beast Itself. Some said they’d fallen to earth as the Beast had drawn the Veil of Night over the world. Some Old Believers said the Godsdial and the Riscolts were the parts of the Beast Itself, perhaps Its dreaming jaws poking out as it slumbered beneath the stone.

As a girl, Jules had told me, if you squinted, the Godsdial kinda looked like the tip of a stupendously huge snout poking out from the earth.

Kids and their imaginations.

“Mr. Genneth,” Andalon wept, overcome by the sights, “why don’t I ‘member these things? Why doesn’t Andalon ‘member the spiny spiny urchins, the deep dark caves, or the tall tall mountains?” She shook her head. “It’s not fair.”

“Maybe you just forgot them?”

Andalon shook her head vigorously. “No, I…” she looked at the vista again. “I never seed it before.”

“Then maybe you never stopped to notice it?”

But then a rush of feeling from Ileene pulled at me. Rapture was aflame in her; rapture, and anticipation, like seed-pod, ready to burst. A gun fired next to my ears wouldn’t have caught my attention half as swiftly.

I whipped my head back and turned around.