CHAPTER NINE
The Invisible Circle
VII
It was close to sunset, and the light was turning red. Alfajean, who still had the goblin sword sticking out of their helmet, sat crosslegged on the alter, nervously thumbing through their wizidex. Oh yeah, there was an alter—a hexagonal prism of black stone almost as tall as Wilburn. Despite its size and centrality, Wilburn hadn’t noticed it until Alfajean sat down on it… and for some reason he didn’t like to look at it for long. The sight of the alter gave him an uneasy feeling in his stomach.
Neither Buttrom nor his bowl had budged. The prophet lay spread eagle on the floor of the temple, his round belly lifting and lowering the clay vessel over and over as he breathed. He appeared to be asleep, but Wilburn knew he wasn’t, because he could tell Buttrom was thinking; once in a while, Wilburn was even beginning to be able to tell what Buttrom was thinking. His awareness of Thoughtspace had expanded greatly over the past few hours, during which he and Iddo had done little else but thought-speak. The more they practiced, the more Wilburn could feel something deep within himself opening, like an extra hand that he’d been clenching in a tight fist all his life and was only now discovering how to uncurl the fingers of.
Receiving Iddo’s projected thoughts was effortless, like filling a cup with water from a faucet, but the thoughts drifting from Buttrom’s untrained mind were nebulous, so it was more like trying to fill a cup with water from the air on a misty day. There was a backwards sort of trick to it, like the signpost at the crossroads. The harder Wilburn tried to read Buttrom’s mind, the harder it became, and when he stopped trying altogether, he got zilch; the sweet spot lay somewhere in the middle, a not-trying without trying not to try but also trying just a teensy-weensy bit mode, not at all easy to maintain. Not easy, yet more and more Wilburn found himself slipping into that mode of semi-active receptivity, of seeing without looking… hearing without listening… not reading Buttrom’s mind per say, just… noticing his thoughts as they drifted by.
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Part of the trouble was that Buttrom’s thoughts were both repetitive and boring. None of this is real, Buttrom kept thinking. I’ve been in an accident and I’ve bonked my head and I’m lying in a coma and this all a hallucination. I’m going to fall asleep now, and when I wake up, I’ll be at home in bed, and I’ll have a nasty headache and I won’t remember any of this.
He’s correct, in a way, Iddo thought. That is essentially what would happen if he could fall asleep… which is precisely why he will not be allowed to. It is his destiny to be here, the silly man.
After failing to fall asleep for awhile, Buttrom would begin to pray: groveling, pathetic prayers that seemed to Wilburn designed to maximumly irritate any divinity who might’ve been listening. Then Buttrom would start over with None of this real.
He’s wrong about that part, though, Iddo thought. The Astral Plane is no less real than Real Life, merely a different flavor of reality. Moreover, my gut tells me we’re in S-2 Parallelaspace—and my gut, unlike MagiMaps, is seldom mistaken. Parallelaspace is the lowest dimension of the Higher Astral Plane, and it exists parallel to Real Life as the name suggests, meaning the two dimensions are coextensive in spacetime, meaning that effectively we are Astral projecting in Real Life—though, technically that’s a contradiction in terms, because what makes Real Life Real Life is the fact that it’s the one dimension in the universe that is not the Astral Plane. We must be in Sector-2 Parallelaspace. Sector-1 is a utility level used for creating closed-time-loop sub-dimensions in Real Life space, and closed-space-sphere sub-dimensions in Real Life time—and if this was Sector-3 Parallelaspace, you’d be able to stick your hand straight through that pillar.
Wilburn grinned and patted the pillar in question. It was solid stone. He sat with his bare feet dangling over the edge of the pavilion—they were just outside the circle, but his butt was in the circle, and Iddo said that was good enough. Iddo sprawled next to Wilburn on his belly with his haunches twisted sideways like a cat. Master and apprentice. They faced the south, watching the landscape flaunt its beauty with increasing shamelessness as the sun went down. Tubular clouds crawled over the jungle far below, looking like pink caterpillars with long blue shadows.
What was that! Wilburn leapt to his feet, thrilled by the prospect of something—anything—finally happening after the long lull. What he’d seen was gone now, but it had been bright, a flicker of yellow near the foot of they volcano. There! Wilburn pointed so forcefully that his wrist popped. But the yellow speck was gone. Then it was back—then it was gone. The speck would vanish for minutes at a stretch, then a reappear for just a second or two. It didn’t take Wilburn and Iddo long to realize that it was following the mountain path, weaving its way up the narrow corridor through the jungle. Whatever the yellow thing was, it was coming to temple. But at this rate it was gonna take for—ever.