Measures of sanity among planeswalkers are difficult to come by. What is normal changes for you. Laws of physics that are cast in stone in one place can be like smoke elsewhere. As a child I saw a fly caught in a spider’s web. I imagined what it would be like to be the fly. I imagined being the spider. I never thought about being the web.
I use magic, not parlour tricks. My parents named me John Stuart. I burned their house down at the age of three. I had no control at that age. They left me at the doorsteps of a church. There I was called Firestarter. They taught me. You would be surprised what you can do with faith, a total dedication to something and a library. I learned to control the fire. I learned to transform into other things.
Today, it doesn’t matter what day it is anymore, I stopped. I wandered into a picturesque meadow. Trees, grass, sky; brown, green, blue. A massive tree lay on its side, long dead and covered in loam, half swallowed by the earth.
Faith is about listening and having the courage to act. I heard desire. It manifested as a sea of voices saying “Come,” silently. The screaming disturbed the leaves where they hung from the trees, unmoving. The wind remained still, except for the gale force of breath, which tugged at my red cloak and made the voices. The cloak could be influenced by things that were here, yet not entirely here. There was something flowing into this world from somewhere nearby, something not of this world, not normal. I felt dizzy for a moment so I became something that could not get dizzy.
The voices changed. The word became a murmur of different words, questions; who, how, brother and what? I saw the rabbit hole tucked into the roots of the fallen tree. Inside I saw, felt, chaos, an infinite drop into eternity. As I dropped into the bottomless pit, I caught a glimpse of a rabbit across the meadow. Perhaps it had meant to say something to me? It vanished as I fell.
Here and now, I fell. Chaos came as an old upright piano. A table with sweet cakes. A ladder with one broken rung. An umbrella unfolded into a mushroom. I saw all these things around me in the small hole. Roots moved by on the walls of the tunnel, far too deep now to be possible. I spun and twisted. Things changed. The piano opened a mouth full of pointed daggers. The cakes exploded into ribbons. The ladder folded itself into a chessboard. The mushroom ate itself.
I landed on the chessboard. My red cloak swirled around me. Red pieces stood around me. Opposite were the black pieces. I had made a mistake; checkers, not chess. I considered my death here on a checkers board. I felt sort of insulted. I stood and looked around at the piece placement. The game had not yet started.
A self-important snort of laughter marked the start. I saw a giant table beneath the board and two massive opponents prepared to face off to an audience of hundreds who stood in hushed silence. A massive hand reached across the board and slid a black piece forward.
Next, a gaudy red-gloved hand stretched out toward my person. I rolled out of the way and slapped at the hand. The crowd was silent. Only their heads moved, turning.
I summoned flames. They were not confronting some helpless wanderer, disoriented and desperate. Fire flowed, the board burned and the plastic pieces melted into gobs of quicksilver tar and blood. Magic here had a strangeness and I had to struggle to control it.
I became a giant, just a larger version of myself. I exploded out of the conflagration, becoming their size. Not a soul gasped or flinched. The player merely reached for me, despite my size. I slapped his hand away. The hundreds, dressed all in different shades of red and black, leaned forward just slightly.
“Cheaters will not be tolerated!”
The tone was sharp and arrogant, self important. A queen, obviously, dressed in black and red filled out a tall throne of brilliant gold and sparkling crystals. Her head, larger than her torso, cast a shadow over her shoulders. Her crown, a silver band of some kind, was lost in her beehive of braided hair. I abandoned the hope of logical conversation.
Her hand reached across the 100 metres between us, growing in size as it did and swatted me like a bug. The army of spectators, the table, the contestants, the queen, and the fire, moved away very quickly. I saw a forest that made no sense in its growth. I saw a mountain range in the distance that tasted like dandelion flowers. I licked my lips, not knowing how I could learn that.
The landing did not hurt as much as it should have. Something broke underneath me. It was bread. I found myself on a table bigger than what would be normal. Massive cups and saucers were spread about, between teapots scattered without discernible pattern. One of them appeared to be made from of the smell of late afternoon sunlight in the summer. I blinked and looked at it harder but did not see it with my eyes. I only interpreted smell. A smashed pocket watch sat nearby, its gold chain hanging off the table.
A man in a hat wider at the top than the bottom flipped a cup over and slammed it down over me. Tea went everywhere. I could smell the warm tea soaking into my cloak. I became a large knight in armour, sort of. My form had a melted wax look as my control ebbed.
The cup grew bigger with me. I smashed my mailed gauntlets against it. It cracked and shattered. The pieces hovered for a second before growing wings and becoming butterflies. I shooed them away.
“I am the Hatter, mad.”
Standing on the table, I looked down at the short man bowing formally with hat in hand.
“Won’t you stay for tea?”
“No.”
I drew a massive sword from my pocket and faced him. We both paused and looked at the slight bend in the blade.
“Oh, excellent. I knew you would stay.”
I kicked one of the teapots off the table. It clanged to the ground.
“Gravitas!” The Hatter yelled and threw another one to the ground.
I ran.
“Not without your tea, you don’t.”
Tentacles of tea stretched out of each pot and grabbed me. They held me in a seat and the Hatter worked a pot up to my mouth. I became something that does not drink but it took every ounce of concentration. The hot liquid poured over what passed for my new face.
“Oh, you are for the jabberwock!”
That did not sound good. The Hatter folded the table in half, then again and it became a suitcase and bounded away. The chairs turned and ran. The rabbit appeared. A glimpse of white and a green smoking jacket. It gasped and ducked back from where it had appeared. I had grown sick of this place and of running. It had not helped.
The jabberwock appeared beastly to be certain, what could be actually seen: tentacles, wind, claws and teeth. To describe its colour I would use the sound and feel of breaking crayons. It bounded toward me on all six truffles worth of legs. Its presence seemed to make things more difficult to understand. Certain words changed, lost meaning and took on new meaning. Its breath smelled like blue. It made me gag. I made it burn.
The fire erupted chaotically, swirling like dye spooned into water. I let go of control and it grew stronger this way. The trees burned. The grass evaporated. The air boiled. The jabberwock became a hiss and crackle. I did not take my eyes off it.
When it stepped out of a cloud of smoke and its teeth snapped open with a loud snicker snack, I swung my blade. It cracked and bent further on the hide. I wrinkled my nose and heard yellow. It might have been green. My senses continued to make less sense.
The claws cut and stabbed. I experienced pain and cheese. Poison. They had finally had their way with me. Blood dripped, and I went for my greatest trick by letting go. I became my greatest and oldest form. My snarl erupted from behind long teeth and ancient eyes. My skin became red steel plates. A dragon fears nothing.
I breathed fire, not that pathetic magic. Not that bit of explosion. Not that shallow flame but true fire, dragon fire. It came from within, from my heart and lungs, drawn from my very soul. The jabberwock evaporated in the inferno.
It did not die, however. I would never know if my senses saw the laws of physics twist or if it had just been madness. The jabberwock became the taste of ash and the scent of time. No longer a thing, I could not kill it; not at all. Its abstract form did not slow it down or make its claws less effective. It bit and sliced, and I bled.
It circled when I looked to retreat. It came all around me, laughing in scents and premonitions. I slowed. Magic failed completely. I became a man again, a badly injured man. It could kill me easily now. The claws stabbed and cut, but only little cuts. Little stab. Little slash. Little pains.
I needed to flee this torture. I needed time to heal. Perhaps a form it couldn’t hurt? My brain scrambled and then stopped. I realized the form, the only one they would let me take. I realized the trap. I saw them shrieking in delight. The rabbit, the Hatter, the queen.
Cut. Cut. Cut. Eventually they would get bored and have it kill me. I understood now. It was shallow comfort. I became the jabberwock.
My mind split and I saw things from all directions. Colour. Taste. Touch. Smell. Sound. They were all the same, even existence and thought. I experienced everything as one. Then someone giggled. Me. I achieved a perverted enlightenment. Matter could be thought. Madness – I had let it in. I hated that it felt right.
I saw the path back now, the rabbit hole. I ambled toward it, no longer able to tell the difference between moving and singing. Either would achieve my objective because they wished it to. Their raw desire here dwarfed my willpower. They were in charge.
I crawled up the rabbit hole by thinking about skating on mint candies strapped to my feet and how yellow is a perfectly good colour to build a house out of, strong and resistant to the smell of darkness. Time and chaos stretched out for what could have been a second or a lifetime. Then finally roots, grass and dirt appeared. These things were real.
The unthinkable form of the jabberwock faded as reality composed itself. Skills, memory and senses began to work. I crawled, too dizzy to get up. Grass gave way to dirt, then a creek and finally a field of wheat. Just these simple, normal things were like a tall glass of water to a thirsty man in the desert. I regained more composure but sickness churned my stomach and did not diminish. I had escaped the web by being fly and spider and web at the same time.
None of the creatures followed me. They did not want to. I had seen the rabbit, but just as a rabbit here. They wanted to be here as they were there through that rabbit hole. Inside me was their madness now, their way into this realm. If I let it out, they could consume this world.
The next time I became something else, the next time I dug down into my well of magic, their madness would claw its way to the surface, and let them in. That’s what the madness wanted.
I knew a place to take it, a horrible place that would be improved by their chaos. I started through the wheat to see what was on the other side, a traveller with a burden now.