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Melvin saw nothing but blue and white light for long, tense moments. When the light finally died, he wasn’t quite sure if their situation had improved.
They were in a grand circular library. The polished marble floors, the smell of oiled leather and the soft glow of paper lanterns were all things that made him want to exhale a much needed sigh of relief. But he couldn’t. A man and woman, their faces twisted in rage, kept his breath bated. In their bare hands they held blazing fire raised as if to throw at them.
The woman yelled at them. “What have you done?! Explain this malice or burn!”
“Whoa! Whoa! No malice here,” Melvin said as he waved his hands. Then he realized he was waving a sword at two people who had fire aimed at his head. He dropped the sword on the floor with a jarring clang.
“We didn’t mean it,” Jason said. “But the undead were chasing us. And the weagrs and the strandwolves. And the black thing made me. And the fort was falling on our heads. And we’re not even supposed to be here. We’re from the suburbs!”
The man and woman looked at each other. The woman nodded and the two of them closed their hands, smothering the fire. She stood with poise, wearing what seemed to be a soft green nightgown. Asian features and skin the color of honey gave an exotic look to the expression of concern on her face.
“Wait, I know you,” Rich said pointing. “You’re the Hierophant Majora.”
“I am,” she said. “And one of you broke my lock. I need to know why.”
They explained in sloppy, broken fragments the events that led them there. One would tell the story and then someone else would interject with details or corrections and pick the story back up. Hierophant Majora and the man with her said nothing the whole time. When Melvin, Rich and Jason finally reached the present, the lady spoke.
“It is late, and you three have been through much. My questions, and yours I’m sure, will keep until morning.” She looked at the man. “Druze, please show them quarters.”
“Wait,” Melvin said. “What about my brother?”
Majora looked at him. “Who can say? Just as you hope for his safety, put faith in those hopes. That is all you can do at the moment, my dear.”
She left them with Druze, a dark featured man with black robes. He took them out of the library and onto a breezeway. Wide marble columns ascended into an arched ceiling and both sides of the breezeway revealed a majestic garden, with colorful flowers, lush plants, and sculpted fountains that sprayed water. It all twinkled in the light of paper lanterns.
“The Hierophane,” Rich said as he looked around in wonder.
The breezeway ended at a tower. The interior of the tower made Melvin feel like he was inside a giant bottle. He stood in the atrium courtyard looking all around at doors and windows ascending up to open sky.
It was a clean, elegant design. Perhaps that was due in some part to the fact there were no stairs. Doors, no matter how high up, opened up to empty air.
Druze led them on the path until they stood on a section covered with charcoal colored gravel. He knelt down and traced out a pattern into the gravel. Once he was done, the strange character he had drawn glowed orange and the square of gravel they were standing on rose into the air.
It coasted up gently several floors, stopping in front of a door. When Druze opened the door, the light came on and he put his hand out for them to go inside.
Rich and Jason went in but Druze put his arm up to block Melvin. “These are not your quarters.”
Before Melvin could understand the what’s and why’s, Druze was drawing in the gravel again. The square rose up a few more floors, leaving Rich and Jason with an open door and quizzical looks on their faces.
Melvin understood when he walked into the room Druze opened. Sheer gossamer curtains surrounded a bed layered with furry throw blankets. The wall, the bed, the curtains—it was all a soft shade of pink. He whirled on Druze, anger etched into his pretty features.
“I’m not a girl!”
Druze’s reply was written in gravel, leaving Melvin with an open door.
Melvin shut the door, but not without a dizzying look down first. He knew the height was intentional. Hierophant Majora wanted answers from them; there would be no leaving until she had them.
Right about now, Melvin didn’t care if he was stuck in a pretty pink prison. It was the safest place he’d been since reality shifted. He looked through his quarters.
He found a rectangular tub of cut stone. His day had consisted of hours of traveling, dueling with weagrs, and running from the undead in a decrepit fortress. The grime of it all felt like glue stuck to him.
He saw two pictographs on the tile wall at the head of the tub, one of a raincloud and the other a row of waves. He touched the raincloud and water sprayed out from tiny holes cut into the ceiling directly above the tub.
He peeled off the steel bikini and let the hot water work its own kind of magic. Worries dissipated into the steam. Troubles swirled down the drain.
He was beyond exhausted. Once the water stopped raining down, he was barely cognizant of toweling off, finding some night clothes, and getting under the fuzzy throw blankets of his bed. Soon as his head hit the pillow it was like a knockout punch.
A loud, powerful knock woke him up. Melvin opened up crusty eyes to a bleary world. Daylight was streaming through the windows.
“I will come back to collect you in thirty minutes,” a man’s voice said through the door. Must be Druze, Melvin assumed.
Melvin got up, his legs stiff and sore. He looked out the window and his breath caught in his throat.
A giant river wove a course from the top of the horizon to almost the base of the tower before bending around, its water sparkling blue and violet. Dense tropical foliage lined the banks of the river. Melvin’s eyes followed a flock of majestic white birds as they flew over a lush copse of palm trees. The birds flew in a triangular formation, a living arrow that pointed to fog shrouded mountains barely visible in the distance.
Melvin stretched, eyes closed as he enjoyed the feeling of release that came with extending the muscles. As he opened his eyes, he caught the reflection of himself in the room’s full length mirror. He was on his tip-toes, arms raised, body only modestly covered in a pink nightie.
“God, I’m ridiculously hot,” he said as he eyed the gracious curves of his legs, breasts and butt. “Why can’t I meet you in real life?”
The thought brought him back to Majora. If anyone could help them get back to their world, it was her. Melvin had only seen a fraction of the Hierophane and he was already astounded by its magic and grandeur. The Hierophant Majora had probably already devised a way home for him and his friends and brother.
The thought of Mike made his stomach lurch as he put on his steel bikini. Mike was tough; he came back from some pretty hairy scrapes in Afghanistan, after all. And he had Runt with him, who was thoroughly badass with those Z-blades.
But the last time Melvin had seen Mike an ancient fortress was crumbling down around him. How far away was Fort Law from the Hierophane? Surely the mages could conjure up another portal close to the fort and search for Mike and Runt.
This was the issue foremost in his mind as Druze came back for him. The expressionless man had Rich and Jason with him. Druze just opened the door this time instead of knocking, giving Melvin’s friends a chance to see inside the room.
“So this is why you couldn’t bunk with us?” Jason said with a wry curve of his lip. “Too many peas under the mattresses in our man cave?”
“Shut up.” Melvin got on the gravel platform and looked straight ahead.
“Mmmm... you smell good too,” Jason said, sniffing close to Melvin. “What kind of soap they give you in the Princess Suite? Is that—lilacs and lavender?”
“I hope you stab yourself with a finger bone the next time you pick your nose.”
“Pretty cool huh?” Jason held up the bone arm, curling and uncurling the fingers. It was completely mobile despite being devoid of sinew and muscle. The thing was simultaneously compelling and disturbing to watch. Jason seemed at home with it though.
Once the platform reached the ground, they followed Druze as he led them through the Hierophane. Many people bustled about now, making the place feel like a city unto itself. Women wore muslin dresses and men wore long flax tunics with a severe “V” cut that exposed most of their chests and stomach. A belt separated the top and bottom halves of the tunic, which stopped at the men’s knees. It all seemed very Egyptian to Melvin.
Few people wore robes like Rich. Druze in all black and a handful of random others were the exception. Of course, no one had on a steel bikini or aian-style tree bark leather. As they walked by, people everywhere stopped and stared. Melvin didn’t know if they were looking at Rich’s robes, Jason’s bone arm, or his own barely covered ass. He felt his face turn warm.
Druze took them to a villa. Lavishly furnished with high, domed ceilings and marble columns, it was a place that made Melvin’s nice room shabby in comparison. Druze led them out to a veranda, where Majora was sitting at a table and looking out at the gardens of the Hierophane while birds chirped good morning.
She was wearing regal white and purple robes as opposed to the green nightgown they first met her in. When she saw them, she smiled warmly.
“Please, sit down. Breakfast is due.”
They all took seats around the table, except for Druze. He sat on the sofa behind Majora and looked stoically at the party in front of him. No sooner had they sat down than servants start bustling about, bringing out plates.
Sweetfish patties, flat cakes of shredded fish cooked with green onions, was the main course. Mushroom slices and generous chunks of tomato, both cooked and steaming, were heaped along the sides. They were served a hot, spiced tea and a green fruit juice that was just a touch tart. Maybe it was the hunger talking as he dug in, but Melvin couldn’t remember the last time he had had a meal this good.
Famished as he was, Melvin was still able to ask about his brother between bites of sweetfish patty. “After we eat, can you make another portal back to Fort Law so I can find my brother?”
“I’m afraid portals do not work as simply as you assume,” Majora said as she nursed her spiced tea. “A mage, no matter how powerful, cannot just open a gate to anywhere they want to be. Portals are a form of recall magic. A mage would have to go to the location in question and craft the portal spell for his or her return later. If it is or ever was possible to get to an unprepared location via portal, that magic is lost to us now.”
“Then I have to get there the fastest way possible. I need to find him.”
Majora shook her head. “We must discourse, plan and prepare. No good will come of rushing into the unknown. ‘Cook your food before you eat it,’ as they say.”
“Wait a minute,” Rich said, “if a mage needs to be present to set a portal, how’d the one we took get there in the first place?”
Majora looked at him and smiled. “Rich is it? I like that name. Rich as in sweet, like a butter-orange cake. The portal was there because I placed it there myself, in the event the dark creature you encountered tried to escape. I had been using that portal every fifty years to go back to Fort Law, where I would renew the witchlock and refresh the portal. It was a flawless system for three hundred twenty odd years until last night.”
Rich’s jaw dropped. “Do mages live that long?”
Fine wrinkles gathered at the corners of Majora’s mouth as she smiled, and her eyes displayed the faintest touch of crow’s feet. For a woman over three hundred years old, she didn’t look a day past forty. “No,” she said simply.
“Your inadvertent reprieve to the creature leaves it free to endanger this world,” she continued. “It is not exactly fitting to send you all home while we’re left to deal with this obscene mess.”
“What exactly was that thing?” Jason asked. His bone hand came up from the table as in emphasis.
“What you’ve seen is more than most know,” Majora said. “But it is a terrible sight, is it not? This being, able to control the nameless and countless dead. The puppetmaster to an unkillable army, an army that too easily converts the living into more of their ranks. Such a thing cannot be allowed to pervert the balance of nature. And I need you all to stop it.”
“Us?!” Melvin, Rich and Jason spoke as one.
“Who else? From what I see, you three make the ideal combination to contain this threat,” she said as she took a sip of spiced tea. From behind the cup, her gaze went between the three of them. Melvin wondered if she was smiling as she sipped.
“You got us all wrong, lady,” Melvin said. “You’re looking at a fumble-handed swordswoman guy, a mage that can’t cast his way out of a wet paper bag, and an archer who’s never fired a shot. We’re not the badasses you’re looking for.”
“My dear, you are more badass than you think,” Majora said, rising from the table. “And I know this because I fully understand what you are and how you came to be here.”
The three looked at each other then back at Majora. She was stepping off of the veranda and into the garden. She turned to them. “If you all are done with breakfast, I’d be happy to show you,” she said.
She took them across the gardens and into a grand building. Their boots clicked on polished tiles that rippled like water as they tread on them. Marble statues and curious devices decorated the hallways. Melvin had to fight the urge to touch stuff every time something new came within reach.
“It is no big secret how you got here,” Majora said. “Magic from the Hierophane pulled you into this world and into these bodies. The only real surprise is your level of awareness and attachment.”
“What do you mean?” Jason asked.
“Jason, right? Not as cute as Rich,” she said, smiling at Rich. “Well, Jason, magic pulls your consciousness from your world into these constructed bodies for a limited duration. Normally, your consciousness is never fully entrenched and aware of this world because you interact with it through an interface device.”
“The game...”
“Exactly. What you call the game is the interface device that our magic uses to bring your consciousness here.”
“I’ve never heard of this kind of magic,” Jason mused.
“Well, prepare to look upon what you’ve never heard of,” Majora said. She waved her hand across the granite wall and tiny fragments of stone scurried out in either direction, leaving a giant passageway that they stepped through.
“I present the cause of your current predicament, the Rift Pendulum,” Majora said, extending her hand toward the giant device in the center of the room.
For its namesake, it did look like a pendulum, an unconventional kind called a Foucault pendulum, something Melvin knew solely because of his Wikipedia habit. The pendulum was a giant, golden bob suspended from a wire affixed to the ceiling. The bob itself consisted of a sphere with a cone extending from the bottom of the sphere to terminate into a needle fine point. The golden sphere of the bob contained light that swirled like a constant storm. The ceiling where the wire hung looked as if it was a night sky made of liquid metal with stars and nebulas changing colors as the pendulum swung. The floor under the swinging bob looked like an ancient map, the highly stylized ones Melvin always saw in pirate and adventure movies. The air shimmered in the space between the pendulum’s swinging arc as if it was tearing a hole in the air itself.
“The Rift Pendulum is the apex of nasran hexation, megrym clockworks, and human ingenuity. It performs a thousand functions, to include powering the magical tools and devices throughout the Hierophane. One of those functions was bringing you here.”
“I don’t understand,” Melvin said. “Why bring anyone here at all?”
“You and yours are the major force preserving law and order here,” Majora said. “You all have the strength, skill, power, and most importantly, the desire to do things others don’t. Few would sanely volunteer to walk into weagr-infested woods looking for trouble, or track down cut-throat bandits, or tangle with a demented mage. Not only do you all do that, you eagerly want to.”
“We’ve played this so much, acting like it was real, and the whole time it was,” Rich said, looking at the pendulum swing.
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” Majora said smiling at Rich. “Every time you play your game doesn’t necessarily predicate your presence here. Pendulum hero visits can be directed by mages, but they are largely automated based on perceived threats as calculated by the Pendulum. It appears your goals of culling a weagr threat in Kazawood matched one of the Pendulum’s calculations that the weagr population had grown dangerously high there. Only when your goals align with the ours does the Pendulum pull you here.”
“So if this is routine business, what’s the difference now?” Jason asked. “What changed that made us so we’re aware of our circumstances and stuck here?”
“That is difficult to assess, Jason,” Majora said. “There are many variables at work. As you can see, a myriad of moving parts. But I assure you it was merely a hiccup, something easily remedied once your quest is complete.”
“You make it sound like a trip to the mall but it’s all deadly and dangerous and a bit much for a bunch of kids from the burbs, so I’d just like to find my brother and go home,” Melvin said.
“I agree,” said Majora, “It is dangerous. But a bit much, no. Your bodies are created, every fiber pure magic. They are perfect. The amazing things possible to you when you feel it’s just a game are still possible. The problem is your minds.”
“That’s a big problem,” Melvin said. “Our minds aren’t right. We don’t want to do it. So why us and not some new guys you pull out of the pendulum?”
Majora looked at the pendulum as she spoke. “Pendulum heroes achieve much, but they are only good for limited engagements. Though, I do wish you had their eager, accepting nature. Only you can change that. More to the point, you all are already pendulum heroes, and much better suited to the task at hand.”
There was nothing in Majora’s proposal about finding Mike or sending them home. The thought of going out there in a crazy fantasy world to contain an evil menace did not set well with Melvin. They had barely survived a day out there.
“We’re not pendulum heroes,” Melvin said. “We’re kids. We know only fractions about this world and the possible dangers. The super skills you’re trying to sell us on are buried to the point of being completely unreliable. You’re better off sending out a group of mages to deal with this. We’re useless.”
Majora turned and faced Melvin, her jaw tight. “How many robed mages did you see this morning? The mages of the Hierophane are already dispersed throughout the world, dealing with problems you three didn’t actively create. There aren’t even enough robes left here to properly instruct the acolytes. You are pendulum heroes, but you stand before me and have the gall to call yourselves useless?”
Majora walked over to Jason and snatched a finger off his bone hand. The bones came off in a crunchy snap while Jason yelled out more from shock than pain. “Suchanaa,” she intoned and a bowl of water appeared in her hand. She dropped the finger in and showed them.
“What keeps his arm together is the magic cast from the source. His arm will always seek to come back together first and then find its way back to the source second,” Majora moved the finger opposite of where it pointed and it slowly moved itself back to its starting position. She tossed the bowl to Jason, who fumble-juggled it while she went over to Rich.
“Rich wears gray robes. His command of magic is overwhelming in its magnificence; only a handful ever live to reach gray. He is nothing short of living splendor. We need this kind of power to contain the monster.”
Melvin tried to protest. “But...”
“No.” The way Majora said it; the way her eyes sparked with cold anger, Melvin knew to shut the hell up.
“Your enlarged sense of self-entitlement does not grant pardon here. This is the consequence of your actions, unintended or otherwise. You released it. This is your weight to bear. But you are also ideal candidates for this task, with Jason able to track it and Rich able to contain it. And if you want the Rift Pendulum to return you to your rightful place you will contain it.”
Melvin cast his gaze down. He knew she was right. “My brother,” he said. “I need to find him.”
“You mentioned last night you were all headed here before you got separated. It is my hope he is still inclined to journey to the Hierophane. Ultimately, I feel it best if we let him come to us rather than turning over a thousand stones looking for him.
“But I understand the strength of family ties. And you are not directly necessary to find and stop the creature. If you choose to go in search of your brother, I will not stop you. But please realize you possess more martial skill than Jason and Rich combined. Your absence will surely be felt.”
Melvin looked at his friends. Rich was nodding at him, eyes clear behind the gray beard. Jason had reattached his finger and was flexing it in amazement. Melvin had a decision to make.
“You do not need to rush your decision,” Majora said. “I need to keep you here for a day before sending you out to task.”
“Why?” Rich asked.
“Sweet Rich,” she said smiling, “in that time I will have taught you a few necessary spells. And it will be time enough to see if you can survive the cost of magic to your soul.”