Night of Endless Portals

What I am about to tell you is not an apocalypse story. Some people called it that when it happened, but the very fact you’re reading this means they were wrong. Unlike most of the world, I’d prepared for the so-called apocalypse for most of my life. So for me it wasn’t the end of anything. It was the beginning of a huge pain in the ass, but also the beginning of the most important transformation in my life.

The air smelled like failure in the counsellor’s office. Until I’d found myself there, watching the man with the tortoise shell glasses clicking away at his keyboard, I hadn’t identified the scent of failure. Ozone, nerve sweat, and tears, those three main notes comprised failure. In truth, my dorm room kind of smelled like those, but only after I sat watching the guidance counsellor click his tongue and shake his head while he stared at my academic record did I connect the stinks.

“It looks like you’ve got a string of F’s this semester.” He glanced at me and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “You didn’t fail Philosophy 308.”

“I got a C in it, right?” My voice sounded hollow in my head, as if the hum from the computer fans across from me distorted it.

“Well, a D, but yeah!”

How anyone could muster enthusiasm over a D in a course considering my circumstances… I didn’t yell, I didn’t even cry at him. Instead, I pumped my fists. “Yeah, a D! That’s only sort of failing.”

He pressed his lips together as if he were trying to frown and smile at the same time. If he kept it up, he would burst out of his skin-tight cerulean t-shirt any moment. Not that I would have minded, but I would definitely have felt like ripping my own clothes off and joining him. It wouldn’t be fair to make him sick though; no one needed that much fat bouncing around their faces.

“Well, anyway… I need to give you this.” His sing-song voice failed to match the page the counsellor handed me. The tone failed to soften the blow.

When you lost your scholarship, it was the end. You’ never receive another penny from the state or private enterprises, it was like being black balled or sitting before the House Un-American Affairs Committee. It should have been printed in red and self-destructed when I finished reading it.

“Huh.”

“Well, I’m very sorry.” I looked up into his pinched face and wrinkled eyes. He managed the appearance of being sorry just fine, like the painting of a blind person who’d never seen a sorry face in their lives. Shaking my head to get the ableist image out sent the wrong signal to the counsellor. “You have options…”

I stood up, raking my chair against the tile with the speed of my reaction. Hunched over and pulled within myself, I couldn’t raise my eyes to look back at the fake expression of remorse. “Thanks, I’m good.”

“Well, I still need to…”

“Thanks, I’m good.” I cleared my throat and turned for the door.

“Well, I…”

“Thanks I am good!” If he could keep starting his sentences with “well,” I could repeat myself. “I don’t need anything else right now.”

“We have counseling services…”

Nothing he said would keep me in the room right then. My world had all but ended. Staring down at the ground over the lump of my belly reminded me that girth and clumsiness kept me from athletic excellence, to say nothing of my posture and hatred of physical labor. Academics had been my refuge. Until right then.

Walking down the hallway, the other students moved around me as if they could sense the failure and wanted to avoid sharing my air. I didn’t hold it against them. In their place, I would have avoided me too. Hell, I wanted nothing more than to avoid the body I’d grown to loathe over the last two years. But I could no more change my flesh than go back in time and force myself to go to class.

What would happen now? Without my scholarship, I’d have to take student loans or I’d be evicted from the dorms. If I’d stayed in the meeting with Mr “Well, I’d…” he’d probably tell me I was on academic probation. Today was not the day I wanted to hear that.

My phone vibrated in my pocket and I considered leaving it there. Only a handful of people would text me. When it continued to vibrate, chills ran down my spine. The number of people who would call me could be numbered without using my fingers.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked. It was Tia. “Tia, what are you doing calling me right now?”

“Brother! It’s happening! Something bad’s coming! I can feel it in my stomach!” A teacher shouted over Tia’s desperate words. I could hear the adult trying to confiscate Tia’s phone. But the panicked sound in Tia’s voice scared me.

“Calm down sweetie. Tell me what’s coming.” My sister wasn’t given to flights of fancy. She’d never been subjected to the insane stories my mom and dad told before I left. And Gramps didn’t tell those stories, ever.

“It’s coming! Soon! Maybe now…”

The phone made a scratching sound as if it had been pulled away from Tia’s hands. “Hello?” The same adult who’d been shouting over Tia spoke. “Who is this?”

“Harlan Gendry, ma’am. I’m Tia’s brother.”

“Miss Tia has been very disruptive today and the students are not allowed to have cell phones on them.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. Gramps had given her the phone for Tia’s seventh birthday. But she wasn’t supposed to bring it to school. I realized the teacher couldn’t see my nod, so I cleared my throat and said, “I understand, what do I need to do?”

“If you could contact your grandfather and get him down here today, we need to speak about today’s incident.”

God, she made it sound like Tia had strapped a bomb to her chest and taken the other kids hostage. Stupid jerk. But I didn’t say that aloud. “Of course, I’ll call Gramps… our grandfather right now.”

“Thank you very much Mr Gendry.”

My grip tightened on the phone as I heard Tia screaming for me. The chills in my spine hadn’t stopped or even let up. Maybe I’d brought this on myself, as a kind of cosmic “fuck you” for failing this semester. Or maybe something else was going on with Tia. Whatever it was, I wasn’t letting Gramps deal with it alone.

The teacher hung up Tia’s phone and I texted my grandfather. I didn’t tell him about Tia, if I did he would drive off to the school on his own. Instead I told him I needed him to come pick me up. It was right after noon, so he might be awake or showering. He wouldn’t reply to me right away and I’d have a chance to go to my dorm room.

Chills continued to run down my spine as I trundled toward my cave of sorrows. My obnoxious roommate might or might not be in attendance, I couldn’t remember his schedule that well. But with any luck, I could avoid hearing about how he’d made the dean’s list again or how he’d gotten the highest marks in his physics sections. Ugh.

As I buried myself in my own personal woe, the tiles on the floor transformed. From dull white and gray abstracts they began to glow with bright yellows, pinks and pastel greens. When they turned fluid and wavy, I hesitated. My feet were sinking into the tiles underfoot.

When I glanced up, the halls around me had vanished. A mountain stood before me and I sloshed through a gentle stream which ran down its viridian slopes. Pale stone bricks lined the path I stood on and marked a clear border between the green waving grasses and the abstract pastels of the path I sloshed through.

Halfway up the mountain, wooden terraces plated in gold with strange words written on them sprouted up like a forest. They swayed like trees in the wind, or like a mirage created by my fevered brain. Unlike my usual stooped gait, I raised my head as I splashed through the water.

Far beyond the forest of gilded pillars I spotted a magnificent glittering palace. Tall spires rose against a canvas of swirling white clouds and green sky. Winged figures and others sitting upon clouds of their own flitted back and forth from the spires. The front of the palace was open and inviting, as if the denizens had thrown open a massive grand gate to admit me.

Dozens, hundreds of glittering people, some with black skin that shined like obsidian in the light, some with golden skin that emitted its own inner radiance, and others with pale white skin somehow muted compared to the others all faced me and beckoned me forward. Though they should have been dots in the distance to my near-sighted vision, I could make out the beatific expressions on each of their faces.

Chanting rose up from the palace. Throats vibrated out low, bass growls that harmonized with high-pitched whistles. Every note, every single tongue and throat sang words I could not comprehend. To my right and left, animals joined in the song with their natural voices, roaring, chirping, and purring in time with the music.

Heady incense, thick enough that the haze should have been clear to my eyes, flowed into my sinuses. Sandalwood, honey, and a dozen other aromas passed over my tongue and down my throat. They filled my belly like a meal, making me feel almost drunk like the time my roommate got me high on hash.

A figure appeared between me and the gilded pillars. Long black hair hung from her shoulders down over her chest and almost to her belly. It obscured her otherwise bare breasts. A red circle, a halo of crimson light, shone behind her head and fluttered a few errant strands of hair toward me. Tied up around her throat a gold-fringed length of cloth bound her neck and stretched around her arms and gathered between her legs, again obscuring her nude body.

The woman held a black… object in her right hand, it looked like a spike or a tent pole at first. But when I focused on it, it resolved into a three-sided dagger. The pommel had a malefic face upon it, with his tongue outstretched and fangs dripping red blood. Two other faces on the handle of the dagger stared away from me, but in profile they looked just as bloodthirsty and rage-fueled as the first.

I took a step back in the stream and the woman paused before me. She extended her left hand which revealed a pale blue diamond the size of my head. How she could have held that diamond in her hand without the light escaping stopped me in my tracks. The woman’s all-black eyes connected with my own and I saw through her for a moment.

A blue skinned, black haired figure sat on her brain pan. He had tusks that jutted up and a wild mustache that streamed down between his folded legs. As the strands of his mustache dropped down to her neck, they changed from black to white on the left and red on the right. When they reached the base of her neck, they changed into a white figure with a fan of arms on either side, with a stack of heads on its neck like the top of a pagoda or pyramid. Each of the hands on the figure clutched the white and red strands of hair and shook them as if trying to get my attention.

Those strands curled around the figure’s feet and continued down the woman’s heart. In the center of her chest lay a rainbow sun. Its center was bright yellow, so bright I would have shielded my eyes if I could have moved my hands. Rays streamed out from the center of the sun in each color the spectrum, instead of six or seven hues, there were twelve. Six of them were colors that didn’t exist on Earth, for which I had no names, no words.

“Who…” It was the only thing I managed to say since entering the bizarre full sense hallucination. As the figure reached toward me, I was certain this was a stress reaction, my mind having snapped from a dozen disparate pressures.

She resolved into a pale skinned figure as the blue diamond touched the crown of my head. Around me the world exploded into pain as my skin felt as if it were on fire. I stumbled back away from the woman as I screamed.

Around me the chanting intensified, the screams of the palace residents joining my own in the darkness of my agonies. Then I opened my eyes and found the halls of my college back. But the screams had somehow followed me from the other world.

People dashed about in a panic. Gouts of exploding gas burst and killed half a dozen people instantly. Those at the periphery caught flame and dashed about, catching those nearby on fire at the same time as they themselves burned. Burning flesh and natural gas reached my nose before any of the runners did. A woman nearby stood transfixed by the catastrophe as the ceiling over our heads ripped away and a titanic figure appeared.

Legs thicker than the colossus himself loomed over our heads as the titan hurled the top of the building away. It reached down toward the woman next to me as she stared up in shock. Instinct drove me froward and I threw myself into her. We tumbled together into a doorway, knocking the door down flat before us and ripping new screams from the people on the other side of the walls. They cowered under their desks as the titan’s hand leveled the surrounding walls. A few unfortunates were caught in its massive fingers, scooped up like candies from a bin.

Laughter as loud as a siren rose up and shook the building as the titan threw back its head and dropped the people and building fragments down its throat in a single motion. Portions of the building toppled around us, crashing into gawkers nearby, splashing their blood over me and the woman I’d slammed into.

Outside, flying beasts out of fantasy scoured the campus, picking up people and ripping them into pieces as they flew by. Those beasts had hides of black soot and wings of writhing flames. Some of them had twisted insect heads, like praying mantises. Those flew upon delicate insect wings shaped like dragonflies. Anyone they picked up, they stung until they stopped moving and then beheaded. I watched in horror as my guidance counselor suffered that particular fate.

When the titan passed its hand over us a second time, there were far fewer people for it to catch. It grumbled loud enough to quake my chest and burst my eardrums. The world shook as the titan changed its angle of attack, scooping a whole section of the building out, no more than a meter away from where I huddled with the strange woman. A man reached out his hands to us as the collection of debris the titan had collected crushed him to death. Before the titan managed to bring the mass to its face, the stranger’s hand dropped from the pile and sailed down to the ground.

“What the fuck is happening?” The woman below me screamed into my ear.

“I don’t know, but we need to get the fuck out of here!” Pipes whistled water through the air, singing out the pressure in their lines were the ends had been ripped out by the titan. They sung a high pitched counter to my lie.

I knew what was happening, but I couldn’t quite believe it, not yet.

One of the flame-winged fliers approached through the haze of sewer-line showers and appeared before me. It reached between my arms for the woman I’d shielded. As if a force took over my body, I raised my pale white arm, the bulky jacket hanging limply around it, and chanted a single syllable. It sounded like the “Om” chanted by weirdoes on campus. But a blue nimbus appeared between me and the flame creature. Its hands struck the barrier and it screamed its rage at me as the blue field stopped it.

Below me, the woman screamed again, this time without words. I tried to stand, but something had landed on my leg and pinned me in place. Rather than drive off the flame winged demon thing, my barrier had only incensed it. Its screams brought a half dozen of its companions toward me, and they raised their own voices in fury at my barrier. As they joined their taloned hands together in a semi-circular ring, my barrier began to fade and lose its luminescence.

I covered the woman below me with my body as the barrier faded. Sure I was about to suffer a painful death, but as I waited a bell chimed overhead.

No dark claws came down to rend me into pieces. No more cries rose into the air as I shielded the woman below me. Even her voice had gone quiet.

Certain I was dead, I didn’t lift my head for a moment, not until I heard her voice.

“By the authority of the Boundary of All Things, I name you Nemesis, I name you Anathema, I name you Forbidden. BE. GONE.” A glorious golden goddess floated high above me, shorter in stature than the titan who’d wrecked my university. She stood atop a silver dragon as long as the titan’s arm. The woman and dragon touched the titan’s flesh and I heard a sucking sound, like a drain emptying of the last of its water.

In the blink of an eye, the woman stood with the dragon sitting next to her. “And you!” She surveyed the flying monsters eating students and faculty with red rage flaring over her body. “I name you Demon and I cast you to the ABYSS!” The word echoed from where the woman spoke, thundering as the hundreds of frozen flying creatures popped out of existence.

Above my head, the titan imploded, folding out of existence as it dissolved inward. The woman and her silver dragon nodded at the titan’s fate and turned back to look over the destruction. She caught my eye as I lowered my head away from her gaze.

In that hanging moment of time, she regarded me like I might have a spider. I didn’t hate spiders, in fact I kind of liked them. Very few, almost none, were dangerous to humans and if I’d ever gotten the chance I would have loved to collect them and stare at them as they spun their webs. The strange white-clad woman stared at me with exactly the same regard.

I was certain she was about to approach me, to ask me how in the ear-ringing silence I could still see and hear her, but then the titan finished imploding and we both turned at the shockingly quiet pop. Where it had stood was a massive black portal the half the size of the titan. With a final glance in my direction, the woman snapped her fingers in frustration and touched her silver dragon. Their image fuzzed and they disappeared.

As soon as she disappeared, time resumed. The water droplets completed their arcs and the woman under me continued her shouting. Nothing else threatened us directly now, save for the danger of the building itself.

I pushed myself awkwardly off of the dark haired woman and stumbled back to the doorway. Seconds after I did that, she stopped screaming and jumped up. “What the fuck?! What the fuck?” I took a step toward her and she screamed again. I didn’t catch her fist come up, and didn’t really feel the connection as she one-punched me right into unconsciousness.

When I came to, I found myself beneath a massive tree. It looked larger than trees should have been. I scrambled up, thinking I’d hit my head during my initial hallucination and had a wild concussion dream. But the state of my surroundings contradicted my impression at once.

People wept around me, gathered in groups large enough to form mobs. Several other people lay at the foot of the tree nearby. It glowed with a green light that faded as I closed with it.

“Holy shit, you’re awake.” I stumbled away from the tree into the woman I’d rescued. “Oh man, I didn’t think that would work.”

A face regarded me from the bark of the tree when I followed the woman’s pointed finger. “What the hell?”

I turned back to the woman, who jumped at a scream from behind us. “I was just about to leave.” She glanced at her hands where she twirled them about each other. “I thought you might be safe here with the…”

“Dryad.” She twitched and looked back up at me.

“What are you… okay, Dryad, sure.” More screams from the campus lawn. “We should get out of here. I… have a car.”

“My name’s Harlan.” I held out my hand and the woman hissed as more screams erupted over her shoulder.

She looked back at me and extended her hand to me. “Malia.” She looked over her shoulder at renewed screams. “We really need to get out of here.”

I let her grab my jacket sleeve and pull me away from campus, still too stunned to do more than follow her. Everything my parents had ever told me, every absurd lie, and fantasy story.

All of them were true.