Sailing Ether Tides

Sailing Ether Tides

Ch: 37 Me And My Shadow

The whole family, which included all of Team Ragamuffin and a number of… more distant relatives sprawled over a greatly expanded inn complex; after the kids added their abilities to their parents’ odd and potent conjuration in a musical ritual that took a lot longer than strictly necessary.

The Wards seemed reluctant to release their odd sorcerous performance spell, even after the structures were complete, carrying on and on into the afternoon. The main house and baths had expanded greatly, in addition to the new structures that appeared between ecstatic verses of classic rock.

‘Mister Brownstone’ and ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ started the set and increased their total acreage to encompass everything within a half mile radius of their home.

Maya and Benny handled the vocals together; their tight and ringing harmonies brought a three song set of ‘Guns N Roses’ classics in for a soft landing on ‘Sweet Child O Mine’.

Most of the guests and family failed to appreciate the sweet, hard rockin tracks from another time and place…

The locals were sadly lacking the musical and cultural foundations to understand the raucous, aggressive style and occult lyrics; none of which the Wards ever even attempted to explain.

The music swelled back up after tea and a snack, as the kids and their parents took turns belting out local favorites and obscure chart toppers from beyond the veil. Late in the night, Mariah buzzed her wobbly, sleepy way back into her branches and fell asleep, without a word to anyone. The bright, springtime aura and scents of her blazing tree became the low, red embers of well banked coals and the fuzzy, cozy warmth of bedtime. That set off a chain reaction, as people began drifting to their beds and into exhausted slumber.

#

Barry tossed restlessly in the comfy, cloudlike bed he’d grown up sleeping in, under that old familiar roof. The same warm scent of forge smoke, spices, herbs and baking filled his mind with peace… Yet his legs and arms churned the bedding and his eyes rolled wildly behind his tightly closed eyelids.

Somewhere, an unimaginable distance from his sleeping form, Barry Ward stood on a lonely prominence; standing above and surrounded by impenetrable gray mist. His searching gaze found no hint of a path or climbable surface, nor any sign that the bare, blasted stone peak was attached to anything at all, below that dense, ever churning cloud layer.

Above, gleaming stars and the two moons shone brilliantly, illuminating the scene by virtue of being bigger and brighter than possible in the real world. Heedless of the glorious vista, the young man glared sourly at a radiant golden being, standing among the distant stars.

Dana, the healer of wounds, succor of mortal kind, shone down on the wretched stone and the angry, defiant young man. He stood with his arms crossed and brows knitted into a furrowed mask of denial and rejection of her rightful role as the sun in this dark and silent realm.

“No. You are unwelcome until our demands are met. I’m not negotiating. Now release me back into mortal sleep.” He snapped, displaying a lack of reverence that still shocked her immortal aura, even after so many rejections.

“You cannot deny me…!” She declared, in a voice that rang through the starry void and made the clouds thrash and spin below him. “Your very soul begs for my touch, mortal fragment! I hear your call and must answer!”

“You have my answer… No, now go bother someone else.” The disembodied soul snapped sharply at the goddess, before turning and leaping off into the obscuring vapor below. He vanished into the white mist and smiled as Dana’s golden light dwindled behind him and the clouds became dark, comforting and cool.

Landing back in his body was the best and worst part of the ordeal, after the long plunge through the never, back into mortal existence. He splashed into his own, restless form with a jiggly, bouncy sensation that was super disorienting and… he had to admit it, pretty damn fun.

He lingered for a few minutes, enjoying the weird, jiggly jello world he’d returned to so abruptly, bouncing and wiggling in a way that was completely incompatible with what he understood as his fixed and firm ‘reality’.

Ripples spread out from his bed, rebounded and diverged in a wildly complex recursive pattern, slowly and subtly reconnecting him to mortal senses and the occult strangeness that he felt growing within himself, after every meeting with the obstinate deity.

Slowly the rippling, jiggling waves in reality subsided; as always, he felt as though he’d just missed out on some profound revelation, almost uncovering some hidden truth of the occult world. The eldritch sensations faded slowly, as reality closed back in around his body, once more.

“Sorry, Barry.” Ward murmured from a shadow near his bed. “I’ve told her again and again to stop, but goddesses are notoriously headstrong and obstinate.” Slowly, his uncle poured out into the small bedroom filled with a young man’s childhood trinkets and toys.

Barry tucked his beloved plush owlbear, ‘Mister MacGruber’ out of the way, so Ward could sit on the bed. “It’s fine, it even feels kinda… kinda good to tell her to take a hike.” He admitted guiltily. “She’s a huge bitch.”

Ward chuckled and shook his head sadly. “When she sees you, she sees a fragment of your dad… not a person. She wanted him when he came here, because he really is a nurturing and kind soul.” The death god in bermuda shorts and an elaborately embroidered guayabera shirt mumbled awkwardly.

“Other forces in the ether had already had a go at your dad’s soul, what those beings did to him… to us, was an obscenity against the universe itself.” The god seated on the bed shook under a bout of barely restrained divine fury at some unvoiced recollection.

“Who did something to him? What did they do?” Barry demanded hotly. “That seems crazy, she hates him for something somebody did to him?”

“Most of that information is taboo, all the gods and spirits are forbidden to speak of it to mortals, even me.” Ward sighed slowly, as he collected his thoughts.

“All I can say is that your dad was migrating through the ether, on his way to this world after dying on his world. Many souls have made that kind of journey, all across the limitless void and everything it contains, on so many worlds. Somehow, he was…” A twisted and furious expression crossed the preternaturally handsome deity’s face. “We… were captured, a lost and damaged, bodiless soul they held me, us for a long time, for… a really, really long time.”

Ward paused for a moment and took a deep breath, focusing his mental resources and calming himself. With a sad smile he resumed his tae, with a cool, clinical detachment in his voice. “Things were done to him, he was damaged, experimented on and… used in ways that I cannot explain, by divine decree.”

They sat in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds, contemplating that thought. “When Gary manifested in the mortal world, what arrived was too different from what he had been.” Ward, grumbled sourly, once more possessed of a slow simmering fury that lingered all around him.

“Dana, when she looks at your dad, she sees only the wounds and rents in his soul, not the person bearing those scars and struggling to survive. When I speak with her, it’s a completely different vibe. She’s so sweet, giving and warm, filled with love and life…” He fell silent, smiling at some fond remembrance.

Barry coughed awkwardly, interrupting his notoriously horney uncle’s reflections on his ‘interfaith outreach’ efforts with the goddess of Healing. “That’s great, now tell me how you got into my room. We don’t have one of your bonsai trees in the house.” The lad grumbled just a little sourly, while shoving his huge, plush owlbear toy farther into the shadows.

“I was kinda wondering about that myself…” The smiling divine shrugged blandly and threw his hands up helplessly. “I felt a weird vibration in the ether and slipped through the shadows, right inside.” He scratched his head idly and turned up the wattage on his grin.

“That’s one of the restrictions placed on us by the pantheon. My trees won’t grow in his house and I can’t appear on the grounds… Just like I’m not allowed to speak to or appear before him directly. I’m an immortal spirit, but I’m also under divine strictures, so I usually gotta appear outside the grounds and can’t cross the boundary without a direct invitation from Shai or you guys.”

“So how are you here now? Does this mean…?” The young man began excitedly whispering and leaning closer to his uncle, embarrassing plushie forgotten.

“No, the strictures and curses are still there. Somehow, you opened a door and let me slip in.” The smiling deity murmured happily. “Now I gotta sneak out before I bump into your pops… He doesn’t need any more trouble and I’m still not allowed to appear to him.” Slowly the tall, slightly goofy man melted into a pool of darker shadows and faded from the little bedroom, leaving no sign that he’d been there at all.

“That was creepy.” The lad mumbled, before rolling back into the embrace of Mister MacGruber and drifting into normal sleep.

#

As always, the three Ragamuffins tumbled into Wilf’s bed and quickly crashed out in a snoring heap, exhausted by a day of hard riding, hard rocking and too many late night snacks. “...takoyaki and curried boar…” Wilf mumbled incoherently in his sleep, as he rolled over, half crushing his brother; who woke up just enough to roll the big lug back over into his spot, before rejoining him in slumber, only slightly disturbed by a faint, lingering vibration or oscillation in the ether.

#

Rio opened his eyes and blinked a few dozen extra times in disbelief. He was standing on the grassy lawn of his childhood playhouse, beneath the eternal void; where he’d once played with his brother, sisters, parents and… “Eponna?” He whispered to the tall, glorious woman standing beside the stream that marked the old boundary between the space he’d long ago shared with Amy and Wilf, in their shared dream world of spirits, fae and divines.

“Yes, my child… You’ve found your way back to me at last.” She gave a decidedly equine sort of delight and shook herself all over, becoming a tall roan mare with ephemeral radiance streaming out from her mane and tail of stars, nebulae and darkness.

“We have some little time, darling… run with me while we can, beloved.” She saw his hesitation and smiled with maternal pleasure. “Yes, your brother and sisters will appear here when the conditions are right. Your little herd is so closely bonded…” She whickered an equine giggle of happiness at that.

“Sweet Becky returned here some few mortal nights ago, and will be joining us soon. The others are with other beings at the moment… Just as we two are reunited at last.”

The eternal, glorious night sky rang with Rio’s giddy whoop of excitement, as he lept the stream and vaulted atop the goddess of all horsies for a good long run across a meadow of wildflowers that stretched on forever, or until the swirling pale mists closed in, hiding the horizon… Only the tall prominence and the red roofed, abandoned inn stood above the fog, sullen and dark under the brilliant starlight.

#

Wilf and lady Brigid shimmered into existence on the vast plain of flowers, near a ring of colossal standing stones and the edge of the dryad forest. Her radiant, blazing warmth and aura of welcome, comfort and rest spread out across the already magnificent vista, bringing a single tear of joy to the big man’s eye.

Amy appeared a scant second later, stepping through a rift of shadows that manifested for only a moment, before evaporating away with the low, resonant tone of a brazen temple bell striking the hour.

At her ankles, a small white kitten purred insistently and twined himself around and around, sending sweet tinkling music up from the tiny bronze bell on his scarlet silk collar. “Come on! Hop up, Shiro!” She called out to the tiny creature and held out her arms, as the kitten leapt into her embrace with a flurry of sweet, chiming music and an adorable ‘Murrr!’ of joy.

Rio and Eponna trotted up a moment later, sweaty, gasping and smiling at his siblings and the gathered friends. Rio vaulted from her back as she manifested her human form; a beautiful woman draped in a flowing gown sewn of the eternal night sky.

Eponna embraced Wilf and Amy, pulling them close and snuffling in their hair, just as she always had when they were small. “My sweet foals…” She blubbered and gushed over them, while Brigid rolled her eyes with sisterly amusement at the mercurial goddess of Swiftness in Motion.

“We’re really back…” Rio muttered from the brassy bosom of the smith goddess who was among the family’s most favored and often Contracted deities.

All of the Ward kids had at least an affinity for the warm, motherly, goddess and her homey cult. Gary, Shai, Wilf and Amy all had active and bonded Contracts with the fae deity, while Rio and the four triplets were showing the same crafty, DIY tendencies.

“Are Gary and Shai here?” He whispered from that comforting, familiar embrace.

“No, perhaps soon, but not yet.” She cooed into Rio’s tight cap of close cropped black curls. “He was banished from this place, against the will of the current residents and in defiance of its innate nature. Who can say when the strictures will fail in this environment?”

“So he will be able to return here…? Will he be like he was before?” Rio asked with a little hope blooming in his voice.

“Return here? Certainly, before too many turnings of the season he will find his way here…” She paused to reflect for a moment.

“As to becoming what he once was… No. He is now a living and natural being, if an odd one. The impossibility he was is gone and cannot, must not return to the world of mortals.” She announced with the finality of a brazen gong.

“The pantheon is united in this. The thing that was done to him is now taboo across the endless expanse of everything, decreed by the Devourer of Souls itself. To create such a thing is forbidden by one who is beyond question.”

“Whatever did happen to him?” Rio asked softly, looking out into the mist shrouded, ever shifting landscape. His eyes picked out what the others couldn’t see; a legion of shadows beyond counting, moving aimlessly in the fog, lost and directionless.

Tall forms with the semblance of misty, indistinguishable, dark haired men haunted the endless mists, pausing occasionally to gaze with empty eyes up at the desolate, abandoned inn on the precipice.

Rio also found himself looking that way again and again; even during his wild and ecstatic ride across the endless plain of flowers. No matter where they stood, the inn was always within view, lurking at the edge of perception. Waiting.

“I suppose that you are developed enough to know… At least as much as can be told within the law.” Brigid murmured unhappily. With a wave, she motioned them into a comfy set of chairs and a wide sofa, which had appeared on the lawn, among the standing stones.

“Sit, children, I have a dark tale to tell…”

#

Gary thrashed and squirmed in his sleep, caught up in one of the unremembered nightmares he’d suffered from for so long. Only for that scant year of wild, heedless Adventure had his sleep been untroubled… largely untroubled.

For that year, his dreams had taken him to a private realm between worlds, his own secret domain of unrestrained madness and impossibility…

He woke with a sour gut, a dry, cottony mouth of ash and dust, as always. He slipped out of the covers and went down into the workshop, to put his troubles out of mind… and so that Shai’s sleep wouldn’t be disturbed by his thrashing movements and incoherent cries.

He sat at the brightly lit workbench with a long, slow sigh and pulled an irregularly shaped object of brass and bronze from a locked drawer that opened at his touch.

Whistling softly to himself, the craftsman slowly began disassembling the device, breaking it down into a multitude of tiny parts, each one intricately worked and precisely milled and polished. Cogs, flywheels, armatures, rockers, levers and catchments began to pile up in neat little heaps on his wide worktop.

As he worked, shadows gathered around the edges of his basement workshop, shadows became the suggestion of underbrush and the trunks of stately trees in a wide spaced, old growth forest. Hazy, ephemeral shadow birds and insects picked up the tune he was whistling, carrying the music on, in their woodland chorus.

Screws, bolts, nuts, tiny jewels and a profusion of ring bearings in sealed housings, greased with exotic monster fats and odder substances joined the organized chaos on his bench, all neatly and carefully sorted spread across his bench.

He slowly began assembling the device inside its bright yellow painted, steel housing. With exacting care he installed his object inside the elongated oval shell, clicking and bolting the parts into place with ease. It was deeply satisfying, the feeling of his crafts coming together with precision; he’d been working with Tallum and Shai learning the art and craft of precision milling and machining, now all that work was paying off.

He ambled over to the massive bronze safe door set in the basement wall, smiling and whistling a merry tune with his shadow forest friends. The safe door was a real and solid object, looted from the palace of a man who thought he could escape death; through the suffering, murder and torment of others.

The lord of that manor had still dwelt there, trapped in his own workings; Gary and his friends had destroyed the lord’s animated armor guardians, looted the house and invaded the horrid laboratory hidden in the depths of the foundations.

A magical disaster had caught the nameless mage lord in the midst of one of his blasphemous, tortuous experiments into the nature of life and death, cursing him with an impotent half life, locked in a jar of his own experimental, unholy liquor… waiting to escape.

Nesting under that crumbling house, surrounded by the preserved victims of his own wicked magical experiments, the pickled mage had gone beyond mad, wailing deranged obscenities through his artifice and magic.

Centuries of impotent waiting in absolute darkness beneath a dead, forgotten town, surrounded by the baleful, accusing eyes of those he had murdered and worse in his selfish quest for immortality was almost enough punishment to satisfy Gary’s fury, almost enough.

He never learned the name of the would-be lich lord, preserved in a vat of magical liquor beneath the creaking, half rotten palace; instead he’d destroyed the man’s notes and ledgers unread, and burned the highly flammable corpses in the basement including the lord himself, denying him even the faint immortality of fame for his ‘magical research’.

Unlike most of the furniture, all of the workstations and most of the tools in Gary’s house, the safe was as solid and real as human hands could build, so that it could safely store the contents behind mundane walls and arcane seals.

He returned to his workbench a moment later, once the safe was magically sealed and mundanely locked again.

He set an object wrapped in an oily rag on the workbench and settled in for the good part. The wide, eager smile on his face didn’t falter even a little as he unwrapped something ominous and terrible, releasing a creeping, half seen, eldritch radiation into the room. Unnamed colors and shapes swirled and twisted among the shadow trees, writhing with terrible, alien grace to the music he whistled and softly sang.

My name is John Wellington Wells

I'm a dealer in magic and spells…

In blessings and curses

And ever-filled purses

In prophecies

Witches and knells…

#

Up at the count’s palace, things were crowded and a little hectic. Custom and tradition demanded that the noble visitors, especially those who outranked the host, should be housed in the residence of the local lord without fail. That assumed… naturally, that the lord would have the finest of what could be had in the local area.

Jaspreet and Abed leaned on the balcony in their pleasant, if humble chamber and sighed wistfully down at the merry little inn by the lake and its brightly lit garden baths.

Next door, empress Gabbie murmured a sad little bathtime song, while washing up in a basin of almost tepid water, hauled up to her suite by sweating, grunting, hard working retainers of the count. She held back her tears, as she thought of Shai’s baths… so near, yet so far away.

In the great room, things were going just as poorly. With so many nobles, their guardians, retainers and servants jammed into the keep, bunks and beds now filled that cavernous stone chamber.

Space was at a premium, quarters were close and tempers were flaring. Worse yet, half of the room’s occupants were jockeying for positions closer to the hearth, despite the warm weather…

No one wanted to be nearest to the count’s trophy collection, neatly displayed near the stairs that led up to the nobles’ quarters.

Many of the trophies sitting on pedestals and shelves were clearly valuable, yet they were also obviously mementos of battle, rather than aesthetic choices or artistic crafts…

A jewel bedecked, horned demon skull sat on a shelf, emitting such a sense of lurking watchfulness and patient malice that few could meet its eyeless gaze for long.

A white clay mannikin of simple craft stood beside a small jar filled with glinting, jewel-like, coarse red sand, with a pasted on paper label that bore only one word: ‘Damsen’.

A crystal skull, whose empty eye sockets seemed even more empty than should be possible for an inert stone, sat on a little shelf of its own; above a gigantic, anatomically correct human heart made from a flawed ruby of staggering size… The monstrous thing looked as though it could start beating at any moment, since it was laced with veins of silver and gold, too perfectly intricate and organically imperfect to be the work of human hands.

More than one veteran blanched at the sight of the occult and creepy doodads, lying inert and lifeless, now that their occupants were no more.

The beds near that little collection of eldritch trinkets remained stubbornly empty, for the same reason that the count had no fear of his shiny oddities being stolen. Anyone mad enough to touch one of those terrible things more than deserved whatever unclean fate they bargained for.

Deep in the late watches of the night, the unfortunate servants who found themselves bunking near the collection of oddities were awakened by a sensation of creeping dread. A half dozen restless sleepers sat up in their cots in mortal fear, wide eyed and staring at each other, seeking some reassurance that all was well.

Instead, they were treated to a subtle sound and light show, as lingering, lurching shadows stumbled out of a few of the terrible things and silently shambled out the door and down toward the lake. The shades passed through inanimate obstructions, but deftly and carefully avoided contact with the terrified, living folk and their shadows.

The things were barely perceptible, unless one awoke beneath their eyeless faces, those featureless forms looming over the former sleepers had shaken them awake very unpleasantly. That was an eye opener that left the unfortunate young men and women shaken, long after the things had departed without doing any apparent harm.

“Well, I’m up for the night…” One of the younger guards muttered unhappily.

The guardsman’s complaint was just enough noise to cover the soft sounds of three young sea captains slipping from their bunks and vanishing out the door in near silent pursuit of the shadowy beings.

#