Incubus Ch. 06

Lilly

The dragon was enormous and red. She roared. "Who has disturbed my slumber?"

Jacob lifted his hands placatingly, but Robert's hands were on his sword, and Helga had her greataxe drawn. "We come in peace. We seek the chalice of truth, and-"

The dragon cut him off. "You seek my chalice? Then die!" She inhaled, preparing to breathe fire.

"Ok, time to roll for initiative," I heard Jerry say, and opened my eyes. The scene I'd been envisioning faded away. I grabbed a d20, rolled, and swore. A two. With my character's initiative mod of +2, that would make her initiative-

"What the fuck, dude?" asked Jacob's player, Nessa. "I should have totally been able to talk my way out of this!"

Jerry sighed. "You told her you were planning on taking her chalice, Nessa. She didn't like that. It's the final boss battle of the dungeon, for pete's sake. You can't talk your way out of this one."

Tom, Helga's player, laughed. "If you could, that would be no fun for the rest of us!" He imitated a female voice. "Helga want to smash!"

Jerry sniggered.

Tom sighed. "Not what I meant, dude."

Nessa sighed. "Ok, fine. But I want some cute NPC womans for Jacob to seduce at the next pub."

Jerry nodded. "Of course. Now, roll for initiative."

As Nessa rolled, I glanced up at Alex, and then at Estries. Alex seemed to be trying to ignore my demon, but Estries was definitely not returning the favor. He hadn't taken his eyes off the guy since we entered the room.

I myself was nervous. I had known Alex for years, but knowing he was something supernatural, knowing he'd been hiding it, still put me on edge. How much did I really know about the guy if he'd been hiding something this big?

Still, I was having fun. The first hour had been a little awkward while we all adjusted to Estries playing watchdog in the corner, and I adjusted to Estries's revelation, but soon we'd gotten into the swing of things.

Jerry gathered our respective initiatives. My character, Theona, was going last. Might be just as well. I'd probably have some healing to do by the time my turn rolled around.

"Helga roars and charges," Tom said, "Swinging her axe." He rolled.

Jerry glanced down at the roll. "Her axe glances off the dragon's tough hide."

Tom groaned. "Damn. I think Alex is next?"

Alex nodded. "Robert draws his sword and attacks."

Jerry glanced at Alex's roll. "He is no more successful than Helga. Dragon's turn. She breathes fire, so make a dex save."

We all rolled. Nessa grinned at her d20. "Looks like I take no damage."

Jerry nodded. "Correct. The rest of you take half damage. Except for Robert, who takes full."

Alex groaned. "Shit." Then he stood. "Anyone mind if I hit the restroom real quick?"

*

Estries

I watched with interest as Lilly and her friends played their strange game. When Alex stood to go to the restroom, I saw my chance, and ghosted out of the room. Circling around through the kitchen, I waited outside the restroom for Alex to finish.

When he opened the restroom door, he did a double take. "What-"

I smiled menacingly. "What are you?"

Alex blinked. "What do you-"

"You know exactly what I mean," I growled. "You're not human. I want to know what you are."

He took a step back into the restroom. "How-"

My threatening smile widened. "I'm not human either."

Alex swallowed. "Okay. What are you, then?"

"I asked first," I pointed out.

Alex took another step backwards, and ran into the toilet. "I- I'm half human. My mother was human. Like, completely human. My father-" He sighed, deflating. "My father is the greek god Zeus."

I blinked. "What?" I wasn't sure what I'd been expecting, but I hadn't expected that.

Alex shrugged self consciously. "I didn't know either until recently. My mother raised me alone. My father says..." Alex paused, obviously considering whether to tell me the next bit. "He says the world will need heroes again really soon."

I frowned. "That sounds... Ominous."

*

After everyone had left, I told Lilly what I had discovered. She frowned. "So he's essentially the modern version of Heracles? I never would have guessed."

I frowned. "I presume you have heard of this god Zeus? Do you worship him?" While I had picked up a lot of information when I was summoned, including a bit of stuff about the religions of this world, the god Zeus had not featured.

She shook her head. "No. No one has since the fall of the Roman empire. Well, there are some people that do, modern paganism and all that, but that's a relatively recent thing. It's certainly not a dominant religion."

I remembered that my mother's world had gods. Well, sort of had gods. People worshipped various deities, but none had really done anything major in over five hundred years. There was even a modern sect of wizardry that claimed they weren't real.

Lilly looked thoughtful. "Maybe the modern pagan movement is why Zeus is active again."

I shrugged. "That might be part of it, but, according to Alex, his father thinks the world will need heroes soon."

Lilly's brow furrowed. "That doesn't sound good."

I grimaced. "That's kind of what I thought."

"Did Alex tell you anything else?" she asked. "Maybe something less cryptic?"

I shook my head. "No. Apparently his father hasn't been particularly forthcoming."

Lilly sighed. "Well, on that note, I'm going to practice wizardry a bit before bed."

I followed her into her room, frowning. "Practice what, exactly?"

She shrugged. "Basic shielding, I think. That seems like it will be useful."

I smiled, relieved she wasn't trying anything dangerous. "Definitely."

Sitting down, I watched while she reread part of a spell book, lips moving as she figured out what she needed to do. Finally, she nodded. Making a complex gesture, she shouted an incantation. "Meth! Ret! Su!

Nothing happened.

She tried a few more times, experimenting with variations on the gestures and pronunciations. Still nothing. Finally, with a sigh, she closed the book. "Maybe I'll have more luck tomorrow," she muttered. "Mind leaving the room while I change for bed?"

*

Lilly

I traveled through mist. It shrouded the ground I walked on so I could not see where I placed my feet, and masked the sky above so I did not know what cast the dim, greyish light illuminating the thick, stifling fog.

I don't know how long I walked there. Time, like everything else, seemed to be lost in the mist. It could have been seconds, or it could have been hours. Years. Centuries. Millenia, even. In the same way, I knew not how far I traveled. Maybe I went nowhere at all.

Eventually, though, something cut through the dull sameness around me. I looked up and saw a light, yellow and welcoming, and turned myself toward it.

"Hurry!" a voice called out. "Quickly! We have little time. And the mistlands are no place for you. Not yet, anyways. Come!"

I sped up my pace, and soon reached the light's source. It was an old fashioned oil lamp, held by a woman dressed in strange robes the same grey as the mist surrounding us. "Follow me!" she called as I reached her. "This way!"

Then she turned to a door that was not there before. Fishing a key on a golden chain out of the front of her robes, she unlocked it and led me through.

Beyond was a huge domed room that looked a bit like the observatories astronomers used to watch the stars. Thin slits lined the walls, interspersed with complex control panels. Through each slit poked a small telescope. In the center of the room was the largest telescope I had ever seen, positioned so that one end could poke through a slit in the ceiling, which was closed right now, and the other end was next to a comfy observer's chair.

A catwalk circled the chamber roughly one story above me. It wasn't a utilitarian steel construction, but a delicate lacework of silver and glass. Ladders reached down from it to the floor, and upward to levers, gauges, and buttons. Scattered across the floor and on the catwalk were tables covered in lenses, the tools for crafting lenses, and thin sheets of glass, both clear and colored. Warm light filled the place, cast by more oil lamps like the one the woman held.

The woman hung her oil lamp from a hook below the catwalk. In the golden light of the observatory, I could see that the grey robes were covered with images of eyes. Green eyes, yellow eyes, orange eyes, black ones. All the colors of the rainbow were represented there. Some eyes were human. Many others very clearly weren't.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"I'm you, of course," she answered. "Or a part of you, anyways. Can't you tell?"

I could, now that she mentioned it. Her eyes were grey, not greenish brown, and her hair was both longer and darker, not to mention curlier, but she was most definitely me.

"But what do I call you?" I wondered. "I mean, I suppose I could call you me, or I, or something like that, but I think that would get a bit confusing."

"Yes, I suppose it would, wouldn't it?" she replied. She paused for a second, brow wrinkled with thought. "I suppose you could call me the Lenscrafter. That is what I am, after all. Or, at least, that's my job."

"I can see that," I said, looking around me at the tables full of lenses and glass. They glinted oddly in the observatory's golden light, giving the entire place a fey sort of sparkle.

"Sit!" the Lenscrafter told me, gesturing to the observer's chair as she started towards one of the ladders to the catwalk. "We have much to do, and little time in which to do it."

I sat as she scrambled up the ladder and started frantically flipping switches, pulling levers, and pushing buttons. Slowly, the ceiling creaked open, and the enormous telescope poked out. I leaned towards the eyepiece in front of me, preparing to peer out through it.

"No, no, no!" the Lenscrafter called, scuttling back down to me and shoving me back against the observer's chair. "You don't look through it, you think through it."

"Think through it?" I asked. "How am I supposed to do that?"

"That's my job," she replied. "You just sit there and relax. Let your mind wander, so that I might move freely. Sit there and do nothing at all."

I sat and made myself comfortable. It felt wrong doing nothing while the Lenscrafter bustled around me, tweaking controls, examining lenses, and muttering to herself, but I realized that, since she was me, I wasn't doing nothing; I was doing exactly what she was doing. Or she was doing what I was doing. Or something like that, anyways.

"That's good!" she called. "Keep letting your mind wander. Ah, here we go."

She scooped up a lens, gave it a quick polish with her sleeve, scrambled up a ladder, and slotted it into the telescope.

"Any change?" she called down to me.

"Not really," I called back. "Not that I can really tell. How would I know if something changed?"

"Don't worry about it. You'll know," she said, giving me a quick pat on the shoulder as she hurried past to a different table. "Let's see, maybe something a bit more analytical this time. Science or math, perhaps."

I turned to watch as she rummaged through a table full of finished lenses. "We really ought to get this place more organized," she told me as she carefully lifted and peered at each one in turn. "Here we go. This is what you used to understand tesseracts last summer, remember? And it's so useful for 3-d geometry."

It didn't look like she wanted a reply, so I listened silently as she made her way back up to the telescope's business end, muttering about parabolas and angles and rotating through the fourth dimension. I could recall using that lens before. I remembered the feel of it against my thoughts as I realized what a tesseract actually was, or considered the intersection of two curved planes.

"That's excellent!" the Lenscrafter told me, slotting the new lens into the telescope and setting the older one aside. "Keep it up! Anything this time?"

I concentrated. For a moment I saw something against the curve of my thoughts, but then it was gone. "Almost," I said.

"Here, let me try focusing it," she said, fiddling with some knobs on the telescope. "Anything?" she called hopefully.

"Nope."

"Then let's try something a bit more basic," she said, fishing around inside her robes for another lens she'd scooped up at the same table where she'd found the lens that focused three and four dimensional geometry. "Pure math," she told me, giving the perfectly round lens a fond polish. "We use it a lot. Very fine. If it has a flaw, it's that it tends to focus better on the numbers than the big picture, but sometimes that's what we want. Like right now. Any improvement?"

"Not this time," I said.

"Something less technical, perhaps," she mused. "Perhaps a writer's perspective..."

It felt like we tried every lens in the observatory. Most were plain, clear glass, but several were of different colors, including a rose colored one that the Lenscrafter said wasn't useful for much but was worth trying anyway.

Not all of them looked like telescope lenses. Several looked like glasses lenses, and a few were odd shapes, like triangles or squares, that I was sure wouldn't fit right until the Lenscrafter slotted them in. There was one that looked like it might come from a kaleidoscope that kind of made my head hurt. The Lenscrafter didn't leave it in the telescope long.

"So what will we try next?" I asked the Lenscrafter as she removed a green lens from the telescope and returned it to its place.

She sighed and leaned against the nearest table. All night she'd been a pillar of bustling energy, but now... Now she just looked weary. There was a grey cast to her skin that hadn't been there before, and her eternally shining eyes had lost their manic glint. And it wasn't just her, I realized. The observatory was fading, just a little. I could kind of see the mist outside.

"I don't know what to try next," she told me. "I've tried everything I thought might work, plus a few things I knew wouldn't. There isn't another lens in here that I could possibly think of trying... Why are you fidgeting?"

"There's this sort of hard, round spot in the seat cushion. It's been there all night, but it hasn't really bothered me until right now."

"You ought to take care of it, then," she said. "It's hard to let your mind wander as it should if you're uncomfortable."

I stood and reached under the cushion, trying to find what made the hard, uncomfortable lump. "It's a lens," I said, surprised.

Suddenly, the Lenscrafter was beside me. "Here, let me see," she said. The grey tint to her skin was fading, and the sparkle was returning to her eyes. She examined the lens critically. "I'd forgotten about this one. We haven't used it since... Well, never, if I remember right. Which I do. It'll need cleaning. And I think we should grind it down a little thinner. You'll have to help me. I can't do it alone."

Together we cleaned off the worst of the lint and grime. I held it while the Lenscrafter ground it thing as an eggshell, in the process making it just a bit more concave. Then, together, we polished it until it practically glowed.

I peered into the lens at my warped reflection. Beyond my face was a field of stars. I turned and looked up. The ceiling was still there, still plain silvery grey. The Lenscrafter had retracted the telescope before we started work, so there wasn't even a hole in the ceiling anymore. Still, when I looked back down into the lens, it showed a starry sky above me.

The Lenscrafter's reflection joined mine. "I thought only the lover's lens was star crossed," she mused. "Strange. Still, I suppose this whole night has been strange to you." She took the lens delicately in her hands, careful not to leave any fingerprints on the glass. "Let's give it a try."

I settled into the observer's chair as the Lenscrafter set about her work, opening the slit in the domed ceiling and sliding the telescope through. Then she slotted in the lens.

"Something's different," I said before she could ask. "There's something... I see it... I feel it..."

"I told you you'd know," the Lenscrafter said with a grin. "Shall I focus it?"

"No... Can you add a second lens, maybe?"

The Lenscrafter nodded. "It's tricky, but I can definitely do it."

"Then add the second one you tried, the tesseract one," I said.

"Will do. Better add the pure math one as well. The two work well together."

As she added the lenses, and then turned the focus wheel to fine tune them, I saw something against the darkness of my mind. Something golden, and long, and thin... Threads. I saw threads. A web, a network that held the world together, linking and binding everything in it, and making sure it all fell into the right place.

That's what most magic was, in truth. Manipulating these threads. Bend them, tangle them, stretch them, move them, and you changed the world. That was what a wizard's power was. Changing these threads.

As the Lenscrafter twisted the focus wheel, the threads burned brighter and brighter. They burned in the space between my eyes, searing into my mind, my heart, my soul. And it hurt. A scream caught in my frozen throat. My hands, my legs, imobile. I tried to call out to the Lenscrafter, trying to tell her to stop, it was good enough, just please stop, stop! Stop!

I awoke, gasping. For a moment I didn't know where I was.

Estries came racing into the room, gazed darting around, searching for danger. Then his gaze flicked to me. "Nightmare?" he asked.

I frowned. "I don't think so?"

Then I realized. I could see the threads of the world, burning in the back of my mind. I grinned at Estries. "I know what went wrong with my spell."

*

Estries

I watched Lilly, concerned, as she stood in the center of the room. What had happened while she was sleeping? She told me she didn't remember her dream, but she'd obviously unlocked a new talent while she'd slept. Or maybe just gone nuts. We would see.

Lilly gestured, and said a brief incantation. A glowing blue shield sprang to life around her.

She grinned. "This should unlock most physical and magical attacks." Dismissing the shield, she darted over to hug me. "I did it!"

I smiled in bemusement, hugging her back. "Good. You're on your way to being able to protect yourself in battle."

She shook her head. "It's more than that! I don't have to look up most spells now. I can calculate them based on the way the threads look to me."

I blinked. "Ok, then." Threads? What threads?

She gestured, and a small stuffed bear came flying across the room to her hands. Another gesture, and an image formed in the air in front of us, of a butterfly. Lilly laughed gleefully. "Some stuff will still be a bit tricky. Elemental magic, for example, because that works differently. And I still can't force you to do things. That takes mental fortitude, not knowledge of spell work."

I smiled wryly. "Good."

Lilly looked out the window, where the sun was just starting to come up. "Whelp, it's Monday morning. I guess it's time to get moving." Whistling, she started towards the bathroom.

A few minutes later, while I was making breakfast, the doorbell rang. From the bathroom, where the shower was running, Lilly called out, "Mind getting that?"

"Sure!" I called back, and headed toward the front of the house. When I opened the door, I frowned. "Sam? What are you doing here?"

The other demon looked at me nervously. "I need your help."