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spookyspaghettisundae · 8 months

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Anima Mundi

Infinity could break a mind. Attempts to truly wrap the mind around the infinite were doomed because the mind was forever cursed with limitations.

Infinity could break a soul. Eternal it may have been, yet reaching for both things within its grasp and the unattainable would stretch it thin, to the point of tearing itself apart.

Inviolable laws of the cosmos.

The only path to infinity was in making peace with its power. Making peace with one’s self. One or the other: accepting the things within one’s grasp, or forever reaching for the unattainable. Surrendering to the limitations of one’s mind, or reaching out to infinity and seeing what lies beyond once the mind had broken like a dam, allowing the forever ocean to swallow all.

The Shadow knew this. A thousand tiny white dots glimmered in its intangible shape, thousands of eyes eagerly watching, eagerly awaiting while Michael worked his magick. It hovered and peered over his shoulder like an oversized parasite of roiling pitch-black. Like a demon. Liquid ink. Spiritual tar.

Dancing darkness, cast by the flames of tiny fires in the chapel, set among small piles of stone and old wood the necromancer had set ablaze with his lighter to illuminate the ruin’s bowels. In that starry night, Michael needed light to complete this magnum opus. The Shadow waited with great patience.

Michael dipped two fingertips into FBI Agent Parker’s open wound, like the painter wielding his palette. The decrepit old wall behind the altar served as his canvas. His fingertips kissed the coarse sandstone bricks, painting upon them the shape of a large triangle.

The beginning of a door to another world. To another time. The beginning of an end.

Parker moaned softly, though her consciousness had slipped into the arms of oblivion.

The Shadow smiled as it waited and watched.

The Shadow’s ghostly tar dripped from other places now, too. It oozed from all the cracks in reality it had wrought. It had invaded this world by crossing through a different door. Hailing from different times. Arrived from a different year, and a different era before that.

A dark traveler in the dark void of time and space. A projection, burnt into the fabric of reality. And yet, it had no true shape.

Eyes and dark tendrils extended like limbs of invisible mold, connecting all the people and places it had visited and infested.

Its tar-like imitation of SUBSTANCE still dripped from the dead machinery of THE HIGHWAY which it had corrupted, deep inside the Heart, in the basement of the Way King’s ranch house. Clockwork systems and steam engines no longer dripped with water, but with weightless matter, with the viscosity of tar.

Even the door where Klemens had opened a pathway between our world and the House of Change now oozed dark matter from its bottom crack.

It gathered in the cracks of a supermax prison cell in Kentucky, where Freddy Fletcher had been incarcerated. He stared at that shadowy stuff, pooling in the darkest corner of his small, confined space, pushing his sanity beyond its final frontier.

Droplets coalesced on the concrete of a basement wall in a mall in Kentucky, where the Shadow’s original form had originally crossed into this age. The sleeping wall, locked away in storage for nobody to see, sweated with tiny beads of dark matter.

In the train graveyard, far away, the same intangible matter pooled in a pit between two blobs of fleshy eyes and tentacle-like appendages. Once been human, THE SUBSTANCE had transformed. Evolved. A remnant of a lost world.

I am what awaits at the end of all roads.

The Shadow spoke in its Whispers to Michael.

Your king’s highway is dead, and I await you all at the end of its final road.

I am inevitable.

The sorcerer did not respond to the Shadow’s Whispers in his mind. He continued to work. Focused on the ritual he was conducting, he painted that triangle to completion, inch by inch, line by line, each edge of its shape drawn to the width of two fingertips pressed together.

Parker’s body lay motionless on the altar of this ruined chapel. Michael dipped his fingers into the wound on her belly again, salvaging more blood from the dying woman.

She was still alive. Barely. For once she died, the blood would no longer be useful to him. Beyond committing his focus and spirit onto the current ritual, keeping Parker alive continued to chew away on Michael’s focus. It sapped him of his meticulously harvested reserves of magick energy, sacrifices upon sacrifices of human lives he had taken in the past.

The Oracle of New York. A dark luminary in the world of occultists.

Spirit speaker.

Necromancer.

Behind even the Shadow, imperceptibly, a cloud of screaming souls swirled behind Michael. The many lives he had taken—most often against their will, sometimes through deception, and on rare occasion, even by honest seduction—all drawn to power his magick. They hated the living they could see through the veil, trapped just behind it. They screamed for his demise, and they screamed for freedom. Freedom from the prison he kept them in. The lives he had traded for arcane power.

Usurper of the throne. The Way King now slept, and his highway, the greatest glyph of all times—the totality of all roads in the world—slept with Klemens now. All owed to Michael’s winding path of dark machinations and betrayal.

Michael desired to open that triangle-shaped door. Just like the Shadow.

They dreamed of the possibilities. A new world shaped by their dreams. A new dawn.

Together, they yearned to usher in a new future.

Thus, Michael painted in the flickering light shed by small fires in the ruined chapel. A reflection of the primitive world they all came from. With Parker’s blood, Michael painted strange symbols along the lines of the triangle. In his other hand, he held the jade tome, the Thaum of Thritain, studying its alien hieroglyphs, and replicating them around the triangle in a fingerpainting in blood.

Getting closer and closer to completing this ritual.

And the Shadow watched with glee.

Outside the chapel, clouds cleared the sky for the moon and distant stars to shine through. They bathed the deserts of Las Vegas in an eerie, cold light. The winds howled, cold and unforgiving, and they fed the flames of Michael’s fire inside the chapel.

And a group of people stood outside the ranch house, down the path along the dead fields, leading to that ruined chapel.

In reality, this path extended merely over a few hundred yards of crushed gravel and sand, flanked by decaying fence and desert.

But the Shadow had altered reality. That pathway now stretched into infinity. The closer one got to the chapel, the farther that path became. And its Shades, its deranged spawn, lurked between the fence posts, and the stray stones, and the cacti. They hungered for human spirit.

Outside the ranch, four people waited. Helpless. Unable to cross that distance.

Special Agent Derek Wells stood out in the open and his tattered bureau jacket fluttered in the cold wind.

Aria Chambers in her dirtied designer dress, and her bodyguard, the bulky mountain of meat in a suit named Barry, stood behind Wells.

Behind them, in turn, FBI director Anthony Collins sat on the sagging steps of the ranch house porch, hands bound behind his back with cuffs.

All four of them gazed across that stretch of unnatural infinity, that warp in the way, stopping them from reaching the ruined chapel on Klemens Weidmann’s dead ranch.

Or, at the very least, the infinity stalled them long enough for Michael to complete his work.

Their palpable impotence filled the Shadow with a sense of sadistic glee.

A sense of victory.

The porch to Weidmann’s home, where hundreds of bullets had pockmarked and torn up the wood and windows, squealed. The fly trap door, barely hanging from its hinges, opened. Three figures pushed out from the bowels of the darkened building. Their boots and shoes clomped down on the porch steps as they stepped out into the open.

Two more people, and a copy of a human.

In their leather jackets, the fallen Way King’s knights, Jericho Kane and Karma, joined this strange gathering.

The Way King’s final homunculus, a clockwork automaton—a perfect copy of Agent Parker’s appearance—followed right behind them.

They, too, came to stare in awe at the impossible distance between house and chapel. At the dancing Shades, mocking with their awful and monstrous presence.

Wells shot a glance over his shoulder to the new arrivals. He grimaced, recognizing the vicious woman named Karma, who had almost sliced his throat open with shards of glass.

He still wore the bandages from that confrontation.

“Oh, fuck off,” she muttered while he glared at her. “Don’t look at me like that. Your partner shot me.”

His hand twitched around the pistol in it. But he held his tongue.

She exuded no threat to him. The symmetrical features of her face shed no spite for him any longer, and she stared like the everybody else into the distance.

“Cool your fuckin’ jets,” Jericho said. His eyes were reddened with recent tears, and that struck a first nerve in the FBI agent. Jericho struck a second nerve when he continued speaking, cementing that he was addressing the evil beauty by his side, and not Wells. “This ain’t the fucking time or place. We all wanna get to that motherfucking snake over there.”

“That thing is no demon,” Aria said, repeating what she had told Wells and Barry earlier, upon their first failed attempt to cross the infinite distance to the chapel.

Jericho peeled his gaze off the distant building and locked onto Aria. His eyes sparkled in the starlight and he swallowed emptily. He tried to find the right words, to convey his concern, or to convince her to get out of dodge before their world ended.

Instead, he only blurted out something stupid.

“Why the hell are you here? You shouldn’t even fuckin’ be here.”

“Shut up,” she snapped. “I go wherever the hell I want. And I have unfinished business with Michael.”

“We all do,” spoke the homunculus. The red-headed facsimile of a woman spoke evenly, calmly, in a monotone that rivaled Parker’s regular demeanor. Staring into the distance like all others, she added, “She is there with him, and dying. The longer we wait—”

“Nah, fuck that,” Jericho said.

“Well, what’s the fucking problem?” Karma asked. “We’re all here to ice that piece of shit, so why are we standing around like jackoffs and talking?”

Barry pointed a meaty finger towards the chapel. Aria spoke in his stead.

“Bad mojo. That entity warped the space around the chapel. And do you not see those things out there?”

As if to underline her words with a threat of ill-will, the Shades danced madly between fence posts, stones, and cacti. Hungry, and wiggling their shadowy claws in anticipation of human contact. Grasping at the gravelly path, like they wanted to slice through hapless legs.

“So fuckin’ what?” Karma asked. She smirked, showing teeth. Having escaped the House of Change unchanged, her sadism returned to the fore. “Are you all stupid? Do you not realize what I am capable of?”

“I don’t even know the hell who you are,” Aria fired back.

Wells swiveled, gravel crunching underneath his scuffed shoes, and his eyes went wide. He stormed up to Karma with wide steps.

He knew.

“Yes. Do it,” he ordered. “Take us there.”

“Yo, cowboy,” Karma said, the smirk fading from her lips. “Hold your fuckin’ horses. Are we all on the same page here? What do all you dipshits think we’re gonna do when we get there?”

A beat of silence. Then everybody answered at the same time.

“Save Parker,” Wells growled.

“Stop Michael,” spoke the homunculus.

“Find and destroy that fucking book, which I bet that asshole has already,” Jericho drawled out.

“Squeeze Michael on where to find the book,” Aria said.

“No clue,” Barry replied.

“Wait, you think he found the book? When? How?” Collins asked. His questions lingered the longest out of all their conflicting responses.

“Shut up,” multiple people told Collins in groans with varying levels of annoyance.

Karma’s smirk widened into a wicked smile. “You dipshits should be way more worried about that thing with Michael. You all know what I’m talking about. We need to get rid of that thing.”

“I don’t think we can,” Aria admitted, deflating more with each word she uttered. “I don’t even understand what it is.”

“It’s bad fuckin’ news,” Jericho growled. “It could just come and go in the House of Change, so it’s clearly out of this world, above our fucking paygrades.”

“Until we figure out how to deal with it, let’s focus on what we do know, and know how to do right,” Wells ordered again.

He puffed his chest out. The anxiety and stress gnawed on his nerves, but he recalled the bureau’s motto. Like a silent mantra, it repeated in his head. Echoed in his mind in Parker’s voice, from the time she had said it out loud in earnest to him, he let it loop.

Fidelity, bravery, integrity.

He let it repeat in his mind while the wind howled over the desert, and all their eyes came to rest on him with expectation.

Even the Shadow’s millions of starry eyes. Even as it smiled.

“We get over there, we save Parker, we stop Michael, and if he has that book, we take the book away from him. In that order. Then we can bicker about the consequences until we’re blue in the face, but until then, we’re in this one together. Ride. Or die.”

Jericho sighed. Jutted his chin out. “Yeah, okay, fuck it. Yeah, let’s do it. I’m game, let’s go, come on.”

Aria sighed and added nothing. She glared at Jericho, for she sensed where they were headed. He only stared ahead into the impossible distance of the chapel, avoiding all eye contact with anybody else. Aria wasn’t ready to let him burn his life away.

The homunculus stared in the same direction and she suddenly spoke, bursting out into a flood of words.

“Agent Parker and I both dreamed of a long valley, where rain fell eternal, and all the stones on mossy grounds were of perfectly geometrical, spherical shape. In the fog, at the end of that valley, a forest of crystal trees awaited, and in its clearing, a tar pit bubbled, from which Shadow rose. It assumed our shape, a dark mirror of the self. Shadow, we all are. It is neither here nor there entirely. SUBSTANCE in an incomplete, corrupted form, twisted by human ambitions. A corruption of all things that exist. It cannot be destroyed without destroying reality itself.”

She fell silent.

All stood stunned, mouths agape at the homunculus fashioned in Parker’s image.

The Way King’s final act of peace, as he had declared himself.

The homunculus expected no response.

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Jericho grumbled.

“Anima mundi,” replied the homunculus.

Aria squinted at the red-headed homunculus. As a true Witch of the West Coast, Aria was the only person present who knew enough to glean any sense of her cryptic message.

“Who gives a shit?” Karma asked. “Let’s go, people. Time’s wasting. Start holding hands like we’re some kinda hippie protest chain. Come on, chop chop.”

She extended a hand for Jericho to take. He seized it, grabbed Aria’s hand. She, in turn, took Barry by his hand, who snatched Wells’ hand in a meaty fist, the one not occupied by the FBI agent’s pistol. Wells holstered his service weapon in the confines of his jacket, and then took the homunculus by her hand, unsettled by how much she looked like Parker.

Karma led the way, back up to the fly trap door into the ranch house, right past Collins, still sitting on the steps dumbfounded. The train of people passed him by, steps thumping up the decrepit old wood, and he gawked at each of them.

“Uh, what—what about me? Hey! Are you leaving me here?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jericho snapped at him in passing.

Karma stepped through the door, and they chain of people bypassed reality, one by one. Stepping through the darkness of the fly trap door, they did not enter the ranch house, they instead emerged inside the chapel.

Her strange and unnatural power had crossed the impossible distance with her improbable ability. The liminality of all thresholds in reality served her as gateways between disconnected places. It could boggle the mind, though the people present either already knew of her terrible power, or possessed the faculties to process its effect in action.

Or, as in Barry’s case—they tried not too hard to think about it. Like anybody exposed to the unnatural, trying to rationalize it with conventional logic, and filing it away in the dustiest and oldest forgotten drawers of the mind, before it could chip away at and erode too much sanity.

The six figures crowded inside the far end of the chapel.

They gazed across the broken pews, to the altar upon which the dying Agent Parker lay. Michael had crossed her arms over her chest, like laying an ancient Egyptian pharaoh to peaceful rest.

Dim light flickered from the three tiny fires Michael had lit. He paused amidst painting the final glyph outside the triangle’s lines, rearing his head to gaze upon the interlopers. Surprise flashed in his bright blue eyes.

And the Shadow, creeping in the darkest corners of that cavernous ruin, it blinked its thousands of tiny stars. It oozed with malice.

Hatred for those six who had simply bypassed its attempts at keeping them away. It had worked so hard to corrupt THE HIGHWAY, distorting the distances of reality to create a pocket of infinity around the chapel, and one of the people present was capable of ignoring that awesome might altogether.

Well, well, well, look at this. Just in time to play the party poopers?

They now all heard its Whispers in their minds, provoking shudders to run down every spine. Then the mental Whispers turned to menacing Growls.

DO YOU NEED TO FEAST ON HUMAN ENTRAILS LIKE VULTURES? TO BE TAUGHT OF THE FRAILTY OF YOUR FLESHY MEATBAGS?

The light from the three flames dimmed and flickered. But it had not been the Shadow to do so.

Nothing but the howling wind, sweeping through the ruined chapel, whistling through the holes in sandstone brick walls.

Michael’s wide-eyed surprise gave way to a half-lidded, relaxed gaze. He picked up the switchblade from the altar, where it lay hidden behind Parker’s dying body.

The threat was clear. The sharp little blade glinted in the dim light, hovering above the unconscious red-headed woman. Its tip, however, was pointed at them.

He smiled at the six witnesses to his ritual.

“An auspicious gathering,” he said.

They would empower the energy he invested in it. They would serve perfectly to seal the sacrifice. Witnesses were almost better than the faithful.

“Karma,” Michael muttered, staring coldly at her. Confidently. He clicked his tongue between uttering her name and his next words. “And here I thought the House of Change would leave you forever… changed. Maybe fix your attitude, or your lousy manners. A shame you show up to sabotage me at the eleventh hour. I really, truly, should have known better.”

Karma smiled at him, but there was no joy behind it. Then the trauma of her entrapment in the otherworld all bubbled to the surface. Her face twisted into a mask of rage and malice.

She screamed at him, “I’m gonna gut you like a fucking fish!”

“God, I’ve had enough of this shit,” Wells muttered.

His pistol was slung up in a flash, and the former ranger shot Michael in the dead center of his forehead. The necromancer crumpled onto the floor behind the altar.

“God fucking damnit!” Karma spat, yelling. “He was mine!”

“Holy shit. Are we already done here?” Jericho said, taken aback by the sudden turn of events. “I mean, fuck, I’m not one to complain.”

His chin crinkled and he took a single dauntless step towards the opposite end of the chapel, towards Parker’s body on the altar.

The entire ruin rumbled, quaked. Its walls shook, and dust rained from the crumbling ceiling. Howling winds swept through the abandoned abode, and the three fires flickered till they nearly died down. Only embers remained and the Shadow grew. Intangible claws crept across every solid surface, closer and closer to the six intruders. The shifting Shades crowded outside the holes in the chapel’s walls, peering inside with tiny white dots for eyes, like a hungry sky of glimmering starlight.

The Growls in their minds rumbled, matching the force of the earthquake.

WE ARE FAR FROM DONE, YOU AND I. NOW YOU ALL ARE GOING TO HELP ME FINISH THIS.

The six people huddled together, back to back now, surrounded by swelling darkness. Terror gripped their hearts, a fear of the unknown paralyzed them with inaction. The agents of dark matter closed in on them.

Get back up, Mikey. GET UP.

Michael’s hand smacked onto the top of the altar, leaving a handprint in blood. His splayed digits trembled as he slowly pulled himself back up.

Heal her. And I’ll take over from here.

“Gimme your gun,” Jericho told Wells. He grabbed at it.

The FBI agent slapped Jericho’s grabby hand away.

Jericho growled, “Just keep shooting him, for fuck’s sake! He can’t keep doing that shit forever!”

Barry and Aria reacted, drawing their own pistols.

“Stop!” Wells’ command sliced through the howling wind. “I don’t trust you to not hit Parker.”

Michael chuckled darkly. Blood wept from the third eye that Wells’ bullet had punched into his forehead. The necromancer poked a finger into it, and smiled upon seeing his own blood and bone, clinging to his quaking fingertip.

HEAL HER. I WILL DEAL WITH THESE INSECTS.

You can sacrifice your own blood, and heal from it again.

“That violates the laws of cosmic transaction,” Michael breathed in protest, wobbling as he stood on buckling legs.

He braced himself against the altar, leaning over Parker. The dark priest. His power was divided in every direction.

The walls of reality are already crumbling while this event ripples forward and backwards through time. Reality is as malleable and decrepit as this old chapel. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel its flesh rotting away as the Way King now forever sleeps? His reign has ENDED.

You can remake everything. You can make up the rules as you see fit.

HEAL HER.

“This is bullshit,” Karma exclaimed. “These are just fucking shadows! What the fuck can they do, anyway?”

She pulled a large hunting knife out of her jacket. Then she snarled, casting a sneering grin at Michael.

“Now… to make good on my promise.”

Michael couldn’t help but shudder. She meant every word and she didn’t care about any consequences.

Everybody else hesitated as Karma charged at the altar, boots clomping down the aisle between all the broken pews, until others broke from their paralysis.

Karma had spoken true. The Shadow and its Shades only postured with menace. The touch of their dark tendrils instilled a dark chill in their hearts, yes, but it carried no substance. As the homunculus had said.

SUBSTANCE in an incomplete form.

The entire group advanced, three firearms drawn upon Michael, waiting for the right moment to shoot him dead.

DOOM.

An explosion of invisible energy repelled them. Karma tumbled backwards over the ground, struck strongest by that powerful blast. The others merely stumbled and stopped in their stride.

The cloud of screaming souls behind Michael had manifested momentarily, surging outwards from him in hateful waves. Each pulse that followed the blast deepened a feeling of sickness in their bowels. They all reeled with a sense of vertigo, feeling unable to reach the sorcerer.

He stood behind the altar, arms wide open, his head cocked back to the crumbling roof, like a dark messiah channeling divine wrath through his entire body. The vision of the cloud of screaming souls dissipated, but one thing was clear to everybody present.

Unlike the Shadow and Shades, Michael’s power was all too real.

The pulses from his cloud of death waned and the sinuous vision dissolved.

In its wake, the Shadow and Shades were all gone.

On the altar before Michael, Parker stirred. A pained moan escaped her parched throat. Uncrossing her arms, she pawed at her belly, where blood still soaked the fabric, yet skin no longer yielded to pressure in form of an open wound.

Healed again. By grace of Michael’s dark sorceries.

She sat up and let her legs dangle off the side of the altar, her back turned to Michael. Her head bobbed up and down, eyelids more closed than open, speaking to volumes of delirium, reminiscent of someone who had just woken up from a long coma in a hospital.

Karma groaned on the floor where she reeled, crawling towards the altar with painful slowness, her face twisted and cringing with agony from the blast, and a bloodthirst that raged in her, urging her to murder Michael.

All others stood still again, paralyzed with a new fit of indecision, and a deep-rooted fear of the unknown unfolding before them.

“Why?” croaked Agent Parker through her haze.

The embers and tiniest of flames in Michael’s fire cast a long Shadow behind her, looming above them.

The Growls had died down into Whispers, now isolated to Parker’s mind again.

As tender as they ever had been… just as when they had first met.

Because we can open the door, you and I. As I always said, and I will say again: you listen.

You let me in.

Tar-like droplets of dark matter began beading upon the lines of the triangle on the wall behind them, oozing from the cracks between the bricks upon which Michael had painted the symbol in Parker’s blood.

“What if I don’t want what you want,” Parker breathed. The pain subsided as Michael’s magick continued to work, and she recovered from all the blood she had lost. “You are threatening these people’s lives. You are… I don’t even understand what you are or what you really want.”

The necromancer tilted his head. The reflection of embers in his icy blue eyes flashed with curiosity as he blinked, listening intently to Parker’s side of her telephone call with the Whispers.

I want to be whole again. To fill the hole with THE SUBSTANCE your sister from another world deprived me of when we crossed over together.

“What does that… mean?” she answered in question anew. “Explain, and I will consider—”

“Parker! Please,” Wells shouted. His gun lowered by his side. “Do not negotiate with these God-damned Whispers!”

Wrinkles creased his forehead above his furrowed brow, and he stared at her with wet eyes, concerned for his partner’s well-being.

Yes. You listen. You understand. We open this next door, and we reshape reality. We cross the sea of stars. Dive into the dark depths of the ocean of time, where everything folds into the present.

The Whispers spoke to her with infinite tenderness.

But you’ve done me so much harm, she answered the Whispers in her own head. No longer speaking aloud. Becoming one with the Shadow, wrapping her entire being around that parasitic entity in a gentle embrace. You have threatened, and hurt, and endangered myself and others. Time and time again. Why would I help you?

As the fire in her being grew, so did the flames of Michael’s externals fires. A cold wind from the desert let the embers and dry wood flare up again with new flickers. Parker’s Shadow grew behind her, and even Michael’s fear began to grow while he craned his neck to behold the swelling presence, towering over them.

“Naw, fuck this,” Jericho muttered. Then he shouted at them. “I know you got that fucking book, and I’m gonna destroy that stupid fucking book, you stupid fucking assholes!”

He didn’t make a step towards the altar. He didn’t need to. His intent was enough. He was moments away from burning down his entire life to finish the job, to ride into the sunset, with all his connections, and affections scattered in the wind. His friend, Klemens, had wanted that book so badly, but Jericho believed it needed to stop existing. And as a final “fuck you” to all the “mystic psychos” around him, Jericho was hellbent on annihilating the tome in one final blast of his own. He only needed to see it to destroy it.

The Thaum of Thritain, the jade tome from another time or space, it rested on the altar, right behind Parker, between her and Michael. It radiated with unnatural gravity. An opposite pole to the screaming cloud of souls that followed Michael through the ether; the jade tome sucked everything in like a black hole. Everybody sensed its presence, even if they weren’t aware of it.

That unreal presence only intensified, as if it was responding to Jericho’s threat.

“Don’t,” Aria whispered. Firmly. Glaring at Jericho, her voice cracked. “Do not throw your life away.”

Jericho clenched his jaw and spat out a string of incoherent expletives before he settled on a plan B. “Fine, fine. I don’t even need to tap my own mojo. Klem gave me a little something and I’m going to make some good fucking use of it now.”

Look at how they struggle to grasp the gravity of what is about to unfold, the Whispers told Parker. They resist without understanding what they are resisting. We can bridge the future and past. Connect all humanity with a higher enlightenment, and move this world one step closer to a greater evolution. Take my hand, and open the door with me, and we will be whole again. You always wanted to see what lies beyond, right? Beyond the confines of the only reality you knew?

“Right,” Parker breathed. “I do.”

It was true. Not only despair had invited the Whispers and Shadow in.

Earnest curiosity drove her. Had always driven her.

Michael burned with the same intensity. He studied the profile of her face, his eyes glittering with adoration of someone he considered his equal, despite the disparity of their occult power. In a mystic sense, they had become husband and bride.

“Yes,” Michael whispered. Oblivious to their conversation. He sensed it beyond words, he caught the glint in her, that subtle change, shifting from resignation to determination.

Yes, whispered the Whispers. Yes.

“Yes,” Parker repeated. She locked eyes with the homunculus down the aisle. Her doppelganger stood still, and rigid, and she stared back at her, mirroring the same calm resolution. “Promise they will not be harmed, and I promise to open this door with you.”

I PROMISE.

The chapel shuddered again with a quake, causing all people standing to stumble, and more dust rained upon them. The desert wind whistled through all holes again, howling.

“No!” Wells shouted.

He whipped his gun up, held in both hands with the same discipline and drill that had allowed him to shoot Michael in the head. But he knew not what to target.

Wells stared down the iron sights at Parker. But he didn’t have it in him to pull the trigger.

Not after all they had been through on THE HIGHWAY.

THE SUBSTANCE, usurper of THE HIGHWAY, thrummed from beyond the triangle door. Dark matter oozed and dribbled from the triangle of lines drawn in drying blood. The walls wept with the intangible tar. The symbols pulsed with the same pull, the same gravity as the jade tome.

“Yes. It’s time, isn’t it?” Michael asked.

He walked around the altar, interposing himself between Parker and their unwitting crowd of witnesses. Michael walked as if he had never been shot, neither in his side nor his head. And he only stopped once he stood in Wells’ line of fire.

The artificial third eye on his forehead no longer wept blood, having healed entirely.

It is time.

“Parker,” Wells spoke up again, no longer shouting. Tremors shook his voice, but he spoke with sharp clarity. “Where do you see yourself when we close the lid on this case?”

His face flickered like the flames, fighting back the despair and finding it in him to muster a feeble smile.

The homunculus and Parker answered in unison, identical words, sharing the same cadence and pronunciation. A strange chorus.

“Kicking back with some damn fine coffee, cherry pie, and so many chocolate donuts that I might just grow sick of them.”

Parker’s lips curled into the same kind of feeble smile. Wells’ smile widened.

“No, absolutely fuck this, and fuck all of you,” Jericho growled. And like Karma before him, he charged at the altar to stop this ritual.

Michael’s cloud of screaming souls exploded outward again, blasting them back, this time yielding even greater force. Jericho learned the same hard lesson as Karma, the same hard way. Everybody else stumbled backwards several steps, thrashed by the hate-waves.

Jericho wound up on the ground, curled up into a fetal position, mere steps behind Karma, gripping his head as if it was about to explode. The teeming mass of screaming, angry souls were threatening to do exactly that. The paradox of their hatred towards Michael extended to his victims.

“Goodbye,” Parker said.

She swiveled on the altar and hopped off the opposite side. In the same fluid motion, she seized the Thaum of Thritain, scooped Michael’s jackknife up off the floor, and then approached the triangle painted onto on the wall.

As soon as she pressed her hand flat against the center of the surface, feeling the thrum of infinity hidden between all worlds, Wells clicked his tongue and shook his head.

He steadied his aim. He unloaded every bullet in his pistol into Michael. Barry and Aria soon joined in, discharging all three pistols in a blaze. The hail of bullets staggered the dark messiah. Every shot caused a spasm, made him dance, like a puppet being jerked around by countless strings, and spraying the world around him in his blood.

Perhaps he would have recovered even from that, with all his dark magick—

But Karma latched onto his ankle. Just as the others ran out of bullets, she clutched, yanked, and sent Michael hurtling sideways through the world, slamming his temple against the edge of the altar, only to bounce off that and crash into the ground where she crawled onto his back to straddle him.

Her hunting knife gleamed in the dark, raised high above her head.

The jackknife in Parker’s hand gleamed the same way.

Parker cut her own arm. Deep and wide. Letting blood flow onto the jade tome, and then drip from there to the ground. Spattering out in rhythmic, gushing bursts.

Sacrifice. Others readily sacrificed other human beings to power their magick, but Parker knew no other choice. Her honor demanded it.

Self-sacrifice.

A simple act, but an honest one. A powerful one. Its rule rippled backward and forward through the ocean of time, a cosmic law, eternal.

Yes. You are kind. And with you, I know, we will evolve together to be so much more.

So much more.

We are so much closer to being whole again. You complete me. Now… finish this.

Others shouted behind her, but their words all blurred into an unintelligible haze, a slurred soup of syllables which she was readily capable of shutting out.

Parker smiled as the warm fluid escaped her to the rhythm of her own heartbeat, painting the floor beneath her in a bright crimson.

The necromancer would ill have a chance to heal her like this, as Karma sat on his back, and plunged her knife into him, over and over again. Michael would only be able to heal himself.

Karma cackled and smiled as she stabbed Michael for the twentieth time. She could have been faster, even, but she relished it every time she sunk the blade into Michael’s back.

The others, meanwhile rushed to Parker’s side. She reached out to the triangle, ready to seal the ritual with the final act necessary: she and Shadow had become one, possessed the will to complete it, and the sacrifice was rendered.

Inches away from touching bloodied palm against stained sandstone, hands grabbed at her. Pulled her away.

Through the darkness, where her field of vision narrowed while the consciousness escaped her again, she saw their faces, huddled over her. Concerned, fearful, and confused.

And among them, the peaceful mirror of her own, that unsettling doppelganger; the homunculus stared back Agent Parker. A strange mirror. Blue eyes like crushed diamonds, fleeting and memorizing every inch of each other’s countenance. The short crop of red hair to frame the freckled pale face of one another.

Agent of Peace.

Damn it all. The Shadow and Parker thought in unison.

The Whispers caressed her mind. Maybe… you were just too kind.

Jericho’s face was the only one absent from those who rushed to Parker to save her life. Wells’ jacket flew off, and he tore up his shirt to improvise new bandages.

Jericho seized the Thaum of Thritain. He had wrestled it from Parker’s weakening grasp in the shuffle. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the tome in his hands, and the jade covers began to crack.

But the Shadow could no longer do anything to prevent any of this.

One vessel, Parker, was already too weak to finish the ritual; and the people present had dragged her away from the triangle.

The other vessel, Michael, was being dragged down the chapel’s aisle by Karma. She cackled again as she dragged her nemesis away from the group, all the way through the dark doors leading outside. Instead, she teleported through that portal, dragging her most hated foe with her, back into the Heart inside the ranch house; the center of the Way King’s machine, where she would continue to drag him to the next and final door.

To the door to the House of Change from which they had escaped, thanks to Klemens’ self-sacrifice.

Past where Klemens still sat on his brass throne alone, eyes closed, deeply asleep, and oblivious to the chaos of the world around him.

Karma continued dragging the bleeding, broken body of Michael. She stabbed him every now and then for good measure, preventing him from regaining enough strength to break free from her clutches. She spat out strings of expletives to spite both him and the screaming cloud of death he commanded, the angry spirits who hated the women who kept adding to their legion, until she booted Michael’s body through the door into its infinite corridor, her final act of disrespect towards the necromancer.

“Maybe you’ll come back out as something other than a flaming piece of shit,” she spat. She cackled by the end.

Michael raised a helpless hand, covered in his own blood, but Karma kicked the door shut between them, banishing him into the House of Change.

And Jericho, well, he indeed no longer needed to burn his life away with magick to destroy the Thaum.

We were too kind, Parker thought.

The Whispers answered her. No. To be whole again, we need kindness, too. You were the right choice all along. A shame we failed, so close to the end.

That kindness was mirrored in the mess of hasty hands, all scrambling to offer Parker first aid, to stop her intense bleeding, and prop her up.

Wells held her head against his chest and told her to stay awake, and stay with him, but everything sounded like she was underwater; a million miles away. They even looked like they were peering down on her through the shimmering veil of the ocean’s surface. Wells, Aria, and Barry all stared into her face, their expressions ranging from panic over dread to concern.

The face of the homunculus vanished from that group, appearing next to Jericho with the calm of a ghost. The flames of Michael’s flickered, and all shadows returned to normal.

Natural.

“Are you sure you want to destroy it? You nor anybody else will be able to use it again to open these doors,” the homunculus told Jericho.

He paused. Some part of him still hesitated from doing the deed.

Maybe Aria could still use the book and travel through time to prevent what was slowly killing her. Or maybe time travel would only invite greater disaster. They would find another way.

Jericho clicked his tongue.

“Nah, fuck all of this. This one’s for Klem,” he growled.

His nape bulged where the Way King’s clockwork spider had drilled into his flesh and latched onto his spine, and the inhuman strength it infused him with exploded outward with all his fury, an unnatural physical might once more unleashed.

The alien tome crumbled in his crushing grasp. The covers cracked apart into chunks. His fingers curled and ripped the ancient parchment to shreds, like a strongman tearing apart a phonebook, and then ripping it up into tiny pieces. He scattered the relic’s remains into the nearest of Michael’s fires, feeding the flames.

They flared up ever so gently, lapping at and then devouring the old parchment, all soon to be ashes joining the dust of the desert.

This is not the end. There is another way, said the Whispers.

But the Shadow was no more. Spread too thin, latched onto the dying Heart of the Highway, and the otherworld of the House of Change, its grasp on this world finally faded. The loci of power it had piggybacked on all waned, and fell apart, devoured by the sands of time. Gone was one vessel, crawling, bloodied, and helpless; lost in the House of Change. Asleep, another, a mind forever obliterated, liberated from his memories.

Only one vessel remained, though her grip on life slowly faded like the rest.

The oceans swallowed the Shadow. The Whispers remained.

Agent Parker’s consciousness faded to black.

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mysticfoxdesigns · 2 months

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Gods I love Bluebonnet season so much. They're my favorite flower

#mystic chaos #mysticfox rambles #the highways are covered in them right now #and there are feilds of blue #i love these flowers so much #i blame my great grandma #she painted them so much

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mystic-scripture · 2 years

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~~ Introducing Highway to Hell: A Stranger Things Story~~

“I’ve been telling you for years, you'd be surprised about the things Nancy Wheeler can and would do...”

The responding statement would haunt Stella Henderson well after it altered her life forever.

“Says the one that went and ditched us the second she got into high school and landed herself some mystery boyfriend.”

The accusation was a false one, but she hasn't been surprised at how Nancy had twisted it when 'sharing' with Barb because it beat the alternative. That the older Henderson was deemed ‘too wild’ by Nancy’s mother, and ‘not good enough’ for her perfect daughter. Playing wild games instead of studying, and partaking in debaucherous substances while she did so. But that wasn't the worst part about the day Karen Wheeler decided that Stella wasn’t allowed in her home anymore, no. wasn't even the fact that Dustin now went over there constantly to partake in a game she’d introduced the younger siblings to. It wasn't even that the very acceptance of it in the boys versus her seemed to cement some antiquated gender roles in play at the Wheelers. No, it was the fact that Nancy seemed to agree and didn't fight for her.

But of course Barb never learned that. Stella had already lost one friend going down that path, so why lose a second, just because Nancy Wheeler "Grew up"? Instead, she caught betwixt two worlds her sophomore year. The world where she’d garnished a truce with Nancy to stay friends with Barb a grade below her, and her secret life of DnD and freakish delight with her boyfriend a year above.

The same boyfriend that snuck into Barb’s funeral to hold her hand, and stayed by her side as she processed the grief. The same boyfriend that she held close and hidden away from everyone who wasn’t in their little club, and would bring her dinner at the game shop- no matter how bad he was at cooking. The very same boyfriend that was unaware of the dangers that continually cursed her brother and his friends the past two years. The boyfriend she’d broken up with in the name of keeping him safe.

But this wasn’t the story of how she lost Barb anyway, or how she’d legitimately rekindled her friendship with Nancy. No, this was the story of how Stella Henderson stopped running from the love of her life, Eddie Munson, and how it took nearly losing him and the rest of her home forever to realize it.

Hellfire Club Taglist: @drbobbimorse @bubblegum-barbie

@booty-boggins @starcrossedjedis @harleyquinnzelz @susiesamurai @juliaswickcrs (Want to be added? hmu! <3)

#Fic: Highway to Hell #Stella Henderson #fd: stranger things #Eddie x OC #Eddie Munson x OC #Dustin Henderson Sister OC #Hendersister!OC #scriptures of the mystic #edits of the mystic #Introduction Post

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harvestheart · 2 years

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headed to Florence, AZ

#Arizona #highway #road trip #Florence #mystic skies #sky show

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toyotaofnorthcharlotte · 2 years

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If you're taking a northeast road trip this year, be sure to hit all of these highlights!

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toyotaofclermont · 2 years

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If you're heading to the Northeast this summer, don't miss out on these road trips hotspots!

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toyotaoforlando · 2 years

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Thinking about planning a road trip to the Northeast? Here are some of the highlights you don't want to miss!

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ffiahh · 11 months

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jinx plays episode

sevika plays candy crush

vi plays subway surfers

ekko plays mystic messenger

jayce plays zombie highway

viktor plays criminal case

calitlyn doesn't have time for this shit, silco doesn't have a phone and vander is dead.

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joeys-babe · 6 months

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Joey B Blurbs: Take My Breath Away

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summary: halloween with your husband joe!!

warnings: none, fluff

pairing: joe burrow x reader

imagine universe: into the mystic

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(y/n’s pov)

i loved joe with my whole heart, but sometimes he got on my nerves. in this particular instance, i wanted to do a couples costume but he refused, saying he'd rather match with ja'marr than do a couples costume.

so instead of doing a costume with him, i'm doing one with the twins. our costume was top gun themed, i was charlotte blackwood from the original movie and the boys were all dressed in little fighter pilot suits.

i was doing finishing touches on my hair, making sure to use a bunch of hairspray so everything stayed in place while joe was helping the twins get their shoes on.

once i was done, i grabbed my purse and started walking downstairs.

"everyone ready to go-" - you stopped when you saw joe

joe was wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, the same leather jacket maverick wore, and aviator sunglasses to complete the look.

"oh.. my.. god.." - you

"did i take your breath away?" - joe

"stop it!" - you giggled as you walked up to joe and kissed him

"you like it? you better, because i'm only doing this for you." - joe

"i love it, joe. you look amazing." - you

"thanks baby. but we needa get going, this outfit on you makes me wanna take a highway straight to the danger zone." - joe smirked

"joe! what'd you do google top gun pickup lines?" - you laughed

"nope, i'm just that good." - joe shrugged

"let's go you dork. come on aviators!" - you walked to the door and the kids followed

joe stood back for a second and watched you walk to the door. he shook his head with a smile on his face, joe couldn't believe he was doing this. but it also made sence, joe hated dressing up for halloween but he was going to do it for you no matter what.

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authors note: little halloween blurb that targets the top gun fans (🥵)

picture joe in that maverick fit instead of the god awful thing he has on today. (still love him though!)

hope you enjoyed! 🫶

#joe burrow #bengals #joe burrow imagine #joe burrow x reader #joey b #cincinnati bengals #joe burrow fan fic

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neomel · 2 months

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Alrighty fellow insane sonic fans i have something very cool for you today: a WORLDBUILDING theory!! this is something that's been kicking around in my head for so long that i forget it isn't something I've shared with many others yet lol

[ This post primarily covers stuff from Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Advance, and ignores Sonic Chronicles and Sonic Pocket Adventure as they have been struck from canon (see: Encyclo-speed-ia) ]

[ It should also be noted that this theory is built on the idea that "the world" as depicted in Sonic Forces is not accurately depicting the entire globe, but rather depicting Eggman's takeover of just the island archipelago where the animal cast lives (South Island, West Side Island, Mirage Island, Northstar Islands, Angel Island) as to explain its geography and lack of human characters ]

Right! So, a big theme in the environmental design of the original Sonic Adventure was having the Sonic cast sort of "cross over" into the human world more - the wording on this was initially nebulous, but with updated translations and clearer official word recently, we now know that it means that the "human world" is moreso like a mainland populated by humans that exists separately from the animal-inhabited island archipelago of Sonic 1, 2, CD, 3&K and Superstars (see: Sonic Origins). My immediate first point of comparison - of all things - is something like the first Madagascar movie, where the lemurs are able to be a fully functioning society in a region completely isolated from humans.

Except it's not quite like that movie, is it? We see in Sonic Adventure (and further in Unleashed, 06) that animal characters like Sonic and c.o are able to exist just fine within the human world, to where Amy has flat-out moved into Station Square. Big and Tails, too, have settled down by the Mystic Ruins close to where Angel Island (sometimes) crashes down by, Rouge owns a club in Sonic Battle - you get the gist. Animal characters, the majority population of the islands as we see in Forces and the IDW series, are able to migrate into the "mainland" human societies, but it appears to still be a rarity, likely not even something everyone has the opportunity to do (Big might've been born on Angel Island, Tails and/or Sonic can fly any of Sonic's friends to wherever they want to go, etc.). The most contact humans have with the animal world is through the Mystic Ruins site, or Eggman using his excessive wealth to fly in and try and effectively colonize the islands as we see in Sonic 1, 2, Superstars, CD, 4.1 and 4.2 (for note: CD, 4.1 and 4.2 take place on the same island of Mirage Island)

Sonic Adventure 2's level select is obviously to be taken with a grain of salt as a stylized take on a world map, but it seems to infer the same thing that Origins' main menu and Angel Island's close proximity to the Mystic Ruins both corroborate - the island archipelago inhabited by the animal characters seems to be quite close to the mainland "United Nations" landmass, most evidently close to Rouge's Route 280 level. And given how often Eggman lays his sights on the islands as a primary target for his schemes (Heroes may well also be taking place on the islands, as Seaside Hill is confirmed to be near/on South Island), it would make sense from the United Nations' POV to try and make access to the islands more accessible. For example, to enable easier import and export of goods, help citizens evacuate from possible disaster (eg. how the Metal Virus in IDW described how it was impossible to evacuate to anywhere else but Angel Island), and so on - a way to connect the two societies more smoothly only makes sense.

With ALL that context and preamble out of the way, this is my theory, and where Sonic Advance finally comes into the picture:

Radical Highway in Sonic Adventure 2, and later Neo Green Hill Zone from Sonic Advance, were together depicting a brief attempt to connect South Island to the United Nations mainland.

You may think this is a bit of a nutty conclusion to draw given how little of a story Sonic Advance actually has, but I think there's a lot we can glean from just the environmental design of Neo Green Hill Zone alone. Compared to the original Green Hill Zone, and most of the levels in the Classic Sonic games that aren't just flat-out urban cities/facilities seemingly built under Eggman's control (Star Light, Spring Yard, Chemical Plant), Neo Green Hill Zone's touches of human infrastructure are far more...friendly, for a lack of a better word. There's parasols and wooden scaffolding, a grind rail or two along paved sidewalks, yet the natural beauty of the area is left entirely in tact. Nothing about it appears like Eggman's work, yet it is quite evidently structured for human interests, for tourism and walking/biking rather than all the funky ways in which Sonic's animal cast are comfortable moving around. Then there's of course the name: NEO Green Hill Zone, as if it's reinvigorating the idea for a fresh new facelift, re-marketing it!

But how does all that connect to Radical Highway?

Radical Highway (and Mission Street by extension) have a quirk unique to them when compared to almost all other urban city levels in the series - as you can see in the image above, they're themed around still being under construction. Compared to a level like Lethal Highway from Shadow the Hedgehog (or the aforementioned Route 280 from SA2) the holes and gaps in Radical Highway are presented as being specifically because the winding roads are still under construction. You can see this on the level map above too - Route 280 and Route 101 appear to be part of a long, linear, already-finished stretch of road, wheras the area of Radical Highway and Mission Street is filled with gaps, inlets and breaks in the road. Route 101/Route 280 already appear to fill the function of letting people cross between the two city areas depicted on Adventure 2's world map...so then, what exactly is the construction and general wobblyness of Radical Highway for?

Well, let's look at Sonic Advance again: Specifically, the end of the Neo Green Hill Zone stage, and the way the game progresses immediately thereafter:

The natural beach environment of Neo Green Hill Zone Act 2 suddenly bows out before the Eggman boss fight to give way to something quite interesting: A red bridge extending out from the island's coast. The bridge's architecture doesn't quite match that of Radical Highway, most notably using tall suspension wires hooked up to some off-screen upper portion of the construction, but I think the idea alone is fascinating enough: This is drastically more modern architecture compared to the rickety wooden bridges otherwise seen in Green Hill Zone. We're still a bit unsure of if Advance 1 takes place before or after Sonic Adventure 2, but if it's before - it may also be possible that the work on this bridge began on the South Island end of things *before* the mainland Radical Highway-end were finished with their work, with the idea of joining the two bridges somewhere in the middle.

Let's again also consider where this bridge takes our characters in Advance - to Secret Base Zone, a shockingly urban facility which we still don't really know the location of. Sonic and c.o need to zip-line into its entrance, with a background that only features light and buildings far off into the distance - is it possible that the Secret Base exists sort of like an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, inbetween South Island and the mainland, as some sort of production facility for the UN? Regardless, it serves as a pit-stop in the Advance campaign - after it, we can pretty cleanly chart a roadmap for where the cast travels. Casino Paradise's ocean background seemingly depicts it as being part of the coastline (bottom left of the SA2 map), Ice Mountain is pretty clearly meant to be another area of Ice Cap Zone given how it leads to the Angel Island Zone - which is, in reality, a dilapidated Sky Sanctuary. Effectively, the campaign seems to go from South Island, to the bridge connecting South Island to the mainland, to a coastside Vegas-like casino wonderland built by Eggman, which is near the Mystic Ruins and thus near Angel Island by extension (it may be connected to Night Carnival from Sonic Rush?). And all of it connected thanks to the works of a bridge, seemingly set up in Adventure 2 with Radical Highway being under construction, possibly with the goals to connect the two core parts of Sonic's world.

Whew! That's pretty much all the words I have, and I've now reached the max cap of images per posts. I truly don't know how many Sonic fans care about these granular details and concepts about the environment of Sonics world in games from 20+ years ago, but I hope it got some gears turning - and if there is some merit to this, it may further get you wondering as to why the path connecting the two was seemingly cut off in the end? Given the cityscapes we see in Forces and IDW, it's possible that this mutual relation between the two worlds lasted for a fair while - what could've possibly led to that bond being broken? Maybe Unleashed breaking the world apart had something to do with it...

Thanks for reading this far if you did - and feel free to add your own ideas or things I might've missed in all of this!

#mel alphabet soup #ill make you eat those words!#sonic #sonic games #sonic the hedgehog #sonic lore #sonic adventure #sonic adventure 2 #sonic advance #sa1 #sa2 #sa2b #sonic writing #sonic theory #sonic series #sonic franchise #sonic x shadow generations #sonic heroes

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deathbecomesthem · 3 months

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Estate Sale 1 of 2

Eddie Munson x Medium!Reader | 3.8K

Summary: Home is not home anymore. The road is your friend. You find yourself in a strange place where you encounter a spirit unlike anything you've known before after a trip to a strange estate sale. There will be second and final part upcoming.

A/N: The first bit of this was written as a request for @jo-harrington on a different blog. I've decided to revive it. This is a story that asks you to suspend your disbelief. Take a journey into the weird, and don't come to me for answers.

Warnings: Blood, body horror, mental distress, and a reader that has a vague history of institutionalization.

The world you live in is on fire, and he is cold. He’s been cold for as long as he can remember. The bites festered for so long. They opened wide, blackened and bleeding, making him hunger for things he could never find. The ache in his gut never satiated, even when his sharp teeth broke the skin of the petal-faced creatures that populated the world that had become his home. He kept to the places he knew from the other side, his school, the Hideout, his trailer - he sat on the stained mattress with his Sweetheart laid across his lap when he heard the primal screams of that spider-like beast. Both the man and the smoke. The time after his new home splintered and bled, his own body changed again. It healed. He laid in his bed, wrapped in the blanket his mother knitted together when he was a baby, and he healed. The wounds closed and began to scar. The sharp fangs that broke the soft skin of his lips dropped from his mouth. And he slept.

–

The combination of heat, humidity, and orange smoke from the raging wildfires - a discontenting trifecta. Is the whole world designed to make you miserable? Yes. It must be. The wind that whips through your beater of a car moves like the air of a convection oven, perfect and even baking without the need to rotate the cookie tray of your faux leather driver’s seat. You wonder if it’s a mirage when you see it, a desolate highway on the central eastern part of Indiana - “Estate Sale”. Mercy. You pray to the gods that wherever the sale is located, there will be air conditioning.

You thought after making your way through Nebraska you’d seen all the corn the world had to offer, but Indiana proves you wrong. It’s not until you pass a sign that says “Entering Hawkins” that you finally see roads lined with trees rather than corn stalks that are looking ready for harvest. You notice the scars on the earth as soon as you enter the city limits. The goosebumps on your forearm are what make you realize how cold the air in your car has gotten, like the air conditioning suddenly kicked on at its max setting. But no, your windows are open, and the sky is darker. Another sign, black spray painted letters on brown cardboard, “Estate Sale”. An arrow pointing to the left at the stop sign a quarter of a mile in front of you.

So you push down the indicator and turn.

–

Eddie only stirred a little in those decades of healing when Wayne took his last breaths. His own steady breaths began to quicken along with his father’s. He gasped in air and felt the vice grip on his lungs. A burning, empty feeling when he tried to expand bronchial tubes and let the oxygen in. The gasping was brief before turning into hollow breaths. Slower. Slower. Slower. And then the darkness pulled him back into that quiet and restful place of waiting.

–

When you reach the center of town, the unease you’ve been feeling turns into disbelief. The town hall is barely visible through your foggy windshield, a building marred with large scars that look like the smaller ones you’ve been seeing along the roadside since you entered the town. You think about cranking your steering wheel and going back the way you came when you see another cardboard sign pointing to the right. It’s not some sort of mystical force driving you through this apparent ghost town, it’s your curiosity. You tell yourself, curiosity killed the cat, and then remind yourself, but satisfaction brought it back.

Another turn of the steering wheel, and a short jog down an old road when you see the final sign. You avoid potholes that threaten to swallow up your Ford Fiesta and take a final turn down a gravel road greeted by a much larger sign reading “Forest Hills Trailer Park”. You are not surprised to see rows of mobile homes alongside the small road your car is bouncing along. You’ve almost forgotten your purpose when you see so many cars that haven’t been roadworthy since your mom was a teenager. You’ve entered a time warp, it’s the only explanation your brain can come up with. Finally, at the end of the gravel road, you see a trailer with a scar down its center. It’s cold enough now that you’re extending your right arm to the backseat of your car to find a hoodie you haven’t needed to wear in over a month. Outside of the trailer are boxes. An estate sale with no one to collect your money, just boxes sitting on the ground with a spray painted “Free” sign propped against one.

Free is something you can afford.

–

Gravel crunches under your boots as you approach the line of boxes. It occurs to you that the trailer itself might be worth entering, but think better of it. Let the ghosts keep their secrets and take what they’ve so generously offered you today. A shiver creeps down your spine when you consider how many spirits might be watching you from the tree tops in the woods that encircle the trailer park. You can feel how real they are in the silence that echoes inside your ears.

*crunch, crunch*

You keep moving until the tip of your boot is against the box closest to your car. It doesn’t have any markings, not like some of the other ones further down the line. You’ve decided to roll the dice and peek inside, only to find dozens of mugs. No one wrapped them in newspaper to protect them from chipping. You gasp when you see it - a Garfield mug almost exactly like the one your Nana had in her kitchen. Nana kept that mug for you, and always served you her special hot chocolate in it. You know it’s not Nana’s mug, because that special cup is chipped on Garfield’s cheek. This one is pristine. You consider, only for a moment, that you could take the whole box with you. Put it in the back of your car and line your kitchen shelves with the mugs. You can hardly believe your eyes, these vintage pieces are in such good condition. You shake your head, pick up Garfield, and move to peek into the next box.

Inside you find mostly clothing, tattered flannel shirts and threadbare jeans. There’s also a stack of hats on one side. Most look barely worn. Evidence of a working man’s wardrobe. You let your fingers brush against the soft denim of a pair of blue jeans at the top and imagine the man that wore them. They’re old school Wranglers, probably worth something even in their current worn condition.

This is when you catch a glimpse of a treasure hidden behind the boxes. Through the misty fog of that strange atmosphere, a shock of something red catches your vision. The way the boxes are laid you, side-by-side, you only catch a sliver of the instrument placed onto its back in the gravel. It’s a B.C. Rick Warlock. You’re not a guitarist, but your Uncle Keith was. You’ve seen pictures of him with a guitar that looks just like the one in front of you, only your uncle’s was black. Your hand moves like a magnet, reaching behind the boxes to pull out your prize. This sweetheart of a guitar found its new home with you. She flashed you her smile, and now you’re hers.

You pulled out of the ghost town of Hawkins, Indiana 3 hours and 15 minutes after pulling into it with - a guitar you don’t know how to play, a guitar pick necklace, a Garfield mug, and a silver mood ring. Each item gave you a sense of joy, each for different reasons. Nostalgia of a more innocent time in your life, memories of family now lost. And you wonder about the previous owners. Most of their belongings, with the possible exception of the pretty guitar you have riding shotgun in your car, would be found at the local dump. The Estate Sale signs bother you, because you know that means they must be gone. So you promise yourself to remember them, even if it’s only when you drink your first cup of coffee in the morning, or when you fiddle with the new necklace around your neck.

You stayed later than you meant to, and the sun was fully set when you lost the sight of Hawkins in your rearview mirror. You’re getting a hotel room tonight. It doesn’t matter that it’s out of the unrealistic budget you never really meant to keep in the first place. You need a fucking shower certainly, but that’s not your top motivation. You want a room with an electrical outlet to plug in your new guitar and see how she sounds. The idea sounds stupid inside your own head as you think it, you don’t know how to play. Not even a single chord.

But it feels right in your hand, the weight of it. You brushed your fingers against the metal strings and felt the vibrations move through you, building and creating a need. Your fingers twitched and you felt a song in them, a tune ringing through them that you only vaguely know. You find yourself humming it through your closed lips when you see the roadside motel with the red “VACANCY” sign lit up.

Even with the sun down, it’s hot as hell outside. You’re happy to see that each room has an air conditioning unit set high up in the outside wall. You can almost smell the freon in the air, and it sends a little shiver of excitement down your spine. You’re desperate after leaving the much cooler air of Hawkins. There’s only one other car in the parking lot,that you assume must belong to the person sitting behind the counter of the front desk.

A bell chimes above the front door as you push it open, drawing the attention of a middle aged man sitting with his feet propped up on the counter in front of you. His balance is lost and you see him attempt to catch himself before he slides off the vinyl office chair.

“Oh, shit. I’m sorry.” You offer a quick apology as he awkwardly plants his feet down on the linoleum below his feet, that Midwestern habit that won’t quit. Apologies all around.

“Oh, sorry. I’m good. Just didn’t expect anyone tonight.” He’s giving you a friendly enough smile when he asks, “you need directions? Or, do you want a room?”

“A room please. At the far end, if possible.” You’re thinking about the song inside of you. You need to let your fingers strum without pissing this guy off by making too much noise.

He’s turning to grab a key from the hooks behind his chair, real metal keys with big red tags hanging from each, when he asks another question, “You’re lucky you came through when you did. This place is coming down next month. No one takes these back road highways anymore. It’s too bad. We did alright for a while when the Hawkins ghost hunters used to make a regular appearance, but that’s been waning for years.”

Your interest is piqued at the idea of a local haunting, but even more so at the name “Hawkins”. A part of you had started to wonder if it was only a delusion your mind created, the otherworldly town with the estate sale. The sale that offered you that beautiful instrument and a pick necklace to match the red of the guitar.

“Oh, ya know I just passed through there. What a creepy place.” You wrinkle your nose, remembering the way cracks in the earth spread out like a giant spider web through the town center. “What happened there? Some kind of earthquake?”

The motel manager - you look and see the name “Keith” on his nametag - is looking at you with open shock. Like he’s looking at an alien, something his brain has never seen before. He swallows, shaking his head at the same time and says, “Ain’t no way to pass through Hawkins. The government has blocked off completely at the city limits since the huge ground shaker two years ago. The city hall, along with the entire city block where it sat, were swallowed up into the earth. Real apocalyptic stuff.”

You open your mouth to rebut his statement, and close it again. It really was just a hallucination - a strange oasis hidden inside the surrounding fields of corn. That earth scarred land only lived in your mind, despite the tangible evidence of its existence sitting in the trunk of your car. It doesn’t matter, because you’d rather believe that you lived in a delusion than the alternative. That you entered another world, something that is simply not possible.

But then why do your fingers ache more and more with every passing moment, crying to stroke the neck of the guitar - Sweetheart, Sweetheart, Sweetheart - and coax a song from her. The desire, need really, overwhelms you. So you nod in agreement, say something along the lines of, “of course, I must be mistaken, I’m sure I would have noticed a giant crater in the ground”, and head out the glass door of the motel office.

—

Eddie’s breathing is picking up, something that hasn’t happened in years. It’s been decades of a dreamless sleep, but his mind is sending out small sparks of ideas. His fingers twitch. His heart, that’s been beating at 30 bpms for more than 30 years, is firing at a steadily increasing rate. The chrysalis is beginning to crack, and his mind is humming a tune. One that you’d certainly recognize.

—

The room is exactly how you expected it to look, only a little cleaner. You’re pleasantly surprised to find a light smell of citrus hanging in the air. The sheets are probably as old as you are, but they smell fresh, and the comforter is soft. Any other night, you’d crawl in and fall asleep without a moment’s hesitation. But you’re anxious to spend time with your new treasures. You’re absentmindedly twisting the mood ring on your finger. You expected when you had placed it on your finger earlier to see it change against the warmth of your body heat, but the plastic gem remains onyx.

You try not to think about the reason for your impromptu road trip while you plug in the amp to the wall socket at the head of the bed. You push back on the memories. Strange things speaking to you in the dark, the hospital, the dead things reaching out to you from their restless afterlives. Prescriptions to fight against psychosis and the hallucinations that never fully left, only grew more quiet in your mind. You’ve learned how to survive this world, to disconnect from those otherworldly voices, and to never speak of them out loud in this world where seeing is believing.

Now, though - something is moving you, an impossible to fight force. And that’s fine, because your curiosity, your desire to connect with the thing that’s led you here, is not a malevolent force. You know that in the same way you know that the sky is blue, the grass is green, and that the living and dead are separated by a thin veil that only some folks can see through.

There’s no one here with you to look at your behavior and show you caring concern. No one here suggests the idea that maybe you ought to drive to the nearest inpatient facility and sign your rights away until the “ghosts” leave you alone. So, you let the gentle hand of the spirit speak through your hands.

They’re not your hands anymore. For the length of the song, you’ve been pushed down somewhere deep inside of you. You can feel the weight of the guitar in your hands, feel the strings under your fingers, hear the sounds filling the small room. A presence, stronger than any spirit you’ve encountered before now, is using your body. It’s a peaceful feeling, letting them take the reins, bobbing your neck along with the fierce and frenzied movements of your fingers.

5 miles plus one dimension away, Eddie’s eyes open. You see through them. You feel the cold air, smell mold and dirt. You hear the faint beat of wings, and a scream of pain. Your body never falters while it plays the song that you now recognize as an old Metallica tune. You feel a string pulled tight - that other body sits up in its bed and shakes its head. You call to him without a voice, eerily similar to the way you’ve been called in the past. You feel him exhale as the echo of the final notes your body plays on the BC Rich echo through the room.

—

Eddie doesn’t know anything outside of the need to follow the path in front of him. He remembers dying. He remembers his true self leaving the flesh, drifting through the air of that hell dimension, never breaking through the gates. Eventually, settling back in the still form tucked neatly into the mirror image of the bed where he spent so many hours of his life in the real world.

He knows nothing and everything. His heart beats in his chest, and air moves through his lungs - this is a living body that should have molded along with the blanket that covered it. Instead, he’s listening to a familiar song and following its sound through the empty wasteland where he’s been hidden away for decades.

And you. He knows you, a stranger that heard his soul cry out and answered without fear. He trusts the path, he trusts his guide. He knows the music will show him how to finally leave hell and walk in the sunlight once again.

—

You sit with the neck of Sweetheart, you know this is her name, in your hand. With that knowledge comes recognition. This guitar has an aura. It has a soul. No, that’s not quite right - a piece of someone has been left inside of her. It’s what called you to her. The chain on your neck that held the guitar pick that is currently pinched between your fingers, feels heavy.

“You bitch,” you say to the guitar without bite. You’re feeling duped by that world you’ve tried so hard to pretend does not exist despite all of the evidence you’ve been shown so many times in your life. You whisper out, “what have I stumbled into here?”

You stand and place Sweetheart in the corner and unclasp the necklace from your neck. You leave the chain and the pick on the long dresser in front of the bed in your motel room, and walk out into the humid Indiana summer night. You haven’t had a cigarette in 2 years, not since the last time the call from behind the veil was too hard to ignore, and yet you still clocked the machine that stands just outside of the front office door. You fumble in your back pocket for your wallet and push a 10 dollar bill into the ancient machine. You’ve never seen one of these in the flesh, and wonder if the smokes that come out will be from 2024 or 1986.

You shake your head at the strange, intrusive thought, and absentmindedly pull the knob. It’s not until you’re holding the box in your hand that you realize you didn’t choose your old favorites, Marlboro Reds. You examine the desert scene behind the plastic film with fascination. If you had looked closer at your own hand, you would have seen that the onyx on the mood ring you picked up along with Sweetheart and the guitar pick necklace has turned an opalescent blue-green. But you didn’t do that. Instead, you went back into the now empty motel office to grab a box of matches from the fishbowl next to the guest book on the counter. Again you’re struck by the idea that you have entered a sort of time warp, this place seems stuck somewhere between the past and the present. 1986 with Wi-fi.

1986. The year means nothing to your conscious mind, but for some reason it is conjured once again. You think that Sweetheart will be safe enough in the trunk of your car tonight. Keep the ghost, or whatever is calling to you through the foggy veil between life and death, out of your dreams tonight. The necklace, too. You need to clear your mind or risk being swallowed whole by whatever this is.

—

Eddie is following two things - the string from his mind that is connected to your own, and a faint glow somewhere in the distance. He is trying to think, but his mind is labyrinthine, and he’s somewhere in the middle unable to see the twists and turns that lead him there. Instead, his body moves on its own accord, and he focuses on the light.

There are things following him, he can hear the solid foot falls land with every step of his own. The things, whatever they are, do not register as a threat to him. He feels no need to turn and fix his gaze on them. They won’t bother him. They share the memories of the hive mind, and remember the way his teeth felt biting into their flesh. They remember when his wings beat, and the ground trembled. They remember the things that Eddie forgets.

That light, blue-green and glowing through the darkness of Eddie’s world, takes his feet beyond the places he has traveled. The following footsteps fall away as he continues his journey, the unnatural light frightening the beasts. For Eddie, it’s a beacon of sorts. With each step, his skin grows warmer.

In the void where the light shines for him, a building slowly comes into his view. He would be confused if his mind knew how to perceive the things that he has been experiencing. Instead, a feeling of relief sweeps over his body when he sees that it’s a motel. His legs are tired, and his head feels too heavy on his neck. His feet carry him to the room on the end where the light glows brightly. The bed in the center of the room is where the source of the beacon is found, and he is more than glad to climb into and sleep in its warm glow. It smells like home here, something he hasn’t known for so long. Tears streak down his cheeks while he slumbers, a different kind of rest than he knew in the coldness of his bed that was not his bed in that monster realm.

—

#eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson fanfiction #eddie munson angst #eddie munson fic

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spookyspaghettisundae · 8 months

Text

Libera Nos

Exotic plants rustled. A chorus of insects chirped. Buzzed.

Jericho Kane awoke in an unfamiliar jungle. With his short and dreamless sleep broken without reason, dizziness kicked in before he even dared to kick off the ground and get up from sitting.

His head spun like he had been drinking hard liquor for hours, making it harder to sharpen the blurry edges of his strange, new environment. The hard trunk of a tree supported his back, and his ass cheeks and legs all felt like they had been planted on top of a hive of angry ants.

Then the illusion began to crumble.

There were no ants, only a sensation of pins and needles in his limbs. The tree in his back was no tree, as its roots had been painted onto a smooth wooden-paneled floor. The trunk sounded like a hollow cylinder of plywood as he thumped against it, grunting while he got back up onto his feet with an initial wobble, overcoming the numbness in his legs.

Every exotic plant failed to hold up as authentic under scrutiny, for they featured neither leaves nor texture, all two-dimensional, painted cardboard cutouts, glued to more plywood, and rendered with the artistic fidelity of what someone would expect from school children.

Rustling, animal sounds, and the chorus of insects all descended from black loudspeakers, almost invisible due to their placement in the shadows enshrouding them, high up on walls and ceilings where stage lights failed to cast their cones of illumination, a dark canvas upon which the mind may project a canopy of jungle trees.

Jericho felt dizzy, sick, and confused. He did not remember how he got here.

For a moment, he even struggled to remember who he was.

Then all the memories came flooding back, crashing on his head like a waterfall. He gasped for air.

The House of Change. This was just another one of its many strange rooms. Lost in the infinite, otherworldly maze.

With no way to track time, he had lost all concept of it. He might as well have been trapped in there for days, if not months. And as the House, to his knowledge, did not exist in our shared world, he doubted its time even flowed in natural ways. For all he knew, he could have been wandering the labyrinth for years.

A captive. Wandering the bizarre infinity until it had stripped him of his identity and the memories of his life. Or lives?

Or it could try—as he thought to himself.

Because Jericho kept defying it. He had very little he held onto, very few things he thought of with warmth, or positivity. Jericho had been in the House of Change before, and it had robbed him of the person he had been before that.

Last time the House had vomited him back out onto Earth, he was only left with vague, blurry shreds of his past. He had even adopted a new name. Jericho Kane’s name had once been a different one. Jack, perhaps?

The Shadow had called him Jack.

Had the Shadow seen things hidden away in the deepest recesses of his mind? Uncovered mysteries buried in the darkest basements of the House?

There was no way of knowing. The Shadow was gone. It had stopped trying to convince him to “let it in”. Whatever it meant with that. Jericho wasn’t sure. The bizarre psychic entity either wanted to be let into the House of Change, for whatever awful reason, or worse, into his very mind.

Like a demon. But something more. Something that brought with it a dark SUBSTANCE, dripping and viscous, like tar. Infectious, like a disease. And old. So terribly, terribly old.

And Jericho was fresh out of fucks to give about playing host to some unnatural being, even if it had promised to help him get out of this wretched otherworldly prison.

A silhouette appeared in the spotlight.

The shadows it cast danced with every movement, walking. Sneaker soles squeaked on smooth floors.

Jericho raised a hand to shield his eyes from the blinding light, unable to discern anything beyond a feminine form.

Even so, he knew who it was. His cell mate. Trapped in there with him, locked away in this cosmic waste pipe.

Karma.

She approached him with a bounce to her step.

“Hey, fuckface, I found a new room,” she said. “It’s like some place where some hoarder loser lives in his mother’s basement, filled with all sorts of trash and nerd shit. The rooms all loop around, but there’s, like, a locked door at the stairs at the top of it, and I have a good feeling about that door. You can pick locks, right?”

Karma, too, obviously defied the House. Like Jericho, she refused to submit. Refused to change.

Jericho’s butt itched, so he scratched it.

“Are you stupid?” he asked.

“No. You’re stupid.”

“There’s no way out of this place, man. Not until you’re a fucking husk that gets shat back out. Do you seriously think you’re bigger than this?”

“Fuck you. I’m bigger than Jesus,” she said, flipping him off. “Are you coming, or not?”

“Yeah,” he breathed, breaking out into a weary sigh.

He hopped off the weird stage and followed her down a dark corridor. A softer light greeted him at the end of it.

Thousands of cardboard boxes made up the walls and ceiling and floor of the hall they traversed. Collages of lost notes, letters, and other handwriting, all hung loosely pinned and taped to the walls. Paper fluttering in the breeze they created by passing by it all. Broken thoughts, memories; externalized to paper, plastering the cardboard hall.

Jericho tried to ignore the writing on them. Part of him feared the thoughts and memories of others could bleed into his own, and mingle with his identity, slowly eroding his self. The House was like a siphon to people’s identity, collecting the skim of what it took from them.

And still, he refused.

He knew: this was how the House worked. It was trying to eject its two guests—it needed them to deal with the Shadow. But it only knew one way of doing such: wiping them out, and leaving them empty, reborn into the world so they could begin new lives.

Two objectives in direct contradiction to one another. Jericho felt no loyalty towards the larger world outside, nor did he hedge any desire to eradicate his identity. Thus, he refused.

Because Aria’s face surfaced in his thoughts, time and time again. The chance encounter with her outside Chicago, the night in the penthouse suite. Drinking together. The warmth, affection. Mutual understanding without having to talk much about it. Her showing up in the white chariot of her limousine, swooping in to save his ass when he had found himself a shitty situation.

The one good thing that had happened to him since his last ejection from the House of Change.

The one good person.

The one person in the world he truly liked.

That’s why he ignored everything else here. It was already chipping away at the rest. Scratching, scraping, gnawing and chewing on his memories, flattening all the things he had been doing. Working for the Way King. Using his magick in service of the old wizard, doing his dirty work across North America.

There were plenty of things Jericho wanted to forget. But even those, he now held onto. Whether it was a twisted sense of pride in his dubious talents, or because he no longer wanted to be the tennis ball forever bouncing between occult rackets—he refused.

He ignored whatever was written on all the paper and cardboard all around him, only catching disjointed glimpses here and there, shreds he could easily dismiss as white noise.

This side up. Call me. Have you seen my cat? Sincerely yours, Natalie Hammond.

Memories torn from other lives, digested inside the belly of the House.

The soft light of the basement rooms awaited them. Just like Karma had described, they waded through a sea of trash. Empty pizza boxes stacked high, crumpled cigarette packs, mountains of magazines and newspapers, oodles of yellowed old computer parts, and stacks of computer game diskettes, flanking a pyramid of empty beer and soda cans, and more.

Garbage.

This all could have been a single person’s refuse, or the collective waste of several souls who had lost their minds and identities in the House of Change.

Refuse.

Jericho smirked.

In his heart of hearts he knew: he had been a crook in every life before this one. A petty thief, carjacker, thug, racketeer. Juvie, jail, living out of cars. Bouncing town whenever he needed to escape the heat. Squatting in derelicts. Squalor. Miserable nights, cold, freezing. Hungry. Angry. Drunk. Stoned. A toothache dulled by bourbon till he took the tooth out with pliers, then more bourbon. Recovering from a heavy beating when he pissed off Big Tony in Baltimore. Stealing for the sake of stealing as a kid growing up in Evergreen.

Making a quick buck however way he could. Gangs, gangsters, and conspiracies.

He kept telling himself he wasn’t a good person, and it felt like the House was trying to help him forget it all.

Discard all the baggage and start over. Start fresh.

But why should he?

Even the truly evil were entitled to compassion. Jericho believed he was far from evil—just dirty. A dirty man in a dirty world. Fitting right in with the trash. And that’s who he was.

Surrounded by trash.

What would the world be without someone to look down on? To blame for everything wrong in it? He didn’t care being the boogeyman. The people who spat on people like him meant nothing to him.

He caught himself picking up a crumpled piece of paper from the trash in the strange basement. An eviction notice for a Tim Miller. Jericho crumpled it up and chucked it into the rest of the garbage surrounding them.

Some part of him enjoyed it. Being the bad man. The outlaw.

Free from society’s rules. He didn’t mind the disrespect all too much. And for every bit of misery his liberty brought him, he enjoyed the open road.

He was hesitant to admit it to himself, but in that moment, it all started rising to the surface of his consciousness. Like a diver slowly returning to the surface of the ocean.

He loved the sunsets. He liked drinking and drugs. He liked the smoke, both from cigarettes and guns. Giving people shit and speaking his mind freely. Not being tied down to any backwater town or shitty city. Unattached, roaming the country as he saw fit. Carving his own destiny into the stones and the trees and the deserts.

He loved this freedom. He loved THE HIGHWAY.

He liked to talk shit on his master, the Way King, but the Way King had given him license to freely travel his roads in his name. And he asked for very little in return.

And there was no way in hell he’d let the House take any of this away from him.

Jericho refused.

The pressure could have crushed him. But Jericho was coal. Dirty, spreading that dirt on everything he touched.

He was coal. Turning into a diamond.

“Keep up, shithead,” Karma said.

Her sneakers thumped their way up the narrow wooden stairs to a basement door.

It dawned on Jericho in that moment that Karma and he had a lot in common.

Working for the Way King. Unapologetic.

That psycho of a woman enjoyed doing what she did best. Killing.

Spinning clay. One of her hobbies.

Jericho vaguely recalled her mentioning it one time, while they had been sitting in a car together, waiting for the right moment for her to get out and assassinate one of the Way King’s targets. Hours spent insulting each other, eating fast food, arguing over the radio station.

For whatever reason, Karma liked pottery.

Remembering that, it dawned on Jericho in that moment. It clicked.

They were like spinning clay, both of them. Mud that only needed a gentle, artistic touch to slowly give them shape.

He followed her up the stairs to the locked door. Brass knob. Simple lock, but fashioned in recent years.

Jericho didn’t have any of his tools on him, so there was no way he’d pick it. But he knew how to open it.

“Get back,” he growled.

Karma slipped under his arm to go back down a few steps.

Spinning clay. The Way King’s hands had shaped them into masterpieces. Lent elegant shape to mud. Forged in fire, painted with delicate strokes, accentuating their every crack and flaw, and exposing the natural beauty in their totality.

Defiant, unapologetic, and perfect at what they did.

Perfect in who they were.

Jericho braced himself against the wall and starting clomping down on the brass knob with his heavy military surplus boot. Kicking away at it with all his might.

Thump, thunk, thwunk, thump, THUD.

A whole chunk of wood broke off, exploding from the door with knob and lock, exposing a large hole in the wood where the metal used to hold. Then he shoved the door open. Dim light and a strange humidity awaited them beyond. A bedlam of noise, of clanking metal, and steaming engines echoing through the door, like a factory’s machinery in full operation.

A door to another room in the House of Change?

No.

It felt altogether different. Like it was a way out.

His heart raced. He refused to believe it could have been so easy. He always refused.

With steady steps, Jericho and Karma passed through that door.

* * *

Klemens Weidmann rode on a mechanical spider for a wheelchair.

Clickety-clackety-clank, punctuated by the occasional metal whine. Eight sharp and spidery mechanical legs moved in perfect coordination to one another, carrying the old man down the stairs.

The Way King descended into his ranch house’s basement.

Deeper into dim light and shadows, where old bulbs sometimes flickered whenever the electricity browned out. Where grime marked the walls and grooves of machinery, where wizened old hands could no longer polish the wood and brass to perfection.

Where steam hissed from his mechanical clockwork, things born from the trash of our world and the mind of an occult genius, assembled in complex arrays. Machines that defied physics, and reality, given life and energy by magick rituals.

Fueled by his thoughts, and memories, and prayers. Others would have sacrificed blood. He sacrificed his self to power the machine which he now entered.

The Heart of THE HIGHWAY.

The Way King rode his mechanical spider through the narrow walkway between the clanking, hissing, and steaming machines. Past strange levers, and odd gauges, and weird cranks that defied conventional logic. For any human being to even attempt to understand the workings of the Heart, they would find madness before they made sense of its arcane design.

A marriage of the old and the new, Klemens had banished his memories into such creations. Though he had never been inside the House of Change, he had stripped himself of memories and identity in the process of realizing his own Magnum Opus.

Only with hazy images could he remember now that he had been a Jewish boy in Germany during a World War. A refugee in the United States of America. Learning how to fix clocks.

Time.

Time was fleeting. Even as the mechanical spider carried him deeper into the center of the Heart at a slow and steady pace, time was fleeting.

However, there was no other way to expedite his final act.

His Magnum Opus, THE HIGHWAY, reflected all things past, and all things he envisioned for the future. The paradox in its existence fueled the current core of reality like his every sacrificed memory infused his clockwork creations with life.

Old machines that belonged in an era past. Controlling the magick glyphs made up of every road in every country of the entire planet.

From the periscope in the Heart, he could see upon any stretch of asphalt, extending even into the concrete parking lots. Though he knew not where to look unless an oracle told him to, the Way King could have seen anywhere he wanted to.

With every manipulation of any lever, he could change distances, shortening or stretching out any journey upon any road for everybody.

And he remembered his knights whom he sent out to do his bidding. To make the world a better place, agents to extend the reaper’s reach, bringing things closer to his mysterious vision.

Why he once sent them out to kill, in his name? He no longer remembered any details. Had it been a thirst for revenge for the loss of a family back home? A twisted sense of justice, to punish crimes committed which neither law nor God would ever punish in this lifetime?

Or had he become part of his own magnificent clockwork?

One cog in a larger system? A catalyst to something far greater than himself?

In the Heart, where he directly controlled THE HIGHWAY, the homunculus awaited his arrival. Fashioned to resemble the FBI agent, Parker, his human automaton patiently awaited him to assist him in his final ritual.

The red-headed facsimile of a woman waited there with the stoic calm of a statue, hands folded in front of herself. Her crystal blue eyes sparkled as they watched him in the dim light, staring at him as the mechanical spider carried him closer, to his final destination.

To his final act. The Way King’s final edict.

An act of desperation, and an act of abdication.

Viscous and dark, tar-like SUBSTANCE now oozed from cracks in the machine. It suffocated the steam, causing gauges to veer their hands and dials into critical territory. Pipes and vents ran red hot with scalding heat.

SUBSTANCE dripped from the metal veins and connecting wooden tissue of the Heart of THE HIGHWAY.

The Shadow had invaded it. Corrupted it.

Klemens no longer knew why, or how. Because he had forgotten it.

Klemens Weidmann, the Way King, had forgotten what he had done. He had sacrificed that memory to power his creations, so he no longer remembered the deed that had invited the Shadow to corrupt the Heart in the first place. He no longer remembered the act of desperation, in hopes of rescuing his rendition of creation, Michael’s manipulation, and how he had turned to something dark, knocking on the door in the back of his mind, asking to be let inside.

He had let it in.

The Whispers no longer spoke to him, for the Shadow had done all the damage it needed to. It had used the Way King in every way it needed. The old man, almost empty of identity, had lost his value to the Shadow.

And he no longer understood any of this. Klemens only understood the dire urgency of their current situation. The fate of the world was hanging by a thread.

The recent memories he had not yet surrendered helped him understand this urgency. He knew: if Michael completed his ritual, the Heart would shrivel, die, and melt into the Earth itself.

Whatever new world Michael envisioned to shape from the primordial mud left over, something sinister would have its hand in forming strange and alien shapes from the resulting clay.

Though the spider moved slowly and steadily, Klemens was acutely aware of how fast he needed to act.

How fast he needed to execute his final act.

Clickety-clackety-clank. The spider stopped near the center of the Heart. The chair made of brass, and wood, and red velvet upholstery. The Way King’s throne.

The homunculus extended her hands. With firm grip, perfect replicas of Agent Parker’s own hands, she helped him off the spider’s chair.

Klemens could no longer use his legs from the bullet that broke his back, but the spry old man still possessed great strength in his arms. His wizened old hands found hers, holding tightly as she heaved him onto the brass throne.

With a sigh, slumping into its cushioned seat, he closed his eyes and focused.

He needed his knights. For his final act, he would need them to escape from their unrightful prison.

He needed to pierce the veil, and open a doorway to the House of Change.

Those wizened old hands flexed, splaying dexterous fingers. Those fingers curled around the controls on the armrests of the brass throne, blindly finding their comfortable grooves on ridged lever and typewriter buttons.

Clickety-clackety-clickety-clackety, he typed and tapped away. Pulled a lever. Twisted a dial.

He could operate the Heart blindly. THE HIGHWAY still obeyed.

And the Shadow had left a trail from this world to the otherworld. It had tried to invade the House of Change, and left its dark matter in its wake, a trail of breadcrumbs that would allow Klemens to form a connection between two worlds, and locate the door he sought.

The machinery squealed, metal churned. Steam hissed. And the pipes screamed as they overheated. The tar-like SUBSTANCE was clogging it all up, inhibiting the Heart’s output—and connecting the Heart to the House.

The furnace groaned, growling, hungry for fuel.

Even with a clear path paved ahead of him, it would take everything to pierce that veil.

To open that door.

Klemens needed to surrender his final memories.

“Are you sure there is no other way?” asked the homunculus.

She knew what he was doing. Perhaps she could bear witness to his final act, and carry word of it into the new future that awaited them all.

Perhaps someone would remember the old world he had once created.

The roadmap of wrinkles on the old man’s face creased and crinkled.

He smiled.

“Yes. This is my way. This was MY HIGHWAY.”

No regrets. No tears. Few memories left to mourn. All banished into his Magnum Opus, ephemeral art that would now be claimed by the sands of time without maintenance, and devoured by the ever-turning wheel of hidden histories. Another chapter closed in the invisible world of the occult, secret behind the walls of what people perceived as reality.

He had always wished for a brighter future for all. Heavy was the crown, weary now his head, and he was ready to lay that circlet down for others to pick up.

Or to create a new world. Without kings or queens. A world without gods, without demons.

Some part of him almost regretted the thought of not seeing what would follow.

Almost.

Then he perished that thought.

Klemens typed upon the mechanical keys, clickety-clackety-clackety-clack. A twist of the lever.

And the Heart sang. It strained its metal voice, raspy through the dark tar of THE SUBSTANCE, the infection that had corrupted his Magnum Opus. It pressed out the backing vocals of the steam from the pipes, and it sang. The chorus carried its final dirge.

The light bulbs buzzed, burning brighter than they had in years.

Electricity.

Electricity surged.

Klemens smiled again.

The Heart rotated. Machinery churned. Clanking, hammering, thundering. Roaring. THE HIGHWAY shifted and turned. Reality warped. Roads shortened, streets elongated. And the door to the Heart opened.

Not with a whimper, but a bang.

A series of bangs, almost drowned out by the cacophony of the Heart’s machinery.

Thump, thunk, thwunk, thump, THUD.

A whole chunk of wood broke off with knob and lock, exposing a large hole in the door where they used to hold. Then someone shoved the door open.

Jericho and Karma stepped into the dying Heart.

Their eyes went wide as they beheld their Way King, sat peacefully in his brass throne.

Klemens still smiled, eyes open. The homunculus rested her hand on his bony shoulder.

“Goodbye, my friends,” he said, addressing all of them.

Jericho and Karma rushed to his side. The invisible crown shed, and with all his last memories fading, Klemens still smiled at them. Their hands found his, gripping them and shaking him.

His gaze turned blank, and though he would live, he no longer recognized their faces.

Seeing shock and then anger and then tears in their eyes, and feeling the heat from their grip, far warmer to the touch than anything the cold metal of his Magnum Opus could have ever produced, he only felt a vague notion that he cared for them, like a father for his children.

In some way he had succeeded, and in that warm sensation, filling his body and soul, he was content.

Whatever he had done, the future no longer rested in his old, wizened hands. As they gripped them in their own, and shook, he sensed that his responsibility now passed onto them, like a luminous form slipping away, and traveling on to the next sphere of existence.

Like a soul completing its journey into the light, into the mirror where they met.

The Heart stopped. The machines lost all motion. After several metal beats, in differing stages of orchestrated delay, the cacophony fell silent.

The man named Jericho Kane found hidden reserves of sorrow where he had thought none was left, sobbing in the realization of having lost the one man he considered friend in this world. Even Karma, who had thought she hated everybody and everything on the planet, yelled at Klemens in anger, demanding he respond.

They would take far longer to come to terms with it, but time was fleeting.

THE HIGHWAY was dead.

And divorced from it all, still alive, and empty of all memories and thoughts, Klemens still smiled.

THE HIGHWAY was dead and the roads ahead awaited others to pave them.

The future was theirs to forge.

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