Kyle & Jasmine

Kyle and Jasmine have a wall between them. There is a wide gulf that separates them despite their physical proximity in the small automobile that Kyle is maneuvering slowly and precisely through red-tinged mountains. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, loves the other, but they are unable to say it. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, is unable to actually spit out the words. Kyle is afraid that Jasmine has forever placed him in her in the sheer-walled confines of her friend bucket, a fate few men are ever able to escape. Jasmine is afraid that Kyle must have issued his affection to someone else and has taken his utter lack of forwardness to be an obvious sign of disinterest. Kyle knows that Jasmine is the perfect girl for him and Jasmine is well aware of the rarity of the chemistry they share. There is an undeniable bond between them, but the rift that drives them apart seems wholly insurmountable. As the car radio plays softly and the sun sets behind them, Kyle and Jasmine are both experiencing the same confounding mixture of contentment and lightning fork agony.

There have been few words spoken on this trip, but it hasn't been an uncomfortable silence. The space is filled, instead, with the flutter of Jasmine's eyelashes or the quiet serenades that Kyle has hummed along with every appropriately longing song. Every now and then their eyes will meet and each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, thinks they feel something spark, but then it's quickly dismissed as a product of their own desperation and the spark is extinguished and the hollowness of their mutual supposed unrequited love rushes back in to fill the void. Kyle and Jasmine are writhing inside, dying to spill their guts and gush over this person next to them, the boy or girl that they adore so very much. The drive is killing them. Neither of them ever wants it to end.

The mountains, now, are stained violently crimson and indigo by the spectacular sunset flowering behind them. There is an aura of magic enveloping the world, the sort of mystic glow that comes from a scarlet dusk, the sort that wildly intensifies the romantic tension that is driving Kyle and Jasmine straight out of their minds. Jasmine's lovely profile is lit up by the dying sun and she looks more perfect, more divine than anything Kyle could ever imagine. Kyle looks distant and lost as he thinks of her, and Jasmine is drawn to his distance, imaging levels of depth dwelling in her friend that she has barely begun to plumb. And it is absolutely maddening. The red mountains are fading behind them. Kyle and Jasmine have descended from the craggy heights and are driving along a winding, whispering path in the middle of a desert wasteland. The purple sky will soon be bleeding stars. If this magical dusk has been difficult, then the night will be practically unbearable.

The universe is shuddering around them. There is a sickening fluidity to it, a dreamy quality that the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, take in amazing stride. Their preoccupation with each other has left insensate to anything outside of their hermetic mobile world. The desert is resculpting itself around them. The red baked clay of the earth is rising up in twisting, finger-like spirals, wrapping around themselves before dissipating and falling to the ground like cinder-block meteors. Pyramids shake themselves loose from the dirt, and great, steaming fissures open up along the roadside. Kyle and Jasmine do not notice the changes. Kyle is hoping to hear Jasmine laugh and Jasmine is drunk on Kyle's eyes. Pale green and bright blue moons fill the darkening sky, maybe a hundred or more, and they detonate spectacularly and ceaselessly, brilliant celestial fireworks overhead. This does not phase Kyle or Jasmine in the least.

The road scuttles beneath their car like a treadmill and soon they aren't going anywhere at all. Gas is burning, exhaust is spewing and Kyle's foot is held fast on the accelerator, but there is no forward motion, no progression. Kyle and Jasmine are so lost in thought, though, that neither notices or cares about their stagnation. As the hours pass, however, they do begin to grow weary and as they yawn, the ground does too, and the earth spits up a little white building made especially for them. It is squat and its walls are windows and it glows from within with a sort of pale ivory that makes it stand out like a beacon in the bloomed darkness of the desert. The building is nondescript and utilitarian and it has a parking lot and a blank marquee sign standing tall at the road's edge. Kyle and Jasmine give a passing inquiry to what, exactly, the little place might be. They agree, then, that it is enough that it is a shelter and they'll stay there for the night. In any other circumstance, settling in a strange, solitary building would be illogical. But they are both so tired and the building is right there. They haven't seen another structure for hours after all. Kyle parks the car. They go in.

Inside, the place is bigger than it should be. It is immense. Cavernous. An echoing giant chamber that could have been a church or a wedding hall or the hollowed out remains of some uncomfortably baroque and ornate theater. But to Kyle and Jasmine, it doesn’t seem to be anything at all. It is a room, an empty room, with its glass window walls and worn cream carpet. The ceiling seems to lower as they delve deeper in. The floor seems to likewise drop beneath them, as if they’re now half underground. It is cool in the building, pleasantly cool, and softly lit in a way that could be thought of as eerie or comforting dependent wholly on one’s particular point of view. The darkness creeps in through the window walls and Kyle and Jasmine eventually find themselves walking in the black beneath a dim spotlight. It follows them through the emptiness. They’re blind to everything outside of it, and the wide open building suddenly seems very small and cramped. They huddle together, as if being outside of the light could somehow do them harm. They move closer and brush against one another. Each feels a sputter-shock run roughshod through their nervous systems. It is infuriating and exciting.

The spotlight comes to rest upon a small lacquered wooden bench in the center of the mysterious building. They can’t see a thing beyond it, beyond the little bench that will barely seat them both. They exchange a weary look. Both of them are so tired, so spent, that they instinctively collapse, in tandem, into a heap on the little wooden bench. Their backs meet at the shoulder blades, and they sit still for a moment, propped one against the other, breathing in the antiseptic air of the building. It is embarrassingly thrilling, this basic, gentle touch. There is sort of pulse numbing pause to the moment, a hard stop on the careening vault of time, and the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, hold their breath and try to make this tiny porcelain moment last forever. But, of course, the clock eventually unspools again and they're forced to come up gasping for air and the bit of crepe that tied the whole of it together has been ripped. Minutes tick on and there is the shrill worry of ending looming over them. Still, there is something so sweet and so utterly unspoiled about this miniscule connection that they each give in, grave and cautiously, to the idea that things between them may have, just maybe, slightly possibly changed. In the lock of the moment, there is a significant boost in ego, in confidence and in passion. And it's Jasmine that takes advantage of that shift in the pair's demeanor.

Jasmine unlocks her position on the bench, twisting herself forward, and moving Kyle like an interfaced sprocket as she does. They are both facing front, now, and Kyle is surprised and a bit unnerved by the change. Jasmine acts quickly to capitalize on this novel orientation, and she softly lays her head on Kyle's shoulder. The effect is immediate and it is explosive and it is indescribably wonderful. Rockets fire between his temples and Kyle is close enough to her now to feel the oceanic tidal rhythm of her breathing. He matches his lungs' cadence to hers after letting out a long, whalesong breath to denote the inimitable pleasure of her present company. Emboldened by her act of affection, Kyle wraps an arm snugly around Jasmine's waist, and he pulls her, subtly, slowly and assuredly closer. She smiles and she lets out a half whispered sigh and he just melts. Exhausted, she shifts again, this time sliding herself down, stretching upon the wooden bench and laying her weary head in his lap. He moves a hand toward her hair and runs his fingers between her locks as her cheek heats up his thigh. It's more calming, this new intimacy, than the hope of any prescription pill or silvery meditations. There is a tenuous, nervous and overly glass-like happiness shared between them; a quiet and luscious release that would verge on catharsis if it weren't still bottled up and in danger of shattering them both from the inside out. They still want to say it. More so, now, than ever before. The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, still desperately want to tell each other, to vent it, to whisper it lovingly and frighteningly into the other's ears. But the wall is still there. It is crumbling, brick by brick and slowly, but it is still there.

The bench changes. It softens and it widens and becomes a davenport while she lays and he sits and there is a plushness to it that lets her body sink into a cloudy abandon. Her tired bones and muscles float on a sea of luxury and the comfort of it flows through her while her mind unhinges from conscious thought and loses itself in a vivid morass of lovelorn dreaming. And Kyle watches her drift off and he smiles. She looks so perfect and so peaceful that he cannot help but love her. He adores her. He feels her every tiny movement rack through his body and the soft tone of her sleepy murmur cuts into him like a knife. His heart balloons with want, but what he wants is here, next to him, and he is terrified at his current surfeit of satisfaction. He is afraid of losing it, and so he tries to etch the feeling into his brain, like a treasure map, so he can find this memory again when things have spun out of control and gone horribly, horribly awry. It'll happen. Somewhere beyond this beautiful night is a future of sickness or hardship or loss or fear. And when he is lost in something bigger and more wretched than his meager faculties can handle, he will find himself, he knows it, right here.

As he tries to pull it all in, he too succumbs to the new softness of the bench turned couch. He gently moves her warm body and slides himself between Jasmine and the sofa's back. He nestles up next to her, wraps his arms around her and squeezes tightly. He plants a quiet, hushed kiss on the back of her neck and he falls asleep.

The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, dream of each other as they slowly turn to ash and crumble away, now commingled in dust forever.

Ghost Town

Sirat, somehow, found herself lazily wandering through the dusty alleys of an old west ghost town. She didn’t remember what had brought her there, nor, she realized with a sort of panicky horror, anything prior to that. She felt blank, a simulation of someone else named Sirat, a pale imitation with just broad strokes to fill in the huge white expanse of identity. And she didn’t like that. Around her, a crop of empty husk, hastily constructed buildings stood sad and rotting as a dim-bulb yellow sun hung low in the sky, hovering over the horizon and flooding the blasted desert landscape with a chalky glow. She felt ill at ease, isolated and strange. Nothing seemed quite right, and while she was tempted to blame her hole-riddled memory, there was a nauseating impermanence to her surroundings and herself. She saw vultures overhead that seemed to blink in and out existence. Things seemed fuzzy on the periphery of the desert, as if the world just came to a stop. She looked at her hands and didn’t feel like they fit with the rest of her personage. They looked different, somehow. It was only a moment, however, before they seemed to change and conform to her specifications. She felt, maybe, like she and the world were being pieced together at the same time.

With little else to do, she began to silently explore her environs. There was a smell to the place, a kind of stench of antiquity, and it stung her nose and made her eyes water. Each whiff carried with it a collection of memories that raced through Sirat’s head in a way that made them feel important and frustratingly intangible. It didn’t take long to acclimate to it, to put it aside and ignore it, but every now and then, a whisper of it would find its way to her brain and restart the memory show. It was disconcerting, but at least it was interesting. At least she felt something other than abandonment and disorientation. The town was small and trite, more like a movie set version of the American west than anything real. There were typical buildings: a jailhouse, a brothel, a post office and a saloon. Hitching posts and water troughs lined the dirt main street. Sirat could picture men in ten gallon hats with holstered guns prowling the alleys, and ladies in their corsets and finery trying to woo them to bed. It seemed so silly in that context, the way real people and real events were distilled to some basic essence of their existence and then launched forward, forever, as a default representation, a perpetual archetype. It struck her then that she, here, was no different. She was an essential part of someone real, someone else who was, no doubt, slumbering peacefully in a bed far away while Sirat wandered through the ghost town. Sirat was suddenly aware that she was a dream, a bit of fluff given form and the semblance of someone else’s life and forced to interact with an imaginary world… she felt inconsequential, then, ashamed of her own lack of solidity. She was angry at having been called into being at all, and saddened that her existence would surely end the moment the real she woke up.

But the dream Sirat, solely through that realization had woken herself up and removed herself from the control of another Sirat’s dreaming mind. She was no longer tethered to the brain that had invented her. Her existence was her own. This was not a concept she readily understood. If there was a difference in her before her self-realization, it was too subtle to notice. So the dream Sirat still felt very limited even as she stepped out from her real self’s shadow to become something greater that the woman that had birthed her.

Sirat, strangely self-aware and anxious about her fate, struggled with meaning. She felt faced with an existential crisis, saddled with a condensed life that she felt needed some purpose, some goal, some form of achievement in order to validate its having happened at all. Lost amidst the ruins of a never-was town, however, she wasn’t sure what to do. She rushed from building to building, hoping that beyond each door there would be some sort of sign or direction. She flung open old doors to musty pantries, to outhouses, to bedrooms and to jail cells and found nothing but dust and dirt and ghostly white cobwebs strung between chipped paint and molding wood. With each failed door, she grew wearier, more frightened and more distraught. Her eyes began to feel heavy, her legs, leaden. She moved with slack muscles and pained joints and felt like collapsing. In the corner of the old saloon’s dining room, beyond a busted player piano, Sirat found a dirty blue mattress, stained with blood and bile and coated in a fine layer of deep gray dust. Depression and fear overtook her. There was no point to this brief exercise in existence, she told herself. There was no end goal, nothing to do, nothing to accomplish. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her whole body shook with heaving, anguished sobs. She was convinced her time was near an end and she had nothing to show for it. There had been nothing, here, in this dirty ghost town… nothing but empty rooms and debris.

Sirat took a deep breath and slumped herself, morose and worthless, into a heap on the mattress and fell into the dreamless sleep of a dream.

As Sirat slumbered, her mind set on pause, time, in its weird dreamy way, still flowed about her. Though she was no longer engaged, the world of dreams was still in motion, and a shadowy little creature, a shadowy little imp, had made her way into Sirat’s ghost town. Once, she had been the consort of a fellow imp, a dastardly little creep that demanded to be called “Thimble,” even though it wasn’t his name. Her name, however, was no secret. She was called Shair.

Shair, like Thimble, had been crafted by dreaming magicians, by men and women who dedicated themselves so wholly to the arcane arts that they practiced those arts even whilst asleep. Imps were the dream-toys of these magicians, built for purpose, to fetch and to test and to serve. Some imps fled their dreaming masters, some were emancipated upon their owners’ deaths. Others, like Thimble and Shair, had slain their magicians to gain freedom. Once, the two imps travelled the land of dreams together, side by side. Thimble, though, grew weary of their partnership and sought out the company of a newly wakened dream, a woman named Kara Frost. He abandoned her in a swirl of formless fog, and she hadn’t seen him since. Travelling alone, Shair would sometimes hear stories amongst Woken dreams, she would hear of how Kara Frost and Thimble had saved so many from the death of oblation. And so Shair, jealous Shair, dedicated herself to the opposite. She had slain her master with no remorse. Surely the destruction of those her former lover and his new escort had rescued would ease her suffering. She was pitiless in her hunt, tracking down those who bore the salvation offered by Kara and Thimble, obliterating their minds and their memories and taking their heads as trophies. In a black bag slung over her bruise blue shoulder, Shair carried the heads of a hundred dreams touched by the waking hand of Kara Frost. Even with so much death on her hands, however, she still felt the sorrow of abandonment.

Eventually, Shair began to wander, lost in confusion and sadness, and in those wanderings she stumble across the ghost town built by the dream of Sirat. Shair loved these places, these miniature hollows of human dreams. She loved exploring the streets and alleys, loved how they ranged from so simple to so convoluted. This one, however, seemed drearier and emptier than most. She was shocked that no one wandered the streets. She was amazed that the place was so lifeless. Like Sirat had, Shair walked amongst the buildings, opening doors and looking for a reason to be there. Eventually, she came across the slumbering form of Sirat on the mattress.

And Shair, then, saw a similar confusion and a similar sadness on the face of the woman lost in her dreamless sleep. She felt an inexplicable kinship with Sirat, a tether she hadn’t felt since walking with Thimble. She smiled for the first time in a long while, and she bent next to Sirat and kissed her softly on the cheek. Shair felt a shock go through her, a wave of cold as she appropriated the sadness of the woman. Shair ran her clawed hand through Sirat’s black tangle of hair. She drew in the dread and the gloom that had afflicted Sirat, and expelled it into the dreamscape as black crepe exploding from her talons. Sirat stirred, her weariness abated, her sadness expunged. The act, for Shair, was redeeming, powerful in its kindness, and Shair suddenly felt a profound hollowness that had come from slaying the dreams saved by Thimble. A heavy remorse set in, a sickness of consequence, and Shair was overtaken by the memories of those whose heads she carried in her bag. As Sirat woke, newly and confusingly content, Shair cowered back into another corner of the musty saloon. A floodgate of guilt had opened upon the poor imp.

Sirat, aware now that Shair had stolen her anguish, saw the imp cowering and felt a wave of sympathy. She could see the hurt in the poor creature’s black eyes, and she wanted, now, to help in any way she could. So she offered herself up to Shair, she offered her assistance as payment for the kindness Shair had extended to her. And Shair, then, knew how she could atone for her sins.

She asked Sirat to lay, again, on the mattress. Sirat complied, nervously, while Shair retrieved her bag of trophy heads. Shair asked Sirat not to move and Sirat didn’t, even as, one by one, Shair removed the heads of the slain dreams from her bag and cracked them, like fresh eggs, over Sirat’s body. She emptied the contents of each cracked head onto Sirat. From one, microscopic cities of glass fell like twinkling dust and dug into Sirat’s skin and eyes. Another produced liquid volumes of chromatic essence, which stained Sirat like a painter’s rag. Others released models of staircases, dollhouse furniture or tiny soldiers determined to die in some far off conflict. One merely produced the smell of French bread and cobblestones from a faux Parisian alley. All of these, the contents of all one hundred heads, were absorbed by Sirat and became part of her.

And Shair explained:

She had obliterated these dreams, destroyed their minds and befuddled their memories. But the essence of them, of who they had been and what they had created, still existed inside of their heads. By releasing them, Shair had given them to Sirat, breathed new life into them as a new life took them over. Sirat was a library, now, of these dead dreams, and Shair was convinced that they could remake them all, if only Sirat would accompany her to the places she had taken them from.

And Sirat smiled, broadly. She was suddenly full of purpose, full of meaning, and full of direction. With no reason to remain in the ghost town, Sirat and Shair set off to old parts of the dreamworld, intent on restoring what Shair had, in madness and in sorrow, so cruelly destroyed.

The ghost town crumbled behind them as they left.

Phaedra Steals A Book

As silently as she could, Phaedra slipped the old book off the sleeping wizard's shelf. She had spent months preparing the draught that finally knocked him out, and even with all of that effort she was unsure of how long the effects would last. Gyrith had a way of surprising her. He was more resourceful and cunning than his superficial bumbling would ever let on. Still, she had studied the man for nearly a quarter of a year, now. Her mission was nearly complete. She didn't even breathe as she removed the leatherbound tome from the bookshelf.

Success! There were no magical alarms, no protective spells, no little impish guards... Gyrith probably didn't even know the value of the book. As he continued to snore in his favorite chair, Phaedra dropped the volume into her satchel and crept from the room. All she needed to do, now, was slink out of the cottage and into the wishing well out back. Then she could return the volume to Chryth, a ransom for a clue to the whereabouts of her brother. She didn't like betraying Gyrith like this, but she was certain that he never would have helped her knowing that his father was involved in the deal. It was better this way. Phaedra wouldn't even have to say goodbye to the old magus. She was better at sneaking out in the middle of the night even when she wasn't stealing.

She tiptoed through Gyrith's kitchen, trying not to disturb the pots and pans as they scrubbed their copper clean. She narrowly avoided being nicked by a knife flying from dishwater to its flatware drawer bed. She didn't like Gyrith's kitchen. It was always this active, day and night, whether she or Gyrith used any dishes at all. His utensils and plates insisted on cleanliness, and that meant bathing once a day. It was, in Phaedra's estimation, a waste.

She crossed the threshold of the back door, her heart lodged squarely in her throat, and realized that, while the book may not have been protected, the entrances to Gyrith's cottage certainly were. A white field of light blocked her exit and dispatched two tiny blue sprites off into the study to wake their sleeping master. Phaedra panicked. She tried to bound through the light, but of course she failed. She fell back onto her behind, disrupting a flow of spoons to their resting place. They hit the ground with a shriek and a clatter. She cursed and stood up, and tried desperately to remember a spell to negate Gyrith's simple barrier. She muttered the words, hoped for the best, and ducked through the light again. It wasn't perfect... the barrier dyed her skin bright blue as she passed through it. Still, she was outside. She could deal with the side effects of the botched casting later. She made a made dash for the wishing well knowing a newly wakened, wholly enraged and likely very insulted Gyrith would be right behind her.

She was right. The old wizard came bounding out the cottage door, suddenly flying, aloft on a mixture of rage and simple spellcraft. He was howling like a banshee, wounded and mad, and the sound of it sent a shudder of guilt and fear up Phaedra's spine. She was so close to the wishing well, now, but she wasn't certain she could make it. Her concentration wasn't great enough, her command of magic not yet disciplined enought to make casting any sort of spell under these conditions possible. She was limited to the speed of her legs, and they didn't seem to be fast enough... especially when compared to the velocity of an airborn wizard.

Terrified and desperate, Phaedra fumbled through her satchel and produced a small vial of dark blue liquid. She didn't even know the contents, for certain, but she drank of it anyways, hoping the effect might save her from her raging friend. There was a sudden itch on the back of her shoulders, a wild sensation that nearly caused her to drop to her knees to attack it with her fingernails. She overcame the urge and kept running, but the feeling continued. It started to crack and burn, like her skin was desert dry and shot through with deep fissures. It hurt like hell, but she kept up her pace as best as she could. It was evident that bits of hardened flesh were shedding from her shoulder blades. And that, of course, was disconcerting to the young lady. She grabbed at the spots on her back and was surprised at the bony knobs that were now protuding from her skin. They were growing fast, too, upward and outward, ripping the fabric of her blouse and jutting out into the fresh air. The knobs were quickly growing into full on appendages, and soon they were sprouting feathers like blossoms on a pea vine. She was growing wings! It was only a moment before they were there, fully developed and useful, and Phaedra beat them as hard and as fast as she could. She left the ground, flapping her new wings, and able, now, maybe to outrun her pursuer.

When Gyrith saw this, he let out a horrid shout of anger and increased his speed. It wasn't enough. Phaedra was nearing the well. Gyrith knew the well in his yard was an onramp to a sort of metaphysical highway. Worse, it wasn't his and he had no rights in defending it. If Phaedra made it there, there was no spell in his repetoire that could stop her escape. His eyes lit up with yellow bolts of hot lightning. He thought, quickly, on a way to detain the girl without killing her. His options were limited. His imagination, however, was not. From a small bag around his waist, a bag always filled with bric-a-brac and nonsense, Gyrith produced a small black screw. He waved his palm over it, said a little incantation to himself, and then launched the screw, like a barroom dart, at his erstwhile apprentice. His aim was ridiculously accurate. The screw flew arrow straight and lodged into the back of Phaedra's neck. She squealed as it pierced the skin.

Obviously there was more to the screw than just a simple sting. As it hung in her skin and Phaedra, still aloft on her new wings, tried in vain to pry it out, the threads of the screw began to move. They reconfigured themselves into a grotesque approximation of a face. Phaedra, from her angle, could not see it, but when it began to speak, she could hear it perfectly well. The screw's voice was eerie and shrill, like a far off hawk's cry, only drenched in echo and speaking in words from some long lost language. Phaedra tried to block the sound of it out. She didn't know what it was going to do, but she knew it wouldn't be good.

There was no stopping it, though. As Phaedra tried to keep from listening, the screw wormed itself in deeper and deeper, until its "mouth" was buried beneath her skin. The pain was excrutiating. The effects were worse. The screw's shrill words moved up into Phaedra's brain through the veins in her neck. She couldn't block them. They were words of control. The screw was taking over Phaedra's conciousness, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

The screw halted Phaedra's flight and had her hover, frantically beating her wings like a hummingbird while Gyrith caught up. The screw demanded that she retrieve Gyrith's book from her satchel and return it to him. She had no choice but to comply. Gyrith smiled, mirthlessly, as she returned his possession to him. She fought, but to no avail.

The screw, however, had plans beyond what Gyrith had programmed it to do. It whispered another command into her skin. She shuddered, terrified at what it was telling her to do. Against her will, she dug back into her satchel and pulled out another potion filled bottle. She cringed as her hand uncorked it and dumped it down her own throat.

Gyrith, still reveling in his little victory, realized what the screw had ordered her to do. And he went pale.

Phaedra's blue skin, like that of a snake, sloughed off of her body. Underneath was a form of writhing, sickly green. It was made of maggots and grubs and other wriggling things. Her new face was horrific, a yellow-eyed death mask with tongues spilling out from all sorts of incongruous holes. Her hair was pitch black and writhing like a sea anemone's tentacles. She was something other than Phaedra now. She was something abyssmal and cruel and powerful and incredibly dangerous. And she was wholly in control of the rogue screw.

Gyrith knew, then, that a long night had only just begun.