by B W Powe
“All people who come here.” Cyrus stressed the word ‘people.’ He made it sound like an absolute standard. “They must be confirmed in their humanity by the acknowledgement of love by others who have been confirmed human. Two people must speak lovingly, truly, of the other’s presence. They must be willing to vouch for that person. They must be willing to say this is human, not an image of the human, or an image of the other side of the human. How do we know? By the test of touch. By the test of love for this plane of existence. Each must stand acknowledged. Each must show they are limited by flesh and blood. This means they can change their minds but they can’t change their bodies.”
Cyrus stared hard at Tomas. He saw the stricken look come over his face. The look was conflicted with feelings and thoughts.
*
Gabrielle and Santiago stood on either side of the knight and held his hands. Then they reached up with their free hands and arms and wrapped them around his arms. The three stood together. Though the castle grounds were illuminated by torches, darkness had come now and the grounds looked shadowed. In this half light, half shadow, the three looked from a distance as if they’d blended into one another, forming a protective circuit.
Like one being . . . Three hearts, one spirit . . . The children a part of the knight, the knight a part of the children . . . Each becoming a part of a shield for the other . . .
This was how it looked to Adina, who stood near the forge watching the odd exchange. She knew the knight had been heroic bringing the children here. Now it seemed that Cyrus – who had made himself leader of the castle through his demand for the code – was interrogating the knight and his wards.
She watched on, curious. And she watched because there was something familiar to her about this knight.
At her back the forge sparked. A shower of ashes fell. The forgers were working on weapons. Adina knew these weapons wouldn’t work against the toons. How she knew this, she didn’t know. But she was certain of it. She had been capable of wielding weapons herself and of sharpening a sword over this fire. Yet she had been at the battle with the toons and saw how the images and smoke, the mists and artful illusions, laughed and reformed. Nothing worked against shapeshifting power. She felt what the children had felt. Still the forgers worked on. They had to do something or succumb to the terror. This knight would help them and show them what to do.
Adina stepped away from the forge fire and the raining ashes.
*
“Why can’t you show me the insides of the castle?” The wizard’s voice sounded like sizzling meat on a hot-oiled skillet.
The eyes skittered upwards away from the rage.
“There’s a protective screen against them.” One of the knights had interpreted the motions of the eyes. This knight was dressed almost entirely in black. Only the upside down mast on his tunic was white. “Someone has figured out how to put up a shield.”
“He’s done so.”
The smoke blackened.
“He senses me. He’s finding his power again. He’s learning without me. Who’s teaching him?”
The smoke billowed into a slate-grey cloud, and the cloud went still. Its transformations stopped. Everyone in the tent backed slowly away, their eyes never leaving the apparently immobile formation. This was the time when the cloud was looking inward for knowledge. The wizard was searching the shadows within, and his knights and his eyes withdrew, recognizing that there were places that not even the toons were permitted to go.
*
“We’ve already spoken for Tomas,” Gabrielle said. “And we gave him his name.”
“We can touch him. You can’t touch a shadow,” Santiago said.
“You can’t touch a dream,” Gabrielle said.
Cyrus was surprised by their passion. They had claimed him again. Would the words of children be enough of a confirmation?
“I’ll speak for him too.” Adina had stepped up spontaneously, surprising herself with her intense need to be there beside the other three.
“You?” Cyrus said. “How do you know anything about him?”
Quickly, she stepped towards the knight. She looked into his eyes, again with that familiarity coming over her, and she saw him look startled, then smile. On impulse Adina brought her hand up to Gabrielle’s face and touched it. She moved her other hand and gently brushed Santiago’s cheek. He jumped back slightly, more out of surprise than annoyance. Adina brought her hand up to the knight’s face, and though his eyes flashed with a moment of fear, she smiled and delicately touched his cheek.
Tomas felt the heat of her hand, and blushed.
“You see,” she said. “He’s human.”
*
That night Tomas wandered alone on the castle grounds. Adina had taken the children with her for food and rest. Cyrus had rejoined the other adults to make plans for the day and the coming engagement with the toons. But Tomas had asked for solitude. He needed to study the castle and its battlements. He hoped to find strategies, because in truth he wasn’t sure what to do.
Yet he’d noticed that when the children rallied to his side, he had instinctively thrown up an invisible protective shield around them. He had noticed that he had even felt protective towards Cyrus, who was suspicious of him.
Tomas was beginning to suspect something about his self. He was in communication with the dream realm. Images swirled into him. When he tried to focus on doing what had to be done, he always saw a way. This hap-pened when he stopped thinking about fear and started to draw on the power that was available in the world. This process came to him in pictures. He saw himself stepping forward. He had stepped forward in the forest for the children. He had stepped forward to get to the castle. He had stepped forward in himself when he had thrown up the invisible shield for the children and the castle’s inhabitants. And he had stepped forward when he had allowed his cheek to burn from the woman’s touch.
He walked and he noticed that he didn’t feel lost.
He had a name.
He had two companions.
He had a goal: to teach the others how to engage the toons and turn them back to the boundaries on the screens.
That was the key: the images weren’t to cross over. The boundaries of the frames around the screens, and of the human imagination, had to be maintained and respected. Humans and images were meant to speak to one another but not to cross over. Not yet, not when there was still so much work to do in the human soul.
*
Tomas gazed up at the towers.
“They’re part of the language of the world too. We’ve added to that language. The forests, the valleys, the hills, the sky, have a language. Humans added to the language through inventions.”
He saw that the towers spelled protection. Like the trees in the forest that he had left, they were there to shelter the children and to give adults time to think and invent more things.
Then there were his shudders of recognition.
Time after time he found himself knowing. They were like lightning flashes that mark a storm’s travelling path. He saw that other people moved this way too. Gabrielle and Santiago had trusted him with their safety in a moment’s decision. Adina had shown trust, in another flash.
*
Tomas wandered the grounds. He observed the guards on the walls and the bright orange candlelight in the chambers inside the wooden halls built through the castle’s centre. The more he read of the language of the world, the more he felt at home.
Would the toons be able to breach this castle? It was an image they knew. They had lived in it themselves. The humans were beginning to fight back with images, setting up reflections that would make the toons think they were fighting something of their own.
Yes, he thought, rather than fight we must hold up a mirror to them and show that every living thing has a reflection and a shadow. This would also show that everything reflected everything else, and that humans have always needed images. They needed dreams and their images of the other side of things. Sometimes
images were allowed admittance into our lives. This had to take time. If people were eternally confined to screens they wouldn’t be able to dream of more. Eventually the toons would have only themselves.
The wizard had tried to bring the worlds together too soon.
He had underestimated how the human world had added more to the language of the universe.
But, Tomas thought, why can’t I remember the wizard’s name?
Why had Adina looked at him in a way that said she knew him?
*
The wizard shuddered out of cloud into streaks of smoke.
The smoke turned to darkest grey with smears of black and white.
Through the encampment the screens quaked. The people who’d been turned into images shook too. They looked to the edges and to the frames that contained them. It seemed to those trapped in the flat realms that other dimensions had momentarily returned.
The toons vibrated with feelings that they couldn’t identify. They looked to one another, but none could express what was happening. They sniffed and blinked, stirring, trembling.
Communications were starting up again from outside the screens’ frames.
*
“Look, a mist rising out of nowhere,” a guard shouted from the tower in the morning.
“The mist is becoming a funnel,” another guard shouted from the south wall.
“The funnel has become a cloud in the shape of a fist,” still another guard announced from the same wall.
“There are fireflies all around a pillar of smoke,” said the guard in the tower gate.
People rushed towards the gate and towards the wall where the guards stood pointing outside.
“Who’s there?” the gate guard asked.
Cyrus led a rushing delegation of warriors, and Adina brought some of the older children, including Gabrielle and Santiago.
But many of the children held back.
“The toons have come,” a child whispered.
“There’s no army,” the guard from the tower proclaimed.
Everyone heard the relief in his voice.
“I see nothing else but the cloud,” another guard confirmed.
Tomas had joined them, though he had walked up to the walls slowly. Adina turned to him, noting his slower pace. Gabrielle and Santiago fell back from the others to be beside him. Nearly breathless from their dash to the gate with Adina and Cyrus and the warriors, the two saw that their protector had moved with what appeared like reluctance.
“You know who this is,” Gabrielle said in that casual way she liked to use.
“Yes,” Tomas said.
It was time to meet the maker of all that had transpired.
*
The cloud spoke: “I’ll tell you the future.”
His crackling voice sounded like charcoal firing up in the forge where the people had made their weapons.
By now everyone had climbed the narrow steps to the walls and towers, where they could see the hilltop and slope down to the valley and the forest behind. The cloud spoke like fire, and yet no one claimed later that they could smell fire or smoke. Some would say that they saw nothing but ashes inside the cloud.
Yet every person recoiled.
It was Cyrus who took it upon himself to reply.
“Who’s telling us of the future?”
“Ask him.” The smoke became a wisp that rose. It was soon a long pipe-like wrangle of black turning mist that seemed to join the sky and the earth.
“Who do you mean?”
“He knows. Make him come forward. He’ll tell you. He carries many secrets.”
The crowd on the walls grumbled and argued, but they knew who he meant.
Tomas hadn’t gone to the walls with the rest. He had headed directly for the one iron door set beside the gate, and from there, with the two children standing behind him he had listened to this first exchange between the humans and the wizard.
*
Gabrielle and Santiago felt the knight’s fear. Tomas had leaned towards the door to study the smoke through the slit. He hunched his shoulders, and he began to breathe heavily.
“What are you going to do?” Gabrielle asked.
“I’ll have to meet him.”
“I’m going with you,” Santiago said.
“Stay here. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Neither does Cyrus.”
“Tomas . . .” Adina started to say.
He looked at her, and again something in her eyes made him want to stay close to her. He hadn’t realized that she had accompanied them. He knew then that she would go out into the field with him and face whatever the cloud could become. But Tomas knew this wasn’t the time to confront that power yet. Still he had to go out.
*
The cloud roared to the people on the walls and in the towers.
“I promise you swift absorption. The human fact is done. You are the last. Why hold out? You know you can’t. I’ll take you to your people. You speak so much of community but love to exclude so many. Now you can all be the same on the same flat plane. Your future is on the screens. The universe belongs to us. We have leapt from the head of your narrow reality into our own. Come to me. It’s done.”
The people were silent, their hush from horror and awe. The wizard’s voice crackled loudly, sharply, like electricity around a faulting pole.
Suddenly they saw Tomas approach the cloud. He walked slowly across the field. He had no weapon, yet people would later say he moved with the courage of one who knew how to fight. He wore his chain mail gloves and tunic, and he seemed to glisten.
*
“Look at you.”
The voice sneered from the cloud.
“Do they know who you are?”
“I’m only learning that too,” said Tomas.
The cloud became smoke swallowing the knight.
On the ramparts and battlements of the castle the people muttered. The smoke had absorbed Tomas. Now the smoke turned into a whirlwind, churning up dust and dirt, leaves of grass and stray branches.
“How can anyone live in that storm?” Cyrus called out to no one in particular from his position on the wall.
The whirlwind was a tornado that somehow didn’t move. All around it there was sunlight and stillness, green hills and the lush colours of the valley. The tornado churned in a gritty fury that made the people watching blink and gape.
“Tomas,” a boy wailed.
“O please no, no,” a little girl prayed.
All along the walls the children who had followed Tomas began to cry.
*
“They’re crying for you. How cute.”
The whirlwind snared him in a tight embrace.
“They’ve claimed me. Called me human.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Inside the storm the voice had become a slow scratching growl.
“Have you told the children your story yet? Do they know I own you?”
“They don’t know anything about that. It’s only beginning to come back to me too.”
The storm gusted: “If you don’t know who you are, you know who I am. I’m them turned into a god and a god let loose. I’m all the energy of the invisible gods loosed in the world seeking revenge for being ignored. The toons rallied to me willingly. They were taken to be unreal, but they had been given energy through human invention. It was easy to make them powerful. When the humans weren’t looking – and they’re always looking in the wrong way, never paying attention – it was easy to get through.”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Who will you side with in the last fight?”
“The children.”
Tomas was amazed by his own defiance. “You don’t have a weapon to fight me,”
the storm said.
*
Inside the whirlwind Tomas felt presences.
He wanted to see through what had become a thick cloud.
Turning first to the right and then to the left he saw shadows. But the shadows weren’t toon
s.
“Gabrielle, Santiago. What’re you doing here?”
The cloud turned into a white mist, and the voice began to hiss. This sound surrounded them in the way that tides lap at an island.
Tomas felt their hands taking his.
“Ahhh,” the mist uttered. The sound became the hiss again, and quickly the children were cloaked by the eddying haze.
“We couldn’t leave you,” Gabrielle said as if she were describing something obvious.
“We thought you might need some help,” Santiago said.
“You’ve put yourselves in terrible danger.”
The mist said: “Not this time. You have a message to bear.”
The children shared a thought, how could they take a message back to their people?
*
On the walls the people shouted. They had watched the two children scramble out of the door and then rush towards the whirlwind that had absorbed Tomas. They saw the cloud swirl and flash and become softer and quieter and rise and absorb them too. Many people wanted to leave the castle to help. Cyrus restrained them.
“Something’s going on here. Watch, wait.”
His suspicions about Tomas had deepened. This so-called knight was one of the toons. Perhaps they’d found a way to deceive the code and to cast greater illusions into their minds. They’d admitted him. Now Gabrielle and Santiago were about to be captured and placed in the entrapment of the screens.
Cyrus cautioned the others.
“Watch, wait,” he repeated. In the pressure of the moment he found a deep calm. He was studying what was happening.
Yet through his calm he thought the end was coming.
*
“Tell them,” the smoke growled. “Go back and tell them of their dim knowledge and their useless information. Tell them of cartoons and images, of things that aren’t human. Tell them of the lightning that speaks and the smoke that changes shape. Ask them what are you in this new universe? They’re the dregs of the old cosmos. Tell them the triumph of the unhuman is almost complete. I speak from the heart of electricity and the DNA of images. Tell them their pixel fantasies have become fierce.”
