by Scott Duff
I sat down beside him and gently put my arm on his shoulders. “Peter,” I whispered.
He jumped, startled. “Seth?” he whispered, peering over his arms with bloodshot eyes. “Oh, God, not again!” he cried out and shoved his head back down in his arms, sobbing harder. The darkness lit up when pictures the size of billboards appeared in the darkness all around us, millions of them all moving in a circle around us. They were all of me—at least, all framed around me. There was me in the Stone armor running past Ethan, me ducking his spell, me on the hood of the car as we drove through the neighborhood to get Ethan and Kieran. They went even further back in time to when he and his father stayed at my house in Savannah. Some centering on Ethan started showing up, then on Kieran. Then of his family. His family took a while, too. There were a few people I didn’t know. Over all, I’d say Peter had a very pleasant life by the looks of these pictures.
“Shh, Peter, it’ll be all right. You’re in a safe place now,” I whispered to him, squeezing his shoulders into me. He suddenly wrapped his arms around me and shoved his head against my chest, crying again. All I could do was hug him back and try to comfort him until he calmed down some.
That’s when the Stone snapped a solid shield wall around Peter and me. I looked up from Peter in the real world to see what the Stone had seen as threatening. Obviously, my sense of time was confused. We hadn’t even gotten off the field yet and it felt like I’d been working on Peter for at least thirty minutes now. Kieran and Ethan were facing away from me and were holding some serious power ready.
“Ehran, do you need me?” I asked, quietly. “I’m at a critical juncture here.”
“No, we can handle this,” Kieran answered without turning around. I couldn’t see who or what was at issue, but I asked the Swords to be ready regardless and loaded the Crossbow. I turned back to Peter and sank back into the darkness.
“Peter, buddy, we need to get you out of here,” I said quietly. “We need to get you back home with us.”
Peter laughed once. “You can drag people out of Hell, now?”
“Hell?” I asked, looking at the pictures floating around us. “Peter, this isn’t Hell. This is your cavern, your safe place. You just got stuck here when the Loa hurt you. Peter, you did so well. You are such a brave man but you got hurt so bad.”
“What do you mean, this is my cavern?” Peter asked. “Why can’t I do anything if this is my cavern? You talked like this would be a center of imagination, where I could do just about anything.” He sniffled. I almost laughed at him. It was endearing that he imagined himself being stuffed up after crying for so long in an imaginary place.
“Peter, you’ve been severely traumatized, for one thing,” I said, standing up and reaching for him to stand, too. “For another, you’ve been cut off from your magic, probably at very close to the same time as your intellect was hit. You’ve been cut off from yourself. But even without that kind of resource to draw on, look around you at what you’ve done here.” I wave my arm at the pictures still shining at us.
“My torment, you mean,” he said, huddling in on himself like he was cold. “Showing me everything I’ve lost.”
“Really? I thought it gave you reasons to live,” I said, surprised. “You’re normally so upbeat.”
“I’ve tried. Over one hundred and sixty three thousand things,” he said, sadly. “Anyway, you’re just a figment of my imagination. Seth doesn’t need to come for me. I’m nobody to him.”
“Peter, how can you say that?” I asked, shocked at the statement. “You’re just as important to me as Kieran and Ethan! I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.” This was getting frustrating. I was definitely not going into psychiatry for a living. This was too damn hard.
“I don’t know what to do here,” I said, scratching my imaginary head as I stared at Peter. He was still naked and hugging himself. I reached back along the path I’d created by my earlier passage and pulled the battery in to us. I pulled out about an inch of power from the battery and started stretching the power strand out more thinly.
“What’s that?” Peter asked, coming in a little closer. I felt that was a good sign, him showing interest in something.
“This is the battery that was in your hand,” I answered. “Mine are being used at the moment and I need some power to show you what I need to help you.”
“That’s ley line energy?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, forcing the image of Peter’s body onto the energy field with a translucency. Then I overlaid that image with an image of his aura.
“I’ve never seen it quite like this before,” he said. “It’s like you’re touching it.”
“You can. Here,” I said, tossing him a pinch off what I was still holding. “Make some clothes or something.” Peter played with the little ball of magic. I wanted to watch but other matters pressed for attention. I checked the image against the real image, a good match.
The Swords were starting to vibrate and hum in a low voice. Not a good sign.
“Peter, this is where I need your help,” I said. “We’re kind of on a deadline here. Kieran and Ethan are about to get into an argument with someone and we’re caught in the middle. Look here. Your body is working now. That, we got fixed. The problem is that your soul was also attacked: here, here, and here, specifically.” I pointed out the areas on the simulacrum I’d made.
“Why does it hurt to look at?” he asked, staring at the battery.
“I think it’s because it exists in more than three dimensions at a time,” I said, trying to stay calm. “Peter, please stay focused over here. I can’t bear to lose you again and if I don’t hurry, I will. Please, Peter.”
“You sound so much like the real Seth,” Peter said softly, chuckling a little.
“Dammit, Peter, would you see me for who I really am?” I shouted at him. There was a lot of emotion in that shout: grief, impatience, guilt, frustration, love, yearning, and so much more. I lost control and all the feelings I’d been capping and constraining came shooting out like a geyser. There was also power in it. A whole lot of power came bursting to the surface. Peter got to see my aura again, then, and how much it had changed. I didn’t know I had changed, other than going invisible to people. I could tell from his pictures, just before my outburst blasted them to needle thin shards.
Once I’d contained myself again, the only light in Peter’s cavern was the glow from the battery and a single picture floating slowly toward me from the distance. I didn’t see Peter immediately till he stood up behind the battery, hand on his head like he’d hit it on something. I had to wipe away tears. Imaginary or not, they made my vision blurry.
“Seth?” he mumbled. “Is that you?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you that, yes,” I said, helping him up.
“I can feel my body again,” he said, confused.
I pushed my senses out into the darkness. I was wrong before. It had a boundary, with “had” being the operative word. My outburst of power had pushed on the boundaries and started fractures that created pathways back to the rest of him.
“I’m not dead?” he asked.
“No, Peter, you’re not dead,” I answered, distracted. I wasn’t sure this was good or bad. I had increased the size of this space by my actions. Looking from the outside, I’d almost filled the gaps completely instead of building new paths and I didn’t know what that meant. And there were still two other areas to deal with yet. We needed to get off the field so I could talk to Kieran and Ethan about this. Maybe they knew what was happening. Maybe they could help.
“You are so beautiful,” Peter said, staring at me.
“What?” I said, startled at the statement.
“Your aura. It’s so bright and strong. So many colors swirling together. Not even your father’s is that bright,” he said, staring at me, eyes glazed over somewhat.
“Peter, I need to leave for a short while, to see what’s happening outside,” I said cautiously. “Will you be okay if I leave you
? I’ll be back. I promise.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. He cleared the glazed look out of his eyes and looked around at the emptiness. “I think I’m good now.”
I sighed in relief as I pulled back into my body and took a step back away from Peter. Then I looked around to take in what was happening on the field around me. It was not an easy sight, being surrounded by a high-ranking caste of warrior elves. Two, actually, with one on each side. Winter faced Kieran and Summer faced Ethan. It looked like both groups had just backed up a few steps, though I didn’t know why. The Princesses of each group stood firm though, unimpressed by whatever had shocked their fighters.
“The Day Sword belongs to the Seelie, McClure. Give it back. Now,” said the Summer Princess to Kieran’s back. Though she faced Ethan, the argument was with Kieran. Her presence was fiery, literally—the grass was on fire around her.
“And the Night to Winter,” screeched the Unseelie Princess, standing on an icy plate. “I tire of this. Take them.”
My cue if I’d ever heard one. I knew that the Stone was going to be an extremely powerful tool and I was seriously having a love affair with it and its force fields. The ‘m’ was still reverberating in her mouth when I grabbed both the Princesses with the Stone’s power and jerked them to me while knocking every member of their teams’ feet out from under them and shoving their shoulders forward into the ground and not letting up. I held both of them tightly in front of me motionless with both Swords out barely an inch from their chins, Night to Winter, Day to Summer. Barely a quarter of a second had passed.
“What the Hell is wrong with you bitches?” I yelled. I saw Kieran and Ethan whirl around. “We just came out of a fight! Five to one, for God’s sake. And you, two of the most powerful beings in the Shadowlands, chose now to pick a fight? When it’s two against fifty? When they’re both exhausted from trying to help a fallen friend? How cowardly can you get? Just… get out of my sight!”
Then I just threw them over the walls. I figured they were strong enough that they’d handle the fall somehow. Didn’t really care that much, either. I let the other elves up, too. I put the Swords away. I got the feeling they were enjoying the day immensely.
“Leave, or I’ll toss y’all out, too,” I said without looking at them. It may have looked like I wasn’t paying attention, but that would have been a mistake. I was aware of where they were and what they were doing. So were Kieran and Ethan and each of them still had a dozen or so heavy spells loaded and ready. Vicious looking magic that I definitely did not want to face. It was no wonder that they took out the lion’s share of the Loa. Damn, Peter and I were so lucky.
The crowd noise in the Arena tripled with stamping and yelling. I really couldn’t tell if it was approval or disapproval. It was just loud. I sat down beside the stretcher and held on to Peter’s arm and hand again. Ethan started dismantling his builds, smiling and shaking his head as he looked around warily. Kieran was doing the same thing, but he looked like he was actually laughing every once in a while. I pushed out onto the astral again and into Peter’s cavern. I had to pull back once to reorient myself—Peter was busy while I was pitching a hissy fit.
Peter’s floor was a grid of black reflective tile lined in yellow every two feet. He had created a lane through the tile using pictures of his life, though calling them pictures was an injustice. They were links into his memories, heuristics really. That’s how my mind comprehended what his mind was doing here. It was interesting to me that I just grasped this without being taught, how much of this was purely instinctive. I was about to pour some speed on and rush through Peter’s life when I noticed an odd little twitch in the structure of the path. It wasn’t much, really, just a slight turn that made me feel like a he’d skipped ahead a few days.
So I kept walking, instead of running through at the speed of thought. It made me feel very uncomfortable, like I was spying on him. I didn’t notice anything else that felt or looked wrong as I walked through his life and I was getting more uncomfortable with spying. When I got to his eighth birthday and I was once again going to rush through, it happened again: a little twist in the path. Except it was such a little twist this time. This time it was like watching a movie with a number of frames removed. Removed. That’s what he’s doing, he’s removing memories he doesn’t want.
“Peter, what are you doing?” I called out to the darkness.
“Seth! You came back!” said Peter, beaming at me, appearing in front of me on the grid as I looked at his eighth birthday party.
“I told you I would,” I said, smiling back at him. “But what are you doing here?”
“Well, it looked like the easiest way to rebuild the links through to the two areas that the Loa attacked would be to realign the experiences that caused the links in the first place.”
“That makes a certain amount of sense,” I agreed, carefully.
“I’m lining up the experiences,” he said with nonchalance.
“Why have you edited them?” I asked.
“What?” he asked, feigning surprise. It even showed in his aura outside. It was a very good job of faking it. I might have been fooled if I hadn’t been so recently intimately aware of Peter. I must handle this very, very carefully. Peter was very fragile right now.
“Peter, why are you editing your memories?” I asked again, softly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped at me.
This was not good. I started us walking again through his life with pictures.
“Okay. Okay,” I said, as soothingly as I could muster. “What do you think we need to do now?”
“I just need you to push the experiences through the two masses at the same time,” he said, smiling beatifically at me. He was putting on quite a show. “It… hurt when I tried and I lost concentration too easily.”
Yeah, I bet it did. We were up to sixteen and the twists were more obvious with missing time periods. Even conversations that seemed totally unrelated had sound dropouts in them. Phone lists were blurred. Correspondence and e-mails looked like de-classified government documents with abundant redactions. He was very thorough in whatever he was trying to excise.
Then around his twentieth birthday, there was a three-month period that was totally blocked out, just before he and his father came to Savannah. Then the cutouts got just plain strange. He’d cut a few seconds or minutes out. I knew because I was in them and I remembered them myself. I listened in on conversation between his father and him about how they weren’t supposed to do anything with magic while they were around me because my father asked them not to but neither knew why, just that it was important to my parents. They both thought it very odd for them, but conceded. Then I’d watch Peter sneak glances at me but block the pictures out. Strange. Not constantly, just sometimes. Then they left and the cutouts and drop-offs declined. There were periods over the next three years where they’d spike some, but nothing like in Savannah or his sixteenth birthday. I didn’t know what to make of it.
We came out of his “Walk of Life” to the simulacrum floating in space. I examined the models briefly, seeing what Peter had planned.
“It looks like it will work to me,” I said mildly, but not really knowing for certain. I was still uneasy about what I’d seen him doing and wished I had more time and a lot more help in the decision making. Peter needed access to his intellectual and emotional centers to see what he was doing was wrong. He wasn’t completely there yet, working with half remembered thoughts and wishes in a deeply complex subconscious mind. He had access to his memories, obviously, but there was a facet of himself he didn’t like or want that he thought he could eliminate. I neither knew if this would do it or if it was a good idea to try.
“Okay, Peter, let’s give this a try, then,” I said. I tugged a little power out of the battery in Peter’s cavern, a thin blue strand for health and broke it into two, stretching and twining the two pieces between my fingers. Walking back to the representation of Peter’s life, I pus
hed the ends down at the present end of Peter’s life and paused, looking down the long path back.
I turned to Peter as he watched me anxiously. I had a decision to make that I was definitely not qualified to make, morally or ethically. But I wanted my friend back. “Peter, I love you for you and I want you back. Not some robot you created. I hope you can forgive me for this.”
I raced down the path, retrieving every erased memory, every dropped sound, and every blacked-out and blurred character of text that Peter had made and dropped the blue strings of power at his first memory and slammed my power into place in the damaged places in Peter’s soul with every drop of care and concern I could muster. Then I backed out of him.
Looking down at his prone body, there was still damage to those three areas, but it was connected now and working together. He was traumatized, to be sure. His uniform was a bloody mess. Right now, he looked like he was sleeping. He sighed, then, and rolled over on his right side, tightening his hold on my hand as he did.
The field suddenly got quiet as a squad of referees surrounded us. I stood as they lifted the litter and escorted us off the field quickly. Kieran took one side of me with Ethan on the other side of Peter until we came to the entrance, then Kieran took the lead, with Ethan at the rear. They led us back to the locker room, transferring Peter to a raised table that wasn’t there before.
Ethan and Kieran started undressing Peter, getting the bloody uniform off of him. I ran Kieran off. “You’re exhausted,” I said. “Go. Sit down and eat something. We can get this.”
“You’re one to talk,” he muttered, but headed for the food anyway. Ethan just chuckled and kept struggling with Peter’s arm and shirt, trying not to jostle him much.
