The Flectioneer
At just over twelve years of age, I have seen thousands of breathtaking spectacles and gruesome horrors. I have visited more places and encountered more struggles than any mortal of Earth would have experienced in one of their ephemeral lifetimes. Every week, sometimes every day, is somewhere new and exciting. I will spend one week climbing glittering towers on some airy, moonlit planet, and the next fighting for my life under a heartless, scalding sun that hovers only a few hundred miles above the chapped ground. Such is the life of a flectioneer, and though it does become exhausting at times, I wouldn't trade this life for every dimension I've ever visited.
Now, here I am, about to begin my next journey. Floating outside of reality has become just as comfortable for me as floating in the ocean. All around me is gold. Or, rather, that's what I think I can see in the total absence of time and space. Gold, the same metallic hue that runs through my veins and glints off the face of the mirror gripped tightly in my left hand. In this hollow, vast nothingness, I center myself in the feeling of the cold silver against my palm and fingers, and let my mind wander. Perhaps the experience is different for everyone; this might be my own special type of nonexistence and mine alone, the kind that only comes from being absorbed into a mirror, waiting for an instant eternity for it to choose where to go, and then -
I stumble a little, and my gaze snaps into focus on the ground in front of me as I regain my balance. My heart jumps slightly from the slight adrenaline rush, just like always, but it's nothing like the first time I traveled between worlds. That time, I had collapsed for several minutes, coughing as I tried to get breath moving through my lungs again, and nearly vomiting at the effect of the intense jolt on my stomach. I'm still rather embarrassed about how inept I once was, but I was only three, after all. Now, I just give my head a slight shake to clear it and look around to observe where I've landed.
So, this is Reality Number 2658. I seem to be in the midst of a few large, rolling hills. There's a nice tall line of conical trees a ways to the right and ahead, and a couple buildings to my left, interspersed with some shrubs and taller grass. Everything is still - calm, even. Everything except Daedalus, who begins squirming impatiently in my arms. He lets out a series of ringing barks, so I put him down and he bounds off dutifully across the field. Interdimensional travel has fortunately never been a problem for him, although I suppose that it was no lucky accident; it is an integral part of the type of mission he was designed for.
I set off at a jog to catch up with the brown, furry blur streaking across the hills, with a combination of eagerness and dread. If he has found something, it means we can stay longer, but it also means that, well, he's found something. I only feel a small amount of worry curl up in my stomach, though. How deadly could a bit of magical abnormality be in this place? I catch up soon enough, and the two of us make our way towards one of the buildings in the distance. A faint wind gently rustles the blades of grass on the hillside, and the pinprick of a sun just barely lightens the dusky, colorless sky.
Just a girl and her dog, out for a nice little walk in the park...
The thought makes me snicker. Earth's customs always interested me – that unit had been one entertaining and perplexing blip in a dull, interminable Planetary Studies course. A planet whose residents had become incredibly advanced in only a few hundred years – invented artificial electricity, automobiles, spaceships, the Internet, and even plastic in the space of less than half a millennium – but had never even thought up the concept of a linieration or managed to send one of their own to a different dimension. It was a rather backwards place, while it lasted, but endlessly amusing to read about a couple million years later. Sadly, that lesson had long since ended. I'd finished all the Planetary Studies material by the time I was sixteen months old.
The two of us arrive shortly at the aforementioned edifice. It is basically a huge gray-green box, altogether quite unremarkable, but I trust Daedalus's nose. I hold up my mirror – it hasn't left my hand; it rarely does – and place it against the building before me, with its face to the smooth wall. Effortlessly, even instinctively, I push my consciousness into the mirror and through, leaving my body temporarily behind.
The pulsing and pounding are the first things to come to my attention. I can hear music... powerful, energetic, loud music. My favorite type. It's echoing, through... hallways, that I can make out now, very plain hallways with odd lines all over the walls and floors. The whole scene is rather confusing to the eyes; it's almost impossible to tell where there's a wall and where there's a passage. Other than that, there is nothing but the beat, the synth, and the reverberating wail of the guitar.
I pull back into myself and grin, the familiar fizzing and tingling coursing up my arms and into my chest and head as I gaze at the wall. I take a step backwards. Now this shall be fun.
Daedalus barks, still waiting by my side, and I crouch to pick him up.
“Ready, Dae?” I ask brightly. He pants and wags his tail in anticipation. I take a breath, draw my left arm back, and begin my count.
One... A brief pause.
Two...
“Three!” My muscles tense as the word springs aloud from my lips, and I hurl my mirror at the wall forcefully. No hesitation; that's the key. My treasure soars through the air, until it is silently swallowed up by the blank wall, shrinking from sight in an instant. Though it's a thick wall, I can still hear the quiet clink of the mirror's metal rim echo through my mind as it lands on the floor on the other side, perfectly unharmed. I take a deep breath and brace myself.
“Go,” I say simply, envisioning what I must do, and the rest of the world vanishes just as suddenly. Another flash of non-reality, and then I return.
Inside, the first thing to appear before me is a pair of wide, yellow-gold eyes with silver pupils. It takes me a moment to readjust, and to realize that I'm staring at my own face. The whole wall reflects my image in perfect clarity. I look down at the floor, only to be met with the same familiar image. Through it all, the surfaces seem to vibrate, carrying the percussive music into the realm of sight as my face ripples like water in a stream.
A house of mirrors... Oddly appropriate.
I put down Daedalus, who is staring vacantly at his reflection, and snatch up my own, hand-held, golden looking glass. There isn't so much as a scratch on it, of course. As long as I am well, it remains flawless. I wipe it off carefully on my pants anyway and head down the corridor that the music seems to be resonating from, with Daedalus following behind.
The trip through a mostly-illusory world is fairly disorienting. A few times I turn sharply and nearly smack into my own startled visage, and I quickly learn to hold a hand out a few inches in front of me, just in case. Daedalus scrabbles over the slick glass surface, continually running into my heels, which doesn't make it any easier. Through it all, though, I sync my steps to the steady beat of the track playing, my mouth quirked up into a peculiar, sideways sort of smile.
After a while, though, the sheer volume is making me cringe. If someone else is controlling this music, they must be half deaf by now. More likely, it's part of the magical anomaly. I must be close by now, I think, but the twists and turns make it difficult to tell how far I've gotten. Finally, I pass through a gap and come to a sudden halt as I nearly run into... a person?
There are more than one – four, it looks like. They are perfect copies of one another – girls, or women, somewhere in between. They spin and jump in a slow, graceful dance, at exact odds with the guitar riff that is practically making my ears bleed. One passes in front of another, and I note that neither disappears from my sight. Ghosts, or memories, most likely both, held in place by magic alone. They continue their pattern, always in exact unison, never wavering or taking notice of my watching them. They see and hear nothing. They may as well be imaginary.
Daedalus barks loudly, trying to drown out the noise, and I remember my task. A quick swipe through one of their empty forms with my mirror, and they each turn to wisps of rosy light, which spiral around me and into the mirror's face until they are absorbed completely, stored safely inside. With their disappearance, the music fades, and there is a half-moment of complete, merciful silence.
Then there is a deep, groaning rumble, and my nerves jump. The far wall of the room begins to laboriously slide towards me, and the ceiling starts reaching for the ground. In a sliver of a second, I realize my mistake. The music and the dancers weren't the only anomaly. The entire building never physically existed. Now that its magical energy, the energy that served as its support beams, has disappeared, it will follow suit... and it would be all too happy to do so with me still inside it.
I bolt for the corridor, which has already begun to shrink closer than I am comfortable with. My shoulder strikes its own reflection as I make too wide a turn and hit a wall, but I continue to dash down the path that I am fairly sure is the correct one. Then I come to a dead end, and my mind freezes up.
It is at times like this that being a flectioneer becomes exhausting. I squeeze my eyes shut, panic rising in my chest.
Then I hear a curt yip, and whirl around to face Daedalus, who is standing at the end of the hallway. As soon as I take a step towards him, he swerves to the right and away, and I follow as fast as my legs can carry me.
I lose sight of him a couple of times, and my throat constricts every time he pauses in uncertainty, but I can somehow tell we're getting closer... or perhaps it's just wishful thinking. He slides into a corridor so narrow that I have to dive into it sideways. I scream over the deep creaking and rumbling as I feel the walls press against my nose and the back of my head at once. Then Daedalus skids to a stop at what looks like a final dead end and drags his front paws against it urgently. Before I can even think, I seize him around the middle, hurl my mirror over my head and through the wall, and shriek “GO!”
A silent, golden pause...
We both land hard on the grass as we are ejected from the surface of the mirror, which is still sailing through the sky. It clunks down on the soft dirt a second after Daedalus and I do, but I don't bother to go pick it up for several long moments. I lie on the springy grass, stare up at the distant sun, take a deep breath, and smile.
At just over twelve years of age, I have seen thousands of breathtaking spectacles and gruesome horrors. I have visited more places and encountered more struggles than any mortal of Earth would have experienced in one of their ephemeral lifetimes. Every week, sometimes every day, is somewhere new and exciting. I will spend one week climbing glittering towers on some airy, moonlit planet, and the next fighting for my life under a heartless, scalding sun that hovers only a few hundred miles above the chapped ground. Such is the life of a flectioneer, and though it does become exhausting at times, I wouldn't trade this life for every dimension I've ever visited.
Now, here I am, about to begin my next journey. Floating outside of reality has become just as comfortable for me as floating in the ocean. All around me is gold. Or, rather, that's what I think I can see in the total absence of time and space. Gold, the same metallic hue that runs through my veins and glints off the face of the mirror gripped tightly in my left hand. In this hollow, vast nothingness, I center myself in the feeling of the cold silver against my palm and fingers, and let my mind wander. Perhaps the experience is different for everyone; this might be my own special type of nonexistence and mine alone, the kind that only comes from being absorbed into a mirror, waiting for an instant eternity for it to choose where to go, and then -
I stumble a little, and my gaze snaps into focus on the ground in front of me as I regain my balance. My heart jumps slightly from the slight adrenaline rush, just like always, but it's nothing like the first time I traveled between worlds. That time, I had collapsed for several minutes, coughing as I tried to get breath moving through my lungs again, and nearly vomiting at the effect of the intense jolt on my stomach. I'm still rather embarrassed about how inept I once was, but I was only three, after all. Now, I just give my head a slight shake to clear it and look around to observe where I've landed.
So, this is Reality Number 2658. I seem to be in the midst of a few large, rolling hills. There's a nice tall line of conical trees a ways to the right and ahead, and a couple buildings to my left, interspersed with some shrubs and taller grass. Everything is still - calm, even. Everything except Daedalus, who begins squirming impatiently in my arms. He lets out a series of ringing barks, so I put him down and he bounds off dutifully across the field. Interdimensional travel has fortunately never been a problem for him, although I suppose that it was no lucky accident; it is an integral part of the type of mission he was designed for.
I set off at a jog to catch up with the brown, furry blur streaking across the hills, with a combination of eagerness and dread. If he has found something, it means we can stay longer, but it also means that, well, he's found something. I only feel a small amount of worry curl up in my stomach, though. How deadly could a bit of magical abnormality be in this place? I catch up soon enough, and the two of us make our way towards one of the buildings in the distance. A faint wind gently rustles the blades of grass on the hillside, and the pinprick of a sun just barely lightens the dusky, colorless sky.
Just a girl and her dog, out for a nice little walk in the park...
The thought makes me snicker. Earth's customs always interested me – that unit had been one entertaining and perplexing blip in a dull, interminable Planetary Studies course. A planet whose residents had become incredibly advanced in only a few hundred years – invented artificial electricity, automobiles, spaceships, the Internet, and even plastic in the space of less than half a millennium – but had never even thought up the concept of a linieration or managed to send one of their own to a different dimension. It was a rather backwards place, while it lasted, but endlessly amusing to read about a couple million years later. Sadly, that lesson had long since ended. I'd finished all the Planetary Studies material by the time I was sixteen months old.
The two of us arrive shortly at the aforementioned edifice. It is basically a huge gray-green box, altogether quite unremarkable, but I trust Daedalus's nose. I hold up my mirror – it hasn't left my hand; it rarely does – and place it against the building before me, with its face to the smooth wall. Effortlessly, even instinctively, I push my consciousness into the mirror and through, leaving my body temporarily behind.
The pulsing and pounding are the first things to come to my attention. I can hear music... powerful, energetic, loud music. My favorite type. It's echoing, through... hallways, that I can make out now, very plain hallways with odd lines all over the walls and floors. The whole scene is rather confusing to the eyes; it's almost impossible to tell where there's a wall and where there's a passage. Other than that, there is nothing but the beat, the synth, and the reverberating wail of the guitar.
I pull back into myself and grin, the familiar fizzing and tingling coursing up my arms and into my chest and head as I gaze at the wall. I take a step backwards. Now this shall be fun.
Daedalus barks, still waiting by my side, and I crouch to pick him up.
“Ready, Dae?” I ask brightly. He pants and wags his tail in anticipation. I take a breath, draw my left arm back, and begin my count.
One... A brief pause.
Two...
“Three!” My muscles tense as the word springs aloud from my lips, and I hurl my mirror at the wall forcefully. No hesitation; that's the key. My treasure soars through the air, until it is silently swallowed up by the blank wall, shrinking from sight in an instant. Though it's a thick wall, I can still hear the quiet clink of the mirror's metal rim echo through my mind as it lands on the floor on the other side, perfectly unharmed. I take a deep breath and brace myself.
“Go,” I say simply, envisioning what I must do, and the rest of the world vanishes just as suddenly. Another flash of non-reality, and then I return.
Inside, the first thing to appear before me is a pair of wide, yellow-gold eyes with silver pupils. It takes me a moment to readjust, and to realize that I'm staring at my own face. The whole wall reflects my image in perfect clarity. I look down at the floor, only to be met with the same familiar image. Through it all, the surfaces seem to vibrate, carrying the percussive music into the realm of sight as my face ripples like water in a stream.
A house of mirrors... Oddly appropriate.
I put down Daedalus, who is staring vacantly at his reflection, and snatch up my own, hand-held, golden looking glass. There isn't so much as a scratch on it, of course. As long as I am well, it remains flawless. I wipe it off carefully on my pants anyway and head down the corridor that the music seems to be resonating from, with Daedalus following behind.
The trip through a mostly-illusory world is fairly disorienting. A few times I turn sharply and nearly smack into my own startled visage, and I quickly learn to hold a hand out a few inches in front of me, just in case. Daedalus scrabbles over the slick glass surface, continually running into my heels, which doesn't make it any easier. Through it all, though, I sync my steps to the steady beat of the track playing, my mouth quirked up into a peculiar, sideways sort of smile.
After a while, though, the sheer volume is making me cringe. If someone else is controlling this music, they must be half deaf by now. More likely, it's part of the magical anomaly. I must be close by now, I think, but the twists and turns make it difficult to tell how far I've gotten. Finally, I pass through a gap and come to a sudden halt as I nearly run into... a person?
There are more than one – four, it looks like. They are perfect copies of one another – girls, or women, somewhere in between. They spin and jump in a slow, graceful dance, at exact odds with the guitar riff that is practically making my ears bleed. One passes in front of another, and I note that neither disappears from my sight. Ghosts, or memories, most likely both, held in place by magic alone. They continue their pattern, always in exact unison, never wavering or taking notice of my watching them. They see and hear nothing. They may as well be imaginary.
Daedalus barks loudly, trying to drown out the noise, and I remember my task. A quick swipe through one of their empty forms with my mirror, and they each turn to wisps of rosy light, which spiral around me and into the mirror's face until they are absorbed completely, stored safely inside. With their disappearance, the music fades, and there is a half-moment of complete, merciful silence.
Then there is a deep, groaning rumble, and my nerves jump. The far wall of the room begins to laboriously slide towards me, and the ceiling starts reaching for the ground. In a sliver of a second, I realize my mistake. The music and the dancers weren't the only anomaly. The entire building never physically existed. Now that its magical energy, the energy that served as its support beams, has disappeared, it will follow suit... and it would be all too happy to do so with me still inside it.
I bolt for the corridor, which has already begun to shrink closer than I am comfortable with. My shoulder strikes its own reflection as I make too wide a turn and hit a wall, but I continue to dash down the path that I am fairly sure is the correct one. Then I come to a dead end, and my mind freezes up.
It is at times like this that being a flectioneer becomes exhausting. I squeeze my eyes shut, panic rising in my chest.
Then I hear a curt yip, and whirl around to face Daedalus, who is standing at the end of the hallway. As soon as I take a step towards him, he swerves to the right and away, and I follow as fast as my legs can carry me.
I lose sight of him a couple of times, and my throat constricts every time he pauses in uncertainty, but I can somehow tell we're getting closer... or perhaps it's just wishful thinking. He slides into a corridor so narrow that I have to dive into it sideways. I scream over the deep creaking and rumbling as I feel the walls press against my nose and the back of my head at once. Then Daedalus skids to a stop at what looks like a final dead end and drags his front paws against it urgently. Before I can even think, I seize him around the middle, hurl my mirror over my head and through the wall, and shriek “GO!”
A silent, golden pause...
We both land hard on the grass as we are ejected from the surface of the mirror, which is still sailing through the sky. It clunks down on the soft dirt a second after Daedalus and I do, but I don't bother to go pick it up for several long moments. I lie on the springy grass, stare up at the distant sun, take a deep breath, and smile.