There in the swirling ether, between the black portal and the ruins of my future, I am trapped in the death tangle of my arcane foe, my mind washed in the madness of battle. As he pulls upon my tendrils, flesh and sinew beginning to tear, I howl a fanatic cry of violence.

  “Graaagh!”

  I pull the dark monstrosity from his wicked doorway. His thousands of eyes go wide with shock. I open my mighty maw, face singed by lightning, and sink my terrible needle teeth into his hell-black skin, green blood gushing from the wounds torn by my assault.

  “Yes!” he cries. “Embrace the horror! You truly are a monster, Jack Wolfgang!”

  No!

  The one word brings silence to the roaring tempest in my mind.

  I slip free the tendril holding the model, hosting my key to victory high above the fight.

  “I … will … not … yield!”

  He pulls harder on my tendrils, his hell-black, hideous mass painted green with his gushing blood.

  “Take a deep, Jack Wolfgang. This is about to hurt.”

  “No!”

  Finally, my purple flesh and red sinews give way. He rips half a dozen or more tendrils from my body, loosing my own green fountains of blood to gush into the ether.

  “Graaagh!”

  He wraps his tendrils even tighter around me.

  “I warned you. It will all be over soon, Jack, and then it will truly begin! Embrace it! Embrace madness. Let not the bounds of this reality cage you any longer. Let the eldritch truths define you. Embrace. Your. Destiny!”

  “Nooo!”

  I open my mouth as wide as I can beneath the crushing weight of his enveloping tendril, but I have reached my limit: the red haze in my vision completely blinds me.

  “Kyrie eleison!”

  We rattle as if hammered by artillery, and clarity returns to me for a moment. I reach into my mouth and down into my insides. When I have grasped what I can, I pull and vomit the innards out, sending my new body, no larger than a basketball, flying up above the monstrosity.

  “Molt and Bolt!”

  A bolt of white, psychic lightning rains down onto my old body, amplifying the power of the psychic electricity, sending it throughout both eldritch horrors. The tendril holding the model café, as straight and tall as the mast of a ship, jerks loose as electricity runs up it, leaving the model floating in the ether. I race to grab it.

  Worked perfectly. Just how I’d imagined.

  “I’m going to do you a favor, Jack,” says Dave, looking up at me then back at the horrors writhing in electrified pain.

  “Another one? I think I owe you too much already. In a sense, you’ve saved my life.”

  “Not yet, I haven’t. But if you’d repay me, pay that debt to another man. Live your life as though at any moment death could take you. Live with every fiber of your being devoted to caring for those around you, to continuing to seek the truth and beauty in all things, and most of all, live always in utter adoration of the source of all Good. Be humble, Jack Wolfgang, and you’ll find your way through the snares of Hell.”

  “I don’t like what you’re hinting at, Dave. Why do I get the feeling you’re saying goodbye?”

  He presses his palms together as if to pray again. “I’m going to shut this door. I’m going to hold it shut until you find a way to seal it yourself and open the other.”

  “The kintsugi one?”

  “Yes. For now, this is goodbye, but I’ll always be near, Jack. You can count on it.”

  I turn around. The massive stone door with its golden seams has taken the place of the ruins and faces the black portal; they are like two prize fighters facing off before their match, before dire combat for an ultimate title.

  Kintsugi.

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  “Kyrie eleison! Begone from this mind, eldritch horror!” cries Dave as he makes the sign of the cross again, white energy gathering around him into a glowing aura like a gas torch. “Kyrie eleison! Your time has not yet come! In the name of El Shaddai, you will torture this man no longer!”

  “Haha, I am no demon. You can’t scare me with your prayers. What is written is written. He will become—”

  “As he chooses!” cries Dave as he jets forward in a blinding flash and collides with the two masses of tendrils like a bright meteor, knocking the white lighting from them like dust from a rug. The black doors begin to grind and slowly swing shut as he presses the monstrosity and the macabre, tangling mass of entrails and tendrils that used to be me, forcing them back into the dark portal. My old body rips apart even further under the duress of Dave’s bright assault, dissipating into the ether.

  ‘Au revoir then, Jack Wolfgang. And we will meet again.’

  Maybe we can sit down and talk over a drink. You seem to have some knots to untie.

  ‘Mwahaha! I do so miss that sense of humor. It’s worth the trade though.’

  Miss?

  “Kyrie eleison! Theotokos, pray for me! Iesous Christos, my Lord, witness me! Who is like You?!”

  “Dave!”

  “Stay back!” he glares at me over his shoulder. Sweat drips from his brow, and his brows softens, his eyes giving me the look of an old friend. “Let me make this sacrifice. I’ve sat in reserve long enough. Don’t let this be in vain for you, brother. You’re going to make it! Put it all on your back! Carry that weight!”

  Still pressing the assault, Dave forces the hell-black beast into the black portal. With yet another cry of “Kyrie eleison!” he passes the threshold out of the ether and into the dark. Slowly, with the grinding of stone resounding throughout the mindscape, the dark doors continue to close behind him. Through the crack that grows ever tighter, I hear his triumphant, joyful chant, a resounding song of victory that comes to me as if a whisper.

  “Christos anesti ek nekron! Thanatos thanaton patisas…”

  The doors close. A golden light appears across them as a seal: the cross, a symbol of victory over death by death.

  “What are you, Dave?”

  I don’t know how long I floated there in the ether between the two doors. Golden crosses shined on both of them.

  I wonder if there’s a third door in between these. Who knows?

  I’ve got to find my way out of here I thought. Dave kind of left me hanging on that one. Must be pretty simple then. I guess this is all a sort of dream. How do you wake up from a dream?

  Pinch yourself, right?

  I look down at my tendrils.

  Maybe if I just imagine I have hands…

  Then I realize it’s quiet. There’s a warm breeze and a golden glitter in the ether.

  Maybe I don’t rush. Maybe I just enjoy the moment. I don’t know if I’ll ever see this place again. This is the kind of thing men read books about and dream of happening, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know; never read too many books. Well… That’s not true. I used to read a lot. When I was young. When I believed in something.

  Reading is a kind of thing you do when you want the moment to last. Sometimes. When the day is just right. Or the night. When everything is calm and cozy, and you have a chance to breathe and be alive. It’s a sort of induced dreaming that the most skilled can do to transcend the mundane world to go on journeys of the spirit, to shape their soul in ways they never would have been able to in their daily lives.

  Damn. I sound like a writer. I hate writers. Bunch of lazy, no good…

  I guess the moment is over isn’t it.

  I’m back at shore of the lake. The dark sky twinkles with starlight overhead. The waterfall rushes behind, sending a cool breeze across my back. In front of me, a robot beeps and boops and whirs, tilting from one foot to another while swinging his arms and spinning his head.

  Roger stops when he sees I’m awake. We endure a silent moment.

  “Mr. Wolfgang. You are back.”

  “Were you … dancing?

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I find it pleasant.”

  “Fair enough. A little exercise does a man well. Can’t see how it wouldn’t help a robot. How long have you been waiting?”

  “If you are asking how long it has been since yourself and Mr. Dave entered your mind in astral meditation, I cannot say. The internal battery for my clock has run dry.”

  “You mean you can’t tell time?”

  “Correct.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Where is Mr. Dave?”

  “He’s… Hard to say, but he’s not exactly coming back any time soon.”

  “Oh dear. He has not perished, has he?”

  “I hope not. But, in a way, I guess he has. He sacrificed himself for both of us.”

  “That is irrational. He is not a machine. Machine’s are designed to perish at the command of their masters. How could he perish? Were you his master? Did you tell him to perish?”

  “What? No. That’s… Look, tin can. I’m not your ‘master.’ I don’t want you ‘perishing’ for me. We’re more like… buddies. If anything happens, I want you to go on and live… continue to function in a way which is sufficient to my desires. I want you to go out into the stars and help people or something. Don’t die for my sake.” Let me do that for you. It’s the least I can do to pay Dave back.

  “Why would you say such a thing? I still do not understand Dave’s reasoning which motivated his act of ‘sacrifice.’”

  “It’s something called love, little guy. We biological types have trouble comprehending it, too. It just makes sense to us, more or less. And you hope you live the kind of life where it makes more sense at the end than it did at the beginning. That means you did a thing or two right.”

  “Beep-boop. Understood.”

  “Really?”

  “Beep-boop. No, but my analysis of the conversation indicates that further questioning will yield no results, so I will simply observe your behaviors until I do understand.”

  “You know, in its own way, that’s a pretty human thing to say.” Then, I realize I’m still holding it. “What? How did this thing come out of the dream with me? I just figured if I kept it, it would stick out in my memory.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a model of the café we’re about to build together.”

  Recommended music for this chapter: Partitio's Theme