AD
ASTRAAD
ASTRAJimmy "The Myth" Randall put the last of the mushrooms into his mouth, felt it dissolve on his tongue. His senses were already beginning to unfocus, to scatter -- but at the same time, to draw into an intensely tight focus, his sight boring a hole in reality. One day soon, he would pierce this veil of reality without the psilocybin, but for now, it was the only way to truly know (and therefore conquer in himself) the Other reality. The moonlit field began to shimmer, as though immersed in a heat wave instead of the cool summer night air whose breezes caressed his naked body and made his skin prickle. Jimmy had much to learn in the many Otherworlds, Lady Lorali had made that clear to him... he was weakening in this world of mundanity, this apparently meaningless world separated from spirituality and pure abstraction. He was losing his desire, his hold on divinity. That must not happen.
But such thoughts unraveled and burned up as the veil fell away from his eyes, revealing a dark velvet sky where the half-moon blazed supernally...the field glimmered like pale green satin, and tiny motes of light floated softly down from the racing silver clouds above. He reeled for a moment, drinking in the richness and sensuality of what had been a simple dusty field at night. His eyes felt like they were burning. The forest that had been a dark line in the distance now glowed with an aurora of brilliant colors, and he thought of one day walking there to see what played in those brilliant lights. The tall spirits of the cottonwoods swayed faintly, communing in hums and whispers he could not quite hear, and a wise owl flashed briefly as it flew across a field far away. Jimmy let his breath out, and felt his body swaying slightly. Was it the mushrooms, or the exhilaration of the sight?
Shaking himself out of reverie, Jimmy focused his mind once again with a supreme effort, and took the next step in what he had to do. He forced his mind deeper into the expansive effects of the drug, but with immense discipline so as not to get lost in it. He felt his consciousness unfold like a lotus, expanding beyond himself into the very air around him...the hums and whispers of the trees became audible to him, and he understood their words. He felt the veil that still clung to his body like spiderwebs, like plastic-wrap, clinging and suffocating him. His eyes had burned through it, but his body was still bound up in physical reality. His will focused again, this time on the veil that kept him from attaining pure spirituality and discarding for a moment the flesh that weighed him down. And now, before the fire of his will, that veil thinned and weakened, till it was so thin he knew he could tear it simply by moving. His voice rang out weirdly in the glade, a wordless tune that sounded to his ears like a bell underwater, and his mind followed the ripples of his voice outward, to see if there were any nearby who watched him, whose disbelief or will might keep him from his journey tonight. There were none.
Jimmy's eyes rolled back in his head. He drew the drug more deeply into his system, and nearly fell over as the world warped and rippled around him. The now-familiar burning sensation hit his gut, and he knew the flame would consume him entirely within minutes. It was a flame from within, sparked in the Kundalini, near his prostate, and it would spread outward from there, until it consumed his gut, his lungs, his heart, his throat, his head and eyes, and finally it would burst upward from his head like a firespout. And then he would be consumed. He felt it now, burning faster now, turning his clay flesh into spirit-matter, with a flame that burned but did not hurt, consumed but did not destroy. And as his flesh was transformed to spirit, it ceased to exist in the mortal world and began to exist wholly in the Otherworld, that shadowy realm that had so long entranced him. And then, as his eyes glazed over from the ecstasy of the transmutation, it was done. He was now in the Otherworld...or the first of many....
SKIP TO:
But Jimmy had left the moon-paths some time ago, having caught signs of his goal: the Totem-spirit Stormcrow, omenbringer and troublemaker. He had some connection to this totem, and felt urgently the need to understand that connection. So now he was on a high mountain-ridge that shone silvery in the Umbral shadows, following the correspondences of Stormcrow, far from the safety of the moon-paths. The Umbral Sun gleamed above him as well, small and dimly golden, since he had entered by day this time. He glanced around him as he paused, looking for signs of danger or attack, his magesight spreading outward as well. Nothing, as far as he could tell. But perhaps his quest would end here, since it looked like the trail ended a few hundred yards up the mountain. Stormcrow had flown, and this time there was no coincidental bridge or other means of ascending further to follow it. The sky pulsed and rippled troublingly.
The mage peered into the softly darkening sky, watching the glittering trail of the spirit's flight as it began to dim. He had been close. Now he was a long way from the place in this world where earth's reflection was -- he would have to wait until a proper time came again, until he had enough power to weave the charms and passions into the shapes that would protect him on this dangerous journey. His eyes caught sight of shapes moving in the forest below, swift, large. He frowned. Expanding his mind outward, he caught thoughts of rage and wildness... ill intent perhaps, but not pure maliciousness. Now what? Slowly, he began to move back down the trail wondering how he would defend himself. His methods defense thus far had been spells that distracted attention away from him, weavings that intimidated the smaller spirits. If these did not hold, Jimmy realized, he may well die today. He glanced down again, and saw that, inconceivably fast, the things had moved onto the mountain, and their huge forms were moving rapidly toward him. Soon he would be able to see what they looked like; he didn't want to.
He heard a noise then, suddenly...barking, a dog's barking. He glanced up the path, and saw a small white dog at the cliff's edge, gazing intently upward. It barked again, and Jimmy noticed that the air seemed thinner, the whole atmosphere suddenly strange. Then he saw what the spirit-dog was so intent on.
A huge, metallic spider-thing had clambered into a crevice from which it peered at them, its eight eyes glittering with an electrical blue light. As Jimmy saw it and stepped closer, his charms took effect, and both dog and spider fled. But as the spider scuttled up the mountain, Jimmy caught sight of something he had not seen before -- the faint glimmer of thin silver strands that were attached to a ledge high up, near the mountain's peak. The strands stretched upward, into the darkness, where if he squinted and used his magesight he could see what looked like a web. The Pattern Web! Peter had told him of it, but advised him not to seek it. It was a thing of stasis, and thus leaned more toward Technocracy territory...eerie howls rang through the Umbral canyon, indicating more of these wild creatures in the forest below. They would fear the webs, most likely. He began to climb the rock, inching toward the webs.
The spider had disappeared, and the strands were quivering. Jimmy grabbed one in each hand; it was strong as steel, and slightly tacky...easy to hold onto. He evaluated the mechanics of climbing, and then did so, with all his strength. He would not find Stormcrow, but he might survive. Soon the mountain was far below, and the large shapes that moved across it did not seem able to follow him. The strands had grown larger, and ahead of him he saw much larger strands glimmering in the moonlight, strands the size of his torso. Strange vibrations hummed through the strand he was shimmying up, and it began to level out; as it grew he eased himself up and began to walk. Casting his magesight ahead, he saw that many strands met in a nexus only a few hundred yards ahead. Perhaps one of the other strands would lead down again, to earth's Penumbra.
But when he reached the "crossroads," he realized there was something there. A grossly fat spider, much like the first but many times larger, sat perfectly still where the strands met and meshed, only its eyes flashing like static on a television. Many smaller spiders crawled on and around it like a swarming brood, and though they hadn't seemed to notice him, he began to feel distinctly unsafe. Perhaps these things were minions of the Union...he glanced back down his strand, and paled to realize that only darkness loomed below. He was much too far even from Stormcrow's airt.
A crackling noise brought his attention back to the crossroads. There was a distorted cloud of energy and light -- no, an image, a sort of hologram -- that hovered around the great spider and had just moved into Jimmy's line of sight. The ecstatic froze. The thing was humming with the same cold, tinny sound that the strands had vibrated with, and every once in awhile a face appeared among the strings of greenish data, the unmoving image of some cleft-chinned comic hero, of all things. Then the cloud of images halted, and Jimmy had the distinct impression he had been detected -- but before he could act, the hologram was before him, and the humming consolidated into words:
identify? a> nature; user, purpose self-id tamfly a>
"Um..." Perplexed, Jimmy shook his head. "You want my name?"
duh, flyboy a>
"...um, call me...Merlin." Don't give your name to anyone, Lorali had said.
yeah right...look merlin, get lost, i'm running a debugger. a> execute clearsys
"Look, I'd leave if I could. Tell me how to get outta here, and --" the webs began to buzz and vibrate, and the hologram-thing rose upward.
parameter spec? a>
"What? What's going on? I --" Jimmy glanced around him, looking for an escape route. The webs began swaying violently, and a sense of vertigo overwhelmed him.
a> none
running...
The crossroads shuddered, and Jimmy was flung into nothingness.