Cassandra Pendragon
Apparently neither one of them had even considered the possibility, at least if the dumbfounded silence, followed by a barrage of questions I couldn't answer, was any indication. Unfortunately there wasn't much for me to tell. Retrospectively, I would not even have mentioned the similarity, if I had thought about it for longer than the fraction of a second. Oh well…
"I understand your curiosity," I finally cut the conversation short, "but there isn't much to do either way. Once you return you can pester him all you want, but playing the guessing game won't amount to much. I'm sorry, I should've kept my mouth shut."
"You aren't even sure," Yueji asked with a valiant attempt at keeping her anger at bay. Not that I blamed her.
"Sure," I sighed, "I'm not sure, but it's more than just his fur colour. I can see much… I'm not wrong. You've spent much time with someone closely related to him. Your magic still remembers what she felt like. It stirred, as if to welcome him, when first you met. If you can't put it from your mind, you'll have to follow him and ask. I can't answer your questions."
"As if," the dragoness snarled contemptuously. "If anything happened to you, Lin would make my life a living hell from now on."
"I don't know if I should feel flattered or insulted… doesn't matter." I squared my shoulders and steeled my resolve for the umpteenth time. It really was true. The more you were dreading something, the better it was to get it over with. Its shadow would only grow in your mind until it seemed insurmountable and I was decently sure that a whole bunch of unpleasantries would be waiting for me behind the door, whether imagined or not. In the deepest levels at the very latest. "I can't wait for the horse month of the monkey year. Come on. With a little luck you can interrogate the fox in a day or two."
"And with a little bad luck," Lin whispered under her breath, even though my ears still picked it up. I chose not to reply regardless. Whatever would I have said? Death? Destruction? Chaos? The fucking end of the world? Luckily Yueji was a bit more pragmatic. Just as I extended my hand and forced the tips of my fingers through the pitch black veil I heard her say:
"Better not dwell on it. If we encounter something she can't deal with, our home will most likely be doomed anyways."
"Great… a few hours ago I even hoped we'd be sharing a cup of tea by now. Am I just…" I never got to find out what she meant, since I passed through the door right that moment and her voice simply vanished, as if I had taken a step of several miles. On the plus side, without the obscuring darkness in my way, I could finally see what the caves had turned into.
"I'll be damned," I breathed, the tips of my tails twitching. "I didn't even see a white rabbit." References to literature aside, Alice must still have felt the exact same way when the rabbit hole had given way to Wonderland. I had expected another tunnel, maybe decorated with a few glowing mushrooms or strange, deformed insects, but I'd never have imagined a floodplain landscape, little ponds and streams included.
For all intent and purposes I had just appeared from a massive boulder in a stone circle on top of a hill, which immediately reminded me of Stonehenge. My feet were sinking into the wet, verdant earth, the smell of nature was wafting around my nose and the song of birds was loud in the air, while my gaze could travel miles and miles in every direction. The comparison to Southern England or maybe even Ireland imposed itself even further when I followed one of the uncounted brooks with my eyes.
Its meandering path touched groves and cut through blossoming valleys until it vanished into the cooling shade of a light flooded forest. Animals played and drank along its banks, entirely oblivious, or rather undisturbed, by my appearance. If it hadn't been for the admittedly strange colours and even stranger forms of the flora and fauna, I'd have thought I had stumbled back into the real world. Clovers quivered in the light, warm breeze, but their stems were purple and their leafs a deep, dark blue. Rabbits with protruding tusks the size of an arm nibbled away at their glowing, pink buds, while flocks of birds, feathered with magnificent, dazzling colours, soared through the sky and sang an alien melody, that reminded me of the melancholic voice of a nightingale, except that the flying musicians overhead were roughly the size of vultures.
I breathed in deeply and savoured the enticing, fresh smell of a brave new world when Yueji stumbled through the portal. As you might imagine, the appearance of a creature the size of an airplane didn't go over without a hitch and we immediately found ourselves in a rather awkward position, where she was trying to navigate her coils so she'd neither squash me, nor topple over the stones. Suffice it to say the the next half minute or so was mainly filled with curses on my side and apologies and exhausted grunts on hers. When her human companion was added to the mix, a few of the boulders, which had stood for the gods alone knew how long, finally gave in. In the end, half of the pylons were lying on the ground and the earth was furrowed with the signs of Yueji's struggles.
"Lin, could you please get off my tail," I groaned exasperatedly when we weren't in immediate danger of being flattened under tons of muscles, sinew and gems anymore.
"Sorry," she mumbled and rolled away. Luckily my eight appendages were plenty padded, so I hadn't broken a single one.
"No matter," I replied distractedly, while I gingerly bent one of my tails the other way to stretch the mistreated limb. "I'm still in one piece, I think. What about you?"
"Feels like I've lost a few pounds, but I'll live." Her joints cracked when she scrambled to her feet and looked around, her eyes going wide. "By the nine heavens, we truly are frogs in a well." In case you haven't yet trudged your way through a sufficient amount of eastern fantasy: the idiom refers to being ignorant of the wider world, like a frog in a well, who can only see a small fraction of the open sky.
"Each horizon is a new beginning," I muttered and finally stopped nursing my bruises. "But I have to admit, I didn't expect this much to happen in a short decade. Usually… wait." Under the incredulous gaze of my companions I plucked a bright yellow blade of grass from the ground and crushed it between my teeth. It was chock full of magic, but the important part was, that it tasted old. Ancient even. The plant itself wasn't older than a few weeks, but the energy it had absorbed from the environment was. And I wasn't talking about decades here, I meant centuries.
The curses that escaped me were uttered in the kitsune language, but my inflection still made it plenty obvious. Before either could voice a question I explained: "just accept what I'm going to tell you. Time, just like space, is a limit defined by a set of pretty narrow rules. Those are crumbling and the gaps become wider the further we go. On Gaya herself the dilations aren't problematic for now, but they can already be felt in your realm. Time is passing much faster for you and it gets worse the deeper we get into the caves. A minute here equals ten or more outside. Who knows how bad it'll get close to the actual gate… shit. Years might pass while we're stuck down here." I squinted my eyes against the bright, blue sky. Only the colour and amount of suns was different. There were three, one an angry red, one a warm yellow and the third a sickly green.
My perception expanded and I nibbled on my lower lip, lost in thought. "I could forcefully adjust the passage of time," I mused without expecting a reply. That'd have been tantamount to asking a monkey for the nontrivial solutions to the Riemann function. Talking out loud was just my way of shutting them up for the moment. And it worked, boy did it work. They didn't even move a muscle. "Worst case… the realm's structure can't stand the pressure and explodes. Not the best idea, then. Slow everything down… maybe it'd be enough to speed us up? To a velocity where time flows congruently to the outside world?" Then I paused. I had another problem.
My connection to Ahri was a transcendent link. Should I use it, it would align the time for her and me, regardless of my own intentions. I could simply choose to not use it, but if she was going to contact me, we would soon find out how sturdy this reality actually was. On the other hand, if my estimations weren't completely off the charts, not more than two and a half hours had passed on her side. It'd take her at least half a day to sort out whatever mess her ward had stumbled into. Ten hours… at least a few hundred over here and probably a few thousand close to the gate. I could accomplish much in a handful of days… not to mention a month. I'd have been able to fill hundreds of pages of my unwritten autobiography with the shit I was able to pull off in a month. Which meant I'd do nothing… which was a first. Sometimes it was just better to keep your grubby paws off the cake, though.
The scent of spilled blood tickled my nose and my eyes reflexively narrowed at the distance. A few hills over a creature, that looked like a cross between a mole and a rat gone bad, had ambushed one of the birds, a big, bright green one, and buried its finger long teeth in its neck. Unfortunately its teeth had crumbled against the iron hard plumage and now the bird was leisurely picking at its eyes, while its taloned foot carved deep, bleeding gashes into its pinkish hide. With a exuberant cry the long, bronze beak descended and vanished among a fountain of blood. A moment later the hapless mole stilled and the bird plucked a glowing, deep red stone from its mangled chest cavity. With a jerking motion the winged menace swallowed the gem and its feathers immediately became streaked with dark, purple veins.
"Girls," I began hesitantly, "I think the wildlife is off the menu. If you're hungry, tell me. I think I got enough food to last you for a while."
"What about you," Lin asked subduedly. She had spotted the all you can eat buffet as well.
"Don't need to eat. My body is even closer to pure magic than Yueji's. Immortal, remember?"
"Aren't you in luck, then," she continued with a forced smile. "I've progressed far enough that I don't need sustenance anymore. You can keep your little treasures all to yourself."
I shrugged. "Let's talk again in a few days, shall we?" Her yes went wide.
"Few days? Didn't you mention hours before?"
"I did… then pray tell, which way? Your guess is as good as mine. I can tell you that the energy becomes much thicker over there," I pointed east, "but unless you can see more than me, that's still a humongous chunk of land we have to explore."
"Can't you…," Yueji, still breathing heavily, interrupted, "I don't know what you did, but when you went after Baihe I could feel the strength of your gaze. Can't you find our destination like that?"
"Sure I can, if you have something for me to focus on. As it stands, I could expand my aura to cover the entire globule… how do you think that'd turn out? A tiny hint: that's what I'd have done, if I had wanted to stabilise the passage of time in here."
"Are you actually telling me that an immortal, a spiritual dragoness and a third stage cultivator have to walk their feet bloody, turning over every stone?"
"I hope it won't get that bad. Usually powerful things stand out, one way or the other. Like I said… east it is. Once something looks out of place… we'll have to see."
"Out of place," Lin echoed incredulously. "Like animals acting weirdly, or plants glowing with their own, innate energy?"
"I didn't know your culture was fond of sarcasm. May I remind you, it was your idea to come along and now I have to figure out how to explore this place without breaking neither it, nor you. Ah… and that's the first time I've cursed your existence." Not quite, yet, but we were getting there. "By the looks of it I can't even leave you alone." The pretty Asian recoiled when I spat at her feet. "It's just grass," I explained, "watch what happens when its sap touches anything, but my own flesh." Her confusion didn't last long. Greenish smoke immediately rose from the spot I had aimed at and when it had cleared, the acid had eaten away a head sized patch of earth. The actually unnerving part was, that the plants were still very much alive. Now they simply laid loosely in a shallow, jagged hole. I heard Yueji swallow, which sounded like a dam cracking.
"What would have happened to us, if…"
"Pain," I replied. "A hell of a lot of it. You would have survived, though… I think. No wonder the fox was convinced, he hadn't been followed. It'd take a special kind of stupidity to venture deep into this place willingly."
"Did you just insult yourself?"
"If I had a choice, I'd be far away right now. Probably somewhere with a beach and cocktails with little umbrellas. Maybe a spa resort with a decent whirlpool landscape and great coffee." Absentmindedly I plucked another blade of grass from the ground and held it up against the suns. "I've been wrong," I mumbled. "Some traces within that thing are even older than I thought."
"How can magic, or energy, even have an age," Lin asked quietly. "I thought its structure could change, but the thing itself is eternal, isn't it?"
"Nothing's truly eternal, but that's not what you wanted to know, is it? You're right, in a way, even though energy can get lost… it depends on your perspective, but that's a bit too much for now. What I meant is, I can actually see the imprint of more than a thousand years. The cycle of life is usually self sufficient, but the minor realms are constantly absorbing excess energy from Gaya herself. Some small… lets call them packages, have been here for longer than I thought. Chances are, if I look around for I while I'll find something even older. Which means the time dilations are worse than I feared. Look, think of time's structure as a stream. The metaphor is inadequate, but it fits in a sense, since it always takes the path of least resistance. Which means, the more pours into a place, the more time passes there…"
"The looser the boundaries are. This place is already on the brink of collapse," Yueji breathed. "By all the ancestors, how bad is going to be closer to the centre? Is there a chance that my home is already gone?" I really wanted to say no, but… I didn't know. For Yueji's family aeons might have passed, only since the fox spirit, we had met, had made its escape. As for possible refugees in case it had happened… no way. With the time stream surging in, nothing but an immortal would have survived. Shit… what about the nightmares, then? Was there actually a chance that my assault hadn't taken seconds, like it had looked from my side, but years and years? Had they had enough time to actually escape the pyre? If so… had they already come to the land of dreams?
"I don't know," I answered quietly, "but we will find out. I never planned on coming with you, to be honest. My goal is the gate itself, not your home, but it looks like I'll have you introduce me to your family after all. I… I'm not sure, but I might have had a hand… anyways, if there's a way, I'll try to help. We'll try to make it right."