Update (Patreon)

Hello everyone. I am alive. My flight was....not good but I made it to where I needed to go. That being said bad flights and re-adjusting really do exhaust you huh? Or maybe I'm just a weak traveler. Regardless. I promised a chapter on Sunday. I don't have it. At least not right now. It's mostly done but I'm about to collapse from exhaustion and am seeing double. So the chapter will be delayed until tomorrow.

 That sucks thought so instead I hope this revised chapter of a WIP of mine will tide you over. If your an older patron of mine you might have read it before, or if your obsessed and went through every post on this patreon you would have seen a doc titled Reborn Immortal. Well now it's tentatively called Dromomania which also sucks as a title but I like the meaning. Anyway, I'm rambling which should really say something about my current state. Here. Read and pick this apart to your hearts content while I take a power nap.

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Dromomania

Chapter 1: Leap

Basil was working a Saturday night shift when the fabric of reality ripped and left a hole of black nothingness where the dairy section used to be.

His manager, who had just warned him for pulling out his phone on the salesfloor, cursed and ducked behind the counters, dropping the cell phone she was talking into. The customers who had come in five minutes before closing for some ‘quick shopping’ screamed and scrambled out the automatic doors. The bisected coolers on either side of the hole teetered and spilled their contents of chocolate milk and orange juice with pulp into the thirsty void. The lights overhead flickered once before the store’s ancient wiring decided against plunging them into darkness today.

Basil stood stock still on the edge of reality. The hole stopped right before his feet, slicing off the tips of his sneakers. He had stepped back after stocking the whole milk, which most likely saved his life. Had he been any closer, he would have vanished along with his hard work.

He felt an empty pang at the thought of the lost milk. That was an hour of his life he wouldn’t get back.

He curled his now-exposed toes and carefully took a step back. The hole, or perhaps tear, was a better word? Basil didn’t really think something that reach eye height could be called a hole, but then again, if he were any good a geometry, he’d probably be working somewhere a little better than retail. Either way, it looked like someone had pinched two ends of the world and torn them open to reveal the fathomless abyss it had been covering up. At any moment, it felt like the portion of existence he stood on would collapse like cloth and pitch him into its depths. He took another step back.

He felt safer now. So it would be okay to gaze into the abyss, right? At the very least, he had to take a picture. Maybe even a selfie? The soft clicking of the phone camera broke the stillness that had settled over the store. He paused to consider a caption. “What in the Non-Euclidean?” Basil chuckled. That one was pretty good.

This was nice, Basil decided. It was too bad it didn’t happen eight hours earlier. The most amazing event in human history, and he still couldn’t get a day off from work. He stared into the deep. A sudden, inexplicable urge filled his chest, and he stepped forward.

His phone disappeared into the bottomless deep.

It was stupid, but he was satisfied. He couldn’t help but feel disappointed, though. As interesting as this was, it wasn’t really going to change his life. At the very least, something could crawl out of the hole. He could befriend it or fight it. He looked around for potential weapons and rated his odds of beating an eldritch abomination in a fistfight.

His manager crawled out from behind the counter. “What the fuck is that?”

“Dunno,” Basil shrugged. “What in the Non-Euclidean amirite?”

She stared at him like he had a second head. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, uh, nothing.”

His manager was about to stand next to him, saw how close he was to the hole, and stayed put. “Basil, step back.” She pulled out her phone with a flustered look. “We have to call someone. 911? Do they take calls like this? We have to tell the store manager too.”

“Do you think we’ll get a raise after this?” Basil asked. “I’d like my fifty cents back.”

His manager looked up from her phone. “I— I don’t think so? You should ask corporate.”

Well, the last time he asked corporate about why they didn’t keep his raise after the minimum wage was raised, they deflected with some argument about something something government. Sad as it was to say, this hole in reality was actually more statistically likely to occur than his job paying him what he was worth.

Something flashed in the corner of his eye. Something flashed in endless black. Shivers raced down his spine, and he leaned over to look at the light in the darkness.

A small blue dot.

It was so obvious now that he looked at it that he was surprised he didn’t see it before. It was impossible to tell what it was. An impossibly vast distance separated them. Yet just as impossibly, he knew what it was. He could feel it in his bones. A long-buried calling opened its eyes once more and screamed in a child’s voice.

A new world.

“Basil? Basil!”

Basil reached out to grab it and tipped over the edge. The abyss took him, and he embraced it, willing himself towards that far-off world.

Unfortunately, what lay beyond reality was more reality.

The fathomless void became the vacuum of space, and the vacuum of space became death. Basil desperately looked for his new world as the air was stolen from his lungs, and his saliva boiled in his mouth. His eyes dried out, and he couldn’t blink anymore.

On the verge of unconsciousness, he saw warring light instead.

One brilliant gold on his right and one silver-gray on his left. One bastion of unquestionable majesty that starlight paused and prostrated before. One so desolate and lifeless that the void of space looked habitable by comparison. Both lights were locked together in a swirl of endless killing and devouring, and Basil’s tumble through the void had dropped him right in the middle of their higher violence. Separated by hundreds of miles, the two living lights arrested his mind and pulled it in both directions. They saved him from blacking out. Now he would die awake. Suffocating in body and being torn apart in mind.

At the same moment, Basil noticed them. He was noticed in turn.

It had been but a few seconds since he was deposited into the vacuum of space and began to die of exposure. Another second since the lights noticed him. Then the golden light surged, spanning hundreds of miles in an instant, engulfing Basil and the sluggish silver light. Then the silence of space trembled with the horrible dying gasp of millions upon millions of insects.

“No!” The swarm roared in one voice of millions. “I am not reconciled! I will not fall like this. “Eastern Pole Emperor, this isn’t the end! And you.” A lance of silver light speared toward Basil with the momentum of inevitability. The golden light snuffed the lance out with unquestionable command. “Damn, you. Damn, all of you. I curse you. Let your finest moments turn to dust!”

The force of the silver light’s last words shattered space like it was so much glass and threatened to do worse to Basil if they reached him. They never did. The curse was turned away to a yellow star millions of miles away that dimmed and became cold and dead. The shattered space and the waiting horrors watching on the other side of the glass were put to order.  The world became gold, and Basil stopped dying, but not because he could breathe again or stopped boiling. He still suffered both, but a golden light burned through his body like fire and halted his lesser killers in their tracks. The light would not let him die, either from space or itself. He felt it now as it seared him even as it kept him alive. This was a power far beyond him.

Out of the formless light in front of him appeared a man—over seven feet in height, clothed in a robe of molten gold. A coiling dragon breached from the metal waters of the robe and defiantly roared before diving once more. Seven purple stars revolved around his head like a crown. Basil could not turn his eyes away. They burned in his skull, trying to contain the man’s image.

“How did you find your way here, We wonder?” The golden man mused. He did not speak any language Basil knew of, and yet his words echoed through his body and forced him to understand. “Did the aftershocks of Our fight extend into another reality?”

Basil did not answer him because he could not. Despite being spoken to, there was only room for one voice in this golden world.

“You seem to have fallen through a crack and found yourself here. Sheer happenstance, truly a twist of fate.” The golden man seemed amused. “Your sudden arrival distracted the Desolate Autumn Cicada Lord long enough for this emperor to land the decisive blow. That means you’ve helped slay an Immortal Emperor.” The golden man laughed, and the world of gold shook with his joy. “We dare say you’re the first mortal in the history of the Eight-Fold Universe to ever do so. Such an accomplishment deserves a reward. Do not fear. We shall return you to your home.”

Basil shook as the golden man’s promise reverberated within him. He would not go back. There was another place he had to go. Thus he committed sacrilege in a place that demanded obedience. With exhaustive effort, he somehow pulled his riveted eyes away from the golden man and gazed over his shoulder. This world of golden light blinded him to everything, but even so, he knew the place he had to go was there. The light searing him turned incandescent with rage at his impudence.

“Oh?” Just like that, Basil’s eyes were immediately fastened to the golden man once more. The golden light stilled under the command of its master. He casually looked over his shoulder as if the world Basil sought was just behind him instead of countless light years away. “You want to go there?”

Basil willed every ounce and feeling of his being into his burning eyes. Hoping against hope that he would understand.

The golden man smiled.

“Even an ant knows to reach for heaven. This is why We have yet to give up on humanity.” He pointed, and a drop of liquid gold flowed from his finger and shot into Basil’s forehead, and buried itself in his mind. “If you become a Golden Immortal, seek out the Court of Heavenly Triumph. If fate is kind, then we may meet again.”

With another swish of his finger, the golden man wrapped Basil in a cocoon of golden light and sent him hurtling off into space.

Within the golden cocoon, Basil watched the universe stretch and bend as it struggled to keep up with its speed. The longer his eyes stayed riveted on the sight of a lifetime, the better he could ignore the golden man’s power scouring his body. It reached into every cell and fiber of his being and destroyed them. That same destructive force then became a healing miracle and restored what it destroyed, saving him from itself before beginning the cycle anew. He could feel the power’s protectiveness and desire to carry him safely, but even an ant would be harmed by a giant’s gentleness, and he was less than an ant when compared to the golden man.

So he burned. He burned through the death of stars and the birth of planets. He burned through the horrors, incomprehensible in scale, that made their home in the dark of space. He burned through the cocoon slamming into a planet and burrowing through its core and out the other end. He burned through light and dark, gravity and time. He burned across a dawn horizon of 100 million suns.

He burned as his prize, that blue marble he had spotted an entire universe away, rose in orbit in front of him. So much like Earth with its blue waters and green continents but so utterly dwarfing his old home in scale. Basil burned as he passed its white crystal moon and the planet-sized tree that grew on its yellow sun. He laughed as he burned and entered its atmosphere and split apart its clouds. The divine power that carried him peeled away in layers and, like a dying meteor, grew thinner and thinner the closer it got to the surface. Eventually, only a film of golden light remained, and it gently set him on the surface with the force that cratered the ground beneath him and sparked an inferno that roared up and swallowed his view of the new world.

Basil blacked out with a smile in a bed of fire and dust.