Fantasy In Miniature

There was still ice in the icehouse, thankfully. She found a nice, solid chunk of the right size and wrapped it in her shawl to take it back into her hut. She set the ice down on the table, then sat herself down. The herbs she’d left steeping in a leather mug were ready, so she drank the liquid and then tossed what was left, leather and all, onto the fire.

Wouldn’t do for anyone to find that. Would do even less for some curious soul to taste the dregs.

She gave it a few moments before she arranged herself, propping an arm up on the ice block and pointing one long finger towards the door. She had quicker herbs, but she was getting near the end of her life anyway and she had wanted to be certain her strength would not fail her while she still needed it.

And that she wouldn’t suffer. That was important.

The day was middling warm and they wouldn’t come to her hut until nightfall, she was sure of that. No matter how righteous they thought their deeds might be, there would be an instinctive understanding that some deeds are too dark for the day to witness.

They would come at night, when the ice had long since melted and her body had long since frozen, and she was sure they would have a few bad moments when they brought a light into her hovel and found her sightless eyes staring at them, her finger pointing accusingly at them.

Maybe they’d learn something about trusting a book over their own senses… or trusting what a vain man with fire in his eyes says about the book. She read the church tongue as well as many and better than most and she was sure it said “poisoner” and not “witch”. She had substances that could be called poisons, certainly, but most medicines were toxic. She only dispensed a fatal dose upon studied request, when it was needful for relief. She had never slain, never poisoned a body while it was still vital.

Until now. But witch or poisoner, the book said “suffer not”… and she would not suffer the indignity and pain of what they had in mind for her.

“Do you ever sit there and ask yourself, ‘Is this all there is?’” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “I ask myself that a lot.”

“Oh?”

“Like yesterday when I finished that carton of ice cream,” she said. “I think I said those words exactly.”

“You were asking me if that was all there was,” I said. “And actually, your exact words were ‘Is this all we have?’”

“I don’t understand the difference,” she said.

“Try living with yourself for a while.”

“Oh, I’ve done that,” she said. “It’s awesome.”

The light danced ahead of the child, winking through the darkness as it slipped between branches, illuminating a path known only to it. Sometimes it disappeared behind a trunk or a screen of pine boughs just long enough for her to worry that it had disappeared for good.

The child didn’t mean to follow. At first she’d only taken a step closer to confirm that the light was there, and then another to be sure. The next few feet had passed in assuring herself that the light was moving, and then a few more went by as she ascertained that it was moving away from her.

After that there were more cautious tests to see if the light moved when she moved, or if it was always moving on its own. They weren’t too cautious… if it wasn’t just moving when she moved, she didn’t want to lose sight of it. Not yet.

She wasn’t following it, though. She knew better than to follow strange lights in the dark forest, or even to step even a foot into the dark forest. She’d been warned about that.

She wasn’t following it… yet. A few dozen steps more and she would be, though. A few dozen steps more and the chase would be on. The wisp could take off, knowing that the child would follow as surely as a fish follows the hook in its mouth when the angler pulls it in to shore. It’s important to allow the child her caution at the beginning, because it makes her feel safe… safe enough to throw safety to the wind and be carried away on a mad dash through the woods to the wisp’s lair, where it would…

“Elizabeth!”

The mother’s voice—and it is unmistakably a mother’s voice—pierces the night air. The wisp briefly flickers down to a feeble green flame, a reaction that evokes an image of wincing.

Not now, not now… not when I’m so close.

“Elizabeth, you haven’t gone down to the forest’s edge again? What have I told you about that? You come home this instant!”

“Yes, mother,” the wisp responds, dimming its flame to an invisible white and skulking away, leaving a very confused child behind.

You come back into the bedroom after your shower. She’s already finished with hers, in the master bath, or else she hasn’t started it yet. More likely that, since for once you were the first one out of bed. You can hear the sounds of her getting ready for her day through the open door.

You’re about to go to her when you notice the blood on the pillow. It’s alarming how much of it there is, and more alarming that it’s still there. You’d think she would have taken the pillowcase off and thrown it in the hamper if she’d noticed.

Maybe a nosebleed in the middle of the night? It looks like a lot of blood but maybe it just spread around a lot. You go over to touch it and find that it’s still wet, and there are little shreds of something scattered around the head of the bed. Bits of tissue paper? You touch one. It feels weird… tougher than tissue paper. You’re reminded of the ragged edge around a popped blister, the ragged bit of… skin.

“Honey?” you say, growing seriously alarmed.

“Is that you?” she calls out. “I had an awful dream… I was trapped inside a face and couldn’t get out.”

“What?” you say, sure you misheard her. Her voice sounds weird and wet… not exactly muffled but not right. Maybe she’s brushing her teeth.

“Skin all over, I was drowning in it,” she says. “But then I woke up and everything was back to normal.”

Then she comes out of the bathroom.

She hadn’t meant to get old.

The years just kept passing without her permission, without any notice. They dropped little hints like holidays as often as they pleased, but they never stopped to tell her, “Oh, by the way, that’s another of us gone that you won’t be seeing again.” They never stopped at all.

The calendar of her mind was an endless progression of tomorrows stretching out into infinity, and it was full of appointments she’d made for some day, but the days slipped through her hands like water. One by one all the things she’d meant to do closed down, dried up, or moved away. She felt the loss of each one acutely, but never learned the skill of thinking of things as temporary additions to the universe.

Everything was permanent and eternal to her.

They just refused to stay.

She never learned to take things one day a time, but with a little effort, she learned not to take them personally.

The handcuffs snapped around his wrists, but one of the metal bracelets began to melt away into beads of silvery liquid on contact with his skin. The other fell right through his wrist, disturbing his flesh as much as a conjurer’s hand does a wisp of smoke, and that only momentarily.

“Terribly sorry, officers,” he said, brushing a stray bit of metal off his sleeve. “But as you can see, when I said I have immunity, I meant it… no laws you’ve heard about apply to me.”

The season turns. The leaves dry out and begin to fall, one by one at first and then in great sheafs. The monks come by daily… more often if the weather is wet… and carefully collect them by hand. To use a rake would be unthinkable. They collect them and carefully smooth them out, then begin the painstaking work of matching them up and ordering them.

Few of the pages are numbered.

Some are in languages that are unknown and untranslatable.

The monks regard these alien texts with no less reverence than the ones which contain useful knowledge in a readily accessible form, and though they can only guess at relationships among the pages from contexts, the make an earnest effort to order and bind them correctly all the same.

That they occasionally reap some practical benefits from the annual harvest of books is a secondary concern. The beauty of the illuminated pages impresses itself also upon the minds of the monks, but that is not what drives them, either. In drier years, the pages often lack color or ornamentation entirely, yet they are collected and curatedwith the same or more care than in more fruitful ages.

Collating and binding the pages is a duty. It is a sacred trust. Even the books they cannot use themselves are preserved with care against a future need they are sure will arise.

Where there is a book, the monks believe, there must be a reader.

The hand of God reached down and plucked the die from the stone table. The two chief angels watched. They did not breathe in the conventional sense, but if they did neither one would have dared. After all the arguing, the rebellion, the war… it had come down to this. The question would be settled once for all. Neither side was happy with the method of settlement, but they had no alternative. God had decreed that if either one questioned or complained once more on this issue, it would be decided in the other’s favor.

One chance. One die roll. They both knew the terms. If it came up odd, then humanity would be created with free will and would control their own fates, according to their means. If it came up even, then even the living corners of the cosmos would remain ordered solely according to God’s will, with every apparent choice nothing more than one more effect spiraling out from the ultimate cause.

God cupped the die in one almighty hand.

Absolute silence reigned as it was cast. It hit the table with a plunk, the only sound in the heavens at the moment. It rolled across the table and landed up against the Book of Life.

It had landed on its edge.

Perhaps a more discerning eye could detect some slight favor to the tilt, but to the angels’ eyes it was perfectly balanced exactly between two numbers.

God nodded, and behind the great screen, noted down a result.

“Well, that settles that,” God said. “I trust we can now move on to more important matters.”

He walks down the street with one hand in the pocket of his jacket, feeling the two little metal disks he carries there. They aren’t coins, though they’re each about the size and thickness of a quarter. One of them is blank and smooth, the other lined with whorls that make it look like a little hedge-maze or a thumbprint.

He found them when he was a child, almost fourteen years ago.

The plain one was in a box of Cracker Jacks… it was loose, and in addition to the little plastic-wrapped temporary tattoo that was there as the actual prize. His mother thought it had probably come off a machine at the packing plant and instructed him to throw the whole thing away, fearing contamination. He threw out the package and snack, but kept the disk. It didn’t feel like an accident to him. It felt… purposeful, though what that purpose might be he couldn’t guess until its scarred twin showed up in a box of Corn Pops six months later.

When the disks are touching each other, he feels calm and secure, utterly unflappable. When they’re apart but in his possession he feels confident and strong, almost invincible. The effect lasts as long as they’re in close proximity to his person, though it’s strongest when he touches them to his skin.

Over the years he’s tried to subtly test if anyone else can feel the effects of the disks, but the results have been inconclusive. He’s been afraid to spell out the reaction that he’s looking for, both out of a sense that this would taint the results and a fear of looking foolish. His worst fear, though, is that someday he will tell someone about the disks and be believed, and then lose them to a thief.

Twice now he’s had dreams where a figure bathed in light tried to tell him the word that will unlock the disks’ full capabilities, whatever they may be. Each time he’s not quite been able to make out the word, but he believes the second time he came a little bit closer to hearing it properly.

He isn’t dependent on the disks, exactly.

He could get through the day without them, he’s pretty sure.

He just gets through things a little more easily with them.

The newsreader put on a serious expression and turned to look at the camera.

“We at channel 6 would like to apologize for the previous story,” he said. “Whether it was an innocent mix-up or a prank, obviously there is no such place as ‘The Bleak, Black Pits of Desolation’ and no ambassadors have been recalled from it.”

“Maybe someone’s a little too excited about the new Hobbit movie, huh, Steve?” his co-anchor said. “It sounds like something straight out of Middle-Earth.”

“I guess you’re right, Susan,” he said. “We turn our attention to the weather, where Scott has the latest on that cold front that’s sweeping in from the frozen maw of… is that… that’s not right, is it? They’re doing it again. Well, here’s Scott with… no?”

Behind the camera, the producer was waving frantically to cut talk of the weather. Steve glanced over to the weather desk, where the reference monitor showed an elaborately painted map of an unfamiliar landscape with names of towns and kingdoms written on in calligraphy superimposed over the blue screen behind a hapless Scott.

The producer held up a hastily-scrawled cue card that had the words “tech. diff.” and “c/2 remote” on it. Susan gave a barely perceptible nod and glanced down at the top sheet on her desk.

“Ladies and gentleman, we appear to be having some technical difficulties here in the studio, but while we sort that out, let’s go to our own Katie Sedgewick and the channel 6 newsvan. It seems there’s a new arrival at the zoo, and it shows that sometimes… nine heads… are better than… one?”

They only showed a few seconds of the live feed before it was cut off, but it was more than enough.

“Oh my God!” Steve said. “What the hell was that?”

“It just… it tore right…” Susan said as the producer lost her lunch off-camera.

That was the last thing that any viewers at home saw on the television before it cut to the 21st century equivalent of a test pattern, the brief station identification clip where the reassuring voice of none other than Channel 6’s own Steve Windsor announced that Channel 6 was there for you, and all the viewers like you.

“What the hell kind of crazy ratings stunt was that?” one such viewer said aloud. He changed the channel with an angry stab at the remote, but Channel 8 was broadcasting nothing but blackness. He grunted and switched to a cable channel that was airing sitcom re-runs. “How the hell are we supposed to trust the news if they’re going to pull crap like that? I mean, did you see that?”

“Edgar?” his wife said from over by the big bay windows.

“I said, did you see that?”

“The sky?”

“The thing on the TV,” he said. He froze as he said it. What did she mean, had he seen the sky?

“I think you should come take a look at it,” she said.

Slowly, he got to his feet.