Chapter Text

As she worked outside, we convened inside. I could hear the repeated rip and smash of reality being torn a new space-hole, over and over again, as she performed her summons. I tried to ignore it and focus on the others. Delmutt and Skylar were deep in conversation and I sat next to the Dog, tuning in to their discussion.

“Miss D, being a dragon is the worst! You can have it if you want but you’re going to hate it. You can’t pick anything up, you have to put your face into your food, and you’re too big to sit indoors with your friends! It would be great being big and strong and able to fly if I could shrink down like Haley can, she’s so lucky!” Skylar was back to an old familiar refrain. I liked the kid well enough, but hearing a 10 year old whine at the volumes she could reach with lungs the size of grand pianos was rough.

Delmutt seemed fairly unphased. She tapped the great scaled girl with one claw, a tink of chitin on near-metal sounding through the garage. “You say that because you are young, and you do not yet fear death, or value the ability to defy it. It is different for the rest of us on the ground, little one. I’d trade many parts for the ability to ride through these battles without fear. Our enemies are growing stronger. For a while it was guns, then soldiers, now- monsters, proper monsters. Oh, I’m not chastising you-” She hugged the girl, who had begun to whimper- “I’m just a bitter old woman who wished she had the power to change the world. You’ve been through a lot, and you’re very brave.” They stayed like that for a moment.

At some point the Dog had teleported its’ head under my hand for scritchies. I was rubbing it behind the ears when it spoke, startling me. “Death. What is death? Not an ending- not anymore, and maybe it never was. I know that well enough. The creators of the tarot had it right- death is merely change, that which we fear most of all.”

Everyone in my adventuring party is so goddamn philosophical. I frowned at it, but did not stop the ear-scratches. It thumped one leg rhythmically. “You keep speaking like you have knowledge of the broader context of what’s going on. Is that just you spouting cryptic nonsense, or do you get what’s going on here?”

The Dog vanished in a spiraling dissolve, then reappeared upside down, ready for tummy rubs. “ You fear it more than most. What is it about change that paralyzes you so?”

Okay, if it was going to play hardball I absolutely didn’t have to keep rubbing. ...I kept rubbing. But he wasn’t getting both hands, damn it. “Alright fine, don’t answer the question that would likely solve all our problems. Let’s examine me then. I don’t fear change, I feel like I’m getting along pretty well given that the world is ending in fire and blood, and my wife is probably metamorphosing into a demigod outside in the yard right now.” Yet as I said it, I felt that it was untrue. “I fear- I fear pain, delivered at the end of a rifle, and-”

“Loss,” said the dog, tongue hanging out as it stared into the air. The others had paused their own conversation now, and were listening in. I really didn’t want this made public. “You fear the loss that comes with change.”

I nodded, defeated. “Yes. I’m going to lose her, or- she’s going to lose me. I just want to hold on to what we have.” I felt tears begin. “She’s the best thing in my life, and we can’t go on like this, I can’t stay by her, I’m her vulnerability.” The realization rocked me. She keeps gaining power but I stay just the same. I’m her vulnerability. Over and over again, I was the thing holding her back, the weak point in our fights, the part she had to rush to protect.

There was a pressure on my back. It was Delmutt, offering support. The Dog rolled to its feet, and looked me in the eye. “Why? Vulnerable because you may die? Or because you cannot let go of what you are, to find what the two of you will be?” It gave me a long, appraising stare. “Walk with me.”

Skylar jumped up in a smooth motion. “Ooh, I want to come too!”

The Dog nodded assent, pacing away in a direction that didn’t bear any relation to three dimensional geometry. “Very well. Close your eyes, and follow.”

We closed our eyes as instructed, but somehow the Dog was still visible. Oh boy, magic, I thought with a trace of bitterness. Magic and I weren’t really on speaking terms right now. But we stood, and followed in that black place, leaving our bodies behind. There was a sensation as we walked, of passage, of moving beyond some indefinable threshold. We trod through that dark passage for a time, before the Dog reached a portal. A simple wooden kitchen door, painted white with lilies on the edges. He turned and looked back to me. “Open it.”

I hesitated, reluctant. “Why me?”

He rolled his eyes. “Because it’s your story we are speaking of. Deep, personal reasons with inherent meanings we could spend all night discussing. And because dogs can’t open doors, you idiot.” Oh yeah. I sheepishly reached out and turned the knob. Beyond was a garden, overgrown, near-wild, bright and vibrant in a way I’d never seen. The flowers were a riot of colors, the trees bore fruit of every description. I inspected a rose more closely- was that paint?

The others stepped through- even Skylar, who had taken the form of a young girl, no more than 10. “Oh! I’m me again!” She jumped with delight and began to run around the rest of us. Delmutt was also human, here. She looked like a well-muscled woman in her 40s or 50s, with close-cropped hair and an outfit of simple coveralls.

She looked the body over, jumped up and down experimentally. “Hmm, you all are much more fragile than I thought. Bones on the inside? Interesting.” She wandered off with Skylar, already beginning to accumulate talking-animal interest from the garden’s denizens.

I turned to the Dog. “Wonderland, then? Non-hostile this time, I presume.”

The Dog huffed in negation and began to walk. I followed, careful not to touch the still-wet flowers. “Before you visited us through Cecilia’s mind, a projection in your own world. Now you walk in Wonderland proper, the power source that she drew me from. We go to meet my creator, she who shares my soul but has chosen to make these lands her home. It is not a wildland, but be careful you do not stray. Metaphors have power here.”

I could follow that, I supposed. We walked for a time and I enjoyed the bright day, the smells and scenery of a vast and sprawling garden. In time a question occurred to me. “So which came first, the story or the place?”

The Dog looked at me like I was an idiot. I hated that look. “A monk once asked master Chao-Chou, ‘Does a dog have buddha-nature or not?’ The master’s response was ‘Mu.’”

He wasn’t going to trip me that easily. “You’re saying I should unask the question. That my formulation depends on incorrect assumptions.”

He shook his head. “You rationalists. You think everything can be coded. That Mu is intentionally obscure, that it can be reduced. If it could, I would have reduced it. I answer Mu because the context of your question is too small for the truth.”

A voice spoke up, from around the corner of the next hedge. It was an old woman’s, and I had only ever heard her as a young girl, but I recognized her still. “You silly dog, you can’t give a straight answer to save your life. Hello Sean.” We walked around the corner to find Cecilia, old Cecilia, on her knees painting flowers. “Hope you don’t mind if I paint while I work, I find this very relaxing.”

I smiled- she had no burns, here. She looked happy. She had done terrible things, I knew, but something about the scene put me at ease despite our last encounter. I felt no real ill-will towards this old woman, anymore. She’d paid for her madness with years of pain, and now she had peace. How could I fault her for that? “Hello Cecilia. Are you feeling better these days? The flowers are beautiful.”

She smiled shyly. “Turns out what I needed most was some fresh air. In other ways, it’s not that different from the asylum. ‘All mad here,’ as the saying goes. But thank you- I’m going for something a bit more representational with my work here, the abstracts just confused the bees.”

I sat down on the grass of the garden next to her. In the distance I could hear Skylar playing, and Delmutt calling after her. It was idyllic, in many ways. “Can you answer the questions, then? Story or Storyteller? And how can I stop being Haley’s vulnerability?”

She shrugged. “Ask Wonderland a question, get a Wonderland answer. It’s all stories, Sean. In a very literal sense, the world is a story that your brain is telling to you.”

I sighed. “Okay, you’re talking metaphysics. Vinay Gupta: ‘The real process of meditation is paying real close attention to what is happening around you without passing it to the mind immediately for analysis…the mind becomes perceived to be another sense’”

She swung her brush delightedly. The streak of paint hung in the air, a very large and distorted flower. “ Yes! Oh, I’d like to meet him. Just another sense- touch, taste, see, feel, hear, think. There are more, of course, but the point is made. The brain is a sensory organ, and you, the conscious you, are the ultimate observer. The people you call mad know this very well, because our brains can’t seem to get it quite in time with everyone else. Meditation, psychoactive drugs, certain forms of insanity- all different paths to one end, the process of getting you outside the parlor of your brain. Of informing you of the separation between observed and observer. ”

I waved my hands. “Let’s take that as granted, for the time being. I don’t see what it has to do with the question?”

She continued painting bright flowers, and the Dog lay at her feet, quite content. “You should. You are the audience, the world is the story. What is the division, between madness and genius? If, sometimes, your consciousness gets bored and pulls a bit of reality from elsewhere, does that make you the storyteller? If you decide to share those daydreams with others, through the mediums you have available?”

I puzzled on that one for a while. A fat bumble bee flew in, landed on the mispainted streak of a flower, and attempted to find the stamen. It stretched and distorted as it wandered, as though I were watching it through strong gravitational lensing. Eventually I thought I got it. “You’re saying the world- this world, Wonderland- existed first, and Carroll visited it in dreams, shared it with others. That doesn’t seem so hard, I don’t-”

She held the brush to my lips. Not wanting a flower planted on my face, I clammed up. “ No, you ninny. What is the observer without the story? What is the story without the observer? Neither can exist without the other. In dreaming, he created this. In sharing, he spread it. In spreading it, he allowed it to exist, to be dreamt. Many have dreams, but few give them power. In giving them to others, they make them real. Wonderland is quite real, these days.”

She pulled the paint brush away and I breathed out. “Acausal creation, then. The narrator taps the pre-existing story, which only exists because he’ll tell it. Would... have been going to tell it? If you’re about to tell me we all live in Paradox Space I’m going to throw something at you.”

Sherriff, who had been listening in the whole time, spoke up through me- in English, for once. “ You’re speaking a lot of sense. We knew we were one soul, but now I’m starting to get it. Sean here is our soul listening to one story, and I’m our soul in another story, and our problems started when the two stories started talkin’ about each other . Crossed wires, like. And maybe one of us happens before the other, but that don’t matter much cause the real universe don’t care about the time in our little slices.”

She cackled, actually cackled, in the way only old women are ever truly capable of. “You’re getting it, cowboy! We live everywhere, and nowhere. We are the creators and the creations. Well.” She looked downcast, suddenly. “We should be. There’s something wrong with our home, as you are discovering. But!” She perked up just as rapidly. “That’s not why you came!”

I sat back, both hands on the grass. “Yes, the second question. Coping with change. I refuse to be Haley’s vulnerability.”

The Dog sat up. “Well, the solution’s easy. You’ve got to stop telling her story.”

What?

I stared at it. “There you go again- insisting that I, what, spun her into existence? You know I didn’t. I’ve never told a story, to anyone, except maybe reading aloud.”

The Dog, still speaking, wandered over to the distorted flower with the distorted bee lost inside it. “Causality again. But you are telling her story, somewhen, instead of your own. Living her life, avoiding the change you see coming. Because you fear the loss of what you have now. When you met her, did you lose what you were before?”

I shook my head. He was tickling something inside me but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. “Of course not. I grew, and changed. I still don’t understand what you mean about telling her story- but if you’re suggesting that by stopping, I won’t lose anything, I don’t see how you can guarantee that. If she became too powerful, too detached- the loss and change that I fear- we would literally lose one another. But if I stay near, I’ll always be there for her enemies to take advantage of. I won’t let her die or grow alien.”

He lunged forward and bit the bee on the little flower. I could hear it buzzing even as he mouthed out. “As a very wise painting once said, ‘Death is but a doorway.’ You must stop being what you are, so that you both can become what you must be together. Stop dictating what she will or will not do- you have been her storyteller, but she can stand on her own. And then- I have watched you for some time now, Sean. Alive or dead, there is no power in heaven or earth that could keep the two of you apart. Find your story.”

And meet her as an equal. I saw, then. Understood what he meant. The possibilities. What I’d have to do, to get there. I accepted it in my heart, and felt the fear begin to fade.

“About time!” said Cecilia, pulling a pocket watch from somewhere in that paint-spattered gardener’s getup. “We’re about to have another visitor, and not one I’d like to meet, I should think. Come away with me, behind the hedge.”

We moved, and hid, and peeked through to see whatever it was she’d gotten so cagey about. I gave up on keeping paint off myself, and simply pressed my face to the hedge. A flash of fur, on the other side. Golden fur, a great tawny mane. The Lion. My heart, so recently unburdened, stopped all over again. He was here, in the hedge maze. A man in cowboy boots, jeans, and a dark hoodie walked alongside him. The Lion terrified me on a physical level, but that man- something in him made my teeth hurt. He set a part of me on edge that I didn’t even know I had, and for some reason I found my mind drifting back to the time I stole twenty dollars from my mother- the first time I could ever recall feeling shame.

Sherriff spoke up in my head. <Somehow his face looks like the face’a every person I ever killed. What is he?> I had no answer.

They walked silently through the garden, heads slowly turning as though looking for something. We held perfectly still and made not a sound until they were well away. Then I turned to Cecilia and hissed, “ What the fuck? Why are they here?”

She smiled sadly. “They’re everywhere, right now. They walk all the worlds that meet ours. That man, the b- bad one.” She stuttered and I could tell her mind was flashing back to the jabberwock as she spoke. I put a hand on her shoulder and she looked at me gratefully. “He fights the Lion, or avoids him most stories, but now they’re working together. That man leads him through the dreams of everyone from back home. Making deals, planting seeds. The Lion thinks he owns it all, thinks he’s the creator. Maybe in his own story that’s true, but it doesn’t have to be so for the rest of us. Unless he wins. Whatever he wants, in our world- I think if he gets it, we’ll all become his. I don’t want that.” She held herself tightly.

“Me neither,” I said. And I think I know who his friend is. But what can I do about it? The Stone Table, that was the scene from Chronicles they wanted to stage next. The return of Edmund the apostate, followed by Aslan’s death and resurrection. Empowering his claim to the world when he dies for Edmund’s sins. But I could throw a wrench in it. I turned to the Dog. “Let’s get back, we’ve got work to do.”

---

I awoke to muttering from Delmutt and Skylar as they readjusted to their meat bodies. I guess being a dream-human had suited Miss D after all- she took a bit of time to get the hang of it, tripping over her six limbs and flailing dangerously with her mantis-claws until we all gave her a wide berth.

The rippling and tearing noises had stopped- I assumed that meant the reality outside our garage was safe to view, and poked my head out of the door. Haley, back in human form, was standing in the field. All of the grass had been flattened and trampled- I presumed, by a horde of smoldering twelve foot tall giants. But there were none in evidence now. I called out. “Dear? Are you done with your ascension? Where’s all the genies?”

She turned, or rather levitated, in my direction. She was floating, I noticed now. Six inches off the ground, arms outstretched in a near t-pose. She was wearing the most ludicrous collection of… stuff I’d ever seen. Her body was clad in a dirty grey robe, cinched with a giant iron-link belt with a bull’s head for the clasp. Underneath the robe she had a loose, ruffled white shirt, and over it she had a poncho that looked like it came from The Quick And The Dead. She had a circlet on her head, and goggles, and lace gloves on her hands, and some kind of leather bracers strapped to her wrist. A literal asteroid field of shining, winking gems was orbiting over her head.

It should probably have been intimidating. I ignored it. “You look like somebody’s World of Warcraft character,” I said, walking over to her. She blinked, and the heat-effect aura of rippling power around her faded out as she floated to the ground. With a brief look of concentration, the magic getup faded she was back to her old outfit- even the stones orbiting her head disappeared from view. She smiled at me and moved in for a hug. My bones creaked with the pressure- “Ooof, lightly, lightly. You can bench-press a truck now, remember?”

She laughed but eased up. “I thought that was light. I’m sorry, I’m not used to all this yet. I probably just gained nine or ten points in every stat. It feels so free ! Sean, there’s so much more room in my head. I think I have a solution for the Riemann Hypothesis, just from giving it some thought!”

I patted her comfortingly on the shoulder. “I have no idea what that means but it sounds like the kind of thing that would have rocked the world, five days ago. So, I take it you were allowed to wish for magic items? Also see previous questions re: genies, the presence of.”

She nodded absentmindedly and put down a bag. “Oh, yes, anything under 25,000 gp in value was obtainable. The genies are fine, they’re in here.” She held up a hand- she was missing a finger. She’d acquired three new rings, two of which looked very pathfinder-esque. But the one on her pinky simply ended it. It looked like a blank stump adorned by a solid black hoop of some type.

I really wasn’t tracking all of this. “Okay please don’t take this the wrong way, you probably have an intelligence score in the 30s or beyond which has got you in the supragenius range. It may be interfering with our ability to communicate. Try slowing it down to the level you would use to explain things to a five year old child.”

She looked at me worriedly. “Am I really that bad? Okay, I’ll take it from the top. The infinite candle loop worked, and I have an intuitive and well-defined sense of how wishing works, as a result of my third wish. But lighting the candles all myself was going to be too much of a pain. So I lit the second candle, used the first two wishes to get two more candles, and the third wish to have Simulacrum cast on me, creating a duplicate under my control with half my abilities. Not that the abilities mattered, all they needed was the ability to light candles and make wishes, of course. Then we both lit the next candles, and doubled up again.”

Oh god, she made a wish doubling sequence. I braced myself for where this was going.

She continued. “So after about 10 cycles of that I had 1024 copies of myself and far too many efreets milling about, so we decided to create a demiplane.”

I laughed. “Oh, just decided to throw out a brand new universe? Of course, how droll.”

She frowned, absorbed in her story, and apparently missing the joke. “Well yes, Genesis and Create Demiplane are both Pathfinder spells, Wish can replicate them. ‘I wish for a casting of Genesis with the parameters x, y, and z, and no additional input not specified in this request” and on and on. It didn’t create a universe though. At first it was more like a small conference room. But I had the efreets give it flowing time with respect to the material plane. Again, not a safe wish, given it exceeded the original spell but-”

I cut her off. “Exactly how many unsafe wishes did you use?”

She smiled. “Oh, I tricked them on that one. I had their understanding of Wish in my head, so I knew they’d try to screw me if I wished for something the slightest bit outside the ‘Safe’ limits. So I made it sound like I wanted the whole thing as an escape hatch. ‘Give me enough time dilation to let my friends and family get help, if I send them in here.’ They helpfully interpreted it in a way that would have killed any of you in minutes. The fastest flowing time Pathfinder describes has 6 seconds out here equal to a year inside the plane. If I’d sent you in there unattended without a way back out, poof - you’d be dead of old age within 5 minutes, assuming starvation or something didn’t get you first. But knowing that- I think that level of dilation will come in extremely handy.”

I was a bit awestruck at that. “You metagamed them screwing with your wish?”

She nodded, lost in thought. “Yes but just the one. I don’t want to rely on unbounded or poorly worded wishing. It took a couple of summons before one of them screwed it up in the right way. But once I had the time dilation, I moved the summon operation inside. Then I set one portion of the self replicating candle pool to make it a respectable size. They doubled up until they hit the number we needed for the effect, then all hit Genesis at once. If there were any wishes left over we threw them at spare candles, I thought we might hand them out later. We went through quite a few expansion cycles like that. It’s… been a while.”

Okay, that begged the question. “So how big is it? How many wishes did you use? ”

She looked like she was doing some kind of calculation. “34 point 8 million wishes, including a few extra for permanence and to set some of the aspects. The outer boundary is a couple miles wider than the radius of the earth. The actual usable surface faces in towards the center like a dyson sphere. I set the terrain to ‘Verdant cityscape,’ and the buildings allow us to make maximal use of the airspace. Here, come inside, this conversation will move faster if you see it.” I was still processing that she’d made thirty million wishes when, without her even lifting a finger, we blinked and were pulled inside.

It was… it was indescribable. It was a city, built inside a hollow ball the size of a planet, and I could see all of it, on and on until atmospheric scattering made it fade into simple blue- even then I could see the border, arcing away above me until the far side was thousands of miles away. It was like being in space, while standing on the ground. It was the biggest downtown I’d ever seen, if you eliminated all the ads and traffic. The buildings were made out of beautifully cut wood and live trees and plants, all of them bearing lush fruit. Architecture curved overhead and joined, in grand traceries of bridges and arches, growing miles into the air, speckled with parks and hanging gardens at every altitude. It was like being inside the hive of some deific bee. Birds in all the colors of the rainbow sang and flew through the infinite air. A distant light source winked in the center of the plane, illuminating the scene like a sun. It was beautiful. It was a paradise. We were standing in a park with buildings all around us. The horizon curved so gradually that it was impossible to detect from the ground, but if you looked up it always felt like you were at the bottom of the world’s most gigantic bowl. She gazed around happily. “I’ll keep expanding on it, time permitting. At the moment it should produce enough fruit and water to support everyone on earth, in a pinch.”

I stared, slack-jawed. Before, I’d understood the power of wishing. I knew that, rules permitting, a continuity break like this was coming. But my wife had just become the living deity of her own planet. And possibly our planet too, at the same time. I looked around, taking it in. There was only a small crew of maybe a half dozen draconic simulacrums scooting about, tending a large pile of leftover candles. “This is… unbelievable. Still, the genies? Where are they?”

She smiled brightly. “Well it turns out they don’t like just waiting around forever to be given wishes, you know? I called it the standby problem- we wanted enough power on hand to do whatever we wanted, but without forcing the entire efreet population to sit here and wait on us. Instead, we made the flowing time work for us. I created a gate-” here she held up her pinky, now whole and intact ”- and had it shrunk down to finger size, then stuck my finger through it, so some part of me would always be in here. Then I had a Telepathic Bond connected between myself and each simulacrum here. Now if I need something, I just contact one of them, and they double up until they reach just as many wishes as I need. Due to the time dilation outside, it really doesn’t add much lag time- milliseconds, at most."

I gestured at the simulacra who appeared to be relaxing in the park. “And they don’t mind waiting hundreds of subjective years between orders?”

She nodded. “They’re automata extending my will, they don’t have any of their own. It’s really quite effective!”

I could see that. “Anything you want, in any quantity you want, instantly. You really did ascend. So, what magic items did you order?”

She jumped, like she’d forgotten. “Oh! Everything I could, of course. Anything under 25,000 gp in value. We got quite lucky there, the rules are very unclear on it but I guess it was grandfathered in by past versions of the spell. Here’s your copies.” I get magic items too? She handed me what I could only assume by the appearance was a Handy Haversack. I picked it up and opened it. It was… deeper, inside. Much deeper. A complete armory’s worth of wands, staves, potions- oh my god. I reached inside and said “Ring of invisibility.” I felt something pop into my hand, and put it on. Bilbo eat your heart out.

She was smiling at me happily. But uh… was I invisible or not? “Can you see me?” She frowned.

“Well, yes, of course. Did you try to activate that?” Uh-oh.

Some experimentation proved that I could not, in fact, use anyof it. Potions didn’t work on me, magic items failed to activate. Passiveeffects like the bag’s size (or, I noted, the vorpal sword’s properties) appeared to work, but I could not make active use of any worn item. If the Boots of Striding and Springing had made themselves lighter, they would have worked- but they couldn’t make me jump any farther. A tremendous letdown for me, but not the end of the world. Haleyon the other hand looked crushed . “I don’t understand. I can cast spells on you. I can use wands to cast spells on you. But you can’t use a ring to cast spells on yourself. What’s the rule?”

I thought about it. Interesting that she hadn’t picked up on it yet, but then- I had some recent knowledge she hadn’t got, yet. Can’t narrate yourself an unearned story powerup, I guess. “Pathfinder’s not real, for me. It’s a game. The origin of the magic has to come from you. It won’t work for anyone else.” I quickly explained the conversation with the Dog, leaving aside my final insights, for the time being. We’d have that conversation later.

We spent some more time working around the rules, and discovered that any magical effect that applied to the weapon would work just fine. So no +5 pistols for Sherriff, but we could produce one that applied any effects to its ammunition. Eventually we settled on a pair of Flaming Thundering Distance pistols, which tests revealed were remarkably effective at reducing unarmored targets to rubble, even at ranges where Sherriff said he would typically have used a long rifle. Still, Haley sat down on one of the park benches, sad and thoughtful. “So this Pathfinder ruleset works for me but not you, but we still don’t know why. Aren’t you part of the same story? I was so hopeful. After I took all the intelligence bonuses, the floating stones and the inherent bonuses from wishes, I felt so fast that I was worried about…”

I sat down next to her. “Unbalancing things. That I wouldn’t be able to keep up. You’re right, I can’t, yet. Don’t let that stop you.” She looked at me in surprise.

“But you were so concerned about that, before!”

I nodded. “Well of course I was, am, but… I think it’s time I stopped worrying about where you’re going. You’ve only just begun and… look at it. I want to see how far you can go. And you can still cast spells on me. So hook me up with Fox’s Cunning, fam.” She hugged me, and without even snapping her fingers one of the simulacra began firing up an efreet chain. Fox’s Cunning was one of those short-lived buff spells, but 11 minutes out there was the equivalent of a century in here, so having it constantly recast would be no substantial drain on her efreets once I was back in the real world. It wasn’t on Haley’s level, it wasn’t even superhuman, just 4 points of additional ‘Intelligence.’ But I found myself rocketing up a scale I hadn’t even known existed, moments ago. My consciousness expanded. I was still me, but my thoughts were so fast now, so clear. “Haley. This is what it’s been like for you? You’ve gone even farther than this? I can’t- this is incredible. ”

She hit me with every other stat-based spell upgrade for good measure. The energy of it was infectious. She stood up, gracefully, from the bench and I found myself leaping after her. She caught the movement, grinned at me, and took off running. Faster than the wind. I felt like someone had taken restraints off every part of me. I chased her, laughing.

The day drifted on and we just ran, and ran. I climbed trees again, like a child, revelling in my increased agility. We wrestled and she pinned me with ease, before we collapsed onto each other. She demonstrated the full extent of her strength- in dragon form now she could lift something in the neighborhood of eleven tons. We went skydiving off of towers and let Feather Fall break our landings. The sheer physicality of being four stronger, four more dexterous, four wiser and smarter- it was intoxicating. Like being freed from a prison I never knew I was inhabiting. I don’t know how long we stayed in that Eden in another dimension, but it felt like too little time. It might have been days, or weeks. No more than a second or two in the ‘Real’ world, at any rate. It passed like a dream, a soap bubble in the course of our lives. We both needed it. My beard grew long, but there was plenty to eat and drink, and a change of clothing was as effortless as blinking. Haley didn’t age a day, of course- her powered up dragon-aging appeared tied to our original plane’s timeline, more’s the pity. But I think, had there not been a world to save, that neither one of us would have left that place. We’d have grown old and died together in paradise, in less time than it takes to boil a cup of tea, in the real world. Well- I’d have died, her dragon-form would barely be ticking over. I suppose that was what broke the spell, for me. I needed to find my own contribution to this thing she’d become. That need drove me.

---

Some time later we sat, watching the world go through another expansion phase. The streets and buildings were filling up with simulacra and efreets as they built toward critical mass before all casting at once. Haley stood on the edge of the tower, fearless, surveying her new world. I sat back a bit- not particularly concerned by fatal drops, but still wary. I spoke up through the telepathic bond we’d set between us. “I’m so glad you brought me here. I was so scared, of what you’d be when you were a god, and maybe I still am. But deep down-”

She turned, silhouetted in the evening air, the light of that lush green cityscape, her personal plane of power, illuminating her from behind. Confident and strong. Herself, perfected. I studied her, tried to commit that moment to memory. “Not a god, Sean. I’m not omniscient or omnipotent. Wishing gives me a lot of control over local reality, but I still have to be present, I can’t divide my attention. It’s not a singularity event, not yet. I’m still the same as I always was. Just, more me.”

“You are. I was a fool to ever fear getting to see more you. Thank you for helping me realize that. It’s helped me understand a number of things, actually.” I paused, then took the plunge. “We have to go back soon. Aslan is out and about, wandering the worlds while he blows ours to pieces. Chances are, he’ll get in here eventually. We need to see the others, and discuss how to stop him.”

She sighed. “I know. This has been wonderful. We’ll do so much more of this, a vacation every other day if we want, and never miss a moment out there. But I have to figure out how to beat him.”

I stood up, and walked up behind her, one hand on her shoulder. “Not anymore. I figured that out, while we were here. It’s not you he’s looking for, it’s me. He just got confused, by the big scary dragon lady.”

She turned, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

I held out my hand to her. “Come on. Bring us back, and I’ll explain.”