Heat Stroke

Way up. Way, way up. The earth curved away beneath us at the edges, pearl-bright and beautiful, misted in clouds. He kept pulling me. I felt what little resistance there was to aetheric travel—and there had to be some, for reasons of not-so-simple physics— begin to lessen. We were reaching the edges of where it was safe for a Warden to go.

I let go of him and hovered next to him. He lifted his hand again and pointed. This time I could feel the force of will that went with it, the compulsion that would guide me to the destination.

Way the hell out there. Farther than even Patrick had taken me.

Into someplace that, in this reality, wasn’t even really space.

I had no choice, I found; I was already moving. I felt Lewis’s hand touch me one last time, gently, as I darted away, swimming like a fast, elegant mermaid through that sea of increasingly thin resistance.

I set myself to glide the rest of the way, and before long I saw it. Not so much a presence as an absence; space out here was big and empty and a kind of neutral gray, shot here and there with fleeting speckles of power being transferred from one place to another. I braked myself, spreading thin against the barely felt touch of the sun, and hovered, considering the problem. The Void didn’t manifest itself here, on this plane. I’d have to go up to see it.

Up from the aetheric are other levels, but David had already warned me not to go exploring on my own without a guide; David, however, was nowhere to be seen. And I had a compulsion.

Three layers up was the highest possible level of the known universe, at least the highest we could reach. Its most primitive, primal form. The black-and-white template for the sixteen million colors used back on Earth. It was hard to focus on anything for long, because there were no familiar landmarks, nothing that conformed to human sensibilities. Just swirls, drifts, eddies. I couldn’t even get a sense of the rhythm of the place, although I was sure it had one. Either the heartbeat was so simple and subtle it defied detection, or so complex and multilayered I couldn’t hope to understand it. Either way, not helpful.

It took me a while, watching, to realize that there was a kind of order to the chaos.

Everything moved the same direction. It moved in circles, sometimes, but the circles were always counterclockwise, just like the flow of the wind-fluid-matter stream.

There was one area moving the other direction. Clockwise. I focused on it, stared hard, and felt a kind of absence there, a kind of gray confusion. It didn’t want to be found, this thing. It was a trap door into our world, and it was designed to stay hidden. I drifted slowly over to it, moving against the current, and paused at the very edges of the spiral.

It felt like… nothing. In fact, I couldn’t even be sure that I’d touched it at all, except visually, where the fog phased into a bluish color as it came into contact with my presently-not-solid form. Was that good? I couldn’t tell. My senses weren’t helping me out at all on this one. As far as I could tell, this swirling eddy looked just like all the other swirling eddies, except that this one went right instead of left. Not a lot to go on, really. I would have preferred a nice big sign that said this way to the void, but I supposed I’d have to settle for what I could get.

I reached for the hot golden flow of Lewis’s power, and began the strange job of closing off the rift. Where I touched the moving pool of energy, I sampled the normal space around it and began replicating it over the tear. It was a little like darning— take good material, stretch it over bad stuff, tack it in place.

It was also hard. The stuff kept slipping under my touch, trying to writhe away. Definitely not just some hole in space. This thing was alive, and it didn’t like me. I persisted. It resisted. Little by little, I gained on it.

I was almost done when it gave one last, convulsive twist, turned, and jumped right out of the fabric of space and tore into me.

If it had been the normal world I’d have stumbled backwards, screamed, and tried to slap the thing off of me; it was definitely, horribly alive. What was worse, I couldn’t even really sense it. If I lost sight of it…

I wrapped both hands around it—or what passed for hand-equivalents here—and began to squeeze. All of Lewis’s potential flooded into me, concentrated into my grip and gave it world-crushing strength.

I felt the thing give with a hot little pop. It dissolved into a rain of silvery light, cold and glittering and totally undetectable as soon as it passed beyond my aura.

I’d seen that stuff before. Where?… with David. On the aetheric level. He’d thought it was odd then.

Now I knew where it had come from.

The rip tore open again and started whirling widdershins again. Oh man… that hadn’t gone well. As I brushed my hand over the surface I saw that sparkle again, saw the fireflies leaping out, away, into the primal essence of the universe.

This was really, really not good. And now I had ripple effects to deal with from the rip coming open again. That had sent shock waves of power throughout the planes—I’d felt it myself, like a sonic boom in my soul.

I left that plane and took the express down, and I didn’t like what I was seeing. Swirling clouds of silver fog on the next level. Hot invisible winds that stank of sulfur on the next.

In the aetheric, power was swirling like dust caught on the leading edge of a storm. I dropped back down next to Lewis, who was busy trying to get control of the thing—not a task for one Warden, no matter how powerful—and I quickly reached out to amplify what he was doing, pulling back waves of charged particles, changing the frequencies of vibrating and propagating wave forms. I started negative canceling waves to try to flatten out the effects, and felt Lewis’s burst of affirmation. Yes! We did it together, leveling, smoothing, pouring figurative oil on the literal waters.

I took hold of Lewis and pulled him down to the real-world level again. He thumped back into his body with a little plucked-string sound that was probably audible only on levels a Dji

If I thought I’d been flying high after the decorating, I was definitely pulling g-forces now. My whole body was humming and vibrating, like it had just been through the best sex of its life.

“Wow,” I said involuntarily, and then blushed and dropped my hand and stepped back. “Um… did we…”

“Afraid not,” Lewis said. Was that a nice flush to his cheeks? Sure looked like it. “The rip’s still there, I can feel it. Now we’ve got other problems to take care of.”

“The waves?” I wasn’t talking about the ocean, but the aetheric; he got the reference.

“There’s a pretty severe widespread disturbance, and it’s ru

He gave me a very direct look. “I promised you it would be one favor. Not two.” He took the empty bottle out of his pocket and held it up. “I’ll keep my word.”