Katalepsis 1.5

Here's the last chapter of Katalepsis in queue. It's a big boy, but I think I can cover it in one post. Let's find out how the heck Evelyn ended up stranded in eyeball pyramid stone apricot xenomorph world!

““We—“ I croaked. “We should leave before I pass out.”

I was trying very hard not to look at the twitching skeletal shapes descending from the ridge, creeping toward us through the mist.

”Leave?” Evelyn’s voice shook. She took a deep breath and used the stone pillar at her back to pull herself up. She was unsteady on her feet, all her weight on her right leg. “Yes, you can do that, can’t you? You—“

Thunder interrupted us.

A rolling crash shook the ground, so deep and so loud it rattled my bones. Evelyn slammed her hands over her ears. I winced and screwed up my eyes. The rotten-apricot sky boiled and bubbled, clouds like sea-tossed oil. The stalking figures in the fog stopped and crouched, as if the skin of the world threatened to buck them off.

Evelyn lowered her hands as we both watched the sky.

”That wasn’t happening earlier,” she whispered. “You can get us out?””

Did Heather's arrival somehow cause that thunderstorm/tremor thing? Weird. It's possible that this is just a natural weather event in the world they've found themselves in, but Evelyn's framing of it at the end suggests otherwise.

The monsters may or may not be native to this world themselves, so their (in)ability to deal with the tremors might not mean all that much.

“I opened my mouth to explain and a wave of dizziness passed through me. My vision swam, black around the edges. My knees gave out, my feet slipped out from under me, and I struck out with one blood-smeared hand to break my fall.

Evelyn lurched forward and caught me under the armpits.

She hissed with pain as her left leg buckled and we fell together on our knees. At least we weren’t face down in the rocks.

I clung to her shoulders and squeezed my eyes shut as my consciousness ebbed back, along with the throb of pain in my head. Evelyn did her best to hold me up as I sagged, but she wasn’t very strong.

”I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I let go,” I babbled, gripped by an urge to explain myself, explain why we were here, like I was embarrassed to be rescuing her from this nowhere-place. “This morning, when I felt your hand, I wasn’t strong enough. I-I didn’t know I could do this, I thought it was all insanity, I wasn’t— didn’t think it was real.”

”Oh, don’t worry, I probably wouldn’t have saved me either.” Evelyn’s voice quivered beneath the veneer of cynicism.”

Wait, so Evelyn wasn't rescuing Heather, before? That was her reaching out to Heather FOR rescue?

And...Heather not only just happened to slip at the same time as Evelyn, but also somehow found her way into the Medieval Metaphysics office without her?

I'm having trouble making sense of this sequence of events. Hopefully the clarification will come soon.

On a positive character note, Evelyn seems to realize just how badly she fucked up in her introduction to Heather, and to be appropriately self-recriminatory. I hope a proper apology will be forthcoming as soon as they're back in Sharrowford.

“I pulled back and she looked at me with mouth agape.

”What? What is it?” I asked.

”Are you aware you’re bleeding from around your eyes?”

I wiped my face. My sleeve came away smeared with sticky crimson. “Huh. That’s new.””

Oh dear.

I'm not sure what even causes that, besides damage to the eyeballs themselves. My first thought is "serious brain damage."

Not a good sign at all. Very, very bad sign.

I guess the best case scenario is that the atmosphere of this world is just causing some capillaries in the eyes to pop. That would be the least crippling and most readily healed explanation. But in that case, I'd expect Evelyn's eyes to be bleeding as well, and this has not been described. So...yeah, muy no bueno.

“Evelyn looked at me like I was mad. Which I wasn’t. Not anymore. Too numb to panic over blood from the eyes. One more misfiring bodily process wasn’t worth my attention right then.

We had to get out.

I had to do it all over again, in reverse.”

And also bring someone with you this time. That might be harder. Or require an entire extra step.

“A second peal of thunder ripped through the landscape, juddering our bones and shaking my brain. Evelyn suppressed a scream and dug her fingers into my upper arms. The rotten-apricot clouds bulged downward, a swell in an inverted ocean, surrounded by a churning vortex widening by the second.

”Something knows we’re here,” Evelyn said. She nodded toward the creatures in the mist. They were less than forty feet from us now, frozen again in the wake of the thunder, clutching at the ground. “They certainly do.”

”It’s okay, it’s fine, it’s—“

What was I going to say? It’s not real?

Evelyn stared at me, wide-eyed. “We are most certainly not fine.”

”Yes, yes, I know, I know.”

”Then do it, get us out of here, before—“

Thunder, deeper and longer and louder, the voice of an angry god. We clung to each other, two tiny, soft, vulnerable apes surrounded by stone and metal and sharp blades. The thunder rolled and rolled, for ten seconds, twenty seconds, and just when I thought it was never going to stop, it began to ebb away.

Evelyn wasn’t looking up. She didn’t see the sky.

The cloud bulge parted; a black rope of tentacle reached through.

The distance, the scale. That tentacle was wide as a train tunnel.”

Seems like those xenomorphs really were just sent by something else to capture prey for it. And their master is most definitely NOT just some human wizard.

Unless it's the ghost of Gilles de Rais piloting an inexplicably overpowered giant squid mech. That's a possibility I guess.

And, of course, a monster being compared to a subway tunnel. You can get so much mileage out of Howie P. Luvvaboi and his eclectic little phobias, I swear.

“I tore my eyes away.

”Okay, okay.” I felt sick as my mind touched the Eye’s lessons. “Just hold on to me. I think I can move both of us. W-well actually I don’t know but it’s—“

”You think? Oh god, can you or can’t you?””

Heh, I can forgive Evelyn's sharpness in this situation at least.

““I can. I know I can. It just hurts so much and—“

I never got to finish that sentence, because the world reared up and shook us from its back.

The thunder roared and the ground shuddered. Evelyn and I scrambled to find something to hold on to, slipping and sliding across the floor of the pit, barely clinging to each other. The great black tentacle rushed down toward us. Displaced air washed away the mist, revealing the knife-and-bone creatures all around. They were screeching, screaming as they crouched low to the ground, long claws dug into the rock, hind legs locked against the stone. They’d anchored themselves, like fleas in the hide of a dog.

I realised, in that moment of clarity, exactly what we’d been standing on.

Whatever it was, it was scratching its back.”

...oh.

So the "stone" is some kind of epidermis, and the pyramids are...scales? Blisters? Something that dots your skin. The "rotten apricot" clouds filling the sky are either an outer skin layer, or just this macro-world's atmosphere being kept away from the skin by some sort of biological function.

Crazy.

The skeleton Alien monsters seem to be pretty nervous about this thing's attention, so maybe they aren't actually working for it after all. I'm kind of thinking of the smaller monsters from "Cloverfield," now; parasites on a giant monster that can also be predatory toward creatures their own size.

Alternatively, they were just chasing Evelyn through a bunch of parallel dimensions and ended up cornering her on this continent-sized creature's skin without knowing or meaning to do it. That's...straight out of Rick & Morty.

“The ground shook side to side in a sudden burst of motion, so fast that neither of us had time to brace. The first shake threw us against the floor, bruised my hip and the side of my ribs and drew a sharp cry of pain from Evelyn.

The second shake sent us flying.

The ground spun beneath us. The motion tossed our bodies out of the dip in the landscape like rag dolls. It was a miracle neither of us passed out or suffered whiplash. Evelyn’s hands clawed my arm and she screamed over the rush of air as we fell, her hair loose and streaming out in the wind.

But I wasn’t letting her go this time. I tightened a death-grip around her shoulders.

People with much more courage than me don’t have time to think while they’re falling from the sky. I certainly didn’t think. That might be what saved us. I groped with my mind for the right formula, the correct equation to take us back home.

Out.

My head exploded. For a second I thought we’d hit the ground and this was death, but Evelyn was still screaming.

Then I saw it, grasped it, had it. Not with my eyes, but with my soul, or what passes for a soul in creatures as small as us, compared to the black, dripping truth of the engines and gears of reality I was trying to manipulate.

”Close your eyes!” I screamed, hoping Evelyn could still hear me.

Reality folded up.”

Not a moment too soon. There might not be a "ground" to fall toward in this world. The creature that shook them off might just be flying around in a void, and be big enough to generate its own gravity (it seems to have accumulated something like its own atmosphere, after all). Still, even if they can fly through the void forever without hitting anything, it might not be as breathable out past the rotten orange clouds. And there might be other creatures flying around.

Great phrasing throughout this passage. Seeing creatures of that scale and entities that reach through multiple realities might well make you wonder if humans are important enough to warrant "souls."

“Evelyn and I landed with a soft thump on the floorboards of her front room.”

Transwarp successful! And they didn't even pop up someplace random and inconvenient!

Now, to get to a hospital.

“We didn’t let go of each other for a very, very long moment, even when Raine scrambled to her feet nearby.”

Either clinging for comfort, or just involuntarily grabbing onto whatever's in reach and not having the strength to let go.

““Evee! Heather! Fuck yes!” She laughed with relief. “How … what … ? Actually, screw it, you know what? I’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. This is amazing, I don’t care how you did it.”

I managed to meet her eyes but I couldn’t form any words. My body felt distant, a shell I inhabited on a whim. Evelyn gingerly rolled off me and sat up in a heap.

”You two, holy shit,” Raine continued. “I can’t believe that worked. Heather, wow, I—“

”I don’t know what you’re laughing at,” Evelyn said. Her voice croaked, thin and strained, but she cleared her throat, and out came the barbed tongue. “This is all your fault, you realise that?”

”What?” Raine blinked, a goofy smile on her face.

”Oh, don’t look at me like that, you know perfectly well what you’ve done.”

”Me?” Raine spread her arms. “Evee, come off it, you’re the one who decided to try untested magic without me here.”

”Well you should have been here to stop me, shouldn’t you?”

Evelyn turned to look down at me. She dropped the scorn she’d used on Raine and met my eyes with naked concern. I tried to blink, but my eyelids felt heavy as iron.

Raine laughed. “I don’t believe you. Come off—“

”This is no time for arguing.” Evelyn clicked her fingers at Raine. “Get a glass of water, the chocolate in the tin, and painkillers. The good stuff, the co-codamol, and be quick about it.””

So Raine is less of a bodyguard and more of a handler.

And Evelyn is self aware enough to realize she needs someone to hold her back, but also not self aware enough to wait for that person to be around before trying something extra whacky. And she's self-righteous about this.

...it's still going to take a lot of work before I can like Evelyn.

Also, Evelyn? Raine? Heather is bleeding out the eyes.

“Raine opened her mouth to argue but then finally realised I wasn’t sitting up or saying anything, or indeed moving at all. She ran out of the room. Good Raine, could always rely on her. Shouldn’t have distrusted her. It was all real, wasn’t it? All of it.”

Evelyn had *better* be ordering that stuff for Heather and not herself.

““And you did kill the thing that came through in my place, yes?” Evelyn called after her.

”It’s under the bin bags!””

I love that this is a casual afterthought shouted from the other room lol.

Anyway, "the thing that came in my place." Sounds like it might have actually been Evelyn who poked the xenomorphs first. Maybe killing that one who she accidentally stranded far from its home wasn't such a great thing to have done after all...

“Evelyn returned her attention to me. “Heather, Heather, can you hear me? What you did there was very brave. Oh dear,” she whispered. “Please don’t die now.” She reached down and awkwardly patted my cheek. I realised she was trying to slap me to keep me conscious.

With great effort I managed to turn my head to one side, then heaved with every last ounce of energy I had and rolled myself over into the recovery position. The world went dark for a moment.

Directly across from me lay the dead monster, underneath some black bin liners Raine had draped over its shattered corpse. Poor thing, lost thing, transported to another dimension where nothing made sense, unable to go home, then confronted by two terrifying apes and beaten to death when it had responded in fear. Not fair, was it?”

Hmm, yeah. It reflects well on Heather that she's able to not only think about the implications in her current state, but also empathize with the creature that tried to kill them.

Or maybe she's being too charitable. The thing did seem like it was *laying in wait* when Heather and Rain found it by the glyph. More information required.

But still, Heather's willingness to give it the benefit of the doubt before she's even been able to process her own trauma and physical pain is admirable. I like to think I'd be able to manage the same, but I don't know.

“Raine returned and helped pull me into a sitting position, though I whined and resisted. I just wanted to lie down and sleep forever. She held a glass to my lips and made me drink small, sharp sips of cold water. I stared into the middle distance. She broke off a piece of dark chocolate and held it up.

”It’s okay, Heather, you don’t have to eat a lot.”

”You need it for the serotonin,” Evelyn said, breaking off several squares for herself. “Best medicine after too much exposure.”

I just stared at it. Didn’t register as food. Raine shot a wordless glance at Evelyn.

”No, Raine, I have no idea what’s wrong with her,” Evelyn said. “She did all that with nothing except her own brain. Even my mother couldn’t do that. Heather, open your mouth.””

"Too much exposure." To the Eye? To whatever energy enables you to see and maybe do things outside of our native plane?

Some backstory about Evelyn. Her mother is also a wizard, and seemingly a more accomplished one, but what Heather did is beyond any known witchcraft. Either there was something special about Heather (and her twin also, maybe?) to begin with, or she's just showing what it means to be chosen by the Eye.

...

Evelyn can also travel between dimensions, she just needs these circles and glyphs to do it. What Heather did is remarkable mostly because she did it just with her brain, not having to use any symbols or tools. Because of what the Eye has shown her after taking her sibling.

Okay, yeah, no, this isn't just me. Katalepsis is literally Fullmetal Alchemist with lesbians, isn't it?

...

Anyway, they're tending to Heather, and seem like they probably know more about her condition than doctors would, even if that isn't much.

“I accepted being fed, too heavily dissociated for embarrassment. Sip water, nibble chocolate, repeat; the process went on for ten or fifteen minutes until I began to feel merely exhausted instead of actually dead.

”The … “ I croaked, coughed with a spike of headache pain, then tried again. “The painkillers would be nice.”

Raine lit up and sighed with relief.

”She’s back, she’ll be fine,” Evelyn said.

Raine grinned. “I’ll bet. Here, courtesy of Evee’s supply.”

I swallowed the pills with a mouthful of water, then realised I was still smeared with my own blood. I made a half-hearted attempt to wipe my face on my sleeve. “What … what—“

”Shhh, don’t worry about it right now.”

”Go run her a bath, we’re both filthy,” Evelyn said. “And fetch my stick, I’m sick of cowering on the floor.””

That phrasing from Evelyn at the end seems meaningful. Like some particularly bad neurosis of hers coming near the surface.

At this point, I'm seriously wondering what Raine gets out of this relationship. She waits on Evelyn hand and foot, puts up with endless bitchiness and entitlement from her, and is expected to be there to protect her from herself at all times. She's not living in Evelyn's house. The two of them aren't even a thing romantically (although they apparently were in the past). So, what's keeping Raine so committed to this? Some titanic favor owed? A desire to keep seeing and learning about magic?

Anyway, timeskip ahead to that evening, with Heather having regained something adjacent to able-bodiedness.

“By the time I woke, night had fallen on Sharrowford.

The hour after we’d returned from the Stone-world was a soft blur of bodily need and bare consciousness. Raine had helped me up the stairs and into the bathroom. I was barely able to undress myself, all my movements slow and stiff, clothes stuck to skin with half-dry cold sweat. I’d pushed away Raine’s well-intentioned help, far too embarrassed to let her strip me. In the end it took me ten minutes just to get my clothes off while she waited in the hallway.

In the bath, I’d drifted off for a long time, soaking in the hot water. Couldn’t recall the last time I’d had a bath. Always showers. Less dangerous when you believe you’re prone to passing out. Eventually I summoned the energy to wash the blood off my face and the iron tang of that other world off my body. Raine had left me clean clothes, a baggy t-shirt and plaid pajama bottoms, which I assumed belonged to Evelyn. Took an awfully long time to get into them.

I let Raine guide me to Evelyn’s bedroom, where she told me to lie down on the bed. She draped a blanket over me and said to sleep as long as I needed. If I’d been tucked into bed by a girl like Raine a few days ago, I would have been over the moon, too excited for sleep, but I passed out the moment my head touched the pillow.”

Nothing like complete physical and mental exhaustion and malaise to suppress one's coomerbrain.

On a very silly minor note, I'm not sure I'd be able to resist taking baths if I had a bathtub in my apartment and I was frequently waking up covered in sweat and vomit. No matter how dangerous doing so would be. Granted, I'm also surprised Heather *has* a tub in her apartment at all; not many people I knew my freshman year of college did, heh.

“Nothing like a supernatural near-death experience to disarm anxiety disorders. I wouldn’t recommend it, though.

Only afterward, sitting up on the mass of Evelyn’s quilts and sheets, did I feel a distant twinge of embarrassment about sleeping in another girl’s bed.”

Oh, you get used to it.~

“Streetlight glow filtered around the edge of the curtains, but otherwise the room was dark. The door had been left ajar. I tested the strength in my legs, then wobbled over and peered out into the upstairs hallway. A light shone from downstairs.

I descended the stairs slowly, one at a time like a small child, clutching the old wooden banister to hold myself upright. My head still ached with echoes of pain and my legs trembled as I walked, but that was nothing; weakness radiated from my core, as if I’d pulled a muscle I hadn’t known about. Halfway down I smelled greasy food and my stomach grumbled. Muttered conversation broke off as the stairs creaked.

In the front room the magic circle was gone. Cleaned away. A dark stain lingered nearby.

I found Evelyn and Raine sitting at the kitchen table.

”Heather!” Raine stood up and took my hands. “How do you feel? You slept okay, yeah?”

”I’ve been better,” I mumbled.

”I bet, I bet. Come on, sit down. You hungry?”

” … extremely.”

Evelyn sipped from a mug of tea and met my eyes with quiet regard. She was freshly scrubbed, hair washed and pinned up behind her head. She had a fluffy blanket draped over her shoulders, t-shirt and shorts underneath.

I tried not to stare at her scars.

The kitchen was all cracked tiles, wooden counters, and a massive metal stove, rustic and cosy and very much my kind of place. An antiquated survival in the modern world. Heat poured from a naked iron radiator bolted to the back wall. Raine settled me in a chair and set about reheating some of the chicken stew they’d been eating.”

I just made chicken stew myself a few hours ago. Shit was relatively cash.

“Sitting hurt. I took a moment to probe my left hip and the side of my ribs, left elbow and shoulder. Bruises from Outside.

”Feeling the aftermath, are you?” Evelyn said. “It’ll be worse in the morning.”

She was bruised too, a nasty purple welt on her chin, and I assumed more underneath her clothes. I tried to give her a smile.

”You can look, if you want,” she said. “No need to pretend you don’t see.”

”Wait ‘til she’s got some food in her, hey Evee?” Raine said, spooning rice into a bowl of chicken and setting it in front of me. The greasy smell made my mouth water.

”I think Heather is more than capable of fending for herself.” Evelyn gave me an expression much softer than the one she kept for Raine. “I don’t let people see me like this, but I assume our relationship is rather past that point.”

”Nothing like saving a girl’s life to break the ice,” Raine said. Evelyn shot her a withering look.

In a tiny, selfish way, I agreed with Raine; I felt guilty, as if I’d taken a dirty shortcut to Evelyn’s heart.

”I was only being polite,” I said. “It’s rude to stare at … “ I gestured with my eyes at her bare legs.

Well, at what remained of them.

Evelyn’s left leg was twisted at the knee and ankle, the muscles thin and withered, as if it had once been broken in multiple places and healed at the wrong angles. She flexed her left foot to show me it still worked.

Her right leg, the good one, was artificial.

A pale rubber socket ringed the stump of her thigh, attached to the matte black curve of a modern prosthetic limb. It terminated in a blade-shaped support structure inside a plastic foot. It looked wrong, a blunt piece of machinery attached to soft flesh, but it was far less weird than anything else so far today.

”It’s carbon fiber,” she said.

”State-of-the-art stuff. Costs an arm and a leg,” Raine said, and cracked a huge grin. Evelyn rolled her eyes, and I could tell by her expression she’d heard that joke a million times before. A tiny pang of jealousy pricked at me, but I was too hungry to care.”

Ah, I see. I thought it was just going to be extensive scarring, or maybe something along the lines of her clothes being open in a more-revealing-than-expected way, but no, it's a bit more serious than that. In addition to missing fingers, Evelyn has one leg all fucked up and another completely artificial. It was established that she walked with a cane earlier, but this is more extreme than I thought.

Something about the rate at which this information is being disclosed makes me think that her mother had something to do with what happened to Evelyn's legs. It would connect a lot of dots, and explain a lot of her...Evelyn-ness.

If her parents are responsible for that, at least they got her a really shiny prosthetic I guess.

Heather being jealous of someone just for having a reliable friendship is...haunting.

““I have to eat,” I said.

Evelyn just stared level at me, so I dug in.

Rice and chicken. Doesn’t sound like much, but it was the first proper home-cooked food I’d eaten in weeks. Not a cereal bar or a microwavable ready meal or instant coffee. The empty, bruised space inside me responded with the most intense hunger of my life, and I had to force myself to slow down. A wave of animal gratitude passed through me. I asked who made it. Raine had. Salt and pepper, oregano and cumin. Real food, made by a friend?”

Oh don't worry Heather, you'll be getting more empty bruised spaces inside of you pretty soon at this rate.

“Raine busied herself clearing up the table, but Evelyn watched me and sipped her cold tea. Raine kept giving her meaningful looks, which drew worse and worse counter-glares from Evelyn, until I was sitting in the firing line of an emotional cold war.

”I have not forgotten, Raine,” Evelyn said eventually, thumping her mug down. “The severity of my—“ She bit the words back and took a sharp breath. “The moment requires significantly more gravity.”

” … iiiiif you say so.” Raine sat back at the table. She turned a smile on me and touched my arm. “Let me know if you need anything, okay? There’s brownies in the fridge, if you fancy one for afters.”

”Do you really think I’m that callous?” Evelyn carried on. “That much of a bitch? Your confidence in me is touching. We’ve both been through rather a traumatic experience today, Heather and I. Give me a moment.”

Raine held up both hands in surrender, a barely controlled smile on her lips. “I didn’t say anything.””

Something went way over my head in this exchange of Evelyn and Raine's, heh.

“I swallowed a mouthful of food and put my spoon down with a clack. “Will you two stop it? Please? I can’t deal with you bickering on top of … everything else. Not right now.”

Raine had the good grace to look sheepish. Evelyn nodded and took a deep breath. She tried to sit up straight, but a suppressed wince passed over her face as she struggled with her posture. She sighed, caught my eye, and spoke.

”Heather, I want to thank you, for rescuing me. You have my gratitude, and I am in your debt.”

I blinked at her.

”That’s Evee’s way of being friendly,” Raine said.

Evelyn rolled her eyes. “You have no sense of gravitas, Raine. Absolutely none.”

”Uh, sure, you’re— you’re very welcome?” I shrugged. “I don’t even know what I did, not really.”

”Mm, yes, so you say.” Evelyn leaned back in her chair with obvious physical relief.

”I’m sorry?”

”I’m not interested in the what. I know what you did. You breached the membrane between here and Outside, and you did so without any magical tools or devices, no access to the relevant books, no knowledge, no training, no history. Your mind, alone. I want to know how.””

"HAHAHAHAHA SORRY BUT YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH LEGS LEFT TO LEARN THAT!"

"BUT HEY, IF YOU'VE GOT A KIDNEY YOU'RE NOT USING MAYBE WE CAN TALK..."

“I held up a hand—the how presented itself to me in a flash of the Eye’s lessons, and suddenly the food in my belly turned to lead. “I can’t— it’s very difficult for me to talk about this. I-I—“

”Hey, Evee, maybe drop this?” Raine said softly.

”Raine filled me in on the basics, the things you told her about,” Evelyn said. “But I need more, I need the details. Yes, there’s some entity out there feeding you hyperdimensional mathematics in your dreams, but—“

I curled up, cold sweat beading on my forehead, nausea roiling in my belly. “E-Evelyn, I—“

”—but what I don’t understand is how you executed it, any of it—“”

Evelyn doesn't know about the Eye, then, if she's just referring to Heather's teacher as "some entity." Or else, she does know about it, but doesn't want to jump to conclusions about said teacher's identity until she's seen proof. Making assumptions can be perilous when one is dealing with Outer Gods.

As for the "how," hmm. I guess "just being really good at math" doesn't cut it as an explanation. Especially given that Heather isn't really a STEM inclined person by her own self-description.

...unless she actually IS a natural math wiz, and her experiences with the Eye have just been causing her to avoid anything that uses it. Maybe she'd be going for a physics or mathematics degree instead of a literature one, if not for the associated trauma? Possible.

But it seems more likely to me that there's a mystical explanation than a prosaic one like that.

““Evee, drop it, seriously.” Raine raised her voice. “She’s exhausted and I told you this makes her ill.”

”Will you stop babying her?” Evelyn turned on Raine. “Not everybody needs your bloody ministrations twenty-four seven.”

I lurched out of my chair, shoved my face over the kitchen sink, and vomited.”

Actions speak louder than words, I suppose.

“The edges of my vision throbbed black. My knees buckled. My body had nothing more to give. Gentle hands touched my back and Raine murmured in my ear, talked me through each deep breath. Clear my mind. Don’t think. Just breathe.

I groped for the tap and washed my mouth out, then turned on Evelyn. She was frowning at me, confused. The same expression I’d seen on a dozen would-be friends in my early teens: Oh dear, turns out little Heather Morell is crazy. Better handle her like spun glass.

”I don’t know anything,” I snapped. “This is what happens, when I try to think about it. Well done, thank you for that, Evelyn, thank you. Why do you think I was bleeding so much when I came for you? Bleeding from my eyeballs? It’s not supposed to be in my head, it’s alien, and it’s killing me.”

I forced myself to hold her gaze, to stand straight, hanging on to Raine for support. I wasn’t really angry at Evelyn. I was angry at everything, life, reality, the Eye, all my certainties crumbling beneath me. No outlet for the frustration.

Evelyn swallowed and looked away.”

Yeah, that reminds me. Evelyn still needs to apologize for last time too.

As for Heather's last words there...the story avoided addressing it until now, but yeah, she's basically right. Unless there's some way of counteracting the wear and tear on her body that the Eye contact is causing, she's got to be burning through her life expectancy pretty fast.

““Heather, hey, let’s get you sat down again, okay?” Raine purred.

I allowed myself to be sat back down, rubbing my tender stomach muscles. Raine put a glass of water in front of me. I drank slowly.

”Some of us never had the luxury of fragility,” Evelyn said.

”Evee, for fuck’s sake,” said Raine.

I gave Evelyn a very unimpressed look. She cleared her throat. “What I mean to say is, it’s difficult for me to place myself in your shoes, Heather. I’m quite used to all of this.””

Oh FFS just someone PUNCH HER already!

It's pretty clear that what's happening to Heather is NOT, in fact, part of Evelyn's own lived experience. She admitted that just a few goddamned paragraphs ago!

““What, almost dying in other dimensions?”

”Well, no, not that, that part was new.” Evelyn looked awkward and took a long sip from her mug. She settled it back on the table and stared at it for a moment before she continued. “I suppose you need it right from the top. Very well. I am a magician, and Raine is my bodyguard.”

Raine slapped the table. “Come on, at least upgrade me to companion. Champion, even! Childhood friend, at the very least?”

”You might not believe in what you’ve seen today—“

”She’s been practising this for hours,” Raine stage-whispered. Evelyn stopped and glared daggers at her.

I glanced between their faces, trying to gauge if this was serious. But of course it was. Did I doubt everything I’d seen today? The blood, the sweat, the choice I’d made to save Evelyn?

A tiny, screaming part of me refused to accept that this was real.

I’d ignored the most important implication.

If this was real, then—

No.

A great tightness seized my chest.

Had to distract myself. Deny, deny, deny.

”Magician?” I repeated, struggling to keep my voice level.

”Yes,” Evelyn replied. “Magician. Mage. Wizard. Whatever term makes the most sense to you.””

Let's avoid "mage" unless you're literally a Zoroastrian priestess.

Also, she still needs punching.

““So, what, you … “ An unbidden laugh entered my voice, the leading edge of hysteria. “Throw fireballs and talk to black cats? Do you have a cauldron in the basement? Dancing brooms?” A hiccup slipped out as I fought to control myself. “Is that what the Medieval Metaphysics Department is all about? A secret magic school in Sharrowford University?”

Evelyn sighed and sagged heavily in her chair.

”Not that sort of magic,” Raine said with a sad kind of smile. “It’s a bit more difficult than that.””

Evelyn, you literally drew a summoning circle on your living room floor. The sort of magic you practice is pretty damned close to what Heather's getting at.

““The department is a convenient bureaucratic fiction,” Evelyn explained. “Protective colouration. It did exist, from 1902 to 1954, for the study of the sorts of things I do. But it wasn’t out in the open, you understand? Respectable academia was cover for a tiny coven of men from the university—professors Ambleworth and Wakeley, with a few hangers-on. They founded the department when they encountered certain books they shouldn’t have been in possession of, things they shouldn’t have seen. Ambleworth went mad in 1948 and died in a mental hospital. Wakeley blew out his own brains two years later. The others limped on for a little while, but there was another suicide and a scandal. That ended it. All that’s left now is the book collection in the university library. Rare things, things you can’t find anywhere else unless you’re part of the right clandestine cliques. I know all this because my family was involved—is involved.” She gave a humourless puff of laughter. “I’m still here, after all. Now the department is just me. When one’s family has donated as much money to an academic institution as mine has, they sort of let you do what you want, as long as you keep it quiet and appear respectable.” She pulled herself up and looked me in the eye. “And what I do there is study the books. Officially I’m getting a degree in classics.”

A battered spark flickered inside me. “Classics? You’re learning Latin and Ancient Greek?”

”I don’t need to learn them, I was taught them as a child. Came with the family obligations. I turn in a few essays every term and the university turns a blind eye. I’m even lined up for a postgraduate program afterward. They don’t have a clue, it’s just me and Raine. If you meet any other mages in this city then it’s too late, you’re already dead.””

That makes sense. Though I wonder why she doesn't just buy those damned books pretty cheaply and bring them home, if the university isn't using them at all and owes a lot to her family. Seems like that might be easier than pursuing a sham degree and occupying a sham college department.

Maybe her family is also being kept in the dark about what she's doing here. That would make sense. And also explain why they're letting her use that house that they want to sell.

The founding members of the Medieval Metaphysics department being literal mashed-up names from Miskatonic University characters is...kind of pushing the joke a little too far for my taste at this point, heh.

Also, I was just joshing about Bluebeard in a squid-mech earlier, but what Evelyn just implied about this world's wizard community is actually starting to give me Type Moon vibes now.

“The way she spoke those last few words made my skin crawl.

”Yeah, it’s more Hannibal Lecter than Harry Potter out there,” Raine said, then caught the look on my face and put her hand over mine. “Hey, that’s why I’m here.””

Ah. Worse than Type Moon, then. Not good.

But hey, at least it's not Harry Potter. Gotta count your blessings.

““There is no community of mages,” Evelyn went on. “There’s my … family.” She made the word sound like an insult. “There’s a few dangerous cults worshipping things they shouldn’t—a couple of them right here in Sharrowford. There’s lone madmen, maybe even one or two others like me, and there’s things out there in the world we try to avoid. And you, apparently.””

Wonder what made the occult underworld so dire?

I guess there being corrupting influences inherent to magic would explain it, since there's emphasis on cults and madmen being major fixtures. Evelyn being a raging bitch might just be the mildest possible expression of what magic does to a person.

Though that makes Heather something of an anomaly. Whatever the story with her (and her sister?) is, it's probably a lot weirder and more exceptional than I thought up to this point.

“I shook my head slowly.

”No, no, this isn’t real.” My voice quivered. I had to convince myself. The alternative was unthinkable. “You’re just … this is just a story. This is some fantasy nonsense play-acting. It’s not real.”

Evelyn frowned. “You need more proof than what happened today? You provided your own proof quite handily, I thought. And you’ve already adapted to it.”

”She is taking it well,” Raine said.

”Yes, but what if I’m crazy?” I had to bite my lips for a moment to control my voice. “What if you two have been watching me and stalking me, cataloguing and recording my behaviour, and you’re both perfect improvisational actors pulling some sick joke on me, riffing off whatever I’ve hallucinated today?” Evelyn blinked in surprise but Raine nodded sagely. She understood. “These are the sorts of questions I have to ask myself.”

”Didn’t Raine kill the tick in front of you?” Evelyn asked. “Wasn’t that real enough?”

”The what, sorry?”

”The tick, the thing which came through in my place, when I completed the swap. That’s what I’ve decided to call it, unless I find it properly described and categorised elsewhere. I think that’s what those things were. That, or fleas. The proof is still right over there.” Evelyn gestured at the kitchen doorway.”

Yeah, I think "flea" is definitely the best Terran analogue. Ticks pretty much spend their lives either facedown in their hosts' skin, or out in the environment in between hosts. Fleas actually crawl around and interact with each other on the host's skin, which these things seemed to do.

Hmm. If Evelyn confirmed that they're parasitic, then the flea or tick analogue might be REALLY close, actually. Their mouths were described as looking like a leech or lamprey's. That's the one other mouth structure (besides the arthropod proboscis that literal fleas have) that you're likely to find on haemovores.

So yeah. They probably literally put their faces to the "ground" and suck blood when they're hungry. Really direct biological analogue. Eldritch David Attenborough indeed.

Too bad Raine had to kill that one, but I guess there really wasn't another choice. Hopefully they're just mindless bugs and not, like, people. Would kind of really suck if humanity's first contact with the glorious fleaman civilization was ruined by these bumbling teenagers.

“I looked round and saw what I’d missed in the front room. Several black bin bags bulged next to the stairs, double-wrapped, sealed with duct tape.

Dissociation washed over me as I imagined the contents of those bags. I looked back at my new friends and noticed other details I’d missed earlier: the shiny clean nightstick on the kitchen sink draining board, next to a butcher’s cleaver.

”Hey, somebody’s gotta do it,” Raine said, smiling awkwardly. “Don’t be scared of me, yeah?”

”That’s okay, I’m not scared.”

Raine’s violence had turned me on earlier, the rush and the romance of it, but the thought of her chopping up a body and stuffing it into rubbish bags left me ice-cold.”

So they chopped up the body, presumably for easier disposal. I'm guessing they're going to incinerate it; god only knows what sort of biological contamination they might risk otherwise.

Heck, they might have already set a plague event in motion in one or both worlds. If biology works more or less the same way over there that it does here, and the biochemistry is similar enough for each other's air to be breathable, then...yeah, this could get really bad.

“This couldn’t be real, because if it was—

Traitor, weakling, coward.

The void yawned wider.”

Huuuuh?

Is that the Eye admonishing her for backing away when she has an opportunity to advance?

If it was just "weakling, coward" I'd think this was Heather belittling herself. But, "traitor?" THAT sounds like the opinion of an outside entity.

I guess she could be thinking of herself as a traitor to her sister, since pursuing this could lead to a way of finding her again if she's still alive. But that seems like at least one too many logical leaps ahead of where Heather is currently at when it comes to processing everything.

So yeah. I thiiiiink this is the Eye mentally urging her to use what it's been teaching her.

““It’s not real,” I whispered.

Evelyn steepled her fingers and considered for a moment. “Raine, pass me the fade stone.”

Raine fetched something from the kitchen counter and pressed it into Evelyn’s palm—the chunk of white quartz I’d seen her holding twice before.

”Pay close attention,” said Evelyn.

I stared at her, not sure what to expect. She held the piece of quartz in her lap and closed her fist around it, then lowered her eyes in concentration.

She wasn’t there.

Oh, I thought, did I miss her standing up and going into the other room? I looked around and caught Raine smirking at me. I cleared my throat and frowned with mounting confusion. “Wait, wait, I was supposed to be watching Evelyn. Wasn’t I?”

”Heather, look at the chair,” Raine said, barely able to hold back a laugh.

”And don’t laugh at me. I still haven’t forgiven you for earlier, Raine, laughing at me when I was on the verge of a panic attack.”

She cleared her throat, sheepish now. “Take a look at the chair, seriously.”

I glanced back at Evelyn’s chair. The blanket she’d had wrapped around her shoulders lay draped over the wooden back. Her walking stick was propped against the armrest.

”And?” I asked.

”And nothing,” Evelyn said.

She was sitting exactly where she’d been before. Somehow I simply hadn’t seen her there. The blanket was wrapped around her shoulders again.

I blinked at her, felt a dislocation of time and space, like reality had just failed and glitched out.

”Where— where did you go? What just happened? Don’t— don’t try to confuse me, I … “

Evelyn held up the chunk of white quartz. “This stone is a small piece of my inheritance. The right sequence of thoughts, personal silence, a little practice, and the user is edited from the sight of an observer. I don’t quite know where it came from, but I suspect my family made it somehow. You’ve seen it before—I was using it Outside, to hide from the ticks. And from you, when you barged into the Medieval Metaphysics room.””

Cool trick. The way it made Heather think that her cane and blanket weren't where they actually were seems like the most impressive part, if it's actually causing her to hallucinate other details to justify the illusion of Evelyn no longer being there. Sort of like the...I think they're called "perception filters?" Something like that...from Doctor Who. Much more than mere invisibility.

Evelyn was cloaked when she seemed to appear out of nowhere in her chair in chapter 2, then. This also does make the fleas seem more hostile again, if she needed to use it to protect herself from them when she was on their dog. I was starting to wonder if maybe they weren't normally hostile to creatures their size at all, if Evelyn was able to survive among them for as long as she did, but no. I guess my Cloverfield comparison was pretty spot-on, then.

Glorious fleaman civilization is still canon regardless.

““Hiding from me? I’m not exactly threatening.”

”I told you. There are things and people in this city we want to avoid. You could have been anybody.”

”Okay, that was … okay.” I swallowed on a dry throat. My hands were shaking.

Raine stood up, stepped behind my chair, and started to rub my shoulders. I shrugged her off and pushed her away.

”Heather, hey, it’s good for you, I promise I’m not—“

I turned on her as the ground began to crumble beneath my feet. I groped for a way out, anything to hold back that one thought.

”Are you even real?” I demanded.

” … Heather? Of course I’m real.” Raine grinned and spread her arms. “I’m flesh and blood, you can touch me as much as you like.””

You should have made that offer right after killing the flea, Raine. Now is not the time.

““No, this isn’t real, neither of you are real. You!” I clamped down on the lump in my throat, the wrenching in my chest. “You’re too good to be true, Raine. You’re everything I need. You’re a walking, talking fantasy, my brain telling itself a fairy tale about being accepted and wanted. About a cool older girl taking me under her wing. You’re not real.”

”Heather—“

Tears were rolling down my cheeks. I fought to keep speaking.

”No! How can you be real? What a coincidence, that you’re here in Sharrowford, that you happen to go to the Aardvark on the exact morning I did, at the exact time I did. What a coincidence that I have a breakdown and you just happen to see me. You’re not real. This is my fantasy and I’m sitting in an empty house in the dark, talking to myself.””

I was wondering if Heather was going to think that, at some point. It did briefly occur to me back in chapter one.

The best argument against it is that if Raine is Heather's mind creating a fantasy of a perfect saviour and companion, then what the fuck is Evelyn supposed to be?

“Evelyn and Raine shared a glance. Evelyn looked like a deer in headlights.

I knew I was being unfair, scrabbling for the slimmest handhold I had left to deny, deny, deny.

”Heather,” Evelyn said. “You performed a technical miracle today. You can’t—“

I rounded on her. “And you, you’re even worse. You’re the unspoken promise that my insanity means something. That being crazy has a purpose. You’re the beginning of paranoid schizophrenia, persecution complexes, banging my head against a padded cell wall for the rest of my life.””

Ehhhh...nah, that really feels like a stretch. Raine already had that angle covered with the cell phone glyph trick. Come on Heather, I know you can do better than this.

““Have you finished?” Evelyn asked. I tried to stare her down, but I felt like a sick child.

”Why Sharrowford? Why are you even here?” I said. “Can either of you answer that?”

”The ‘Eye’—whatever it is—has been feeding you knowledge for a decade,” Evelyn said. “The most likely explanation is that it wanted you in Sharrowford, so it nudged you to choose the university. I’m not surprised, considering the nature of the city, the sorts of things that happen here.”

”Heather, it’s okay.” Raine tried to take my hand but I flinched away from her.

”That still doesn’t explain you two,” I said.

Raine leaned down so I couldn’t avoid her face. “Heather, hey. Sometimes you get lucky. The nightmares stopped, didn’t they? Even if we’re not real, that’s a pretty good trade-off.”

That look on her face—the kindness, the understanding, the bloody-minded stubborn refusal to give up on me—shattered my last line of defence. I lost control.

I wrapped my arms around my head and rocked in place on the chair, great big wet sobs ripping out of my throat. Ten years of nonsense and lies. Ten years of being this, and the whole thing fell apart around me and I couldn’t keep it out anymore. I scrubbed at my eyes, hid my face behind my hands, drew my feet up onto the chair and tried to curl into a ball.”

Heather has spoken about earlier awkward or vulnerable moments being humiliating for her, but she's barely saying anything about this one, and to me it seems the most extreme. Like, telling people what parts of your most sensitive emotional underbelly you think they represent, with the expectation that there's no one listening but actually there is...I'll be surprised if she's able to look either of them in the face after this.

Especially Evelyn, given her total lack of sensitivity and emotional intelligence.

I don't like the insinuation that the Eye somehow influenced Heather to choose Sharrowford, though. Retroactively insinuating that subtle mind control happened sort of calls the character's agency into question, especially if (as in this case) said mind control could very easily still be going on. When the character in question is the protagonist, well, that's a problem. Hopefully Evelyn is wrong about this.

“.”It can’t be real it can’t be real it can’t be real—“

Raine put her arms around me and held on tight. I tried to push her off but I didn’t care anymore, gave up and buried my face in her shoulder. She could cut me up and shove me in bin liners like the monster if she wanted, because I was living rubbish.

”Shhhhh, it’s okay,” she murmured. “Heather, it’s okay.”

”It’s not, it’s not, it’s never okay.”

”It will be, it—“

Couldn’t deny it any longer. The truth came out in a wail, at long, long last.

”I left her behind.””

So that's the "traitor" thought, then. It was Heather's own thoughts after all. She's never had Maisie far from her mind, and part of the reason she's insistent to accept the schizophrenia diagnosis is because that means she doesn't have to keep tearing herself apart worrying about Maisie.

Which, after however many months or years had passed without her being able to DO anything for Maisie, is pretty much the only option Heather had. It would have destroyed her otherwise.

So, now it's catching up with her, with years of interest. Hopefully mitigated somewhat by Heather now having the tools to start following Maisie's trail.

Now that I'm thinking about that piece of backstory again, the way that no one besides Heather remembers Maisie seems kind of like how Evelyn's fadestone works. Working on the minds of the witnesses, smoothing over discrepancies and contradictions, creating excuses for why the person isn't there (or, in this case, was *never* there). Similar type of effect, but vastly more powerful. Like the level one and level twenty versions of the same spell.

“Neither Raine or Evelyn said anything for a long moment, but I could picture their faces. The shared look over my head, Evelyn’s frown, Raine’s realisation. I kept going, pouring it all out between the wracking sobs and the horrible pain in my chest.

”My sister. Maisie. My twin. I left her behind in Wonderland. If this is real then she was real and I left her behind. I left my sister behind.””

;(

Well, here there's another little timeskip to later that night. And...this chapter has been long enough AND dense enough that I think I'm going to have to split it. So, last part of it will be up later. Until then, until then.