<html> <body> --------- Metamor Keep: Divine Travails of Rats by Charles Matthias and Ryx Pars IV: Infernus (h) Saturday, May 12, 708 CR Charles shivered as he crouched on the narrow strip of gray slipping through a hole in reality. He could almost feel the spectral touch of Tallakath wrapped about his limbs, and the horror of it left him only by degrees. The ancient Åelf stood behind him implacable and silent. A few minutes without seeing such terror was all he yearned for, but the unreality of the bridge was too great to give him even that surcease. The rat grabbed his tail in both hands and rubbed his thumbs across the short strands of fur dotting its otherwise scaly surface. Warm to the touch, a mark of the beast he had long ago accepted with delight and a measure of pride, it soothed him to hold it. He wiggled the tip up and down so that it brushed across his snout and whiskers. For a moment he imagined that it was not his tail he touched with his nose but his children. Their bright faces all eager to press against his own, each overjoyed to see their father and to be in his arms. He yearned to hold them and press their little bodies with wiggling limbs and tails against his chest and feel every breath they took and every laughing squeak. And how he wished it were Ladero he could hold. The rat sighed and lowered his tail to the bridge before straightening. He did not turn, but felt the Åelf's presence at his back. “What shall we see at the next realm?” Qan-af-årael's reply was gentle despite its severity. “It is the realm of the mad one, and that is what you should expect to see and feel – madness. Everyone we see there will be mad. Talk to none of them, for they will try to drown you in their madness.” “Surely they cannot all be mad? Not everyone was a prisoner of the pits.” “Perhaps those who only recently arrived have not succumbed to the madness. But can you tell them apart?” Charles pondered that for a moment and then shrugged. “I do not know. I just know I have to keep going if I am to reach Beyond.” He set one paw before the other, and the non-reality beyond the edge of the bridge twisted around them like a lens coming into focus. His steps carried him closer and closer to the ever narrowing point of the bridge. He sucked in his breath waiting for the end. The sensation of all things becoming microscopic returned for a brief moment before he stumbled into a colorful landscape overlaid with wave after wave of swaying grass, flowers, mushrooms, and ferns. He stared in bewildered awe at the vivacious colors, each of them bold and sharp with contrast, the reds a pure red as deep as blood, the blue as peerless as cobalt, the green as rich as jade, and every other shade each striking with such distinction that he could almost see lines marking the boundary of each with each other. The flowers towered above him, their fragrances overwhelming him with a sweetness so strong that he felt nauseous. Mushrooms strove to a purple sky dashed with golden clouds, their caps swollen like a watchtower cupola and their base as hard as mountain stone. Charles stood upon a patch of bare earth that felt as smooth as glass despite being pockmarked with little roots and stones. A breeze rushed over him that seemed hot on his left and cold on his right. A sticky miasma seemed to coat the inside of his mouth from his incisors to the rear molars. All around him the susurrus of the wind and brushing fronds of petal and pistol carried a suggestion of chattering voices, screams, and hysterical laughter, all blended so tightly that he could not discern which was which. Wincing, Charles narrowed his eyes and attempted to cover his ears with his hands. Even though he pressed his palms over the holes – he felt the prick of his head fur on the soft backs of his ears as the jabs of needless – the strange discordant flow of voices penetrated as if they were breathed into his mind from some other direction. He grunted and tried to scan the overlarge garden for some signs of where he might go, but every direction appeared the same as any other. Qan-af-årael appeared a moment later only a few feet behind him. The Åelf's countenance twisted ever so slightly as the ground beneath him buckled as if the stones, dirt, and roots were all as malleable as taffy. Their eyes found each other, and the first thing Charles noted was that the colors in his friend's guise were all muted in comparison to the realm. He could look at the Åelf without discomfort. “Please tell me you know the way to the next bridge. This place doesn't feel...” Charles stopped and blinked, ears lifted higher in surprise at the sound of his own voice. The words came from his throat but the pitch was off; even for a rat it was far too high and light. The intonation and inflection that he heard from within his chest and through his ears was clearly feminine. His paws lifted to his chest, but he found nothing unexpected there. His tunic, the cape about his shoulders, and smooth chest beneath was as he'd always known them to be. The Åelf's expression was quizzical, even as he took an experimental step, one eye watching the ground bend beneath him as if he were standing on the skin of a large drum. Charles sucked in his breath and asked, “Do I sound like my wife?” “No,” he replied, and whatever oddities seemed to exist in this place were for the breath of time it took for the sound to strike his ears and register in his mind completely annulled. “But this place does not always show us the same things. The Bridge... I do not feel it yet. I will tell you when I do.” “Thank you,” Charles said, and winced at the hearing what almost seemed his wife's voice from his throat. He rubbed his paws together, and took a tentative step into the tall grass. The flowers may tower above him but the blades of grass only came to his middle. The ground which bent beneath the Åelf's boots seemed solid, if extraordinarily smooth. And then he took another step and felt as if he'd shoved a knife through his foot. “Ah!” Charles leaped backward then fell onto his side, face pressing into the ground which flowed up across his snout as if it were the surface of a still lake. And yet, though his eyes were pushed into the dirt, he could dimly see something stretching into limitless depths before him. It was faint and gray, a dull color drained of all vitality. He could see no edge to it but it had shape. Something in its manner suggested a disc of impossible width and breadth. His gaze was drawn along as if by an arm, spinning about a central point. It sucked at him like a lodestone, vanishing deep within itself in a place where no detail or differentiation could be made. All substance, all thought, all being, funneled into a mass from which there was no escape and into which he felt himself drawn. The maelstrom vanished as he felt a hand grip his shoulder and pull him upright into the brightness of the over-sized field. Charles gasped and swung his limbs, eyes wild as the vibrancy struck him. But they found Qan-af-årael and settled there as in an oasis. Charles stilled himself, stretched out a hand, and gripped the ancient one's robe, savoring the soft feel of the fabric and the way it caught his claws. This felt right. Together they pulled him to his feet, and he winced anew at the strange texture of the ground. “I feel like I'm either standing on ice or knives. I wish I had boots!” He grimaced at the sound of his voice which now croaked like a frog. Even some of the words seemed to be more animal noises than actual speech. “It is not real. Hold on to me and you will be able to walk.” Charles held on to the robe long enough to grab his sleeve with his other hand, and then side-by-side the pair began to walk through the grass. The ground felt odd beneath his feet and continued to change with each step. Sometimes it was soft as if he really were walking upon the ground; other times it was hot like coals, and then sharp as blades, and then again smooth as glass. When the pain came he clutched more tightly to the Åelf who did not seem affected by the randomness of sensation. Nor was it only through his feet he felt so assaulted. The blades of grass felt like trailing claws, soft feathers, cold iron, brittle dirt, jagged clay, supple leather, porcupine quills, silky hair, snakeskin, and many more things he could not describe. Charles flinched from their touch after only ten paces and huddled close to the Åelf like a child pressing to his father in the midst of a strange crowd. The grass parted after another thirty paces. Above them swayed the flowers and mushrooms as a foul and sweet-smelling wind rushed just above their heads. The whispered glimmer of laughter and screaming danced at the edge of his hearing. The syrupy fragrance poured from each petal like a bottle of perfume emptied onto his head. A burning taste lingered on his tongue. Beyond the grass they were met with a sight more remarkable and more unbearable than tall flowers. The ground, if it could be called that, curved upward and then backward before breaking into trailing paths that spread in every direction and at every orientation. And yet, though Charles could discern actual ribbons of land curving in the distance without horizon, each ribbon seemed impossibly wide, as if it contained a world infinite in each dimension, all of them folded one atop another. He stared for only a few seconds before the attempt to place each piece of ribbon in proportion to every other piece left him with a sharp headache. The rat groaned and lowered his eyes to the ground which was too bright a contrast in green, brown, pink, blue, and red between a layer of moss growing over broad slabs of vibrant granite suffused with various minerals. Frustrated, he just closed his eyes completely, tightening his grip on the Åelf's robe. “Guide me, please. I cannot look.” His voice boomed in his ears and he winced, lowering them against the back of his head. He felt a soft touch from the Åelf's hand on his own, and then they kept walking. He set one foot ahead of the other tentatively, hoping for once he would feel the ground as it was. For several long minutes he endured oddity after oddity. His toes felt sore from all of the changes they suffered; from bitter cold to searing heat, from ice smooth to razor sharp, from gooey soft to steel hard, and from desiccation to hoariness. Charles attempted to block the sensations by willing his feet turn to stone but even that accomplished nothing. When his feet brushed against each other he could indeed tell that he had made them stone, but the myriad touches continued, each one different than the last. He pondered if he could use his Sondeck to fight back the sensations, but how to even begin? He attempted to guess what he would feel with each step. Sticks, stones, mud, moss, glass, ice, fire, steel, coals, brass, and anything else he could think of that he might recognize through the callused flesh of his feet and the prick of his toe claws. At first he was always wrong. He sought some pattern in the order in which each sensation came, but after more paces than he could count he abandoned any such thought. Why, in a place where the ground did not feel as it should, where scents were not as they ought to be, and where everything appeared wrong and the land itself was impossible, should he expect an order to any of it? Even as he continued to guess with a near perfect record of failure, one paw gripping tightly the robe of his Åelf guide, his ears danced with a melody which cavorted in the air as if the entire world were speaking to him. The longer he kept his eyes closed the clearer the sound became to him. There was no rhythm to the melody which seemed to at times be played by a flute and at others by some stringed instrument. And there were moments when he felt certain this strange, sinuous, and almost innocuous melody was performed by shattering rocks beneath a hammer. That too gave way to the strident sensation of claws dragged against glass. But through all of those changes he could still discern a true melody, even if it was one that seemed to have neither beginning nor end. To the rat's surprise, the more he listened to the melody, the more he let it seep into his thoughts, the better he was able to guess what sensation he would feel beneath his feet. Now when he heard a fragment of tune he knew that he would feel dry leaves between his toes. A upswing in the melody guided him to a hard iron slab. A stuttering murmur signaled the chill of ice. And a sforzando tone announced that he was about to be stabbed. Charles discovered that this sensation, not only predicted by the melody wending its way through his thoughts, could also be altered by pausing just a moment to allow the melody to change. He experimented haphazardly at first, by making a brief pause as if he were about to stumble whenever the sforzando notes struck. Something else would always follow, and soon he no longer felt the jabbing pain of standing on knives. Not only could he avoid that anguish, but he soon learned how to avoid the burning of coals and the freezing of ice. He was, in some strange way, dancing to the music of the world. In that dance, a strange sort of conforming to a meander without meter and to a pace without purpose, Charles found he could determine what sensations he would feel beneath his feet. Not only could he avoid those that were unpleasant but he could dictate the sensations he actually wanted. Should he desire dry leaves to crunch between his toes so he might know the pleasure of a warm autumn afternoon he merely had to step with a drifting theme that floated ever down. When he sought the soft loam of freshly turned earth a pastoral lilt sufficed. And should he seek the solace of stone a three note question amidst the cascade of melody would guide him true. Charles delighted in this for a time though the length of time was lost to him. Mere seconds of discovery and only few steps did he make, or had it been hours and he'd been dancing with abandon in a forest glade of his imagination? He did not know. All he knew was that at some point when the melody made him wait longer than he liked before settling on the motif he desired that he was no longer gripping Qan-af-årael's robe. Charles blinked open his eyes and screamed as light poured in like water sucked down a sinkhole. He slapped his hands over his face and opened one of them a sliver, peering out between his fingers at the tiny cleft of the world before him. Even that sliver stung but through it he began to make what sense there was to be had. The rat found himself on a small moss-covered path that rose up before him, curved over his head, until it joined itself back again. The world beyond his little wheel was tilted at an odd angle so that it seemed he would fall to his death should he step outside the wheel. Charles blinked several more times until he could finally lower his hands from his face. The music that had guided him, once so present to him, now seemed absent and he had to strain to hear it. No matter which way he turned he could see no trace of his guide. He cupped his paws to either side of his snout and bellowed, “Qan-af-årael!” This time, to his surprise, he could barely hear his own voice. It was as if his ears and his throat were on mountain peaks standing on opposite sides of Metamor Valley. Only the faintest of echoes of that shout remained. “Qan-af-årael! Help me! I'm lost!” Charles shouted again, but as before it was as if the words were stolen in the air before he could even utter them. “Qan-af-årael!” A strangely appetizing smell touched his nose and he found his head turning back into the wheel. Right in front of him, along the path, he felt all of his animal senses drawing him. His jaw gaped, whiskers twitching, and tail dancing behind him as he found himself leaning forward, taking step after step along the path. The ground twisted beneath him, the wheel turning, even as the world beyond the wheel rocked back and forth like a boat on the sea. Before he quite knew what was happening he had fallen to all fours and clawed at the ground with both hands and paws. The rat felt helpless as he continued to run forward. Any slight turn he managed to push his body to take was punished with the sensation of stepping on knives. And, as his pace quickened, he became aware of not only the allurement that was always only a few paces ahead of him, but he could feel a heat building behind him, as of an oven following behind, the bristling snarl of flame licking across black iron grates, ravenous and roaring as it grew hotter and hotter. The rat scampered faster and faster, the world outside his little path tossing back and forth. Before him his whiskers felt and his nose savored a delectable flavor of indescribable desire. His posture pushed him forward, legs and arms shortening, body stretching, and back arching. He could not make himself think of anything except obtaining that which was just before him other than escaping the fire that raged just behind him. His tail sizzled and he dug his claws into the ground and pushed faster, uncomfortable in the strange bindings that bounced along his back and legs. Those bindings eventually tangled in his hindquarters and made him trip, smacking his snout into the ground. The wheel rushed forward for a moment before settling back down, as he kicked his legs and scrambled to get free. Rolling onto his side, the rat blinked at the dark brown thing wrapped about his hind paws, and the strange black thing dangling from his shoulders, as well as the other brown thing wrapped over his chest. He bent his head forward and nibbled at it to get it off. The rat just managed to wriggle his legs free and gnaw through part of the thing clinging to his forelimbs when a strange but pleasant warmth filled him from whiskers to tail. For a brief moment all fear of the fire behind him or the inducement before him was washed free and his mind, stretched thin between those two extremes was suddenly vibrant again. It was like he was being loved. He took a deep breath, staring down at himself and his beastly posture, and began to tremble. My name is Charles Matthias. He repeated this thought several times while forcing his body to take on its most human shape. He pulled his trousers back up and secured them over his tail, then inspected the damage down to his shirt. The tunic had been chewed through along his right breast up to the side, but the lacing at his sternum still held it together. And with his cloak drawn over his chest none would notice the damage. Slowly, Charles stood up and surveyed his surroundings. The heady scent that had rendered him for a short moment a beast in mind and almost wholly in body returned. He gagged and put a hand over his nose, casting his eyes around the wheel of grass and dirt, and then out at the landscape beyond the edge which seemed miles away. The scent slipped through his fingers and his nostrils flared, his legs and back beginning to buckle, the compulsion, the raw need to chase after this scent already eating at his mind. With what will Charles had left he turned and jumped out of the wheel. ---------- May He bless you and keep you in His grace and love, Charles Matthias </body> </html>