THE PROBLEM WITH PORTALS

             Shivering, the mage Lucas Archwright woke up with a face full of dust.  He hadn’t been out long, perhaps as little as two minutes, but he could distinctly feel there was a black void in his brain where recent memories should have been.  

             He stood up and shook what turned out to be powdered mercury off his belted black robe.  Its presence was alarming not merely for the toxicity of the substance but for the fact that mercury is a liquid at room temperature, and even when solid, not easily made into a powder.  Wiping his eyes and spitting, Lucas decided that the real lesson here was that room temperature surely is the temperature of whatever room in which you happen to be standing, in this case some gelid subzero.  Also there was the minor lesson that when you wake up not knowing where you are or what you’ve been up to, you risk doing so coated in poison.

             With a shrug, he took a step.  Lucas had never been the kind of man who spent much time looking backwards.  As a mage with sufficient skill to use his five runes to teleport around the magical planes, looking backwards could be tricky.  The task at hand, though, was surviving long enough to get out of here.  It was a cavernous space muddling the distinction between outside and in.  At an indeterminable point far in the distance, no matter which direction he looked, Lucas saw the internal barrier of a spheroid of dark violet clouds.  Bridges dripping with icy tendrils joined vaults of crimson metal.   There was no sun here, no horizon.

             It was just another realm in between, he thought, a thaumaturgical way station or planar linkage.  There were many such places.  No mage, no matter how long-lived, could ever claim to have seen even a thousandth of one percent of them.  Grand Caster Arlina of the Ecko Tower on Nai once said that every living entity in the cosmoses of reality who gained access to magic likewise birthed a new realm of surreal existence.  The common mage analogy is that a construct in a galaxy of evolved life is linked to a magical realm much as dreams are linked to memories in a human mind.  The distinction is important to the caretaker of said mind, but both are stored in the data fields of firing neurons just the same.  Only occasionally does a thinker lose track of which is which, and in that confusion, the most important connections are made.

             But fuck all that noise!  Lucas was cold and had recently bathed in, swallowed, and inhaled a chemical Qin alchemists used to call the river of agony.  If he survived it, he’d just freeze.  It had to be hovering around negative forty for the mercury to have solidified.  If Lucas wanted to recreate this elsewhere, he would cast a spectral dustmaker with potent sweeps of his elegentis and corlo runes.  Only nobody would ever do such a thing, as the destruction- well...  It’s the kind of magic that takes away horizons and suns, obliterating the caster and anyone nearby.  Magic is dangerous.  But, he supposed that something like it must have happened here.

             No matter.  Lucas could portal out once all five of his runes recharged.  Rule one, of course, was never cast unmapped portals, but given his current predicament...

             The only chance he had was to sit in a heat bubble made from a pulse cast of his il’aedr rune, then teleport out and let the dimension rift purge this body’s cells.  That would mean hours of il’aedr reinvigoration and he’d suffer from the mercury in the meantime, but it was worth a shot.  Crouching, he focused on the symbol on his forearm, an abstract tattoo that looked like a viper ensnared in a capital A.  “Il’aedr!” he said, pumping his bare hand upwards.  Then he waited.

             The shivering was replaced by the feeling of small bugs crawling on his skin that couldn’t be alleviated no matter how much he itched.  After that he started to see spots of bright light in the corners of his vision; he heard a ringing in his ears.  Phantom smells wafted through his nasal passages.  True delusion onset from nearly complete peripheral neuropathy followed and then sensation blindness.  Focusing all his attention on recharging il’aedr took what little strength he had left.  After hours of vile sickness, he saw it spark to match the others.

             Only his voice to guide him and a memory of the gestures, he stood up and screamed “Elegentis, corlo, il’aedr, tyranna, feariay!”  A vacuous hole was torn into existence through which the desperate mage stumbled.

** **

             Sweating, the mage Lucas Archwright awoke in a burning field.  He could feel his toes searing and the first thing he saw beside the darkness behind his eyelids was the hem of his robe igniting.  He hadn’t been out long, perhaps as little as two minutes, but he could distinctly feel there was a black void in his brain where recent memories should have been.

             He stood up and beat out flames before they spread.  He was in a broken realm of flowing molten metal.  He supposed the real lesson here was that metal doesn’t much care what physical state it’s in; molten merely speaks to a human’s desire for it to be something else.  Also there was the minor lesson that when you wake up not knowing where you are or what you’ve been up to, you risk doing so on fire.

             See the problem with portals is that if you don’t know precisely where you are, you can’t get to precisely anywhere else.  Magic is dangerous.  There are too many realms to explore.  No mage, no matter how long-lived, could ever claim to have seen even a thousandth of one percent of them, except Lucas Archwright, but he wouldn’t know how to talk about it.  Lucas had never been the kind of man spent much time looking backwards.