- Chapter 060 -

  They Have Depth

  The tension in the pub, which had snapped taut at their dramatic entrance, dissolved just as quickly. The patrons, the ghosts of Mark’s own memory, gave the two arrogant newcomers a final, collective glare of pure, Mancunian disapproval, then returned to their own conversations. They were an interruption, an annoyance, but ultimately, they were irrelevant to the more important business of a quiet afternoon pint.

  One of the regulars, a burly man in a high-vis jacket, got up from his stool at the bar, walked over, and pulled the heavy blue doors shut with a grunt. "Bloody outsiders," he muttered, loud enough for the whole room to hear. "No respect."

  As the doors clicked shut, Mark felt a profound, almost physical sense of relief. The vast, sprawling, and utterly exhausting memory of Manchester began to shrink. He felt the distant, phantom rumble of the trams fall silent, the endless, intricate architecture of the city dissolving into a dormant, featureless grey. The strain, the constant, grinding effort of maintaining that vast, complex illusion, eased from his mind like a physical weight being lifted from his shoulders. All that remained was this room. The warm, familiar space of the pub and the small, rain-slicked patch of the street visible through the frosted glass of the windows. It was a smaller stage, a manageable battlefield.

  He walked over to one of the high, circular tables near the center of the room, his movements steady, his confidence solid. He pulled up a tall, backless barstool and sat, a deliberate claiming of the space, a space keeping his friends from their view.

  Eric and Clyde followed, their earlier triumphant curdling into a simmering, impatient anger. Their expectations obviously were not met, being invited to the table as opposed to running out the door. Eric sank onto a stool opposite him with a grimace. "No back?" he complained, shifting uncomfortably. "I’m even less impressed now than before."

  Clyde didn't sit. He remained standing, his gaze sweeping the room with a disturbing intensity. He was scanning, not with his eyes, but with his magic, a predator searching a suddenly shrinking forest. Mark could feel the probing tendrils of his power, searching for the other prisons, the other captives. Searching for a leverage that was no longer there.

  A cruel smile spread across Clyde's face as his search came up empty. He looked at Mark, his eyes gleaming with a triumphant, malevolent light.

  "It seems you've had a... miscalculation, Shilling," his voice a low, condescending hum. "I can't sense those other memory-spaces anymore." He feigned a look of theatrical concern. "Did you lose them? All that effort, boxing us in here, just to have your little friends slip into oblivion."

  He leaned in. "Beg, and I may even offer to rescue them."

  Mark just looked at him, his expression a perfect, unreadable blank, he knew the truth, that his friends were watching only a short distance from here. He gestured with a calm, almost lazy wave of his hand to the empty stool beside Eric. "Have a seat, Clyde," an almost bored invitation. "You're making a scene."

  The specialist's triumphant smile faltered, replaced by a flicker of genuine annoyance at the dismissal. He was an actor who had finally delivered his big, dramatic line, and his audience had failed to applaud. With a theatrical, almost contemptuous flourish, he reached into the inner pocket of his shimmering suit jacket and produced a small, perfect sphere of clear glass.

  He held it up, a magician presenting his trick. Inside the sphere, a miniature, ghostly image of a massive snow leopard paced and snarled, its cold, blue eyes glowing with a captured, impotent fury. It was the memory of the warning, the phantom beast Mark had summoned on the street, now trapped in a tiny, fragile prison.

  Clyde's smile returned, cruel and absolute. "You see, Shilling," he purred, "memories are such... delicate things."

  And then, he closed his fist.

  The glass sphere didn't just shatter. It imploded, collapsing into a fine, glittering dust that sifted through his fingers and drifted to the sticky floor.

  The illusion of the beast was gone. And Mark felt it. A sharp, stabbing pain, not in his head, but in his mind, a single, clean puncture in the fabric of his own history. It was insignificant compared to the roaring, cosmic inferno that had consumed his stars, a pinprick against a supernova. But the implication was clear and a void had been created.

  Clyde had just deleted a piece of him. An momentary creation, a fleeting thought in a rush of action, but only a shadow to be used as a threat, but he had done it.

  With another flourish, he produced two new spheres from his pocket, one holding a fuzzy, indistinct image of a rainy Manchester street. Another, with the blurred, laughing face of a friend whose name Mark couldn't quite recall. He held them up, a silent, menacing display of his power, a promise.

  He was proving his point. Claiming could break it all. Piece by painful piece.

  "I've already taken a copy of these, of course," He juggled the two spheres in his hand, a casual, terrifying display. "It would be such a shame if they were to... break."

  "Oh, stop being so dramatic, Clyde," Eric snapped, his voice a sharp, impatient crack. He waved a dismissive hand, clearly unimpressed by his specialist's theatrical performance. "We're back where we started. So why not just get back to work."

  Mark didn't look at the spheres. Didn't rise to Eric's taunt. Instead, he reached into the inner pocket of his own suit jacket. His fingers closed around a smooth cardboard box. He pulled out a deck of cards, the worn edges a testament to a hundred different lonely nights and a thousand different games of solitaire.

  He began to shuffle. The soft, rhythmic riffle of the cards was a steady, calming sound in the tense quiet of the pub. Eric scoffed, a sound of pure, unadulterated contempt.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  "What is this?" he sneered. "First the cricket bat, now a deck of cards? Your little parlor tricks are becoming tedious, Shilling. And playing dress-up as the Final Warden isn't intimidating. It's blasphemous."

  The insult, so casual and so specific, snagged Mark's full and undivided attention. He stopped shuffling. The Final Warden. His suit. His black work suit. He looked down at himself, then back at Eric, an interesting assessment for another time.

  He didn't comment. He spread the cards face down on the high, circular table, their backs a fantastic, intricate pattern of silver and gold swirling around a central, stylized eye. They fanned out in a perfect, silent arc.

  He finally looked up, his gaze bypassing Eric completely, and settled, with absolute focus on Clyde.

  "He failed to tell you?" Mark asked, his voice a low, conversational murmur that was somehow more menacing than any shout. "Did your paymaster fail to mention who I am?"

  He paused, letting the direct question hang in the air.

  "And that this Ark," he finished, his gaze unwavering, "is not my true home."

  Clyde let out a short, dismissive huff of a laugh. "It's become painfully obvious you're not from Titan," condescension dripping. He gestured with a lazy wave of his hand at the pub, at Mark's suit, at the entire constructed reality around them. "You're probably just some bookish recluse who's spent far too much time lost in old fantasies. Which, I'll admit," he added, a flicker of genuine, academic interest in his eyes, "has made sorting through the noise of your mind a tedious, but... educational experience. It will certainly make future endeavors of this nature far easier."

  The sinister admission was not missed, Clyde had confirmed the prospect that Mark wasn’t the first, or the last, and that he was using him as a learning experience to get better…

  He tapped a finger on his chin, a picture of professional assessment. "My guess? You're from California. Or, given the amount of trouble you're causing, perhaps you're one of the xenophobes from First Landing. Someone who slipped through the sealed gates."

  Mark didn't reply. He turned his gaze back to Eric, his fingers tapping a slow, random rhythm on the backs of the fanned-out cards. "I retract what I said earlier, you should be paying him more," a flat statement of fact. "For all the trouble you're clearly putting him through."

  Eric just scoffed. "It makes no difference. He is a paid service."

  Looking from Eric's arrogant face to Clyde's strained one, and then down at the cards on the table. "In a game of cards, gentlemen," he began, his voice dropping, "the most important skill is knowing when you're beat. Knowing when to fold your hand."

  He looked up, meeting their gazes directly, his own expression one of civil sincerity.

  "And I am recommending, as a professional courtesy, that you both walk away from this table. Now."

  "Stop stalling, Shilling," Eric snapped, his voice a low, impatient growl. "Afterwards, you'll all wake, end up in the infirmary when found. You'll be just another amnesiac patient, and if there's anything left of your little friends' minds when Clyde finds them, they may be lucky enough to still be productive members of society. Just with a conveniently large memory gap."

  Angry red light poured from an aura around him as he raised a balled fist. “Community is my domain, and here is no different. No librarian here to stop me convincing them.”

  “Sod off plonker!” shouted when of the phantoms before throwing a crumpled up crisp packet at Eric’s head, the distraction causing his failing display to fizzle into an angry glare.

  Mark's smile, already thin and cold, stretched into something a bit more sinister. He turned away from Eric. He looked directly at Clyde, his gaze unwavering.

  "Clyde's having a performance issue, though, isn't he?" Mark mused, his voice a quiet, conversational murmur. "I hear it's an age thing, nothing to be embarrassed about. And you, Eric, are running out of time."

  “ENOUGH!” Clyde glared back, holding up one of the crystal spheres, a warning, a loud warning.

  Eric's face, already flushed with impatience, turned a deeper shade of angry red. He rounded on his specialist. "What is he talking about, Clyde? What 'issue'?"

  Mark didn't wait for Clyde to reply. He tapped a finger on the fanned-out deck of cards, his tone shifting to that of a manager delivering a scathing assessment of a poorly executed plan.

  "You failed at the context, Eric," Mark explained, his disappointment evident. "I admit, Clyde is a terrifying force. His magic is immense, and had you spent a little more time planning, had you bothered to understand the nature of your target, this whole thing should have been over and done with by now. A smash and grab. But here we are." He gestured dismissively at the cards. "With a deck of cards."

  Clyde looked very uncomfortable under Mark's gaze, his earlier arrogance gone, replaced by strained concentration. He didn't answer Eric. Instead, a furious green aura erupted from him, pushing outwards.

  The pub groaned. The sturdy wooden tables shuddered. Glassware rattled precariously on the shelves behind the bar, and a few of the frosted glass panels in the booths developed hairline cracks that spread like spiderwebs. Mark felt a sharp, burning pain in his head, and a thin trickle of blood began to seep from his nostril. Clyde was pushing harder, his full power brought to bear against the very fabric of this memory.

  Mark just smiled, wiping the blood from his nose with the back of his hand. “He can’t risk damaging the prize you want to steal, basically a blunt instrument.” Dropping his head in his hands as the burning pain expanded into a searing blaze behind his eyes stealing his breath, only to force himself back upright.

  "This place," his voice staggered but clearly through the groaning pub. He gestured unsteadily to the bar, to the tables, to the very floor beneath their feet. "And them." He pointed to the patrons staring in vague disapproval at the disruption. "They're not basic imaginations, Clyde. They're memories. They have stories. They have depth."

  He met Clyde's furious, strained gaze, his own eyes gleaming with a cold, triumphant certainty.

  "Depths, Clyde, that you failed to account for."

  "It's just a matter of time," Clyde hissed, the words a strained assertion of a control he no longer truly possessed. "Just more noise. Nothing that will stop me."

  Mark laughed. It was a genuine, almost pitying sound between coughs of pain. He didn't even look at Clyde. His gaze settled on one of the regulars at the bar, the burly man in the high-vis jacket. And he didn't just see a phantom. He saw history. He saw the man's first nervous pint on his eighteenth birthday. He saw the raucous celebration after the birth of his first child. He saw the quiet, solitary grief after the loss of his wife years before her time. A hundred different visits, a thousand different moments of joy and sadness, all woven into the fabric of this place.

  "He's wrong, you know," Mark croaked towards Eric. He gestured with his head toward Clyde. "He thinks he's just sorting… through files. He doesn't realize he's walking through a graveyard."

  Steeling himself, he aimed a cold glare towards them. "While my friends, wherever they are, and I are trapped by Clyde's magic, you need to understand one thing."

  He leaned forward. "Pain doesn’t motivate me and… Time is not on your side."

  As he spoke, the warm, ambient light of the pub seemed to dim, the shadows in the corners deepening.

  "So if you choose to keep playing this game," Mark finished, his gaze unwavering, "if you choose to stay at this table... then whatever happens next is on you."