57.

  “On your feet mageling, we must move,” the Pigeon King said.

  “I don’t think I can,” I muttered.

  My body shook from exhaustion. My mind was fuzzy and I was barely able to gather my thoughts. I felt like my chest had been cracked open and everything inside had been clawed out. The horrors of my mind had left me reeling and nauseous.

  “On your feet!” the Pigeon King snapped. “You have no physical body to be exhausted!”

  Objectively I knew he was right, but I was bone tired. I had no will to do anything but lay there on the cold cobbles and desperately try to forget the horrors that still ate away at me.

  “What was that thing?” I asked the Pigeon King, my voice barely more than a hoarse whisper.

  The Pigeon King did not reply.

  “You know what it was,” I said more firmly.

  “No.” The Pigeon King said flatly. “Now is not the time…”

  “When is the time?” I snarled, still staring up into the sky. “That thing has…”

  “Mageling!” I heard the Pigeon King snap.

  Why couldn’t he just leave me alone? This was all his fault anyway. He had dragged me into the mental hellscape of my own mind and now he wouldn’t even let me… Then I felt the flagstones shift and grind underneath me.

  “Move!” The Pigeon King cried out.

  I rolled to my feet, the instinct for self preservation cut through my self pity, and I saw the strange floating walkways and staircases were beginning to shift and roll with tremendous grinding sounds. Then I looked at my feet and saw the flagstones were beginning to crack.

  “Run!” The Pigeon King shouted to me but I didn’t need to be told this time.

  I took off sprinting, the flagstones breaking apart under my feet. The sound of cracking and shattering concrete filled the air. More lightning flashed in the clouds, the surrounding sky suddenly looking redder and angrier than when we had first arrived. As I sprinted, I realized the platform I was running along suddenly ended. There was about a 6 or maybe 7-foot gap between me and the next chunk of concrete and flagstone, beneath which was the endless red sky.

  To make matters worse, the platform in front of me was listlessly floating around, back and forth, not quite staying still and not looking stable enough for me to grab hold of. The Pigeon King, of course, had the benefit of being able to fly, so this whole affair was somewhat less life-threatening for him. Despite this, he flapped his wings and squawked, looking genuinely afraid. Then I realized the only way for the Pigeon King to get out of here was back through my mind, and if I dropped off the edge here into oblivion, the Pigeon King would be stuck in Somnix’s nightmare kingdom. A small, rather spiteful part of me, kind of wanted to keep him trapped in there as payback for dragging me through this, but the bigger, more logical part of me wanted to live.

  I put on an extra spurt of speed, imagining I was running across the rooftops of the Mulberry Estate. I hit the edge and leaped. I was in the air for what felt like an eternity. My legs and arms windmilled, and the platform drifted lazily, slowly inching away. I just about managed to land my toes on it, sprawling forward and scraping painfully across the flagstones, but I was safe for now.

  On my belly, I spun and watched the platform I had been on crumble and collapse into nothingness. I looked around and saw platforms doing the same everywhere, breaking apart and renewing in different places, staircases shattering and regrowing, doors crumbling in on themselves. All the platforms and bits of floating wall and chunks of masonry shifted and reset before my stunned eyes.

  "We have to keep moving!" the Pigeon King shouted, flapping just above. "Somnix’s kingdom is unstable, especially for a mortal mind. We cannot rest here!”

  I still couldn’t summon the will to fight. I felt drained, my body moving on auto pilot, while my mind still reeled.

  “Mageling!” The Pigeon King squawked. “You must…”

  “What’s the point?” I said bitterly, staring down into the void.

  “Mageling you cannot give up here!”

  “Why not?” I said, eyeing the Pigeon King coldly. “You want me to risk my life, my sanity, to get back a fucking feather, and you won’t even tell me the truth!”

  “I have never lied to you!” The Pigeon King shot back. “And I will help you, mageling! But first, we must survive this nightmare! You are a lot of things, my featherless follower, but you are no coward! You will not give up here and allow your enemies victory! Is that understood?”

  I grimaced and stared into the roiling red clouds. Lightning flashed and I took off running again. Whatever else I was, whatever the hell I was becoming, I never gave up. I didn’t know how. Survive, that was the only option I knew.

  The platform I stood on was barely 12 or 13 feet long, but fortunately, it was only a small hop onto the next one. This one was a floating wall with a ledge of bricks sticking out of the bottom. I hugged the wall, fighting between the urge to look down and squeezing my eyes shut. With my eyes firmly locked in front of me, I pressed my cheek against the cold rock of the wall and began to shuffle along it.

  There was no wind, no air, and very little sound, but still, my mind convinced me that there was a whipping wind tugging at my feet and body, that I was freezing cold, and my fingertips and toes were beginning to go numb. I gritted my teeth as the Pigeon King flapped behind me shouting encouragement. I made it across to the next, more stable platform. This one had flagstone steps going up, which were just wide enough for me to fit through. I reached the top and found nothing. There was a small circle of concrete at the top of the stairs, which afforded me a gut-wrenching 360-degree view of my surroundings. There was nothing but the roiling red sky both above and below. I looked ahead and I could still see the castle, but it was impossible for me to map out a route. Everything kept moving and shifting. It was an impossible, mind-bending task.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  I looked over the edge in front of me and saw there was only a single small platform that I could reach. Even worse, it would require me stepping onto the crumbling wall in front of me, which was barely a foot thick. Even then, I would have to leap down maybe 10 more feet onto a platform that was listlessly floating in circles.

  "This is impossible," I moaned as the Pigeon King flapped around my head.

  "Nothing is impossible," the Pigeon King replied. "You just have to screw your courage to the sticking post and keep moving forward."

  I looked at him with a side-eye. I didn't know what a "sticking post" was, I didn't know how to screw my courage to it, and if I was honest, I don't think I had enough courage left to screw it to anything. But I’d be damned if I was going to chicken out now. Here's a life tip: when you lack the courage to do something scary, rely on impulse instead. I took a step forward onto the crumbling wall, feeling the masonry crack beneath my feet. Wobbling precariously, I dropped into a squat and gripped the edge of the wall, looking down at the platform again. Without hesitation, I leaped.

  Luck had to be on my side because if I was a second earlier or a second later, I would have either missed the platform entirely or hit the edge and bounced off to endless nothing. Instead, I sprawled across it, hugging the edges desperately, hoping that I didn't keep sliding forward right off it. I scrambled back to my feet, and my stomach lurched as I saw the next platform that I could reach was little more than a floating hunk of rock, maybe just wide enough for me to stand on. I didn’t have lungs, I couldn’t breathe, but I was still breathless. There was no blood in my body, but my cheeks felt flushed and my heart raced.

  I swallowed and timed my jump as it floated by and stepped neatly onto it. That was easy enough, but as soon as both my feet were settled on the floating chunk of rock, I felt it begin to wobble and shake. I've played enough platform games in my life to know that a wobbling platform is never a good thing. Just to my left, floating by, was a staircase that began nowhere and ended nowhere. I had to move quickly before this platform gave out underneath me.

  Steadying myself, I shuffled to my left to get a little closer to the staircase, and that sent the rock flying. It spun from underneath my feet, and I don't know if it was luck, skill, or just sheer feral instinct, but I managed to grab hold of the edges of it as it whipped out from underneath me. A horrifying moment later, I found myself dangling under the rock, staring down into the lightning-filled clouds below, and I'm not too manly to tell you that I whimpered.

  "Mageling!" the Pigeon King cried, flapping around me. "Hold on!”

  "Thanks for the advice," I grunted at him through my teeth.

  The platform kept wobbling. The staircase was drifting by. I frantically told myself that I was weightless. Gravity itself was imaginary in this place. But that didn't make it any easier to hold on to the little chunk of rock with crumbling bits of brick raining down on my head. It was now or never; the stairs were almost out of reach. So, I did the only thing I could. I began swinging myself back and forth, trying to gain momentum. I reached the apex of my swing, screwed my eyes shut and let go, hurling my body forward. Just as I opened my eyes, I saw the staircase coming up underneath me. I braced myself and cracked my shins into the corner of the stairs painfully, and then scrambled to get a handhold before I slipped and rolled down them and off the edge. After a breathless second, I knelt on the stairs, panting deeply.

  The Pigeon King flapped and sat on the stair in front of me, nodding his head.

  "Good work, mageling. That was somewhat impressive.”

  "Thanks," I panted. "But I don't know how much longer my luck can hold out.”

  "Agreed," the Pigeon King said.

  "Are we any closer?" I asked, and the Pigeon King shook his head.

  "What?" I groaned in exasperation and crawled to the top of the stairs.

  The castle was still as far as it had been when I started. I looked behind me and saw nothing that I recognized. The route that I had just traversed looked entirely different. I couldn't even tell where I'd started from.

  "This is insane," I snarled in frustration.

  "This is Somnix," the Pigeon King replied. "None of this is real. This is all mental trickery and illusion. If we were in my mind, I could see through it in an instant, but your mind is weak and susceptible to such tricks.”

  "Well, remind me next time we need to fight a dream demon that we should go for a ride in your head," I snapped.

  "If only," the Pigeon King sighed. "But you are right. We can't just keep blindly blundering forward. We have to see our way through this trick."

  I scanned the horizon, looking at all the floating pieces of rock, staircase, and walls, slowly piecing a path together. It was pointless. Every time I tried to track a route, bits and pieces just shifted or fell into oblivion, disappearing in front of me.

  "How the hell are we supposed to make our way through this?” I groaned.

  "We're not making our way through," the Pigeon King said. "We need to make our way through it.”

  I looked at him, nonplussed.

  "Isn't that what I said?”

  "No," the Pigeon King replied. "You are still working under the impression that we are somehow going to traverse our way to the castle. Instead, we need to make our way through the illusion and see reality. This is all some enchantment designed to disorient the mortal mind, and your mind has, for some reason, created this mental projection. Your perception has created this floating nightmare."

  "Why would I create this?" I asked him.

  "I have no idea why your mind does the things that it does, but I'm growing tired of it.”

  I didn’t blame him.

  "This is like when we went through the processing part of my brain, right?" I asked, and the Pigeon King nodded. "So this is just something my mind has created in response to Somnix’s enchantments?”

  "More or less," the Pigeon King replied.

  "So if I can force the picture back together, then we can make our way to the castle?”

  "If you had perhaps three or four more decades of experience and some understanding of your own mind, perhaps," the Pigeon King said.

  "I don't need that," I replied, waving a hand at the chaos before us. "This is just a puzzle!”

  "A puzzle?" the Pigeon King replied.

  "Yeah, a jigsaw. I used to do them all the time with my Grandad. He loved doing World War II and stuff, you know, big tanks and forests and planes. You just have to put the pieces together.”

  I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm before sitting down on the edge of the step, staring at the mess of masonry, flagstones, steps, and doors in front of me. Seeing but not looking, just getting a vague shape of it all, slowly putting the pieces in the right places. I began to let my mind drift, drift to that same mental state I had when I was Runecrafting. My brain went to that place where there was deliberate but not conscious thought.

  The Pigeon King watched me curiously but didn't interrupt. I took another deep breath and then closed my eyes, and I saw the picture. It was bare bones at first, just a series of rough lines and shapes. But slowly, the details began to fill in. I began to see the flagstones, the way they connected, where the stairs went to, where each door should be, where the floating braziers and candelabras could slot into place. I reached that perfect place of certainty, and when I opened my eyes, I was looking at a corridor. It was a long corridor that looked like it was ripped straight out of a medieval castle. All flagstones and rugs and candelabras stretching into the distance.

  I looked up and grinned at the Pigeon King.

  "You were saying?"

  The Pigeon King scoffed and rolled his eyes before hopping into the corridor.

  "Honestly, the child does some simple tricks to see through an illusion, and suddenly he thinks he's a real Magi.”

  I grinned and stepped into the corridor, feeling how firm and secure it was, and then followed the Pigeon King into the darkness of Somnix kingdom of nightmares.