-TWO-
"It's all in how you look at things…For instance, if Christmas trees were people and people were Christmas trees, we'd all be chopped down, put up in the living room, and covered with tinsel while the trees opened our presents."
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Ameria Wil Tesla Saillune was not happy.
"You imbeciles! You brainless sons of slugs! How could you possibly let him escape out the window? I'll have you hung by your ankles and beaten with pointed sticks! And bitten! By big dogs! With even bigger teeth! And when the dogs get bored, I'll throw you down the grand staircase until…until you're nothing but tiny, insignificant bits! And then I will have the head chef make a casserole of the you-bits and eat it for dinner!"
She stormed upstairs to her suite of rooms, and glowered on the pink-and-gold chaise lounge for the next two hours.
Jarek Trall-Delmar-Damagan was not happy.
He had failed to wake up next to an insanely beautiful woman for the first time that week, first of all. Not that there hadn't been one to wake up next to last night. He felt rejected for approximately three seconds until his ego comforted him into thinking that he was too good for the slut.
He rang rather rudely and incessantly for his highest paid butler, and ordered the mail to be brought in. The butler courteously pointed out that the mail was sitting on his bedside table. Within minutes, the butler was escorted out of the house by the large security staff.
Zelgadis Graywords was insanely happy. He landed wrong on his left ankle, which sent snarled pain impulses through his nerves at every step. His cloak snagged on a rosebush, leaving ugly rents in the fabric. He had always liked that cloak. Oh, well. The rosebushes repeated this favor tenfold on his face and hands, golem or not. The grin on his face would have sent small woodland creatures fleeing in terror.
He skipped happily down a slope, tripped, and rolled fifty feet over mud and gravel into a well-placed pond. He sat up, brushed the pond weed away from his face, and whistled a cheery tune as he waded his way out of the lagoon, which just happened to be stocked with Slagarian Biting Fish.
As he wandered down a dusty road, bruised, bleeding, drenched, and covered in pond weed, he decided that he felt like singing. Unfortunately, he couldn't remember the words to any happy songs. It didn't really matter, because at that moment it almost simultaneously began to rain and a runaway horse nearly trampled him.
Zel immediately left the road and stumbled through a forest composed almost entirely of pricker bushes until he came upon two large caves, both of which looked like a rather dry, comfortable place to spend the night.
A clan of large, bad-tempered bunny rabbits, he discovered the hard way, inhabited the first cave.
The second was empty except for the excess of rubbish and pointy-looking gravel on the floor. He did his best to clear a space, sat down, built a fire, and cooked up a plump Slagarian Biting Fish that had trapped itself in his hood.
Now, as every seasoned wood-dweller knows, one should never eat the Slagarian Biting Fish. Their flesh is not only mushy, bland, devoid of nutritional value, and generally icky, but also mildly toxic. Unwitting consumers of Slagarian Biting Fish often report symptoms of eight-drink-hangover headaches, stomach cramps, and strange dreams.
When an amateur wood-dweller asks advice of a seasoned wood-dweller, the advice will often come in the cryptic form of this phrase: 'Don't eat the Slagarian Biting Fish.' After which the amateur wood-dweller will go out into the woods and come crawling back a day or two later, moaning, groaning and muttering, "I finally figured out what that meant…" The amateur wood-dweller will then be considered a seasoned wood-dweller and the circle of life will continue.
Ignoring the grinding pain in his stomach, Zel did a happy little dance out of pure joy before keeling over and falling asleep.
He had a very strange dream.
Zel sat straight up, quaking in fear. His first thought was that there was something else in the cave with him. But no, that was silly. The noise was his own heart beating, his own panting, his own ungodly snarling and roaring.
Yes, there was something else in the cave.
Being an un-cowardly little sorcerer, Zel drew his sword and crept cautiously into the pitch-black bowels of the cave. As cautiously and silently as one can creep when there is the crunchy type of gravel underfoot, that is.
The farther he went, the less the pitch-blackness persisted. The cavern was becoming suffused with a metaphysical blue glow that seemed to shift in a predetermined pattern. There was a sound, almost a taste to the light, if such a thing could be imagined, like looking at sunlight underwater.
Zel tiptoed his way through the rapidly narrowing passage, eager to find the source of the glow, which he found very comfortable to behold.
A serpent's tail, thick as a young tree trunk, flailed across the opening at the tunnel's end. Zel screamed. He was drowned out by another bout of roaring and groaning.
Teeth as long as the palm of his hand glistened in the creature's mouth, which could only be classified as a lion's mouth, because the creature's head was also that of a lion, its bright mane streaming down to the creature's chest. From there on, gold fur became rather wiry, dull gray curly goat's hair. This could also be classified as normal, because it was, in fact, the body of a goat. And the tail was a serpent's, thick and muscular, glistening green and brown, fully long as the creature itself.
A yawning wound festered in the creature's chest, above the heart and directly where lion's mane boiled in thick gold into goat. Black-red blood oozed freely from it, crusting a sickly dried copper on the once beautiful fur. Zel's stomach flipped over when he saw that the creature was, in effect, lying in it's own blood.
It was amazing. It was terrible. And it certainly had a reason to be roaring in agony.
Zel contemplated whether or not to just put it out of its misery, as it seemed to have gone into a stupor, great head resting on its cloven forefeet in semblance of sleep.
A sound no one else could hear made its eyes flutter open, and it sat up and turned those eyes to Zelgadis.
Human, female eyes, a deeper brown than he'd ever seen. His mind swirled with images of coffee, pottery, chocolate, nothing comparing to this. Something stirred within his soul, and he knew the beast was human, and that it knew him and accepted him. He knew its eyes would plague his dreams until the day he died if the creature also ceased to be.
Involuntarily, his brain formed a sentence. "Who are you?" he whispered.
Organ music blared discordantly into his ears. A wedding march.
Ameria Wil Tesla Saillune, crown princess, floated down the aisle of the chapel, purple hair a jabbing contrast to the foamy puffs of white lace boiling around her as an excuse for a dress.
Zel tried to scream and found that he was rooted to the spot, unable to speak or even run for his life. As he struggled to open his mouth, Ameria stopped next to him on the altar.
No. No, no, no, this can't be happening, it can't, I won't let it…
"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…"
"Skip it, Reverend! Make this snappy, I haven't got all day!"
"Ahem. Do you, Ameria Wil Tesla Saillune, take this…"
No, no, not a chance, no way, absolutely not…
"…Slagarian Biting Fish to be your lawfully wedded husband?"
"I sure do!" Ameria hugged the immense Slagarian Biting Fish standing on her other side. It looked rather pale, but, then again, Slagarian Biting Fish usually do.
Zel opened his eyes and sighed. My, what a strange dream…
He stood at the mouth of the cave, looking out onto the world, taking deep breaths of exhilaratingly frigid air. The sun was just beginning to rise, splashing the forest with its first color. The rabbits were hopping about for joy in the dew. There was a nice path through the pricker bushes he hadn't noticed last night.
He had a feeling it was going to be a pretty damn good day for striking out on one's own.
He also wanted coffee.
TO BE CONTINUED