Chapter Fifteen: Puzzle Ball

"Again."

I almost flinched. I was really growing to hate that word…

In front of me were two items; a small wooden sphere with two tiny holes on opposite sides, and a short length of string. The goal of this whole clusterfuck of a lesson was for me to telekinetically guide the string from one hole to the other. The catch was that the small wooden sphere happened to contain a maze, carved by the most skilled of artisans, and the route between the two tiny holes was a very elusive one.

Sure, you're probably reminded of what's-his-face from Greek Mythology, who ended up stringing a spiral seashell by tying a string to an ant, then luring the ant to the other end of the seashell with honey. Yeah, maybe that might've worked if my planet had ants. And even so, Scales would've just considered it to be cheating.

I think that if my teacher was a wiser, older individual, he or she would tell me that I need more patience, that I am too impulsive, or any number of things that are wrong with me. When I started swearing and threatening to shatter the box with my Bowie sword, I think an older teacher would have told me to relax, to calm myself, to 'feel' the maze with my Vis—which I learned was the consorts' word for their telekinesis—and figure out for myself where the string should go, rather than blindly trying to feed it through every passage I encountered.

Constructive criticism and shit, you know?

But I didn't have an old, wise teacher. Instead, I had Glimmering Scales, and he was pissing me off even more than any self-respecting geezer ever could. He rarely spoke to me, except during our 'lessons'. And by 'lessons', I only mean every afternoon when the younger consort gave me the puzzle ball and the string, telling me to solve it.

Every time I nearly broke down in frustration, having to pluck the string from the puzzle ball every time it got snared or entered a false passage, Scales would simply tell me, "Again." When the profanity started to fly, and on one occasion when I even tried to throw the puzzle ball into a lake, he would just fix me with that maddening blank, emerald-eyed stare, and all he would say to me was, "Again."

Today was different, though. Scales still was not saying anything new, but I could tell that he wanted to. Perhaps he was just waiting until dinner. The reason for this, obviously, was the fact that there had been a double-assassination attempt just three nights ago, and I'd been on the receiving end of both of them. One black carapacian tried to kill my dream self while another black carapacian silently attempted to off my then-asleep waking self. The only reason I was still alive was because Scales had intervened just in time to stop the second assassin's killing blow.

And that sort of got me thinking…when I went to sleep here, I woke up on Prospit for the duration of my rest. But what would happen if my dream self died? Would I just have normal dreams? Or what if someone killed my waking self? Would I be dead, or would I be able to continue existing through my dream self?

"Who wass the assassin who tried to kill you?" asked Scales, breaking the silence before I could overthink myself to death. "I've never sseen ssuch a creature, before. Why wass it trying to kill you?"

"Well." I tried to think of a good way to explain and drew a blank. "I'm not sure you'd believe me if I told you. It's pretty wild."

"I am sspeaking with a figure of mythology," Scales retorted. "What iss wilder than that?"

"Fair enough." I gingerly set down the puzzle ball, resisting the urge to crush it to oblivion with my Aspect. "Imagine you have two different bodies. When you fall asleep, you wake up in your second body. And when you fall asleep in your second body, you wake up in your first one."

"You have two bodiess?" Scales sounded just about as skeptical as he possibly could.

"Yep, two bodies." I nodded. "This one here, and another one waaay up there in the sky, next to the sun. Skaia. The Great Sky Flame."

"I ssee…" I really wasn't sure if Glimmering Scales understood what I was saying or not. Either he did, or he had given up trying. "And wh

"And why do they want you dead?"

"Pff, fuck if I know," I could only shrug. "Whatever the overall objective of this game session is, the Dersites are opposed to it. The key to it all is Skaia, your Great Sky Flame. The Kingdom of Darkness wants to destroy it, while the Kingdom of Light tries to keep it safe. But apparently Prospit is destined to lose the war."

"Where doess that leave you?"

"Oh, we just have to magically become badasses with our Aspects in time to kill the Black King before he turns Skaia into rubble," I answered evenly. "No biggie. As you can clearly see, I've been making untold amounts of progress…"

"Your ssarcasm doess you no favorss," Scales remarked dryly. He then took notice of the puzzle ball that I was still holding, and he nodded to it. "Your puzzle remainss unssolved. Remedy that while I hunt our dinner." And with that, the red-scaled cobra stalked off into the forest, leaving me alone in the clearing we were using for our campsite.

The Knightswood really was a giant forest. It had been ten days, I think, since we left the main village of Clan Nathair. We'd been traveling east, towards the savannas inhabited by the peoples of the Desert Fires, ever since then, and we still had yet to reach the forest's edge. I learned from Scales that there were three great forests in the Land of Rain and Rivers. There was, of course, the Knightswood, which Clan Nathair had de facto control over, with the smaller clans also living in the forest acting as vassals of sorts. I'd noted how European this had seemed for a society that had thus far reminded me of Native Americans.

The second great forest was the Shadowed Forest, which was home to those Western clans that did not live in the Knightswood. Clan Ashei seemed to be the clan that ran affairs in this forest, acting as counterparts of a sort to Clan Nathair. They were not as powerful as the Nathair, but they came in a close second. I got the feeling that there had been multiple instances in which these two halves of the Western Fires had been in conflict with each other.

The third forest was the smallest, and it was called the Old One's Garden. Finally, it seemed that I was not the only figure of legend that these consorts named their shit after—the Old One had a forest of her own, whoever the hell she was. The Old One's Garden was the forest that surrounded the Knight's Mountains. The palace of Hyperion, my planet's denizen, rested deep within this forest, in the foothills just south of the Knight's Mountains—apparently, this is where the Forbidden River ended up. Because of this, it was decreed by the Old One that none but the Knight himself—me—are permitted to travel down this river, which earned it its current name.

I decided to try my luck at the puzzle ball again.

I closed my eyes, breathed in deeply, and out. In deeply, and out. I imagined that I was the string, that I had a body of thread with a single guiding light at the very tip. And after breathing in one last time, I took the string with my Vis and entered the entrance hole of the puzzle ball.

Just as usual, I felt the gradual curve of the first tunnel of the wooden ball before suddenly I was being bombarded with different choices of routes for me to take. It was like following a white beam of light into a prism, and suddenly being blinded by all the different colors that exploded outwards at the point of refraction. There always seemed to be a different number of new tunnels to explore, and they always felt as if they were moving.

But it was just a wooden puzzle ball—how could the tiny, carved passages within be moving? It was impossible, just a trick of the mind. Almost like the telekinetic equivalent of an optical illusion.

I took the tunnel that felt the most 'right', but as I ventured further and further down, the string grew more difficult to pull along behind my guiding force. I turned down a second tunnel, down a third, and eventually I came to a complete stop, sensing nothing in front of me but solid wood.

Dead end.

I retreated back down the tunnel I'd just entered until I reached the junction it branched off from, but I did not recognize any of the other possible routes. I'd entered and come back out of the same tunnel, but somehow I'd ended up in two different parts of the puzzle ball. Now you're starting to understand why I hate this thing so much. As I tried to find my way back to the junction I'd last gone through, I just ended up getting the string even more entangled within the puzzle ball, until I couldn't even move forward anymore. The string simply refused to be pulled forward any further.

As I shook my head and returned to my senses, I could see that almost the entire length of string had already vanished inside the puzzle ball, which I had to pluck back out. Glimmering Scales was slithering back into the clearing by then, a brace of dead rodents balanced on his back, under his sword sheath. Again."

Scales finished placing the firewood where it needed to go, and he took a deep breath. He then opened his mouth, baring his fangs. A thin, concentrated jet of fire spurted out from Scales's jaws, bathing the center of the firewood in bright, amber flames. Within seconds, the cooking fire was burning, and Scales began adding the larger pieces of wood to keep it going.

I'd just been about to enter the puzzle ball again, but I was distracted by Scales lighting the fire. "Okay, how the hell are you doing that?" I asked Scales. "I've done it accidentally a couple of times while fighting imps, but how can you do it on purpose?"

"You'll figure it out," replied Scales. "SSolve your puzzle ball firsst. Fire will come later."

I woke up with a brief yawn, rubbing the bleariness out of my eyes. The first thing I saw was the green ceiling of my room, then the slightly darker green walls, the green desk, the green computer.

I did my usual routine—get up out of bed, stretch, head over to the window to look out over the golden moon of Prospit. Waking up to Skaia's warm, soothing light was so much better than waking up to normal sunlight. It's kind of one of those things where you need to feel it to understand what I'm talking about.

Until now, I hadn't been certain my dream self had survived the assassination attempt, and my excitement at being okay swept me off the floor and out the window.

I soared across the Prospitian sky, glimpsing Cruz's dream tower in the distance. I stared at it for a few seconds, then decided to revise my earlier thought—I had two someones to see before I went to Prospit. I changed direction and veered towards Cruz's dream tower, swerving to avoid a particularly tall golden spire as I went.

As I neared Cruz's tower, I began to hear music faintly playing, growing louder and louder the closer I got. "…and as the marijuana burns we can take our turn, singin' them dirty rap songs…" I hummed to the song, recognizing it as one of Afroman's most famous singles, and one of the anthems of the stoner culture. The unmistakable smell of pot also grew stronger with the music.

When I got to the window, I saw Cruz sitting in his beanbag chair, strumming an acoustic guitar to the song, a still-smoking joint hanging lazily out of the corner of his mouth. The sounds Cruz was making were pretty cool, but they didn't quite go with the Afroman song—I decided to keep that to myself, though.

Cruz would probably keep on strumming and smoking until the world ended, so I took the initiative and hopped through his window. As I did so, I made a mental note to myself that I really couldn't keep on using the 'until the world ended' thing, anymore…seeing as the world already has ended…making us a virtually extinct species, save for eight dumb highschoolers with powers they have no idea how to use-

Nope. No, no, I'm not thinking about this shit, right now. No.

"Hey, Cruz," I greeted my friend as I set foot on his carpet. My dream room and everything in it existed in various shades of green, and I know Tami's existed in various shades of red…everything in Cruz's room, though, was cyan. I wasn't quite sure why our rooms were the colors they were, but there had to be some kind of reason.

Cruz's eyes flew open, and he smiled at me. "Waking up to a dear friend," he said, sitting up and holding out a fist. "That's just priceless. What's up?"

"Oh nothing." I bumped Cruz's extended fist. "I only survived an assassination attempt, you know, no biggie."

"Oh, shit, I heard about that! Are you okay?"

"Yeah, Cruz, by virtue of the fact that I'm here, alive, talking to you," I replied. "I'm flying over to Prospit, today. Wanna come with?"

"Uh…" Cruz fidgeted, trying and utterly failing to hide the discomfort he was clearly feeling. "I'd love to, but I can't exactly fly yet."

"What?" my forehead was creased by a deep frown. "Are you aware that you're aware that you're dreaming right now? Flying's never been a problem before."

"No, I'm not."

"Not what?"

"Dreaming," Cruz clarified. "I'm not dreaming right now, bro. I'm wide awake."

"But…"

Cruz fixed me with one of the most serious looks I've ever seen him give me. "This is the new me, dude. The real me is dead."