Recently I've been organizing all the freebie stories associated with a particular novel or Work in Progress into individual files. I've given them titles like Cauldron Tales: Stealing Myself From Shadows or Cauldron Tales: Fairest, depending on what they're associated with. I ended up reading a lot of them.
A while back, I wrote a crazy story about Damian Ashelocke walking into The Tipsy Hedgehog with balloons. This particular prompt made me start thinking about that story. Where had the balloons come from?
This exceptionally mad Tale of the Navel: The Shadow Forest was the result...
He must have taken a wrong turn in the garden. For the fence was no longer there. People were walking up the cobbled street running down the center of Omphalos, but he didn’t recognize any of their faces.
“Hello!” A young man with rounded cheeks, auburn curls, dressed in a red doublet, hose, and a cap with a feather in it had a hand wrapped around several strings, attached to a trio of floating red eggs in the air. “I’d say it’s nice to see you again, only you’re never nice.” He wagged a free finger reprovingly. “Are you, you handsome devil of a prick?”
“I must be dreaming.” Damian, yes, his name was Damian rubbed his eyes. “Either that or I’m still in the Shadow Forest.”
“Wrong on both counts.” The young man walked towards him, the floating eggs keeping pace with him. “We’re in a ghost town. Either that or we’re the ghosts.” He ran his free hand through his rumpled curls. “Don’t worry. I’m not supposed to be here either.”
“Who’s worried?” Damian snapped before recalling his manners. He had no idea where he was. This stranger appeared to have a clue. Antagonizing him would hardly be helpful at this point. “Where is here?”
A loud whistling distracted him. Both he and the stranger turned to face a fair-haired woman, whose shaggy silvery-golden tresses were pinned up around her sweaty face.
“Ashleigh,” Damian murmured before he wondered how he knew her name.
The woman stopped, blinked at him for a moment. She reached up to touch the coin around her neck before turning the youth with the balloons.
The stranger simply stood and smiled at her, not saying a word.
“Seraphix save us, I sometimes think I’m losing it.” Ashleigh shook her head before walking straight through Damian.
He shuddered, feeling ripples of cold run through his chest, legs, and arms as if someone had run a knife made of ice across him.
“Like I said, we’re ghosts.” The youth watched Ashleigh walk away towards a half-finished cottage with narrowed eyes. “Only we can see each other…for now.”
“This looks like Omphalos.” Damian turned in the direction of the Navel, only it wasn’t there. A cottage covered with vines with a dusty green door stood where it should be. “Only this isn’t the Omphalos I remember.”
“That’s because it isn’t our Omphalos, Damian.” The young man held out the hand with the strings wrapped around it. Perhaps they were leads of some sort, for the creatures, the strange red things hovered over his wrist. “Take these balloons. You’ll remember.”
“Perhaps I will. Perhaps I don’t wish to.” Damian gazed at the strings leading up to the crimson oval beasts above, the balloons? “What do you want in return for giving me, err, your pets?” They might well be inanimate objects, but it was best to err on the side of sentience, in case these balloons were sentient. Damian didn’t want to something or someone he’d just met. “Assuming these balloons are yours to give and you’re not holding them captive.”
“Oh, for the love of sweet Suetonius…arachnocrats!” The young man rolled his eyes. “Look, it’s in my best interest to give you these balloons. I’ve been trying to find you. If you take them, you’ll remember me.” He sighed, a weary, exasperated sound. “It pains me to admit this, but I need you, Damian. I need that Ashelocke cunning of yours to find a way out of the mess we’ve all landed ourselves into.”
“You have my name.” Damian gazed at the hand controlling the balloons with wary interest. “Not even I knew that for a while.”
“Yes, look, it’s easy to get confused if you leave the Shadow Forest via Door, only to find yourself in a new world.” The young man fidgeted. “It’s even worse when it looks like someplace familar, only it’s not.” Once more, the stranger thrust the balloons at Damian.
The young arachnocrat tensed, but all the red creatures did was bob up and down over their heads. No sense of menace came from the balloons.
“Calm yourself, prick.” The young man fixed a sober brown eye upon him. He had a clean-shaven face, one which a razor had been applied to.
Damian gazed at the faint hint of reddish stubble in fascination. This was a male from outside the garden, whom had to remove the hair growing upon his chin.
“Yes, it’s hard not to swoon at the sight of beauty such as mine, but try to control yourself.” The young man rolled his eyes again. “We’re trying to find Christopher, remember?” He set his lips together, giving his jaw a hard look. “You do remember Christopher, don’t you?”
“Of course I remember Christopher!” Damian snapped, swallowing the lump that formed in his throat just at expelling that name. It conjured up memories of a tear-stained, heart-shaped face, surrounded by coppery-golden hair, while eyes filled with swimming color gazed at him.
For a moment, he could almost feel those liquid hues surrounding him, like lapping waves, a pond filled with tears. He’d sink into them, if he didn’t summon the light, the bright, cold light, which felt like the very power of the treacherous moon himself. For the moon was a man when Damian met him, a man with glacier eyes filled all the radiant colors Christoper possessed, only they’d frozen into stillness.
“I could never forget Christopher.” It was more of a wish than a truth, for the Shadow Forest could take anything from someone fool enough to stray from their path. Damian shook his head, focused on the fool in front of him. “The question is how do you?”
“This is going to get very tiresome if I keep finding you, losing you, find you again, only to be unsure what you remember.” The young man sighed again. “Look, take the balloons, please.” The young man thrust the strings at him once more, making the fat red shapes overhead bounce. “For Christopher’s sake.”
For Christopher’s sake. It had all be for Christopher’s sake, the search for power. He’d found a place for Christopher, a comfortable home in the Navel while he’d stepped beyond the Door in search of an answer to a question which continued to haunt him, even after he’d fled from his aunt’s gardens.
Aunt Duessa, yes, he could remember her red-lipped, predatory smile, her eight hands dancing in a series of arcane moves he could never counter, never beat, never be safe from, unless he found something stronger than the hands of an arachnocrat, perhaps one single hand with enough power to thrust any hungry intentions away…ah, what was he dreaming?
Damian smiled at his own folly and reached out for the strings.
Memories exploded in his head as soon as he touched them. Memories of this young man, where he’d met him…
“Peter,” he gasped as he recalled the ephermal, gossamer images from beyond the Door.
****
“Follow me.” Damian turned away from the lake, stalking down his path, careful not to leave it. “Don’t stray from the road.”
“No need to be so demanding,” Peter growled behind him. His annoyance radiated off him, making everything shimmer with heat. How had this idiot become so powerful, so fast? Damian bit his lower lip. All of his life he’d sought such strength and this boy effortlessly shaped his environment.
Perhaps it was because he didn’t care. Perhaps because this Peter concentrated on what he wanted, letting his desire shape things around him. Perhaps Damian was being too passive, too defensive, waiting for things to spring out at him.
Christopher was beyond the Door. Christopher was in trouble. He had to find him, to figure out what Door led to him…Damian almost ran straight into a tree trunk.
“I thought you knew where you were going.” Sarcasm drifted off Peter in crimson whiffs. “You acted so sure of yourself.”
“Nothing is sure in this place. Just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, it warps your understanding, unraveling it completely.” Damian slid his hands over the rough bark, curved in places almost like a human figure. “My path lead me to this Door. We both want to find Christopher. Somehow he must be behind it.”
He wrapped his fingers around what felt like a knob and pulled. The door opened. A blast of energy knocked Damian and Peter off their feet, turning everything white around them…
…until they found themselves standing in a kitchen.
“Are you here for our birthday?” A slender, endearing little boy with a mop of golden hair and shining, violet-blue eyes gazed at him solemnly.
“Intruders from other worlds have stumbled on our party.” A second little boy uttered the statement as he stared into Damian’s, appearing to look directly into his soul.
“Ah…” Damian had no idea what to say. He looked from child to child, to the gigantic frosted…was it some sort of confection? sitting on the table between them. Both boys wore colored hats. More of those floating creatures, the balloons? were bobbing towards the ceiling.
This appeared to be a kitchen, yet it was unlike any kitchen he’d ever seen. Arcane square objects protruded out of every angle, surrounding what appeared to be a pump and a stove right next to each other.
“Oh, we’ve come out in a modern world!” Peter stepped forward, showing no sign of confusion. “Why, I’ve been in Omphalos for so long, I’ve almost forgotten these places! Hello, kids!” He grinned at both of the little boys and waved. “Is it someone’s birthday today?”
“Ours!” The first child piped up, grinning back at him. “This is Omphalos, too, only it’s a different Omphalos.”
“I guess so. They must have have different tech levels, depending on which Omphalos you’re in.” Peter strode into the bizarre kitchen, completely at home. “Ah, a microwave! It’s been so long!”
“We try to use it as seldom as possible.” A stout, frowning woman bustled into the room with bushy eyebrows and a wrinkled countenance. “I don’t seem to recall inviting either of you to this party.”
“Oh, let them stay, please, Map!” Danyel pleaded. “We hardly ever see someone from another world. Why, maybe they’ve met other versions of ourselves!”
“Maybe.” At last, here was something Damian could make sense of, sort of. “We’re trying to find Christopher. We walked through a Door, looking for him, only to end up here.”
“Christopher?” The first child’s eyes got even wider. “You mean he’s real? He’s not just part of my dreams?”
“No, he is real. Or he was real. That is, we’d like to make him real again.” Faced with that pair of shining, enquiring eyes, being fixed with both eyes, Damian found himself fumbling for the right words. “You’ve met him in your dreams?”
“We meet all sorts of people in our dreams.” The second boy continued to gaze him, not smiling. “This doesn’t mean they choose to stay.”
“Neither should you.”
A shudder ran down Damian’s back at that voice. He turned, to gaze into green eyes, as hard and pitiless as a pair of emeralds.
“Leiwell.” Goosebumps broke up along his arms, even as he locked eyes with the young man who wore one of the same polo shirts he once preferred to don.
“Christopher isn’t here.” The corner of Leiwell’s lip trembled with what might have been guilt or anger. “Something brought you here. Something you need to continue on your journey.”
Leiwell reached out to grab the dangling tails? No, they were strings, hanging from the balloons. At least Damian was sure they were.
“Take these.” He thrust them towards Peter. “They’ll lead you to where you need to go.”
Peter accepted the strings with a frown. “Err, all right.” He gazed up at the balloons in bemusement. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen these, either.”
“Just how are they supposed to guide us?” Damian shielded a hand in front of his face, to ward off whatever traps Leiwell might have planted in these objects, not that it would matter. He had no idea what the rules were for this world, but it made him feel better. “Are they a part of someone we need to meet?”
“Yes.” The second child spoke up. “Us. The right versions of us. The ones that’ll lead you to the one you wish to find.”
“You want to find Christopher, don’t you?” The first child nodded in agreement. “I think we all have shadows of ourselves in different worlds, but some are more helpful than others.” He pointed to the balloons. “These will take you to someone who is.”
“All right,” Peter spoke before Damian could say anything. He smiled at the children along with the tense young men. “We’ll leave you to your party.”
Before Damian could object, he turned around to face the door behind them. He opened it.
“Wait!” Damian cried before the streaks of white light swam before his vision, stealing his balance, his senses, making everything glow and disappear…
****
…Damian gazed up at the balloons over his head in astonishment.
“Oh, good!” Peter smiled, even as his legs began to disappear on the road in front of him. “You’re remembering. It looks like I’m about to forget, though.”
“Stop, don’t leave!” Damian thrust out a hand, only to have it pass through the young man’s chest.
“I’m afraid I don’t have a choice.” Peter gazed down at his missing legs. His torso was also disappearing, turning into a red haze. “Go find those children, Damian. They’re somewhere in this Omphalos.” The crimson doublet vanished, along with the arms attached to them. All that was left of Peter was his neck and head. “Trust your instincts.”
His neck and head vanished.
“How very helpful,” Damian growled. He glanced up at the balloons, the cottages, and the cobblestones under his feet. “Well, at least this Omphalos is small.”
He started walking towards one dwelling with a swinging sign, painted with the image of a mug. It was as good a place to start searching as any.
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