Lachlan stood at the edge of their floating island, next to the cairn where the birds had taken off from. He glanced over his shoulder, at the cottage, once again bathed in red light, but this time static. If he could get the help he needed, Chloe had all the time in the world, quite literally, but he would only get one shot.
But first he needed to come clean.
He took another severed and modified arm from the trunk now at his feet, winding it up and setting it to join the others hovering behind him, bringing his total to five, if he wasn’t counting his actual arms. This new one was pale and slender, and aside from the golden lines under the skin seemed completely human, and in its grasp it held a single antler, stripped of velvet to expose the bone. He caressed the structure, moving his hands in a highly specific manner, with each stroke a soft sound emanating from it.
The cairn shuddered, and the space before it shifted, the stone falling into a gap in reality to create a passageway. He stepped into it without any hesitation, and then he was falling, the shards of a billion, trillion other worlds flying past him, each teeming with the life the Fae needed to anchor themselves to worlds. But this was no ordinary fairy path.
He reached out with his foot to take another step, and them he was standing elsewhere: under the canopy of a hidden grove in a darkened forest, illuminated only by sky rays of sunlight peeking through the brush above, at the edge of a small pond that seemed far too deep and yet, enticing all the same. To his side was another cairn, this one old and battered and covered in free-growing moss. The forest around them seemed solid, impenetrable. No humans would find him here.
There had been many theories he’d entertained over the years about what his employer’s abode actually was. It was on universe A01’s Earth - the Endless One had confirmed as much - but it was either too well hidden for even the most powerful thaumaturges and other kinds of reality bender to find, or it was its own pocket of reality. These days, he leaned more towards the latter, but both was sufficient testament to why his employer was referred to by the Fae as a veritable god.
And yet it needed him.
“Indeed,” a booming voice filtered from the trees above, as something long, grey, and insectoid with a multitude of scythe-like legs unfurled itself down from the branches. As it reached the other side of the pond, its upper body curled upwards, revealing the top half of a humanoid in a grey suit and vest, a good obscuring all features aside from three bright blue eyes shifting around in the darkness, and two blood-red antlers, freshly shed, stucking through the material at the top. Its scrawny arms were too long to be comfortable in any imaginable sense of the word, and charred, at some points to the bone, obscuring whatever skin they may have once had.
This was the Endless One, his master. The giver of all his boons and his ability to travel worlds in an instant. The client of his project, whose very interests were now in abject peril.
Lachlan had never known fear like seeing Endless in person. It was by definition, and by the very restraints of his originally human nature, incomprehensible. Even staring at it now made his fake skin crawl, churned up organs he’d designed to be as efficient as possible. “My lord,” he said, straining to keep his voice steady.
“Speak.” Its next word didn’t reverberate as the first, but instead was like a lashing whip, quick and sharp and then gone like the wind through his hair and the trees.
Lachlan swallowed. “There’s been a slight setback to our project. The latest…prototype has fallen into a metaphysical, metatextual vortex,” he said quickly. He could feel something in the back of his mind, scraping together the details behind his words with no effort at all. “I might need help to recover her. It.”
Endless tilted its head. Lachlan had always thought he was good at reading people, regardless of species, but whatever this thing had in mind was nothing short of a mystery to him.
“My lord?” he beseeched yet again.
“I cannot help you,” it said, another lash of wind.
“But if I cannot rescue Chlo- the prototype, the setback might last another century.”
“Hmm.” The words rang through Lachlan’s metal ribcage. “She means something to you, does she not?”
“The project means everything to me.”
Endless laughed. Or so Lachlan hoped. The sound it made caused the water to fizzle, the trees to crackle in protest, and his heart to stop for just a second, quite literally. “I jest, demon,” it said, sounding disturbingly human now, but still missing some nebulous quality real people had from its speech. Lachlan hated this voice. “You love her do you not?”
Lachlan, pursed his lips, unsure of where the conversation was going.
“Be not afraid. That is what your agents of old say. I find your fear amusing, demon, but it is time to drop all pretense.” The rest of the Endless One came down from the tree, its “tail” a curved blade that reflected what little sunlight there was in this enclave. “I was once human, as you were. And I have been waiting for this day.”
“What does that mean?” he asked, taken aback by the shift in their conversation.
“It means you might finally realise the point of this entire endeavour. Chloe is not a weapon. She is a way out.”
“Out…of what?”
“This hell we call reality.” Endless’ voice finally settled at an accent he couldn’t determine, but the Angloc was crisp. “Got millenia, Fae have been ostracised, not only for our magicks but for our very existence. We are incompatible with those paraphysically capable, such as the little humans we live among. That is the way of the universe. But with Chloe, we have a chance to integrate. To live together.”
“I had an inkling of this when you asked me to try to fuse a Faerie and a magical creature five hundred years ago. Exophysics and paraphysics. What could go wrong?”
“Then maybe you understand. But that is not enough. It has never been enough. The two sides, brothers, cancel each other out. Only when they meet in the middle can they ascend beyond us.”
“Why now?”
“Because you love her.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I have seen people go to unknowable lengths out of love. Love elevates, always. That is why I know you will succeed.”
“That makes no fucking sense.”
“It will be by your hand that she is rescued, demon. I cannot interfere, for there is no love within me for your kind. That was taken from me a long time ago, so that I could get here. Show her that she is no puppet, and she will not merely be so.”
Lachlan set his jaw. “So you’re not helping in the slightest?”
“I would tell you to seek the creators of the machine that has trapped her…but you already know that, do you not?”
He could’ve sworn that at that moment, the Endless One smiled. How it did it without any actual muscles in its face or even a mouth to begin with was something that physically hurt his brain to think about. “I do.”
“Then we are done here,” Endless said. “Try not to tell other Fae about this meeting. I need to uphold my image.”
With a wave of its gangly arm, Lachlan was then standing next to the cairn on his island again. The cottage was still glowing pink, and time around it was still frozen. He looked at the comets in the sky.
“Well shit.”
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