I’ll Be Your Anchor
“Ready?”
Onari peered down the length of the old carbon fibre harpoon gun, almost directly at where Lachlan was standing. “Yeah. I got this.”
“As soon as I throw this,” he said, making sure she saw the bronze ball in his hand. “And the vortex destabilises. That’s when you shoot at this.” He held the severed leg of the anomalous insect out in front of the open cottage window. Though they had dried it, the chitin or whatever the material was, felt glossy and slippery.
“You should say when,” she suggested. “I don’t know what a…whatever vortex this is is going to look like when it’s not stable.”
“Good point.” He peered into what was a mass of pink that took up most of the study, diffracted as if through some kind of crystal. He had opened the front door of the house, and the door into the room with the cortex to give them both a clear shot and a straight shot, in and out. “Okay, I’ll tell you.”
Onari adjusted her posture, and took aim through the window. “Yeah, okay. Now or never.”
Lachlan lowered the limb for a moment, and climbed in through the window into the cottage living room. He looked at the orb in his hand one last time, mulling over Rooster’s foretelling of his own death. There was no way he could tell whether the man was lying. That was always the scariest part. But he trusted in his own abilities, and in Onari’s aim, and in Chloe’s tenacity. After all, he had built her that way, and not only in the physical sense.
He pulled his arm back, and chucked it at the timefrozen vortex as hard as he could. Lachlan didn’t stick around, vaulting back out of the window and pressing himself against the outside wall. He waited and listened.
Onari glanced at him. “Is it unlocked?”
“I…” He frowned. He certainly heard the air being pushed around, but it sounded like nothing like when the cortex had first formed. Lachlan poked his head into the window.
The vortex was rotating as it had been, but it wasn’t growing. It remained confined to the area around his desk, carrying papers in its stream, round and round. It just kept doing that, a tornado of pink minding its own business, refusing to both relinquish Chloe and wreak havoc.
“Wait.” Lachlan mantled over the windowsill, back inside. “You’re kidding me, it’s fucking stable.”
“What’s that mean!?” Onari called from outside. “Do we still need the anchor?”
“We still do! But Rooster said it’d kill us both. If it’s stable, how could it…”
“Are we still doing this or not!?”
“Right!” Lachlan took a couple of steps away from the doorway to the study, and held out the insectoid limb. “This good?”
“A bit to the left!”
He took half a step to the left of the window.
“Firing!” With sleek fwup the harpoon was launched from the mount, piercing the insect limb in its thicker, less proximal segment, tearing it out of Lachlan's grip and sailing it across the room, through the door and into the swirling gale of pink mist. The cable on the end of the harpoon continued to unravel, sinking deeper and deeper into the metanarrative storm until it went taut, and then the unaltered velocity began to pull Onari towards the cottage. She dug her heels into the coil, ripping up some of the grass outside the window, as she forced the harpoon gun sideways with as much strength she could muster. Right before she reached the window, she flipped it around the right way, diagonally, and let go as she fell back onto the yard.
There was a loud sound as the harpoon gun slammed into the corner of the window, its orientation locking it there, resisting the force of the vortex’s pull with its carbon fibre tensility.
“I got it!” she exclaimed, forgetting she was close enough now that Lachlan could probably hear her quite well.
“Stand back.” Lachlan stepped into view of the window frame, his eyes squeezed shut as he concentrated on the space within that cloud. Slowly, but surely, space began to distort, and soon the doorway to the study was replaced, each section of it fading out into a corridor of images that hurt Onari’s eyes to look into, until there was nothing but a passage, the same kind she had taken to get here. She averted her gaze. “How’s it?”
Lachlan opened his eyes, sighing with relief. “It looks normal. Okay.”
“What if this goes wrong?”
“Then you follow the evac plan. Just whistle correctly.”
She looked up into the sky, at the circling blue Marabou stork. “That thing is actually going to carry me back to Earth?”
“It’s a yokai. They can lift you. And the portal thing is not mine, it’s my boss’.”
“Your boss?”
“Endless. I’ll take you to see him when I get back. He’s kind of an asshole.” Lachlan stepped forwards and poked a hand into the fairy path. “Feels kind of normal as well. At least as normal as my experiences tell me.”
“Go.”
“Hmm?”
“You’re stalling. Go in there and save her already.”
He bit his lip. She was right. He was stalling. Rooster’s words still echoed in his mind. Why would he say…
Then it hit him, and he almost started laughing. The fucking bastard. He turned around, a big grin on his face, and Onari must have heard his deranged chortle because she looked awfully concerned. Her nose was scrunched up and her eyes were full of suspicion.
“What is it now?” She crossed her arms.
“You’ve never met Chloe, but if you did, you do have the skills to medically analyse her and modify her, right?”
“What’s…what’s this about now?”
“My notes are all in the workshop. I’ve recordings of me messing with puppeteering pieces. I’m sure over time you can learn the basics of neurosynchronous casting, and maybe even make your own parts…”
“Lachlan? Are you okay?”
“Perfectly fine.” He didn’t lie. Figuring out Rooster’s cryptic messages was like finally completing a puzzle you had been stuck on for hours on end. It was satisfying in that strange way. If anything, he was elated, both that he now knew exactly what had to happen, and that he knew Rooster’s philosophy of circumstantial motivation was entirely accurate. There really was no turning back, and he had a choice to make.
So he chose Chloe.
It was obvious that Onari saw the look in his eye, because she began shaking her head.
“You were right about me,” he said. “Tell her I’m sorry.”
“Lachlan, wai-”
He turned around and ran through the faery path, the rest of Onari’s sentence fading away, left in the world on that end of the passage. Unlike the other paths between the Sun Court’s cairns and faerie forts, the trip was not instantaneous. He kept jogging, his feet landing on paths invisible ahead of him, so ethereal he dared not look down in case it shattered the illusion, and he drifted to who knew where. While he had trained himself never to look at the images, one caught his eye, and then the rest, and then he realised it wasn’t like all the other flashes of existence from the other paths.
He knew them. Most were inside his own cottage, or on one of the many floating islands, and others were in the ruins of civilisation on that same planet, from entire deserted cities to burned shipwrecks on the coast. In them were always him and Chloe, always together, always talking. It was every moment that had been there for each other, and every ounce of affection they had shared.
Because you love her.
He kept sprinting. She had to be around, be here somewhere. The temporal anchor had never opened a path between his world and the meta-reality she was trapped in, but instead had linked them. They were both cairns, or at least the Fae part of both of them were, as he was now realising, and it was bringing them closer than they had ever been.
Lachlan crashed through a wall, but it wasn’t physical or even perceptible, and he was suddenly floating in calm at the centre of the vortex. The eye. He spun around frantically, the lack of gravity causing him to start rotating uncontrollably before he remembered where he was, and he closed his eyes.
I feel ground underneath my feet. The gravity is surprisingly similar to that of Earth, and it becomes easy to find my footing.
When he opened his eyes, he was standing on a long, narrow path of clear glass or some other transparent material, reaching into the infinite. “Fuck, that actually worked,” he mumbled. He closed his eyes to try again.
It’s not long before I find Chloe. She’s safe, she’s…
He opened his eyes, sensing something before him. The path had shorted considerably, and directly in front of him was Chloe’s form, floating in the air, her eyes closed…and a bright glowing arrow stuck through her midsection. He knew now exactly what it was there, and reached out to take hold of the shaft.
He pulled hard.
The arrow came free with much less resistance than he expected, and didn’t seem to leave a wound on her body or her clothes. It evaporated into a swarm of white point lights that themselves vanished into thin air.
Chloe gasped awake, and fell onto the glass path on her back. As she groaned, Lachlan rushed over, brushing the hair out of her face. “Hey, hey. It’s me,” he said softly, cradling her head.
She blinked at him. “Lachlan?” she asked, almost in disbelief. “It worked?”
“Worked? What worked?” He smiled.
“The places I sent you. The things I wrote you into doing…so you can get me out.”
“Is that how it works?”
She nodded. “You’re here.”
“I’m here,” he affirmed. “And you’re-”
The pink of the surrounding space shifted, distorting into waves and patterns unfamiliar to them both. The storm wall was accelerating, threatening to spiral out of control.
“It’s destabilising,” Chloe breathed. “I had a feeling…oh!”
Lachlan had picked her up in a bridal carry. “No time. Help me a little here. Think of the edge of the eye, and the path. Let’s get to it. As the crow flies.” He closed his eyes, and he knew Chloe was doing the same, because the resonation of their mental images made it all the brighter and clearer, like a lucid dream. They had control.
He opened his eyes, and the wall was mere metres away, a limit in an infinite space that he couldn’t properly process, but didn’t care all the same. He simply carried her to it, and set her down. “You first.”
He looked her in the eyes, leaning in close. “If you’ve written my story so far, then you know how this has to go.”
“I couldn’t see the ending,” she whispered. But she knew. He knew she knew. It was probably written all over his face. “We can fix this together.”
“Not together. It’s not possible.”
“Then you go!” She met his gaze with her own fierce one. “You’ve got this far. I can write you further.”
“There are some things I can’t do.”
Her breath caught in her throat, though there was no breathable air in this place. “Why?”
“Because of the choices I’ve made. The person I am. But you haven’t got the chance to figure out who you are yet. They’ll be kinder to you.” He put his hands on her shoulders, caressing them. “It has to be you.”
“Please don’t do this.” Her jaw was clenched.
It was inevitable.
“Good luck out there.” He pushed forwards, shoving her out of the eye and into the faery path he could feel was still open. Not for long, but she would make it, if it was the last thing he did.
The storm was getting worse, and through the mists, he was beginning to glimpse more images. Unlike those in the fairy path, those related to the respective connection, these were all over the place. Someone on stage, singing and dancing as a crowd cheered. A truckload of party merchandise, struggling up a winding mountain path. A man staring at the ceiling of his room, wondering if anything would ever change. With each passing flash, he felt himself sucked into the stories, fracturing him into a hundred pieces. The storm was coming apart, and he didn’t know how bad it was becoming out there. The thought of Chloe making it out was probably the only thing he could anchor himself to, as the path closed and he was left alone in the turbulent mess within the story-maker.
But he still had one trick up his sleeve. “Come and see,” he whispered to himself, knowing full well it was heard.
The indescribable entity appeared in the void before him, wearing white, but its features flowed like water across its head. This was the shapeshifter. The wolf. Or as Lachlan knew him, the First Horseman of the Apocalypse, far past his prime. He said not a word.
“Shoot me.”
The figure tiled its head - his head, now becoming more masculine to match Lachlan’s experience - and smiled. “No deal, puppeteer. Your boss didn’t include you.” He spoke with a hundred different voices at once, including Lachlan’s.
“Then my deal.” He raised both hands. “If you had a deal for Chloe, it means you didn’t lay a hand on her. I respect that. You’re surprisingly compromising for someone who calls themselves Conquest.”
“Your offer?”
“You’ve likely never seen what I am before. So…”
Conquest’s grin widened, almost bursting out of his face.
“...do you worst.”
“I accept.” He raised both hands, and grasped into an ethereal bow of pure light, burning even in the void. The similar string and arrow was pulled back.
Lachlan, for what felt like the final time, closed his eyes. It’s up to you now. I love you, Chloe.
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