Between the twin steel beams atop the black tower, a speck of light struggles against the chains that bind him. A old hag, riding a ragged broomstick laughs as she careens through the air, wildly riding the churning storm like it were a rowdy bronc.
Though he struggled, Timothy could not free himself from the chains. They were forged from hardened steel, branded with the makers mark of mortal metallurgists, and well beyond his powers to break.
"Ha ha ha haw!" the old hag cackled, "I have you now my sweet, back in the cage of sky and storm which you belong. Now you will obey me and bring a message to my old friends." she ordered, grabbing me by the scruff of the neck and lifting him until he was face to face with her wicked, toothy smile.
"You can't make me!" he shouted back defiantly. "I don't belong to you!"
"You?" her voice was like a shriek, and this close, made my hair stand on end. "I carved you from living stone! Grew with time and patience you did, MY time and patience! Now look at you! Covered with fungus and smelling like dirt, it's even under your fingernails! Getting its roots into you, weathering your chiseled lines... I should burn you clean, take you back to the stars where you belong!"
"No, you can't!"
"Yer right, I can't," another cackle. "But I have much work for you to do on Earth, and you're going to get so very dirty. At least I can be sure of one thing!"
"What's that?" he grimaced as with a quick yank she snapped him free of the chains... though really, if reality's laws were to be followed, the snapping should have been his limbs.
"A rolling stone gathers no moss," she grinned, and he tumbled down to the earth below.
The storm was against him then, its winds buffeting him and rains soaking him, but the Fae's contracts were hard at work and he fell unerringly towards the target below. I squinted down as he *remembered* the speech she had drilled into him and stretched out his arms, lighting the air on fire in a brilliant trail as he streaked across the sky.
Compared to his long flight it seemed that the ground rushed up at him all in the very last second, and so he rolled along the grassy meadows of a forest with no idea where he was. It was almost enchanted, beautiful, and everything he looked at had a reality of its own. He came to rest against a large stone, where light filtered from the sky in idyllic sunbeams. One thing struck him as funny, that was he was now covered with even more moss scraped up from the muddy trail when he slid across the forest floor. It changed to momentary horror when he stood up and brushed off his suit, and it all fell off.
Dancing through the glade was a nymph, beautiful with long blonde hair. She was dressed in a green fairy dress and had dragonfly wings jutting out of her back. Perhaps only as large as his finger, but she leaned forward to whisper something in his ear, and then he whispered something back, and it nearly tore him out of the dream trying to remember.
She took his hand before he could lose himself and Timothy found himself chasing after Kandice, somehow the same size now. They played among the enormous plants and flowering towers of vines and lost track of time. There was just the two of them, though their playfulness was ever getting more serious and it was only a matter of time before the forest was torn apart by an enormous castle.
It had windows for eyes and portculli for teeth, two wooden doors slamming open and shut line mandibles on a hungry tiger. Its legs were stone foundation, cracked into countless projections, each of them having been stuck in something, like a well or a frying pan or a piece of artwork.
So they ran, running under falling logs and over lilypads and through brambles and coming up short when the ferns and trees betrayed them and made an impassible wall they couldn't push their way through. But there was a hole to the side and Timothy pulled her, into the Den and hid in the fireplace where they walled off the mouth with iron pokers and knives and sticks.
That couldn't stop her, though, and one house squeezed inside the other, stone screeching on stone and wood splintering on iron. "Iron?" they wondered, and their grate melted on top of them, trapping them in and reforming into a kind of round-topped birdcage with a solid bottom.
"It's not pure!" the house laughed, but the voice came from one of its windowlike eyes, and just as they were holding each other and quaking in fear and right before one of the house's clockwork arms reached forward to pick up its prize there was a gunshot, then another, and the house crumbled, knocking the cage backwards into the darkness, and into the abyss.
They fell and fell and the abyss drained into a blackened sea, and Timmy and Kandi were able to push the grating off, and sailed on the sea in their iron boat. Eventually, in the distance, there was a glow on the horizon and they sailed to that, fanning the air behind them with their little wings.
As they got closer they saw, fluorescent tubes with neon colors rising out of the black water like an Emerald City of glass and argon. The colors changed and wibbled, gimvaled and slithered, spiking with an electric beat on a bedrock of gray rock. The boat touched shore and they walked upon the neon-lit floor and began to move with the beat, which began to be accompanied by other loud music. As they began to dance as Timothy thought they had in a club once before, he felt his mental eye being drawn upwards as his body and soul remained fixed on his agile partner below. Up the tubes until they started to cluster together and touch for their varying heights required a cavernous ceiling, and the glass enclosures began to resonate and vibrate and take on the aspect of organ music. At the very top, suspended in the light like fish in a tank were people Timothy knew, everyone he knew, Sonja, Nathaniel, the Stranger on the Street, his father and mother and students in his class and members of the spring court and kings of the seasons, all capped by rubber tops and sealed with a sigil as white as snow hammered and twisted by fingered hand’s music accompanied by a laughing somewhere in the Lady' Houses soul, and he looked up the tubes to the satanic lighted face, through the windows past the curtains beyond the inky darkness-outlined chair, the things that go bump in the night and the wallpaper that gives children a fright was a face, laughing, Mercedes.
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