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Allegiance(105)

By:K. A. Tucker


Forcing my head up, teeth gritted, eyes opened, I expected to kiss a metal train grill. The instant my eyelids lifted, though, the wind and sound vanished. There was no train. There was nothing but a strange hissing sound and a wall of dark gray wind rotating furiously ten feet in front of me. Behind me. All around me. Tipping my head back, I saw the tunnel rise all the way into the sky. A tornado. I was standing motionless in the eye of a tornado. Not a hair on me shifted, even as the deadly force embraced me in a cocoon of particles and shriveled plants, as it spun at speeds powerful enough to toss a car like a toddler tosses its toy.

Closer and closer the dark wall came, tightening around me, the powerful mass now within arm’s reach. This wasn’t normal. This is not what a tornado did. This tornado was alive, and morphing. It was going to swallow me whole.

Never one to suffer from claustrophobia, something about the uncontrollable chaos unnerved me. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Reaching inside, I began plucking threads of my magic.

I shrieked as invisible hands ripped at the flesh and muscle that kept me whole. It was as if my own helix strands were retaliating against me. I crumbled to the ground in agony. Agony like nothing I had ever encountered before, and I knew pain. I’d had more than my share of being scalded, skewered, stabbed, shot, and tortured a dozen different ways. None compared to this. This was sweeping and excruciating to my core.

Clenching my teeth until I thought they would crack, panting in pain, I peered down at my arms, almost expecting them to drop to the ground. Why were the Fates punishing me like this? Why bring me here to drag on this torture?

And then it dawned on me.

It was to demonstrate their divine power. They were showing me the force I was up against. I was a simple organism next to them. A feeble nothing. They controlled all; they granted all. Next to them, I was but a mortal. How dare I use my magic to counter what they were conjuring?

As if my thoughts triggered relief, the tornado vanished along with my agony, leaving me hunched over in a small pile on the dirt, disoriented and unbalanced. Taking a deep breath, I lifted my head, preparing myself for the next exhibition. The next test. My eyes met white. All was white. Like a psychiatric ward, only there were no decipherable walls or ceiling or floor. No doors. I was sitting inside a two-dimensional blank canvas and the artist hadn’t begun yet.

A shimmer somewhere off in the distance grabbed my eye. A tiny ripple of light—like a tear in the canvas—broke through. Then another … and another. All around me, shimmers of light appeared and grew closer until my surroundings undulated like sunlight glimmering on a thousand diamonds. Out of these iridescent waves floated four forms with no discernible features. They glided forward and began to take shape.

My environment morphed yet again. I was no longer crouching in a white nothingness. I was now perched on a round marble pedestal, maybe a foot in diameter and the axis of a shallow, round vessel, divided in four equal sections by short walls. Each section brimmed with tiny glass marbles.

A forest of peculiar trees outside of the vessel had appeared in the seconds that my eyes were focused on the glass marbles. The trees were the size of enormous ancient oaks, their canopies sprawling, only their trunks were made of a crystalized substance. I gazed in awe at the perfectly round, stiff leaves of kaleidoscopic colors hanging from the branches. Though no breeze touched the air, they shifted and glistened in the sunlight. Sunlight from not one but seven glowing masses above. Ferns with the same kaleidoscopic leaves covered the forest floor, looking all the more bizarre given the glimpses of lush green grass peeking out from beneath.

A crunching sound attracted my attention to the left, to a grove where a pair of deer grazed on the fern leaves, seemingly unbothered by the unusual texture of their meal.

I could’ve spent hours mesmerized by the peculiarities around me—the two-headed owl settled on a crystal branch, the patch of rainbow-colored four-leaf clovers, two squirrels prancing along the ground on their hind feet, holding hands as a loving couple would—but the four figures now standing beyond the bowl were more than enough to occupy my attention. Two men, two women, dressed in gauzy white gowns. That much I could tell. They had the typical human traits—noses, eyes, limbs—but there was nothing typical about them. Four sets of perfectly round irises like stained glass windows studied me as I stared back at them. Their noses were long and excessively narrow, their lips thin and wide and tinged with blue, their cheekbones high and angular. They all had identical long blond hair, only the strands looked like spun gold and floated around their shoulders as if immersed in water. These creatures were both hideous and hypnotically beautiful.