26th February, 2006
The Nortcha Drif
Sunday, 1:13 pm in Shoot the Messenger!
Short furc drabble written while waiting for reports to run at work.
The instant he walked through the door, Ixxis thought his eyes were malfunctioning. He has been hopping in and out of the portals of Furrabia all day, mostly out of the kind of train-wreck combination of disgust and curiosity bought on by sheer ennui. The portals, he’d learnt, lead to ‘Dreams’; private little pockets of reality. It seemed the universe was thinner here than he was used to, able to be shaped by any half-wit with a perversion and a desire to share it. They lurked all over the place, sickly shimmering maws that seeped into every gap between buildings, every wooded hollow, every den of vice. Each one lead to some private horror – from the dehumanizing depravities of the slave pits to the empty nightmares of twisted geometry and asynchronous form. He has spent hours lost in the illogical expanses of one Escherian nightmare before accidentally stumbling upon the act of will that allowed him to escape. That first experience has been traumatic at best but once he learnt that while falling into a Dream in the heady Furrabian streets was a treacherously simple affair, waking up was almost as simple.
It was, he thought, a little like travelling on the Prehiphary back home; the soft places between the structred order of the Sephiroth and the dangerous but well-formed Paths that linked them. Except the whole of Furrabia – and, from what he could tell from the few travellers he had spoken to, everywhere else in this reality – was soft. It was a land of sleep, a land of the subconscious – of fears and fetishes and wishes– where Will ruled all. A Godless land, Ixxis had realised eventually, and the thought had made him shudder.
The Dream was in a decidedly unlikely place; far from the main streets and their sprawling excesses of fur anf feathers and sin. It was, however, a place Ixxis himself knew well; a place he had spent many hours idling away, under the broad expanse of leaves from one of the gigantic, gnarled desert trees. And there the portal had spawned; a sickly silver glow leeching out from between massive, twisted roots, tracing glyphs and patterns not even Ixxis’ state-of-the-Art mek could translate.
It felt like a trap. Or should have, but Ixxis did not fear Dreams, not anymore, and so he had stepped into the cold glow, allowing it to seep into his mind, to pull him down drowsily into the insidious caress. As always, his mind balked instinctivley at the intrusion – at the Godless heathenry of it - but he pushed down the feeling and found…
The heartbeat was bass, pounding thick and hard and more than familiar though stone walls. Ixxis blinked, rapidly, head cocked first one way then the other in a gesture so avian he usually tried to avoid it. Ahead he could see a stone wall, tacked hastily to the ancient rock was a poster:
The Mechanical Flowers
3000 - 0300
“The Mechanicals…”
“Ixxis! I didn’t see you come in you shifty old crow!”
Almost painfully, Ixxis turned to the source of the voice, not wanting to believe his ears. Surely his mek was statiked, surely that couldnt’ be…
“D’Arcy?”
A big toothy grin split the gebru’s equine face. “Nice to see you remember. Haven’t seen you in here practically since last Rotation.”
Ixxis blinked again, hating himself for it. “I’ve been away,” he said eventually. “On work.” He saw D’Arcy’s head tilt towards the Message hanging at Ixxis’ side – like all gebru, D’Arcy’s eyes were covered by his Legion regalia but, like all gebru, this didn’t seem to hinder his ability to see. “Still should be,” Ixxis corrected, quickly.
“Funny to see you in here then.” The tone wasn’t exactly accusitory, but it could have been. A Fallen Malakim was not something readily welcomed.
Ixxis just shrugged. Pull yourself together you stupid crow… “It’s within the bounds of my Delivery.” Which was true enough, he thought; he’d been told to stay within Furrabia. Dreams were part of that, and he’d fallen through one to get here. Nevermind that he would have sword two sides down the ue he was back in the Nortcha Drif, back at the Crossing just below the city-Sephira of Hod. That if he turned around and dared to look outside he would see the vast tracts belonging to the Devil, Lamen and Tower Roads stretching out before him. He didn’t dare to go outside; inside, he was still in the Dream. Outside… outside he was Fallen from his duty.
“I missed this place,” he said eventually. It wasn’t home – not the endless starry abyss of Da’ath – but it was close enough.
D’Arcy just grinned his equine grin. “So do we all, crow.”
With a nod and the longtime surety that he wouldn’t be refused entry byt the big gebru bouncer, Ixxis pushed aside the velvet curtain and – for the first time in nearly a Rotation – entered the Nortcha Drif.
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