chapters 1-16

I

Bealz was 11 years old. His dad had been gone, locked up since before he was even born.

Bealz's mom never really said anything about him, his dad. She would just kinda start looking real sad and say stuff like, “I don't know, baby,” or “I wish I could tell you more, honey,” or “leave me alone, lil nigga!”

Or something like that.

Bealz was sad a lot. He didn't show it, though. At least not like they do in the movies and on tv. Like the white kids get to do. He couldn't act like that. Not where he was from.

He often noticed the kids on tv. They had lawns and always had huge, over-sized boxes of colorful cereals that the Arabs down the street from him didn't have on the shelves and they had brand new bicycles and giant smiles.

They also had moms and most of them even had dads.

Bealz did too. Just not like theirs.

Bealz's mom was around sometimes. He mostly stayed with his grandma, Ms. Penny, though. She wasn't really his grandma, cause she wasn't really his mom's mother. She had been her foster mother when his mom had aged out of the system.

She had nowhere else to go, his mom, so she had Bealz, since babies were equated with an increase in the public aid check and some more LINK. That was her best chance to contribute to the house, the ghetto equivalent of upward mobility. That, and stripping.

Or at least that's what Ms. Penny told him when his mom wasn't around.

Many of the kids in Bealz's building, like him, were worth little more than a check to their over-stressed families. The incremental uptick in benefit, though, was never enough to ease the overall strain and the kids remained painfully aware of their value, both at home and in the streets. Where many of them chose to be.

Either way, there was little time in either place for daydreaming and imagining. Even for an 11-year old boy. Stepping up onto the El platform that offered up a gateway out into the world and away from his violent, Southside Chicago neighborhood, known as the Wild Hundred's, Bealz is painfully aware of this reality.

Standing atop the platform in a semi-circle around their unofficial leader, Deshaun, a group of six boys look to be counting up their pooled money, the likely proceeds from this mornings larcenies.

Deshaun lived two neighborhoods over, in Robbins, arguably the only other area around here worse than his own. They went to the same school and, at least according to Deshaun, were natural enemies because of some invisible boundary between their 'hoods. This was enough to keep Bealz actively avoiding the physically mature 12-year old.

He could, for the most part, keep his distance, though every now and then he had to pay the piper. Most often he could talk his way out of an outright confrontation and come away from it with a little less money or the loss of some prized bit of clothing. The worst of it had been a beating in front of Deshaun's crew that had left him bloodied and bruised.

Recently, though, Deshaun had changed tactics. Instead of threatening to take from Bealz, he had begun to demand that Bealz accept some things from him. One day, flanked by his boys, Deshaun had stepped up onto the platform wearing the brand new Jordan's, the ones that had just hit the stores at midnight the day before. When they saw Bealz, they surrounded him and asked if he liked their new kicks. When he hesitantly replied, “yeah,” he expected to get viciously kicked by those new kicks.

They offered him his own pair instead. Taken aback by the offer, Bealz still managed to say, “No thanks,” only to discover to what extent this had been considered the wrong answer.

Ever since then, he had to be even more vigilant in avoiding Deshaun and his goons. Ironically, even more so than when they only wanted to beat him up for bragging rights. Now that they had found a new benefactor, the only explanation for their new largess, he couldn't seem to shake them.

Deshaun, with his back to the stairway, holds the others attention. Bealz freezes, causing a momentary, mini pileup of commuters rushing up behind him.

His eyes darting left and right, Bealz devises a quick plan of escape and begins to slowly ease back down the steps.

Tonio, Deshaun's closest crony, of course, catches sight of Bealz just as his head begins to bob down out of sight.

“Hey!” Tonio shouts and points towards Bealz, causing the other five heads to snap around.

“Shit,” Bealz hisses between clenched teeth. He turns on his heels to take the remaining steps four at a time. It doesn't take long for him to hear the agitated sounds of commuters being shoved aside as Deshaun and his gang fall into pursuit.

Tumbling out onto the sidewalk, Bealz looks around frantically before darting off towards Ms. Penny's. She wouldn't do shit to help and would likely get really pissed at him for leading a pack of thugs to her door, but he knew they wouldn't follow him all the way into the building. At least he hoped they wouldn't.

If Bealz could just make it to the end of the block, Deshaun would have to cross over into his neighborhood. He knew that an invisible line in the sand wouldn't stop him, but it should at least give him pause. Deshaun had made too many enemies on this side of the street and even though Bealz didn't get a whole lot of love from the boys outside his building, he still lived on the block.

If anybody were to beat Bealz's ass it had damn sure better be a local.

Bealz darts into the alley past the corner store just as Deshaun and the gang turn the corner behind him. Checking back over his shoulder, he doesn't notice the sleek black sedan idling about ten feet away from the store's back door as he lowers his head, preparing for an all out sprint to base.

Just as he begins to gather speed, though, the back passenger side door of the sedan swings open.

A deep dark voice calls out from within the car's dim interior, “Aye, little nigga!”

“Mook! Get his little ass!”

Skidding to a stop, Bealz instantly regrets taking this shortcut.

He knew who this was. Or at had at least heard about him. The dude had started to become something of a local legend/urban myth. The story of a benevolent benefactor who'd recently hit the streets. This was the man himself.

Bealz momentarily froze as he thought about the other side of the story. The flip side of the shoes, the cash and the neighborhood juice. Some of the kids who had taken up his offer were also vanishing. Most never to be seen again.

A couple, though, had been found. Or at least their mangled, bloody bodies had been found. Bealz didn't want to end up dead, turned inside out and left crumpled and discarded like trash in some dirty alleyway like they had been. He had passed on the shoes. The mystery man in the sedan didn't seem to like that very much. Bealz had been running ever since.

Spinning on his heels, he lowers his head, prepared to run flat out in the other direction. Maybe he could speed past Deshaun and his goons before they could react.

Before he can gather any momentum, though, he runs smack into a brick wall and falls down flat on his ass. Bealz is dizzy, seeing stars as he squints up against the bright morning sunlight at the silhouetted figure of the largest man he had ever seen in his entire life.

Mook reaches down with hands as broad across as pie pans and lifts Bealz from the ground by the nape of his neck. Bealz feels like a weightless scrap of paper. Tears sting his eyes and he goes limp, recognizing the uselessness of a fight.

As Mook stuffs him into the back seat, Deshaun and the others turn the corner in late pursuit.

Turning away from the leering boys and towards the man in the car, Bealz's blood runs cold. He feels an instinctual tightening in his gut. He knows this monster. This was no mere man. This was the demon who stalked him in his dreams.

“Mook,” the dark man says, a gleaming, golden grin breaking across his face, speaking to the big man while his eyes pinned Bealz in place. “Tell Deshaun's monkey ass to get back up on the platform. He fucked this up. I'll handle his ass later...”

Grunting with consent, the giant man closes the door.

Bealz is swallowed up in the darkness.

II

Chicago sat atop the State of Illinois like a jaunty, precociously donned cap. Serving as the State's primary economic engine, amongst its greatest exports, its main contributions to the downstate economy was a steady stream of bodies to fill the many prisons spread throughout the rural areas.

And while this provided a financial boon for these sparse communities, it meant hours and hours of separation from the families they'd left behind.

It was hard enough to take the El to a real grocery store.

Many of the kids around here, where Bealz lived, were just like him. Their dads were housed in prison units hundreds of miles away. They were basically left behind to figure things out on their own. Especially the boys. The girls tended to have more intact maternal structures within their families. Their main problem was fending off the well-armed, dangerously confused preteen and teenage boys raised up in a rape culture in the middle of an urban war zone.

The women then, many forced into responsibility, had no choice but to take up the mantle of leadership, not just in the home, but in the community at large. Many times, before they can even vote.

For those boys who chaffed under this direction, who yearned for some greater connection to the worst of their rapidly developing instincts, there were the streets.

There were people like the grinning monster seated across from Bealz in the back of this one hundred thousand dollar sedan.

“What's up, lil nigga? I been tryin to catch up to you for a while.”

Blinking against the unnatural darkness, Bealz can't speak. He is too afraid to move. This seems to please the man across from him.

“What you scared for, my man? I ain't gon bite.”

Looking at the wet, wide smile that broke like a crack across the man's dark face, golden teeth gleaming with menace, Bealz thinks that this man is capable of doing just that. He had the look of a predator all too willing to sink its teeth into its prey.

“I know you know me, right? Don't act like you don't. You gon hurt my feelings,” the man says. His words seep into Bealz's brain, making his head hurt.

As Bealz continues to cringe against the locked car door, the man's grin melts away into a menacing sneer, “Aight now lil nigga. You hear me talkin to you. I'm tryin to be nice. To show some respect. Where's mine? I asked you a question. You know who I am?”

“Uh, yeah. I know you...,” Bealz stammers hesitantly.

“What's my name”

“Dakari,” Bealz answers. The name seemed cold upon his tongue.

Sitting back, Dakari's grin returns, pleased by Bealz's answer. “Yeah. You know me.”

Nodding stupidly, Bealz can feel his heart trying to burst from his chest. There is a man in the car with him. All of his senses tell him so. But Bealz can see something else. Sense something else. Something like a viscous, shifting shadow hiding just underneath.

As he stared in horror, tried to understand what he was seeing and not seeing, the pressure in his head continued to grow.

“I know you too, little man,” the monster says. “Or I should probably say, I know your pops.”

Taken aback, Bealz looks away from the eerie, rippling nothingness. He boldly looks at the man, the fear momentarily suspended by the mention of his father.

“Oh...,” Dakari says, self satisfyingly bobbing his head. “Didn't know that, did you? Well, homeboy, let me be the first to tell you, there's a whole lot you don't know.”

Dakari reaches out towards him suddenly and Bealz jumps back before seeing the gold link chain puddled in the man's outstretched palm. It had seemed to appear in his hand like some kind of magic trick.

Laughing, Dakari says, “Go head on, lil nigga. I ain't gon bite you. Shit, I can't even touch you right now. Against the rules. Later for that.”

“Take the chain. It's yours...”

“I'm good,” Bealz blurts out, every cell in his body screaming out in panic.

The grin remains steady upon Dakari's face. Leaning closer, he says, “Take the chain.”

Looking from the man's hand to his grinning, golden face, Bealz is filled with dread. The necklace seemed almost to vibrate. He could feel a menacing iciness emanating in waves from it. He wanted no part of it.

Dakari wasn't asking. Tipping his hand over, he drops the chain into Bealz's lap.

“Now get the fuck outta my car,” he says, all of his charm evaporating in an instant.

When the back door suddenly swings open, Bealz yelps in surprise and falls backward out onto the grimy, cinder strewn alleyway. Looking up, he sees Big Mook staring down at him. Bealz can see sunlight streaming down, around and slightly through him, as if the giant of a man were opaque.

He can see the large man's true form shifting, prismed through the sunlight. It was huge. Bealz began to struggle, trying to scrabble away from the car and the hulking monster hovering over him.

“Mook!,” Dakari calls out from from black hole of a backseat. “You can touch him. Put that chain around his neck. Now!”

As the oscillating image of a man and a monster reaches down towards him, Bealz continues to scramble away, now trying to crab walk awkwardly to the side. His mouth is opened wide, as if to cry out, but he makes no sound, manages only to dumbly stare in disbelief. He understands that his reality had broken. He thought maybe he was going insane. He just wanted to get away.

He doesn't get very far.

Mook daintily plucks the chain from amidst the gravelly cigarette butts and discarded detritus and gently lifts Bealz's head, cradling it like an infant in the crook of his massive arms.

Bealz can feel Mook's huge hands/talons moving with an uncharacteristic deftness across his neck, like feathers.

When Mook fastens the clasp, Bealz feels himself washing away into darkness.

III

Bealz dreams. He knows he is dreaming. He usually does.

And not just because his dreams had always been so intricate and confusing. It was because they always seemed so real. So familiar. As if he were not just looking through someone else's eyes, experiencing someone else's feelings and emotions, but experiencing them himself, as they happened.

In a way, his dreams were more real to him than the real world. It was a place to escape the dusty, rat hair smells creeping through the thin walls of his daily reality.

There were glimpses of darker things in his dreams, too, though. He'd seen Dakari there before. Except that he didn't look like a man then. Or not quite like a man. Bealz could see something else, some kind of dark, miasmic smudge where a man should be.

It made him nauseous to look at it and Bealz knew then as he shrank back from the probing black smear that roamed about, searching around in his dream, that most all monsters and demons could easily pass for regular-looking people in the waking world.

Now Bealz dreams of his father. He's never lain eyes on him, but has a clear image of the man in his mind. When he's dreamed of him before, he could almost swear that his dad was really there with him, that he was actually talking to him. Asking the kinds of questions a father would ask a son at the end of a normal day.

How was school? You got homework? Did you eat?

Just a dad talking to his kid.

But sometimes, in those dreams, his dad would ask these questions while also showing him things. He would take him places and introduce him to many different strange and wonderful people. All of whom weren't really people. Some seemed to be places, whole fields and forests and huge rock cliffs, the clefts in their faces cracking into wide granite smiles.

These anthropomorphics spoke through the winds in the trees or the hum of the insects in their fay gardens or through great towers of flame that roared deafeningly. All of them, people and places alike, treated his father with deference. Likewise himself.

But even these strange dreams, as he thinks back on it, seemed perfectly normal to Bealz. As if he weren't dreaming of some fantastical places and people, but instead meeting old family and friends. It felt as though he dreamed of a home that called to him, where he could smell the air, so sweetly scented. Nothing like the exhaust choked air that hung like a low cloud over the neighborhoods bordering I-57.

Dreams were the purist form of escape for Bealz. He cherished these moments, the chance to drift away, to leave his grim reality behind in search of his father, the bright skies and fields filled with singing flowers. Here he could find diversion from the cruelty, forget that he slept curled up tight in an overstuffed two-bedroom apartment.

Now, as he recognizes with lucidity that he slept, he looks around hoping for beautiful fields and a sun-filled sky. What he sees instead looks very much like a prison cell. His father sits on the lower bunk of a hard, uncomfortable looking mattress.

“Hello, son.”

“Dad?” Bealz asks, thoroughly confused.

“Hush, now. I need you to listen son,” Bealz's dad says. “You'll have questions, but for now I need you to just listen.”

“What?” Bealz asks, just the same. “Dad, I don't know what's happening. I'm really scared. That man, he said he knew you!”

“I said, hush, child. Things have changed,” his dad says sternly. “The rules have been broken. They call me out to war.”

Bealz can feel hot tears welling up and spilling down his brown cheeks. Why would he be feeling that? Why would he feel so clearly the salty sting of tears? He was dreaming.

But he knew, in that instant, that he really wasn't.

His father, sitting rigidly, un-moving but for his mouth and eyes, continues to speak to him, cutting through Bealz's distress. “You must go, child. Now you must run. My enemies have been made aware of you. They will come, so you must run.”

The room slowly begins to fade away, washing Bealz away with it.

“Wait!” he calls out. “What do you mean, I gotta run? I ain't got nowhere to go!”

“You'll know,” the fading shadow says, his voice fading away as well. “Look for your mother. Look for my allies. They will come also. They will keep you safe until I can find you and protect you myself.”

“How? You're in fuckin prison!” Bealz begins to panic. Never a good thing to do while dreaming.

“How are you supposed to help me? I mean, you're locked up.”

“I've told you, the rules have changed, son. I no longer have to abide by the laws of man. But first I must gather my strength...”

“...and son?”

“Yes, dad?”

“Watch your language, boy...”

“Uhm, yessir?” Bealz stammers, as he too fades away to darkness.

IV

Someone was pounding on his head. Huge hammer blows. Staccato quick and resonate, echoing painfully round and round inside his head.

Struggling to open his eyes to identify his attacker, bright red and silver splinters of light lacerate the back of his brain.

Not hammers. A fist. Pounding impatiently upon the door to the bedroom that Bealz shared with four others; two snotty nosed temporary placement kids, a nine year old bed wetter and a cruel thirteen year old with a penchant for booger tipped wet willies.

Sitting up and looking around confusedly, Bealz can see that he is alone in the room. A most unusual occurrence as it is, but there was also bright light streaming in through the bed-sheet covered window. Ms. Penny didn't allow any of the kids to come back to the apartment until the end of the day. Bealz hardly ever came back before nightfall. How did he get here?

He struggles to remember the morning's course of events, drawing a blank soon after ducking out of Ali's Market with a Little Debbie's Iced Honeybun on the way to the El. He'd somehow lost a whole lot of time and had ended up back in his room.

Someone was yelling. The screaming began to clarify, he began to make sense of what he was hearing. The screamer was screaming at the fist pounder.

Jesus, was that Ms. Penny yelling? And if so, who the hell was pounding on his door? Bealz considered escaping out the window.

Sitting here doing or saying nothing as an alternative, he knew, would just make everything worse, so, swinging his feet onto the floor, head still swimming, he pushes himself to the door, unlocks and opens it.

His mother, Monique Felani Kokua-Binti, is standing there, fist cocked back, ready to crash down upon the door once more. There is a wild look verging on panic in her eyes.

“Bealz!” she says with a start.

Bealz is confused. He's felt confused quite a bit lately.

“Mama,” he asks? “What's the matter?”

Ms. Penny, standing with her hands on her hips just over his mother's shoulder, erupts, “What's the matter? Little nigga, what you doin locked up in that room in the middle of the damned day? And why in the hell is yo crackhead ass mama runnin roun my house poundin on doors like she done lost her damn mind?”

“Bealz, baby, we gotta go!” His mom, eyes wide with fright, clutches at him, her hands kneading his tee into a crumpled rag.

“Mama, stop!” Bealz says, his eyes grown wide. He'd never seen his mother quite like this and it scared him.

“Baby, we gotta go!” his mother continues.

“Monie,” Ms. Penny says. “Girl, you know damn well you ain't takin that boy nowhere!”

Bealz's mom pushes him back into the room, ignoring Ms. Penny altogether. “You need to get your stuff. We ain't got much time.”

“Mom,” Bealz says. “What's going on? Where are we going?”

Stopping suddenly, the disheveled dementia seemingly suspended, Bealz's mother looks at him quizzically. “He told you. He told me that he told you. Didn't he tell you?”

“What?”

“You just saw him. You know what we have to do.”

Barging into the room behind them, Ms. Penny is visibly in a rage, “Monie, you need to get yo black ass outta here now!” she roars.

Snatching at Bealz's mother, Ms. Penny attempts to spin her back towards the door.

“Mom,” Bealz says, his panic rising as his mother suddenly and drastically changes before him. She is no longer the confused, crazy lady they all know her to be. She became a storm.

Bealz can see it, a storm erupt within her form. She raises her hand with slow certainty and lightly touches Ms. Penny with the outstretched palm.

A bloom of light cracks open and Ms. Penny, all 380lbs of her, flies back off her feet. Her head raps the upper doorjamb as she is hurled backwards out of the room and her neck snaps loudly. Her body slams into the far wall at the end of the long hallway leading to the front of the apartment, a discarded sack of broken flesh.

Bealz can't breath. The air is sucked from his body. He can only stand rigidly, looking at the bloody smear atop his doorway.

“Bealz,” his mother says, snapping him back to her. “We must go.”

She is still wrapped in storm. He doesn't know her. He is literally scared stiff.

“Bealz! We must go now.”

Moving slowly, as if in a fog, Bealz looks around the tiny room. There is nothing to take. He checks his pockets for his old ass iPod. He has nothing else, nothing of value, no sentimental attachments.

He lived in a glorified closet. There was no room here for casual materialism. No shelf space for personal belongings. Hell, he was forced to share shoes with a thirteen year old bully.

“I'm ready, mama...”

“Then we gotta go.”

Raising her arms, Bealz's mother closes her eyes and begins to chant quietly. Bealz recognizes the nonsensical words. She would often mutter and mumble similarly to herself, making her out to be the neighborhood nut job.

Now, Bealz can see something else. His mother pulses with power and the room grows hot as a small, fiery hole begins to form between them.

It grows, shooting out tendrils of energy. Bealz jumps back and yelps in shock as a rift splits open the air. As it clears, a cloudy, smoky haze receding into clarity, he can see through to somewhere else. He can see straight through to his dreams.

“Is that...?” he asks, tearing his eyes away to look at his mom.

“Yes,” she says, taking his hand and leading him through. “It is.”

V

“Belozi,” Bealz's father thinks, head lain back on crossed arms. His feet were crossed, crowded and propped up at the foot of his bunk.

“ Belozi Bin Askauri. He doesn't even know what his common name means.”

To be fair, there were not many who knew the meaning of his name either. Real or common. Of course it was best not to dwell on it much, lest a stray thought leak out in the company of some unseen enemy. One's real name, when granted with purpose, served as a virtual link to one's essence.

Askauri Bin Qwana. That was his name. It was the common name by which the State of Illinois' Department of Corrections knew him by, at least. His real name was too long to recite without a company of living griots to attend to the listener.

Askauri. This is what his mother called him. What his people called him.

He missed them, his mom, his people. One and all. Still, he thought again of the jest to be had back home at the idea of the great Bin Askauri, locked away in a most drab, most non-magical prison. under guard of Earth-borne humanity.

Hell, it was still nearly enough to make him laugh.

Oh, if his mother could see him now, he thought. He could certainly hear her clearly enough. “You see, this is just the type of thing I've warned you about...,” she'd say.

And she had, of course. Warned him. Chided him for years about his frivolous ways. His bandy behavior and the recklessness along with the numerous and salacious trysts strung across two worlds. Most concernedly, she had warned him off from his more bellicose pursuits. His thirst for adventure and the childishly macho desire to test the extent of his physical and diplomatic limitations.

As the youngest heir to the throne of the Long Plains Kingdom of the Incata, Askauri's never felt the paralyzing yoke of responsibility required of the King in Waiting. That had been his brother's rightfully inherited burden to bear. Askauri was free to enjoy the benefits of royalty and fame at leisure, without the severe threat of obligation.

This of course had led to some hair raising moments and scandal within the Royal Court.

After years of complacency, though, and the only reason Askauri had been able to avoid censure up to that point, the Court was now nothing like the massively unforgiving, formally structured morass of complicated rituals and regulations that it had once been.

Instead, and quite by necessity, it had ceded its day to day concerns, spawning a massively unforgiving, formally structured morass of an administrative state with its own system of complicated rituals and regulations to take its place.

Political and social progress, at its corrosive worst, it seems, came even to the magical lands.

So much was changing. So rapidly. Class, genetic and magical hierarchies, caste systems, all were crumbling under the weight of this social progress, and it was difficult, if not impossible to check the tide of disruption.

Some form of an infrastructural communications system had been up and running for some time, even way out in the dimensional sticks, allowing even the lowliest of beings in the Incata access to all of the online information currently available in two worlds.

And information, as is well known, can eventually spawn cataclysmic upheaval.

Royalty, basic and magical knowledge, entertainment, far off connections and communications and dancing cat videos; all of these things had lost their mystery. And with the absence of mystery, there began to grow a dearth of faith, which lead to an absence of belief. The need for elaborate rituals and the expectations of caste acceptance waned in tandem.

Lacking magical propensity no longer hindered one's access to all sorts of amazing knowledge and abilities. This of course had led to a huge downturn over time in the legitimate employment of wizards, witches, mages, and other sundry magical folk. Why would you need to rent out some crop quickening amulet when you could just Google the best organic fertilization techniques?

Many people within the magical communities blamed the long serving ruling families for these changing fortunes. Pointing to Askauri's frequent trips to the other side and its influence over him as proof. Others, if not most, understood that this form of modernization was a natural result of their current state of alignment.

The Incata was not always tethered as it is to the Earth. The two states of dimensional being circle about each other in elliptical orbits, only interacting periodically over vast spans of time. It was possible to cross between the two when they were not in synchronous orbit, though it was much more difficult.

The Earth and the Incata had been locked in a dimensional dance for several thousand years now and was likely not to separate for at least several hundred more. Askauri had only ever experienced existence during this latest period of contact and had always enjoyed easy access between the two realms, taking advantage of the close proximity.

Some believed that there should be a greater level of contact between the two worlds, that the Incata should fully reveal itself in the spirit of mutual cooperation. These folk spawned near religious, cult-like followings, though their numbers were few. None of them could rightly recall the reason why this open contact was not meant to be.

This isn't the first time that the Earth and the Incata were so closely linked and it will be far from the last, with a cataclysmic shift occurring during both the periods of conjoining and separation.

Many times, on Earth, particularly, this period of global upheaval has been interpreted as both the beginning and the end of the world.

Most in the Incata, and a relative few on Earth, however, have always known these to be the inherent cycles within a naturally abiding system. The sun rose and set. The seasons waxed and waned. Galaxies rotated about their central core. And the Earth and the Incata parted ways only to eventually drift back into each other's arms.

Together or apart, each exerted equal but opposite force upon the other. It was this balance that was now challenged. There were factions at play in both worlds who wished to bring about a permanent and open connection between realities, who didn't hold much faith in the legends and laws of old.

The Earth-borne faction of these ideologists hungered for greater access to the magical sources of creative energies abundant within the Incata, while their counterparts in the magical lands desired the sorcerous technologies, the power and control that the Earth's vast forms of material wealth represented.

Each faction was representative of the epitome of their world's own particular forms of conspicuous consumption. So, what more is there for them to attain when they owned most of their own worlds already?

For the fabulously wealthy and the impossibly powerful, there were stakes to be had in the next world over. Consequences to the future be damned.

For much of his life, Askauri had been able to consciously minimize the threat represented by a handful of these esoteric cultists and their weird extremist beliefs. These seemed like issues of the state. There were Lords and Ministers and Department Heads and Directors for that sort of thing, after all. His time, as far as he was concerned, was best reserved for his own pursuits.

He lived and trained like a soldier, yes. He was, after all, the honorary commander of the Royal Families' Forward Expeditionary Unit. But he partied as if he had no concerns, no other obligations.

Perhaps if he'd known that things were so much worse than he had imagined, much worse than the Queen Mother or his goofy fop of an older brother had let on, he would have made a different choice.

He knew that it no longer mattered.

He could feel his brother's death, the moment he drew his last breath, even across the veil. He didn't need to be there to know what that portended and if he had any doubts about whether there had been a more mystical hand at play in his arrest and conviction, they were completely gone when his brother's life energies and fleeting memories had washed over him.

Now was no longer the time to concern oneself with such regrets, though. He knew that The Great House of The Askai, Rulers of The Great Plains Kingdom of the Incata, had been called to war.

His family's heritage as The Defenders Of The Great Pillars, Central Spoke of the House of Families and Keepers of the Aspects, was being challenged for worthiness.

But for now he must concern himself with his son. He'd thought that no one of importance knew of the boy or the boy's mother. Mostly because none would likely suspect that Askauri's heart had been stolen away so easily. The woman had not been his first fling, nor the boy his first bastard.

Before, though, all were easily enough forgotten. His mother had helped to see to that, quietly compensating the women and brutally eradicating any unborn potential threats to the familial line of succession.

She did this as a sort of royal duty, he supposed. Askauri was not in line to inherent the throne, but a good many people still dreamed of tapping into the Royal Family's vast supply of Dukedoms and Earl-ships and any number of other lesser appointments best reserved for unwanted bastards.

Bealz's mother had been different, though. Much different. She was not a member of any of the Great Houses. She was not the comely daughter of some dignitary or politician. She didn't come from any of the powerful merchant families. In fact, she was not even of the Incata.

She was a stripper from the Southside of Chicago.

Askauri had fallen in love immediately, her, not so much. They'd met when he had, on a lark, visited the dank, dark and dangerous gentleman's clubs lined up like a seedy row of strip malls just outside of the Chicago city limits. He and a couple others from his Royal Expeditionary Forward Unit, the band of soldiers, fellow revelers and confidantes whom he kept company with, were celebrating yet another successful foray to Earth.

Watching her dance onstage, he had found himself completely captivated. There was something familiar about her. Something ghostly and attractive that he could not quite name. She looked vulnerable, almost ethereal as she moved about the tiny stage, completely ignoring the gathered throng of hooting men thrusting money towards her.

Askauri couldn't tear his eyes away for different reasons, though. He could sense a latent power, thrumming just beneath the surface.

He paid outrageously for a private lap dance, wishing to be nearer, to know more of her. Any thought given to 'rescuing' her from a life trapped in such circumstances were dashed immediately,

though, once they'd actually met.

Hers had been a most harsh life, certainly, made even more so by the fact that she was an alluring young child abandoned into a broken, state run foster care system. What she had been able to achieve most successfully, as a result of this, though, was endurance. She was a survivor in the midst of a world filled with hustlers, pimps, drug dealers, deviants and killers.

She was no shrinking violet, however. Many of the dancers were working girls, prostitutes who handed tips over to their pimps as soon as they left the stage. Most were barely of age and quite a few were still little more than children, roped into the life by unscrupulous men.

She was having none of that. What she did, she did of her own accord and strictly by the rules which she set and refused to deviate from.

Askauri watched for her later on that night, waiting to see if she was going to take him up on the earlier invitation to breakfast at closing.

Surprising herself, maybe it was something about the strange man's eyes or the fact that he really only seemingly wanted to talk, she had accepted. This, of course, didn't stop her from checking the box cutter's blade before stepping out into the alley behind the row of clubs.

Awaiting her in an idling car, Askauri could see two men silently split away from the dark shadows surrounding the cone of light cast by the yellowed bulb above the back door. His heart had quickened as he opened the car door with the intent of dashing to her defense. What he saw next had stopped him cold in his tracks.

Her hand vanished inside the clutch purse she carried and came out faster than the average eye could follow, with the blade of the box cutter fully extended. She swung it round in a tight, practiced arc as lethal in its execution as anything Askauri had ever seen.

This is not what had stopped him dead in his tracks, however. It is what she had become in that instant. Her being had transformed, erupting in a blistering flame that burned above the perceptions of the cowardly men closing in on her.

He could sense the energy roiling off of her in waves, even at a distance, and it was impressive.

She was an adept. Here. In this place. The most unlikeliest of places to meet such a beautiful creature.

Her fires marked her as the descendant of some long lost warrior caste. Somewhere in her genetic past, buried beneath thousands of years worth of DNA, her ancestors had been fierce protectors, soldiers serving the God of Two Skies, the one true unifying force between the two worlds.

Her kind were rare, if not little more than a rumor in the Incata. They were down right unheard of here on Earth.

Askauri was amazed as he watched one of them, Earth's own living Valkyrie, eviscerate two junkies in an alley behind a strip club in Gary, Indiana.

It was like watching the angel of death performing a masterwork. Much more intimate than a lap dance.

Later, they ate pancakes at Denny's

She did not know what she was. Had never really known what she could do. How she could do it. She just did it. It scared her sometimes. Kept her fed and safe most others.

Soon enough, Askauri folded her over into the Incata and brought her before his mother, who rejected her right away.

Askauri would not abandon her, however. He had her secretly enrolled in the Moor-lander's Mountain Region Academy, high up in the University Cities, hoping that she'd learn to fully explore her range of expressions, only to lose her once again to the Earth when his trusts were betrayed.

Before he could follow after, her senses, her memories, had been clouded. She remembered little of what he had shown her of herself. He lost his connection to her and she eventually lost track of time. Forgot a great many things.

But she never forgot the intense love she felt for the child she carried out of the Incata within her womb. The child none of the other 'elf people', as she called them, knew about. Not even the child's father.

Only wishing to care for the boy, though, her mind had become a painfully splintered thing, trying to reconcile the memories of two different worlds. Two different lives.

She spiraled down into confusion, lost touch with the inner source of her strength.

Soon, she forgot. Easy enough when all those around you think that your tales are just the unchecked ravings of a madwoman.

When he had smuggled Monie into the Moor's University Cities, Askauri knew what was at stake. He had been warned about the scope of the dangers faced by each of them, but it had not really become perfectly clear until she had been expelled from the Academy and soon enough from the Incata all together.

He tried to follow after, to seek her out, but when he arrived on Earth there was a trap there waiting for him.

He manifested above the body of a young woman who looked very much like his lost love. The police were there to greet him. In disregarding his mother's wishes in his pursuit, he'd chosen to set aside his mantle of authority, leaving him powerless to act against the laws of these men. Askauri was helpless. Just another black man professing his innocence.

He had been locked away for nearly two years before he could even sense the existence of his offspring. Soon after that, though, the child began to call to him, to seek him out.

He met his son in a dream. The essence of the boy. He was only able to talk to him, guide him through the child's own imaginings of the Incata, where he had been conceived, explaining to him what he saw, whom they met.

The boy had no idea that he was conjuring forth impossible memories. Memories of a time when he was but a quickened idea in his mother's womb.

Askauri was powerless to help his son in any reasonable way, but what bit of his life's essence, his link to The Source that he had been able to maintain, he used as a shield of protection for the boy and his mother. He could only hope that it was enough since his grasp on the energies flowing from the Incata was a tenuous thing.

The shield had been weak, at best, depending more on their anonymity than his magical might, and now it had been shattered altogether. And now, until he could withdraw the energies exerted in the shield's formation, he'd be too weak even to speak to the child in the dream state. He could only hope that the boy would remember some of what was shown to him upon waking.

Askauri had reached out to Bealz's mother. To his broken warrior. Her mind remained in a perpetual state of dreamy duality. Neither fully awake nor asleep. He wasn't certain if she could understand the urgency he had tried to convey to her. The need for her to focus, to shake off the cottony doldrums, the remnants of the Queen Mother's spell of banishment.

She needed to get to Bealz and get out of there before the others came. And to do so, she would need to find a way to find herself. If only for a moment.

Askauri knew that, if nothing else, Monie had held on to the need to protect her son. Her mind had wandered far and wide, ranging out over time and through two different worlds, but she remained anchored to the boy. Bealz kept her from drifting too far.

If Monie could get to their son, sneak with him back into the Incata, Askauri was certain that they could find safe haven, that there were some he could trust to aid them, hopefully before they were recognized by any others. And once they were properly concealed, he could begin to consider his next move.

But first, he would have to find his own way back to the Incata.

Easier said than done, he thought, staring up at the underside of the top bunk.

Much easier.

Slowly gathering his thoughts and energies, calling upon meditational techniques honed during his childhood magical academy training, Askauri slips off, first into a deep sleep, then into a coma.

His cellie, unable to wake him some hours later, calls for the guard.

Coming in and checking his pulse, the guard then radios in for a medical response unit.

Askauri is pronounced dead the next morning.

VI

Bealz's head swims sickeningly. He lurches to his hands and knees and vomits violently. His eyes water painfully, slowly adjusting to the sudden burst of a much too bright light. Sitting back on his haunches, he rubs furiously at his face, trying to clear his vision while his heart races with panic and his breath quickens.

He'd just watched his mother kill Ms. Penny by touching her. Something else had happened, though. Something in his mother had changed.

And then she had brought him here.

Bealz knew where he was. Recognized it immediately. He'd seen this sky, smelled this air and felt the silken, golden grasses pressed down beneath him before. This was the Incata. A dreamworld that he could not believe really existed.

This was supposed to be a mental trick, like the many different counselors used to talk to him about. A place for him to go, to escape into his mind when things got too bad out in the real world. But this was no dream. This was no subconscious escape, no break from reality.

This was real. His mother had brought him home. That other place, the dingy little room they had just stepped out of, and the filthy alleyways, the crowded El trains, Deshaun and Dakari and Ms. Penny and the hellish life lived on the south side of Chicago, that was the dream. Bealz had somehow known it all along.

But even though he felt a familiarity here, his body, all of his senses, screamed out in alarm, disoriented by the slightly different quality of the air, the vibrant colors swirling through the grasses, the somewhat stronger pull of gravity. Everything was so much like Earth, but nothing like it just the same.

Slowly getting a handle on his breathing, Bealz's eyes begin to clear and he can look around, see through the receding tears. They had stepped through atop a small, gently rolling hill overlooking a small flower filled valley. His mother, standing with her back to him, looks down at the peaceful scene below them.

“Aren't they pretty?” she asks.

Bealz is speechless at the sight of the fiery storm that still wrapped itself around her. Here, in the Incata, it revealed her in all of her true glory. His mother was a warrior. A fierce, steel and leather bound warrior. There was a great, yew-wood bow and a quiver filled with electrically sizzling and popping lightning bolts slung over her shoulder. She had a great broadsword at her side, larger and heavier than anything Bealz himself could lift from the looks of it, even with both hands, and a wicked looking dagger, her hand resting on its pommel, sheathed opposite the sword.

As she continues to look out over the valley before them, the flames engulfing her begin to gutter and taper away and she slowly slumps back into her normally crumpled, confused, self.

“I come here when it gets too hard. She doesn't know I can do that. If she did, she would have locked me out a long time ago...when she banished me...” Monique Felani says wistfully.

“But,” she goes on, brightening a bit. “I can still come here anytime I want! Sneak right in through the back door,” she giggles.

Turning to look at her son, the sadness in her eyes belying the laughter, she says, “This is where I am when I'm gone, baby. This is the only place that still makes sense, you see?”

VII

For most of his eleven years, Bealz had been taught that he was nothing special. In this, he was just like all the other kids he knew or knew of in his neighborhood, which made up the entirety of his world and helped to shape his own opinions on the matter.

Ms. Penny let him know that he wasn't special. The older, meaner foster kids who shuffled endlessly through the apartment, they let him know with words and fists and feet that he wasn't special. The teachers at school, the cops around where he lived, the foreigners who owned all of the essential businesses on his block, the news announcers who droned on ceaselessly in the background while Ms. Penny cleaned; they all let Bealz know that he was nothing special.

His mother, though, she had always told him otherwise. She told him that he was special. It was nice to hear. And he really wanted to believe her.

Just like most all kids, though, at least where he was from, he too had had to learn the truth soon enough. There was nothing so special about helping her, his mom, doped to the gills on psychotropics, get into bed. Or knowing to check on Ms. Penny's younger brother, Tony-Tone, when she was at bingo to make sure he didn't pass out with the needle stuck in his arm and get blood all over the sofa again.

He also knew that the art of pacing himself to stay up on a school night to watch a puking, pooping baby who's name he didn't even know while the grown folks celebrated drunkenly in the next room, was not all that special either.

Bealz had necessarily learned to become proficient at such things. Changing diapers soon after no longer having to wear diapers is commonplace enough on the Southside. At least it was for the likes of Bealz and thousands more just like him, crammed into similar spaces, living with similar circumstances.

Now, though, he was thinking that maybe his normal, outside of the commonplace for an eleven year old foster kid, had been quite different.

It was always easy enough to chalk his quirkiness, his penchant for staring into empty spaces, answering unasked questions, or marveling stupidly at the beautifully colored auras which lingered around some people's heads, to an overactive imagination. Or maybe just expected because of his mother's tainted, crazy-ass blood.

But all of that stuff had seemed real to Bealz. And most importantly, not really that big of a deal.

Like the time in the alley a couple buildings down from Ms. Penny's. He'd come upon a dead body. An old bag lady who'd maybe been out in the cold too long.

She had obviously been dead for sometime when she spoke to him. Sang to him, really. A sad song. A lament for a cherished, yet difficult life. She sang his name, except it was something that he could not quite understand, and called him 'young lord'. She thanked him for listening to her song and said goodbye.

He could see a mist, like a wispy breath in the cold morning air, steam up and out of her body.

Considering this now, Bealz wonders at how he'd just accepted it for what it was, didn't think that it was so unusual. Or even the least bit scary. He had just listened politely because he thought that's what he should have done.

Of course he kept stuff like this to himself, lest he be subjected to another couple of rounds of therapy meant to convince him of his imaginative brilliance and how it was a perfectly normal escape and sadly, likely an understandable reaction to life in such a traumatic environment.

How none of it was real. How it really wasn't anything so special.

Now, holding his mother's hand as she leads him hesitantly towards the edge of the clearing at the base of the hill where they'd arrived in the Incata, they stroll through the shin-high flowers that covered the valley floor and Bealz marvels at just how easily it is to adjust to a new reality. Especially since it had been peeking out at him the whole time. Showing itself through the cracks.

Looking up at his mother, he can't help but wonder at just how right she had been. They were in a whole different world and Bealz thought that it was pretty damn special.

VIII

Watching the two of them walking down the hill towards the sparse woods that gradually thickened across from the valley floor, laying in wait, a well concealed hunter considers the best way to approach Bealz and Monique, knowing that they would be caught completely off guard.

The boy's mother is a formidable warrior, possibly even Shujua'a-vri Nwamke, the female aspect of a Warrior Spirit. She had lit up the sky, so of course their arrival had been observed. The power she wielded in ripping open a portal, while sheathed in flame, was apparent and impressive.

Soon after they arrived, when Monique had slid back into the weak, disheveled looking thing now shuffling through the lilies, that power had winked out. Snuffed like a candle flame. She was vulnerable.

As the two slipped in between the tall, thin trees, the silent hunter, known, feared and celebrated throughout the Incata, falls in behind them, taking note and avoiding the other set of eyes that tracked them from within the deeper density of the woods.

Up ahead, Bealz and Monie crash on through the trees, loudly announcing their approach, oblivious to the trap they were strolling right into.

IX

There weren't a lot of trees to look at in Chicago. Not on the hardscrabble Southside streets. The few there that could be found were usually decorative, planter friendly little things scattered along the boulevard, serving to do nothing more than to break up the monotony of constant urbanity.

The sight of the trees, as Bealz and his mother ventured into the woods here in the Incata, took his breath away. He marveled at their natural beauty and majesty. The trees rose up and out of sight, like the big buildings downtown, and he couldn't help but to gape up at their heights like a naively excited tourist.

As they walked on, he grew more at ease. It grew easier to dismiss the impossibilities of the moment. Walking into a cathedral of trees, Bealz thinks nothing of new worlds or the blood, death and fear left behind in the old.

A falling leaf beckons him onward and he darts ahead, laughing and calling back to his mother with such long awaited pleasure in simply losing himself in the excitement of an unexpected journey begun. He had never really been anywhere before, so this was a new feeling. For him, just like most everyone else that he knew, those who lived their entire lives solely within the confines of a couple dozen or so city blocks, the idea of traveling outside of that red-lined, gentrified urban space was just as far fetched as the idea of finding fresh food in a neighborhood store.

“This must be like it is in the country, huh, ma?” Bealz asks his mother loudly, envisioning the endless fields of corn that grew downstate of Chicago. He'd never been surrounded by such an immense area devoid of concrete.

The only thing to even come close had been the photos he'd seen before in textbooks of widely smiling, red faced farmers sitting in the cab or hanging off of the side of some huge green combine. There was usually just the one huge house in the background and it would always be surrounded by a never ending sea of tall, gently swaying stalks of corn.

To every inner city, public school kid, this looked like an unbelievable la-la land that was supposedly only hours away from the grit and the grime and the perpetual misery packed densely around their everyday existence. It was hard for them to imagine waking up to such quiet, uninterrupted space.

“Not quite like you think, baby,” Monie replies distractedly, looking about as if she too were caught up in the euphoria of a dream. But of a different sort. She felt something silken flit across her face. As if they were walking through unseen spider's webs drifting through the air.

Bealz, of course, is unaware of his mother's confused caution as they follow the forest trail demarcated through the trees. He skips along happily beside her when the path allows for it, behind or ahead as his curiosities take him.

Monique slows their pace. She listens to Bealz, barely answering his many questions, keeping him engaged just enough to mask her unease. She knows that she'd lost much since Bealz's grandmother had banished her. She tried to remember what the boy's father had attempted to show her of herself, but he had always spoke with such pretentious confusion.

The dark, ebony skinned men and women in the mountains had been better at it, more patient, if not amused by the idea of instructing such a crude child of Earth. She couldn't recall much from her time with the Moors, high up in their University Cities, attending their uppity Academies, but she could, unfortunately, remember that she had not progressed very far in her studies before she'd been abruptly expelled from the Incata.

She fought desperately to hold on to what she'd learned, but the Queen Mother had no intention of her ever recovering that part of herself. Her mind had been broken and scattered across two worlds. The spell, Monie knew, was intended to leave her lost and completely broken forever.

She also knew that it had been Bealz, not much more than an idea forming inside her, that had kept her from falling over into the abyss altogether.

Still, so much of what she knew, so much of her once confident certainty, had been drained away. She'd lost so much, even from before she'd met Askauri as a nineteen year old dancer determined to take care of herself at all costs, back when she had to rely on no more than sharp instincts and sharper reflexes. Sometimes just to make it home alive.

Even then, though, before the idea of magical black men and different worlds and bitchy mother-in-laws, she had been more than capable. Never anyone's victim, or at least never for long.

She'd had to fall back on those more primitive instincts since this other reality and the ability to access her more powerful, inner self had been torn away. Monique Felani had long been a survivor, though, and growing up around the worst that humanity had to offer had left her equipped to thrive far beyond just the concrete jungle that was the Southside of Chicago.

A sixth sense of sorts had developed, lending itself to a city-bred skittishness. And rightly so. Danger could very well be lurking around every corner. Especially if you were a 19 year old stripper heading home past the witching hour.

Now, peering up ahead through the trees, she can't quite shake the feeling that something was lurking near by. Unseen webs, feathery, seemed to lightly brush across her face. It was like an unwanted touch. An intrusion. It felt to her like the sickly familiar feeling of a festering, malevolent male lust, the dangerous kind that the bouncers would keep a watchful eye on.

She had never needed anyone to walk her home, though. She'd always known that she could handle whatever problem she might happen to meet along the way.

Monique knew that she had, at one time, been fierce. Fearless. She had never been one to cower through the darkened streets. She couldn't allow herself to do so now, here in these woods.

So, for Bealz's sake, for the peals of laughter he'd broken into, she tried not to show her uncertainty, the fear that grew and tingled along her spine. Besides, he had already seen her at her worst, much too often. A disappointment greater than he could possibly understand, given her inherent strength, the truly remarkable story of her very existence and the sheer will to persevere, despite the fantastical odds, calculated in two different worlds, against her.

Gathering her thoughts as best as she could, Monie attempts to shake free of more than ten years worth of confused cobwebs. She struggles hard to focus. Bealz's enthusiasm helps.

She wipes distractedly at her face.

Bealz darts about, looking up at the trees, searching their trunks and the loam for interesting morels and chanterelles, grossing out over the bugs and beetles teeming on the forest floor. Everything was so new to him. A brand new world filled with surprise.

She tried to explain to him what she could, which wasn't much. Just enough to further fuel his curiosity. His wonder is contagious and after a short time, begins to erode away at her tension. It is a joy to watch him. A pleasure more than ten years in the making.

The woods, she recalls from a snippet of poetry, certainly are lovely, dark and deep. Scary is one way to look at them, for sure, but these same woods had so often before, when she'd come here alone, magically worked to calm her chaotic spirit. It had been a healing balm as she strolled through its idyllic scenery.

The air is sweetened as the giant trees slowly exhale. The pastoral sounds of an active biome is peaceful, lilting in its background persistence. Watching Bealz slip around a slight bend in the upcoming path, Monie may be confused about much, but she knows very well why she'd come here before. Why she had brought her son here now. To this lovely, quiet place.

Darting ahead, laughing ridiculously, Bealz disappears momentarily from view. The pure joy that he exuded was enough to finally allow for a silly smile to creep across her face.

Hurrying along, awakened and drawn to the joyful sounds bubbling in his wake, Monie steps around the bend and freezes. Her heart suddenly turns cold and she silently curses herself for dulled senses and intellect.

Bealz stands in the middle of the tiny forest lane looking wonderingly into the eyes of a bent and broken old man.

Still enraptured by the shiny newness all around him, he is excitedly amazed to meet someone walking around in this fairy tale place.

The old man, with a mischievously youthful sparkle in his eyes, claps and clasps his hands together in delight.

“Oh, ho!” he cries. “Well, met on a Monday!”

“But it's not Monday,” Bealz says, laughing at the man's absurdity.

The old man is draped in what appeared to be a mixture of animal pelts, multi colored scarves, buckskin and blue jeans. He pulls behind him a crudely constructed, two-wheeled little wooden cart loaded with an unrecognizable array of brick-a-brac.

The man's cart, it's worn, wooden wheels pegged to a wooden shaft, appears aged, smoothed and hardened. Maybe even petrified.

“What a clever young lad you might turn out to be.”

Fighting against the panic, Monie finds her voice and says, “Bealz, come over here, to me.”

Bealz doesn't seem to hear his mother, lost as he is in his delight.

The old man, maintaining eye contact with Bealz, speaks to Monie. “I heard a tale sometime ago,” he cackles. “Yes, I did indeed. It was all bout a wee little thing and her baby bo!”

“You get the fuck away from him, now!” Monie reacts instinctively, shaking free of her shock, her fires beginning to kindle.

“No, no, no,” the old man says with a tic of his head. “No need for none of that. I'm just a well met stranger in the woods, now, dear. Don't you fear none and I won't neither.”

Monie can feel the heat of her flames begin to stir, “If you don't back off now, old man, I will hurt you.”

“Oh, you'll do no such thing, Daughter of Earth. You'll both be worse for it.”

“See,” the old man says. “The boy already dances. Caught up in my web and ready to tell me a tale or two. Wouldn't want nothing to happen, now, would we?”

Bealz doesn't seem to notice the conversation between his mother and the stranger. His smile stretches painfully across his face and he dances in delight, bouncing up and down and clapping his hands.

“Bealz, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Monie demands. “Get the fuck away from that old creepy ass nigga, now!”

“Oh, t'ain't nothin wrong, young missy. He's just a eager to let me take a peek, you see. Oh, deary, just lookit him. How he shines so,” the old man says, his eyes sparkling impishly. “Now, you're gonna cool down, too. I'd hate for you to see him dance his last.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“Just him, at the moment, dear Earth Child. T'ain't no threat, neither. But it is a good bet. Let's walk a spell, tell an old man a story. Just a bit to step and we'll be right in my back yard.”

Fear and uncertainty sap away at Monie's fury. The flames gutter and dance and die away as she thinks to negotiate. “Look, mister. We ain't try to walk around in your yard. We just didn't know, is all.”

“Oh, yes,” he says. “All in all and none is none. But, whoever you were, my dove, your story's done.”

Perceiving the threat in his whimsical words, Monie sidles slowly towards her son, “Look, man. Just back off OK. Just leave us alone.”

“Tsk, tsk, no need, no need. No need indeed. You've let my thread wrap round so that I can take a look, and now your story too will be in my book.”

Monie's eyes begin to sting and water. She brushes furiously at her face. “What is this?”

“You see, you see?” the old man says, pleased with himself. “And now you will get to hear the story of me and how ol' Pickle-Me-Jack found his lunch while out walking about and following a hunch!”

He gets busy and wraps them both tightly in invisible, silky threads. They somehow fit quite snugly amongst the collection of kitsch in his little wooden cart.

X

Askauri's body was in the prison infirmary. Looking down on it, he felt a pang of pity for what he had become. Prison changed a man. Forced him to devolve into something completely unrecognizable to his younger, more optimistic self. Here lay the culmination of all of his dreams and aspirations. A sad sight, indeed.

His time in incarceration had been a morose and lonely affair. There were no next of kin noted on Askauri's intake paperwork and no one in more than eleven years ever listed on his visitor's list, though he did surreptitiously receive the occasional envoy. His only pleasures had been in meditating, reading, working out and sleeping. Especially sleeping.

The barriers were thinner during one's deep sleep, so he had been able to slip below the veil of his concealment spell and enter into Bealz's personal dream domain. This had been his one chance at experiencing anything even close to freedom. The one chance to talk to, to interact with his son. Even if it was, when it was all said and done, just a dream.

The same could be said, he knew all too well, for most every one of the prisoners who were pining for home, for family, for those lost to this country's bloodthirsty demand for mass incarceration.

Still, Askauri had attempted to make the best of what he could while locked up. He spent much time in meditation, reviewing the lessons from his youth, practicing the mental exercises necessary to manipulate the base aspects his family was responsible for maintaining. In this meditative state, he was able to separate into a locally projected astral emplacement and engage with his familial history. A sort of cloud based repository of genetic knowledge.

He much better understood now his family's role in the Grand Dance and learned to greatly regret his own youthful dereliction's of duty. Askauri would have to live with the knowledge that the acceptance of his responsibilities much sooner would have saved a lot of people from the harm to come.

He also understood in the moment that it was because of these neglectful choices that he had met Monie. That there was a Bealz.

Evidence that, sometimes, roses really did spring from cracked concrete.

Before, though, as a younger man, duty, responsibility, obligation to something bigger, something beyond the limited confines of self, none of these things held much interest for him. Askauri had no reason to adhere to tradition, to act with anything but self-serving interest.

For him, it didn't really matter. It wasn't like he would be king. The king was dead. His mother ruled in his stead and his older brother awaited the crown. Askauri's contribution to this lovely family portrait was symbolic, at best.

Why not, then, enjoy his time and avoid, if he could, any boring calls to duty.

It was like that up until the moment he'd fallen in love. Monie should have been no different than any of the other women he'd traipsed around with over the years. For him, the bar for their approval had been very low, pegged as it was to their willingness and the ability to withstand a good four or five day binge.

Monique Felani, Warrior, Daughter of Earth, had been so much different. So much less of what he'd sought out and discarded before.

He'd walked away from his comrades the night they met, didn't see any of them again for several days. And when they did see him, with Monie at his side, they knew immediately that something was different. And it was. His choices from that moment on were conceived of from a different place. They were made with another in mind.

This newfound sense of responsibility had turned painful when he first felt Bealz's consciousness flare up in search of him. The implications had struck like a hammer blow. He sat alone in his cell and wept for days.

His banishment, forbidding him from being there with her, with his son, had been the most painful experience of his life. Never before could he have imagined such a longing for the chance to fulfill once onerous duties and obligations.

Never before had he so longed to be an upright and righteous man.

In a way then, he had those now conspiring against him to thank. He would see his son. He would hold his lover in his arms again. Thanks to someone's inept meddling, he would do so much sooner than he had only just recently thought possible.

He had been bound by the laws of this man's Earth due to his abandonment of authority. In doing so, Askauri had voluntarily set aside his birthright and along with it, the outright ability to access his family's mantle of power.

The brand that he wore, that his own father had seared into his chest above his heart, was gone. It was his family seal, burned into his flesh, serving as proof of identity as well as a badge of authority, of honor.

The veve-pattern entwined within the brand served as a key, unlocking the magical genetic heritage which ran throughout the Royal Family's bloodline and served to facilitate his connection to the Source. Without it, considering his lack of experience wielding the energies through tedious methods such as studying, he had been virtually helpless. Left with little else, basically, but a mostly ineffective bag of tricks.

Until the rogues had shown their hand.

Askauri's spell of concealment had masked both the boy and his mother's presence. They were all but invisible unless one had prior knowledge of their existence, knew of their whereabouts, or possessed a piece or part of them or their belongings.

Askauri should have known the instant the spell had been disrupted. It should have been impossible to do so without his awareness, so another force must be at play, counteracting the alarms.

Worse than that, when the barrier had been broken, the boy and his mother would have flared up, their essence lighting up the dimensional planes like exploding stars. Hopefully, Monie would have received his warning and got to the boy, got him out and away into the Incata before anyone else recognized what their sudden appearance portended.

If she could manage to get him there, Bealz would not be so easy to find. Here on Earth, with this world's lack of magical attributes, he would stick out like a sore thumb. The Incata held more than its share of danger, and most likely the root of the plot against his family, but at least Bealz would be hidden against the backdrop of the Source.

As Askauri continues to look dolefully down at his graying body, two privately contracted prison nurses enter the cold room. Roughly transferring the dead man to a wheeled gurney, Askauri is rolled down into the bowels of the aging medical unit.

This is the long serving prisoner's greatest nightmare. To live a life devoid of hope for the chance at freedom was one thing, enough to break a man's mind, but the idea of not just dying alone, but dying alone in prison, was terrifying.

Inmates knew not to proscribe to the myth of an idyllic graveyard out back. To die with no one to claim your body in here is to know that you will face the flames, be reduced to ash and humanely discarded. That was the only fate which awaited the imprisoned dead down in the dark basement.

Askauri, though, felt not one bit of remorse as his body was shifted into the angry red maw of the furnace. He watched with passivity as the flames singed black his hair, scorched and split his skin and bubbled away his blood and fat. He watched as his body was slowly reduced to a charred and shriveled skeleton and then to nothing recognizable. A grayed pile of ash.

As the last of his flesh and bones gave up its cellular cohesion, he could feel himself growing thin, thinner than even his current ghostly form.

The room blurred, the air sharpened and, quite anticlimactically, Askauri stepped out of the void of the astral plane, the thin place between worlds, and into the Incata. He fell to his knees, weak with the effort. The family crest, his brand, burned anew on his chest. It glowed red hot and felt just the same.

He could feel Bealz's presence immediately, feel a slight distress buried beneath images of laughter and light. He could do nothing for him right now, though. Not like this. Counter-intuitively, he had to get back to Earth immediately if he was going to have any chance of protecting his son.

But Askauri had misjudged just how weak he had become, cut off as he was from his homelands, and struggles to hold onto consciousness. He knew that he had to get up, get back to his feet, back to Earth, before it was too late.

But first he had to rest up. Just for a little bit.

And so, right there in a field of flowers at the base of the hill that Bealz and Monie and a hidden hunter had passed through not long before, Askauri fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

XI

The forest was dying.

It was being slowly sapped of its essential energies. The magic that animated its consciousness was being leeched away, drained like a tapped tree.

All over the Incata it was the same. The living avatars of this world's most essential natural elements were under attack, some had even succumb, dying off and forever severing the sub-dimensional connections that they maintained with the Earth. Roots that had grown deep down into and through the thin barriers between worlds, serving as transoms and anchors since before recorded time, had been lost forever.

Deep in the heart of many of the Incata's elementals, growing like cancers, the Anansia Shitani, Spider Demons known to swap out and share human forms, slowly spin, killing and replacing these nodal points from the inside with a massive weaving, a binding spell that they hoped would tie the two planes of existence permanently in place. If these demons were successful, the natural orbital ellipse of the Earth and the Incata would be forever disrupted. Or so it was believed.

Pickle-Me-Jack, an old and malevolent creature, had been hidden away here in the heart of the Great Forest for some time. He had cast his thin, corrupting threads all throughout and slowly sucked away at its life energies, perverting, corrupting, until a dark tangle of foul webbing had formed. A sickening tumorous knot that swallowed up whole stands of trees, cut off the sunlight and created a cold, dark void that seemed to absorb the sounds of the world around them as Jack shuffled towards it, his little cart trundling along behind him.

He laughed and sang and bobbed happily along, pleased with himself. He'd gathered two unique and tasty morsels. Had felt them tap-tap-tapping along his invisible webs. He'd woven a calming about them before they knew what was happening and watched with delight as they gladly sought him out, winding themselves up tight.

The boy, weaved up tight, trapped within his mind, his delight glowing like a pyre, still danced and darted through the field of flowers with his mother, just as happy as a bug. He couldn't see the threads.

The woman though, she had resisted from the start. She had somehow sensed his weaving as she walked through the woods. It had taken more effort to draw her in, to find a story that would keep her, but he had, and now she is holding her son, spinning round and round with laughter in the field of flowers they'd just passed through.

But she still distractedly brushed at her face.

Pickle-Me-Jack had planned on doing the boy first. His young stories were undeveloped, unripened. He will be a sweet bite to eat, but there wouldn't be much there to tell. He'd wrap up the meal much too soon.

Oh, but the boy's mother! Jack would draw small sips from her and bottle the best for later.

Ducking into a ragged hole amongst the web sheet-ed trees, they enter into a cave-like dwelling, a hermit's hovel lit by a dim blaze in a makeshift hearth. The main room gives way to several passageways that vanish into eerie darkness.

Taking his prey from the cart, he means to tuck them away amongst the many piles of bones and bodies. The desiccated dead and dying, some fully intact skeletons, the scattering of long dead voles and birds and a few bears and boars and unicorns, and dozens of wooden boxes, filled with corked bottles, crowded the room, forcing Jack to carefully pick his way through the mess.

He grows irritated to see that Monie had burned away at several layers of his bindings. He'd have to get started on her right away.

Pickle-Me-Jack fed on psychic energies. He devoured the stories and tales of his victims, savoring the spicy emotions sprinkled throughout their histories and memories. Which were most often two different things.

Warming his fires, he set about preparing his meal. Snatching Monie up, he scrabbles up the side of the hovel and spins her in place, leaving her dangling upside down from the ceiling. Dropping down to the floor, he peels back the intangible threads from around her face and weaves his way inside, filling up her mouth and nose and eyes and ears. Her life story springs open to him, a tidal wave of events, a world-line spun back through to her beginnings.

Monie begins to thrash about, rejecting the foul intrusion.

He weaves faster, filling her mind with his sickly threads until he overwhelms her resistance, overpowering her defenses like a virus. He finally breaks through and threads in place the cherished recent memory of her surrounded by a field of flowers, chasing after her son. This is a good story. A tasty little morsel. It would keep her wrapped tight in his weaving.

He wanted more. He needed more.

He could sense the depths within her. The histories. There were great crescendos of emotion buried down inside her.

Pickle-Me-Jack shudders with sensuous delight as he begins to draw forth from these memories. He slowly, patiently works at the twisted, tangled layers of her world-line, the unalterable chronicle of her life, smoothing out the uncertainties and straightening out the confusion.

He was a meticulous chef. Discerning. He prepped his meals with care.

This one was something special. As he began to get a clearer understanding of the torrent of memories and emotions that rushed forth when he'd tapped into her mind, he could not believe his good fortune. Her life's essence blazed a path back through several of her generational lines. He could see into histories that she could not possibly know that she possessed.

Pickle-Me-Jack could grow fat from the sustenance this one had to offer.

His eyes rolled back and his tongue lolled drunkenly as he probed deeper, searched further along her genetic line for more. He unlocked the natural barriers that he encountered, hungry, desperate to reach the end of her.

He would fill his disheveled home with draught after draught of her distilled memories and histories. He would satiate himself with her story.

XII

Monie had grown quiet. She looked about and saw an endless field of flowers. Bealz's laughter rang all around her but she couldn't see him. Something seemed to flit across her face. Like a spider's web drifting along the breeze. She brushed at it annoyingly.

She didn't see the trees.

She came here often. Loved to stroll through the flowers at the bottom of the hill that she always stepped out onto. She loved the scent of them, the flowers. A beautifully aromatic explosion that filled her senses, drove out the garbage stench of the city streets.

But she only ever wanted to stroll through the flowers on her way to the sanctity of the trees. She cherished the close, intimate feeling of the woods. It seemed to reach out to her, as if it sensed her longing, and wrapped itself around her in a soothing, oak and pine and willowy comforter.

Now she couldn't see the trees. They should be well within sight. The little valley at the bottom of the hill was no more than a few minutes stroll before it gave way to the first of them. Now the flowers stretched on and on and Bealz's laughter echoed further and further away.

Monie brushed at her face, no longer annoyed. Now she was angry.

XIII

Pickle-Me-Jack left no track nor trail in his passage through the forest. Bealz and Monie, meanwhile, cut a wide swath as they made their way, crashing about in oblivious delight. Their trail vanished, though, just as the forest takes a turn, darkening, changing over suddenly from light to dark. The darkness wasn't just caused because of the density of the woods. This was something else.

Jo-Mel had tracked them at a distance, following them into the heart of the forest, and now silently contemplates the sudden disappearance of Bealz and Monie's trail. It was as though they'd simply vanished into thin air. Highly possible, but unlikely, given that Monie wielded her power with no subtlety, like a hammer. She would have simply torn a hole right through the barriers. Jo-Mel would have sensed it happening, would still feel its residual energies.

There was no scent, however. No displaced leaf, no stirred nor scuffed soil along the path, no broken twigs or branches. No sign of them whatsoever. Their trail simply vanished in mid-stride.

Jo-Mel had never been thwarted from pursuit, however, and knew that people left behind much more than physical evidence. Peering deeper, looking for the near imperceptible eddying wake of their passage, a curious void can just be seen swirling in and about the trees. Jo-Mel senses a weaving, a mystical working possibly concealing a larger threat.

This was the predator lurking amongst the trees that watched and waited as Bealz and Monie approached. Jo-Mel could sense its malevolence. The forest was sick with it. A curious sort of illness, though. The gangrenous rot grew from within, leaving the outer appearance of health.

Grown unchecked, this could have led to the death of, not just this place, but the entire glen and glade surrounding the woods, as well.

How could this have gone unnoticed? Jo-Mel is disturbed by the implications and wonders, far from the first time, just what had become of the Royal Family. So many of the duties of the House of Askai had gone unfulfilled, untended, since the disappearance of the wayward prince.

Could this too be evidence of the Royal Family's dereliction's?

Jo-Mel could not quite fathom the damage that could be done by the death of such a large and integral part of the Incata's magical landscape. Surely there had to be some who had sensed the festering blight growing within the very heart of this Elemental. And if not, that blight must be caused by a powerful and dangerous entity, most likely a demon or something like it, loosed from the dark places between worlds. Something capable of masking itself for some time. Only such as these would possess both the power and the inclination to even attempt such a lethal working.

Slowly drawing a razor sharpened katana from its sheath, Jo-Mel proceeds forward with extreme caution, tracking a nothing of a thing, an absence of space.

XIV

Pickle-Me-Jack worked furiously. He wove and wove, layer upon layer, forcing his threads deeper and deeper into Monie's mind. He searched frantically for a story, a memory that he could use to ensnare her, but she fought hard against his attempts.

He had never encountered anything or anyone with the ability to withstand his weavings so. It distressed him and caused him to experience something foreign to his kind. He began to grow afraid.

XV

The sky above the flowered valley began to darken. Monie could no longer hear the sound of Bealz's laughter.

She'd stopped casting about, no longer attempting to orient herself with anything familiar, no longer attempting to believe in something that she knew wasn't really there.

Monie, standing in the middle of an endless field of flowers, feels trapped. Feels an unwanted intrusion. She scanned the horizon, searching for her captor. She grew warm, could feel the air heating up around her. She drew comfort from the heat, stoked the flames higher.

The flowers and the silky golden grasses at her feet begin to blacken, the soil pulls back and splits as the moisture within it is driven out by the spreading heat. Combusting into flame, the field begins to burn.

Monique Felani Kokua-Binti, whose name means Daughter of Earth, The Undying Warrior, standing at the heart of the conflagration, the shambling and shuffling, confused persona burned away, withdraws her dagger.

XVI

Pickle-Me-Jack held on as best he could but he was being drawn further and further into the swirling storm of flames. He tried to pull himself back, but the threads he'd woven held him fast. He was no longer in control of Monie's story.

His prey had transformed within the cacooning of his weaving. She now wielded a mystically honed dagger and sliced easily through his bindings. With a deft maneuver, she twisted herself round and dropped lithely to the floor.

In the same rapid, fluid motion, she sheathed her blade, retrieved the stout bow from around her shoulder, nocked a bolt of lightning and pinned Pickle-Me-Jack to the wall.

“I told you to leave us the fuck alone!” she roars.

This was a different woman. Different even than the one who'd stood not long before at the the top of a small hill, having just ripped open a dimensional portal. That woman had acted out of a desperate maternal instinct. Lashing out, unfocused, reflexively.

Monie had only ever been able to summon the strength to venture into the Incata when her mind had become too tormented by the fractious damage done to her by the Queen Mother. In those moments, when she was free of the muffling clutches of the psychotropics that she was involuntarily forced to swallow, she could escape within herself. She could escape within the Incata.

That woman had been but a shading of what stood here now, within Jack's seat of power.

Pickle-Me-Jack, in his hubris, had failed to recognize that his weavings and workings, detangling the mysteries which plagued Monie's mind, prepping her memories to devour, had actually served to free her of her occluding enchantments.

She could see clearly for the first time in more than ten years. Her memories were once again solely her own, unified within her mind.

What she could see most clearly in the moment was a monster. A vile molester. This thing, this insect of a man who now squirmed piteously against the arrow piercing its chest, had violated her. It had left its disgusting scent on her. She could still feel remnants of its evil spore shriveling away in her mind as it died, the severed threadings falling away.

Monique Felani was pissed.

“I'll peel that nasty skin from your bones, you dirty old man,”

Pickle-Me-Jack squirmed and hissed, “You bitch!”

Monique loosed another arrow. It thunked into his chest alongside the first. “Don't call me that. Where's my son?”

Jack's skin began to shift, he began to contort into his true form. He shed his human shell like a split and molted carapace.

“You fucking bitch!” the thing hisses once more. “You dare strike me here? In my own nafasi madaraka, my place of power? You are nothing to me, I who have survived the nothingness. Who was birthed in nothingness and crawled up from it. I will wipe your mind, suck you dry!”

Monique Felani shows no concern for Pickle-Me-Jack's threats. She casually scans the interior of the room and realizes that an enchantment was at work, that the room was cloaked in illusion. This was nothing more than an animal's den. Jack had worked a weaving, similar to the working used to mask his true form. The interior of a charmingly cluttered, or filthy, depending on one's bent, hermit's hovel hid its true nature.

“I smell your fear, old man. I know your kind, no matter what body you wear,” she says and looses another lightning arrow, this one finding it's home in Jack's right eye.

He roars in pain and charges. He'd morphed into an unnatural amalgam of man and spider, it's human head split open into grotesquely snapping mandibles, and he scrabbled forward on a strange array of jointed legs, malformed human arms, hands and feet.

Monique Felani easily ducks beneath the gruesome beast's swiping, slashing, pincers. Pickle-Me-Jack crashes into the far wall. His bulk is hard to maneuver in this small space and she takes advantage of it, pulling her sword from its scabbard, she slices at the demon's underbelly, ripping wide a huge gash as she rolls underneath and away from his attack.

Jack screams again in rage and pain and jabs out with a branch thick spider's leg, its razor sharp talon stabbing into Monique Felani's thigh. She chops at the leg, severing it. Pulling the talon out with a grimace, she turns the attack on Jack as her sword bursts into flame.

Fending off his battering limbs, she pushes in towards the heart of the beast, her sword tip lancing again into its exposed underbelly, this time driven deep, hissing as his blood extinguishes the fire.

Pickle-Me-Jack wraps her in a chest cracking bear hug and pulls her closer, its slavering jaws snapping open and shut, meaning to rip out her throat.

Outside, Jo-Mel listens to the sounds of the struggle coming from within the ragged hole in the middle of the forest. The woman would stand no chance against whatever it was behind this massive working. Surely these were the sounds of Monie and Bealz's last moments.

Jo-Mel, blade drawn and at the ready, dips inside Pickle-Me-Jack's lair, prepared for the darkness, though unprepared for what transpired inside.

Two monstrous life energies were locked in combat. Their forms writhed and swirled through both the physical and the astral planes. Monique Felani had become a raging storm. She was a towering electromagnetic storm cloud shot through with fire and lightning. Pickle-Me-Jack loomed over and around her, himself a demonically insubstantial, protoplasmic spider pulsing with power.

Their amorphous forms twisted and danced about each other, a maddening display of unearthly forces.

Jo-Mel was thunderstruck. It was near impossible to believe that this was the uncertain, timid little thing left over from the fires which brought them here. Monie had lit up the horizon with their arrival, but had quickly dwindled away most unimpressively. What Jo-Mel now witnessed, as it raged and roiled, was the pure, unchecked fury of a mother's protective fires gone nuclear.

Monique Felani was channeling an unprecedented amount of magical energies, and Jo-Mel was further astonished to see that she had somehow drawn on the very life essence of the forest itself. It was actively lending her its strength. Jo-Mel could see the ley-lines shifted beneath her, sparkling, twinkling brightly as the power flowed into her.

When Monique had looked around the demon's dim rooms, she'd seen through the veil of his illusions and could see the true purpose of its workings. Pickle-Me-Jack had bound the Elemental which resided in this forest, which was this forest. He had encased it beneath layer upon layer of his weavings, finally subduing and feeding on its near infinite psychic impressions. The energy was turned back on the forest, killing it slowly from within.

She had responded to the Elementals mournful cries of pain and desperation. The Elemental had responded to her in kind, adding its own energies and efforts to hers when it sensed Monique Felani's hatred for Jack and her concern for, not just her son, but the consciousness that she felt trapped here.

As the struggle waged on, Monique Felani began to beat back at Pickle-Me-Jack's slippery form, she began to surround him, to smother him, squeezing, pressing him back down into the form of the little old man they'd first encountered.

The fury of the storm intensified and the air trembled as the Shuju'ua Vri wrested the living heart of the forest away from Pickle-Me-Jack's vile weavings, ripping asunder the powerful workings that had grown firmly in place with a thunderous shockwave.

A large ring of trees, some of which had stood tall and proud for millenia, was felled, flattened by the bow front. They were already weakened, poisoned and weighted down by the dense weavings and webbings that Pickle-Me-Jack had heavily strung throughout.

“Please, o great warrior! Your mercy!” the old man mewls.

Monique Felani double fists the hilt of her broadsword, spins, extends and slices the demon's head clean off of its shoulders.

Throwing the smoldering blade to the ground at her feet, she whips her bow back into position with another of her wickedly electric arrows at the ready, pivots in a blur and fires at Jo-Mel's head.