“Y’know, fat boy, for someone with a half-decent imagination, sometimes you ain’t as creative as you could be. I mean, c’mon, a dragon’s such a cliché. A standard, overused icon like a unicorn. You read too much Tolkien as a kid, y’know that? I think — hey! Whassa matter?”
The lines of force composing the Outcast’s blossoming dragon form snarled and twisted, the solidity of the contours fading. “I don’t know…” he said. He raised his staff higher, straining to pull more energy from Bloat’s reserves. Something drained the energy from him, pulling it away. As the Outcast struggled to retain control, a huge, glowing white sword materialized. Swinging through the darkness with an audible whuff, the weapon sliced the birthing dragon in half and then shattered into a hundred streaming meteors. The penguin made a sound like a strangling cat. Pumping furiously with its tiny legs, it skated away over the rocky ground, its funnel hat askew. The Outcast reverted to Teddy behavior at the magical assault, burying his head in his hands as streamers of burning phosphorus hissed past him.
“This isn’t the way,” a voice said. Teddy (No, he told himself, I am the Outcast. Not Bloat, and especially not Teddy…) peeked through his fingers. An ancient, olive-skinned man in a brightly colored serape was staring back at him. The old one’s face was leathery and almost flat. It had an Indian look to it, alloyed perhaps with Spanish blood, like pictures Teddy/Bloat/Outcast had seen of native South Americans.
“You have interfered too many times. You ignore all the signs, and you’re utterly ignorant of what you’re doing,” the old man said. “I can no longer tolerate this. You make the Old Ones angry. They curse me.” Muscles wobbled in an empty bag of skin as the old one flung his arm out. “I brought you here to deal with you.”
For the first time, the Outcast noticed his surroundings. He was no longer in the Rox’s caverns but on a lonely peak in the midst of a tall range of mountains. A cold mountain wind scoured his face. To breathe the frozen, rich air was both painful and exhilarating all at once.
“Hey, man, I don’t have no quarrel with you,” the Outcast said. He tapped his staff on the ice-glazed rocks so that the amethyst glowed warningly. “Just leave me alone.”
Bloat had two types of dreams. Lately, he was most often wandering the Rox as it truly was, usually as the Outcast and often in the company of the penguin. But the initial dreams, the ones that had first hinted at the power, in those dreams he walked in a surreal world, one littered with symbols and images and strange landscapes, a world that shifted under his feet and where things of myth and legend and tales lived all jumbled together. That strange place had always seemed real too. Still, he’d never had both dreams together. It had always been one or the other. This was the first time one had blended into the other.
He willed himself to wake up, to be Bloat again, sitting in his fantasy castle in his fantasy land.
He remained where he was.
“You are Bloat,” the old man said. “Teddy.”
“I’m the Outcast, not Bloat. And Teddy died years ago.”
The leathery face cracked and folded under the freight of a brief smile, yet the lips were the only part that moved. The eyes — dark and brown like plowed earth — had no amusement in them at all. Instead, they were sad, gathering with tears. “A name means nothing and everything.” Then the smile vanished, as if it had never been there. There was only the quiet sadness and behind it, like a thundercloud, a lurking violence.
“Yeah. So who the fuck are you? Are you someone else I dreamed up?”
The Outcast knew that his defiance stemmed at least partly from the ignominy of having cowered like poor Teddy during those first few seconds of contact. He stiffened his full lips, let his muscular chest widen and fill. He could see the sinews rippling in his forearm as he gripped his staff. He looked fierce and wise. He looked good.
The old man barked laughter. “I’m nothing of yours,” he answered softly. Do you really have such an inflated sense of your own worth that you think you can rule this place?” The man spat the globule hit the rocks and froze instantly. “You may call me Viracocha.”
“Great. Viracocha. You dragged me to this damn mountaintop?”
Viracocha nodded. He spread his hands wide as if in benediction; at the same moment the sun broke through the cloud cover. Great columns of dusty yellow shot down from the sky, touching the blue spines of the mountain range. “This is my land, a vast place, but only a small part of the greater vista beyond.”
“Very pretty. You probably do a great business with picture postcards.”
“You mock me.”
“You were first in your class, weren’t you?”
Viracocha hissed, a sound like that of a thousand writhing vipers. The sibilance echoed from the stone cliffs surrounding them. “You are an abomination, Teddy,” Viracocha shouted. “You steal from all of us. You send your creatures to walk here where they don’t belong. I listen to the whispers in the winds; I’m not alone in my anger. They all talk of you, those who may walk here, and they spit when they say your name. I tell you, Outcast or Bloat or Teddy — you don’t know with what you play.”
“I play with my own power.”
“No.” The infinite sadness in the old, rheumy eyes hardened. “You have no conception of what it is you do or how you do it or why.”
“Tell it to the fucking nats,” the Outcast shot back. “I handled them. I built a whole place all my own. I’m the governor. I’m the Outcast. I’m the one who built caverns, who gave life to dream creatures, who built a wall and palaces and gardens on a barren island. I did that, man. I got too many real things to worry about than dreams like you.”
The Outcast could feel his power returning and settling in his bones. He could sense the link to the sleeping Bloat-body, stretched across some intangible mind-barrier he’d never felt before. He could move his will back along the lines of power to that division and push; he could open a rift in the dream and find his way back. The realization calmed him. His breathing slowed.
“Look at you,” Viracocha said. “You’ve become so full of yourself. The others — they said that you’d learn, that you just needed help like any fledgling. ‘We should be patient,’ they said. They dismissed my warnings, saying that you’d lose your ability to interfere with us or that your own kind would take care of you finally. But none of that has happened. You’ve grown from an irritating scratch to a gaping wound in our land. I say it is time to stop the bleeding and close that wound.”
“Right,” the Outcast said. “I get it now. You’re from my subconscious, aren’t you? — like all those things that Kelly” — he stopped himself — “Tachyon said. You’re all the fears I’ve had of the Rox failing.”
“You still do not see it, Teddy.” Viracocha had on his sad gaze again: no, he was actually weeping, the old fart. The white-haired head shook dolefully. “Look!” he cried aloud, lifting his hands to the sky again, his gaze there now, not at the Outcast. “You see! It is as I told you — he does not comprehend. He is hopeless.”
The ground rumbled underneath the Outcast’s feet. Stones slithered from the heights and crashed nearby. The grating dull thuds echoed through the misty landscape as if in answer to Viracocha’s words.
The old man’s gaze fell upon the Outcast like a bludgeon. The eyes were dry now, and malevolent. His stare burned the Outcast like the heat from a fire. “You must die,” the old man whispered. “All heroes die.” Each word was like a knife thrust, and the Outcast’s body staggered with the impact of them as if they were physical blows. “Die now, Teddy,” Viracocha said again. The Outcast had gone to his knees, breathless, his heart pounding against the cage of his ribs. The world spun softly around him at Viracocha’s invocation. He thought he heard laughter.