The old face was behind the rune; to its left was a fat sweaty one. To the right, a middle-aged woman, lines of concentration etched on her brow. Beside Tom and behind him were arrayed the faces of young people. Most only a few years older than himself, some had fear in them, others showed nervous excitement. Tom spun around, seeking an opening in the circle of faces. There was none.
Up, he thought, I’m in a three dimensional space. Tom imagined himself fleeing upwards above the circle. This is, after all, a drug induced psychotic state; I can do what I please, thought Tom. His mental body flew upwards away from the circle. Behind him, he heard a grunt of annoyance.
“Necros filium spiratu. Thomasedwardperkinje thou art ours. Thou art bound!” Suddenly from the glowing sigil webs of yellow light shot out surrounding him, blocking his escape upwards. He was webbed in in all directions.
“Shit,” said Tom in his mind. “Well, this is a dream, right? I may be whacked out of my head now, but I must still be at the party, these aren’t doctors. They say if you wake up before you hit ground, you won’t die from a dream fall, thus if I wake up they can’t hurt me. Therefore I’ll wake up.”
With all the strength he could muster, Tom tried willing his eyes open. He tried to feel the couch under his body, to hear his friends at the party. To fade from the net and return to his own body. He heard a young voice say, “What’s it doing? It’s fading!”
The old voice said, “Tricky bastard, it’s got a body stashed somewhere on another plane and it’s trying to return to it. Quickly Jehenna, put Orl wood on the brazier and do Kristel’s Fourth Order Binding. I’ll sever its cord.”
Tom could almost imagine the feel of the couch below him and Paul’s voice begging him to wake up. “Thomasedwardperkinje, altos novos ejnikrepdrawdesamohTsovon sotla Thomasedwardperkinje. By thy true name desist, halt and stop. I Lenamare the Great command thee.” The old voice shouted. Green smoke began to twist around him, as it touched him he could hear a woman’s voice entwined within it, which kept repeating his name and several unintelligible phrases. The green smoke bound him so that he could not move. His muscles, imaginary though they might be, were frozen.
The old voice rose in power. Words rolled through the multi-colored realm. Words that somehow managed to install loathing and a deeper fear in Tom than he thought possible. He had been convinced that he was already as scared as he could get. There was something in these words that installed a deep abiding dread in the very core of his being. He knew that these words were more terrible than anything yet spoken to him. After a few minutes of sounding more like distant thunder rumblings, distinct, if indecipherable words became clear.
“Umatrium seperatum crystum, sceptum Dictum Thomasedwardperkinje, Thomasedwardperkinje, Thomasedwardperkinje. Morium seperatum ce ist. Severance eternal, no more together. Depart thy vessel, leave it in peace. Ek filos, nor xastre, exodus corpum Thomasedwardperkinje, se Dictum ek flux. Supremum, deritivum nos treum, kris falthos reyen kryolbus. Se feat lux Thomasedwardperkinje.” As his name was pronounced the last time, Tom felt a great ripping within himself. His heart, his brain, his mental/physical self-screamed. He felt raped, shorn, and destroyed.
Although his entire self-screamed in agony, nothing passed between the green ropes binding him. He did not move, he couldn’t. He felt himself dissolving in upon himself. He felt weak and worn, he didn’t even have the strength to hold himself together, he let himself melt and ooze. Yet he could go nowhere for he was tightly bound within the green smoke.
In unison all the voices began to chant loudly and triumphantly, for they knew they had won. “Thomasedwardperkinje, appear we conjure thee. Take thy true form, demon. In the name of Estrogal and Varn, Tamros and Uneseros, we command. Show us thy hideous true form, creature of evil. We command thee by thy true name; appear in this room, in this tower. Enter now this our domain. Your spirit is ours, come to us.”
The old voice then rose above the rest. “Come demon. I Lenamare command thee. Reveal thyself before me, thy master.”
In his mind Thomas saw before him an image from his nightmares, something from the fantasy novels he read and from the games he played. Yet the image before him was real, it was no drawing from a book, nor was it a fantasy creature. He saw it and feared it, yet was drawn inexplicably closer to the immense muscular red figure. All of the sudden his mind blanked and there was no longer the demonic image before him. His imaginary form screamed in agony. His soul twisted and contorted in ways not meant for mortal men. He flipped between here and there, now and then. His form stretched and contracted. It was one of the most terrible and painful experiences in his sixteen years.
Suddenly, he could feel stone beneath his hands. His eyes were closed; he was on his hands and knees. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, he could touch and feel the world around him. At last, he was freed from the color world in which he had been. His head ached; his body, his true physical body, ached. It ached as if every muscle in his body had been pulled like taffy. He also felt weird tingling sensations all over; he just didn’t feel right. He was also tired, bone weary. Tom sat there on his hands and knees, with his eyes closed, and rested, too tired to do anything, too tired to even think about where he was or what had just happened.
He heard a gasp from behind him, and a small voice from behind say, “We conjured that?” He was too tired to even think at what the voice was saying.
“Silence,” Tom heard, physically, not in his mind, the old voice say. “Thomasedwardperkinje. I have summoned you here, and you are mine, you will obey my every command or you will suffer. Now I have no further use for you at the moment, so be gone until I summon thee.”
Thomas opened his eyes to look at the hated voice. Before, however, he could raise his eyes to the person speaking; he noticed a pair of huge red hands with claw like fingernails on the floor before him. They were attached to the biggest forearms he had ever seen. His eyes followed the arms up to biceps, and then at this point he had to move his head down to trace the arms to the appropriately sized red gleaming body to which they were attached. With an incredible exhaustion and annihilating shock he realized that the gleaming red body was his. The horrible demonic image he had seen in his mind was himself.
With that thought registering on his mind, he felt rather than saw Lenamare twist his hands in an arcane gesture, and then the room disappeared.
Chapter 2
The demon disappeared from the center of the pentagram. Lenamare breathed a small sigh. “Well, students. I think that’s enough work for one day. You may return to your studies now.”
Lenamare stood calm and poised as ever as pudgy Trisfelt ushered his charges from the tower workroom. He avoided the glare coming from Jehenna standing near a brazier. Finally, all ten students had left and Trisfelt shut the door behind him as he left. Lenamare slowly stepped to his left and sat down in the wooden armchair that rested there. Now that the students were gone, he allowed his exhaustion to show.
Jehenna proceeded to douse each of the braziers in the five sympathetic pentagrams. She too was tired, unlike Lenamare who had done most of the work.
“That-was a bit much,” said Lenamare.
“We were lucky, no more preparation than we had, and with a room full of students,” commented Jehenna. To an outside observer her statement probably sounded like a neutral observation; Lenamare, however, knew her too well and thus felt the full brunt of her censure.