Laris Amalthea

The cracked-open door of the Wizard’s office forebodes a bottomless darkness that captures all of Laris’s senses. She feels herself be thrown through it, strands of hair that she can’t see whipping against her face. Her spine impacts against a table, maybe a desk, and bends a touch too-far, too-painful. The force of the collision causes her head to rebound backwards and splinter the wooden surface.

The darkness lets go, recedes into the corners of the room.

The office ceiling, dotted with warm dim lights, dances in her vision as Laris slumps backwards. She glances upwards – or maybe sideways, it's hard for her to tell right now – and sees a grand man with the visage of a dragon leaning back in the desk chair. His head rests against his shoulder, soft snores escaping his snout. His wizard hat, oversized and rumpled, casts a shadow over his closed eyes.

Laris attempts to push herself upwards, but the world swims sideways, and she succumbs to the warmth pooling underneath her head.

—

She’s on her team’s spaceship, looking out the window at a splatter of blinking stars. But the scene feels surreal; every time Laris looks again out the window, the stars have shifted. Laris stands from her bunk and tiptoes into the hall, heading towards the bridge. The ship’s interior lacks the white noise of its life support systems. Instead, silence rings like a thrumming bell.

The captain’s seat is empty, but to the right, manning the radar, is Simon. And to the left, at the weapons controls, is Fareena. Laris steps forward towards the helm, where the captain’s absence marks the crew’s incompleteness.

Because, afterall, of course: the people that Laris has met while on the Wizard’s Wife were never on her team’s spaceship. 

“Laris!” Fareena greets with a wide grin as she spins her chair to face Laris, “Isn’t this so cool? I hadn’t ever been in space before!” 

Is that true? Fareena and Laris didn’t talk much about their travels while on the Factory Floor. But Fareena always seemed less traveled and more naïve. So maybe dream-Fareena says that she’s never been to space because that’s what Laris expects of her.

Simon, by contrast, always looks so knowing, like his wrinkles hold hard-earned truths only learned from a long life. He looks over his shoulder and smiles.

“Dear girl, do you know where we are?” Simon asks.

Laris peers over Simon’s shoulder to compare the radar to her knowledge of deep space, but the star maps displayed are nonsensical, illogical. Laris glances out of the window; maybe there’s a landmark hidden amongst the stars.

Except she deeply, truly knows these stars, which now postray an arrangement burned into her mind. She clutches the folds of her skirt in white-knuckled fists. And then the stars start disappearing. And she knows how this dream goes, because she’s had it so many times before.

Before the darkness can start squeezing, squeezing, squeezing – god, why is the darkness always squeezing – and the ship starts breaking, she throws Fareena over her shoulder and grabs Simon’s wrist, rushing them towards the escape pods. 

“Hey, what gives!” Fareena says, squirming.

“Laris?” Simon asks. His eyes portray no mistrust; fitting that the dream version of the man who restored her trust in others would trust her too.

The darkness wraps around the ship, squeezing with such force that the metal walls begin crumpling inwards. The normal lights burst into showers of sparks, leaving the emergency lights to paint the hall in a bath of red. Laris’s legs buckle downwards as the artificial gravity malfunctions and increases to unmanageable levels. Simon’s wrist is yanked from Laris’s grasp as he crashes to the floor mid-step. Fareena ceases her struggle; she can’t lift a limb much less escape Laris’ hold when overpowering gravity steals her every muscle twitch. Laris positions Simon over her other shoulder and stumbles towards the two now-in-sight escape pods.

Laris pushes Fareena and Simon together into the second pod. She launches the first escape pod, empty, because she remembers the reality of what happens to the first. A sacrifice to the darkness, so the second one can escape. Laris launches her friends’ pod, the one destined to be rescued. She watches through the porthole as the escape pod shoots backwards, as the seams of the ship rip apart around her and the darkness invades.

During her training to be a peace officer, Laris was taught what happens to someone when exposed to the unforgiving void of space. Now her mind enacts every excruciating detail, every imagined sensation on her dream self. She can’t breathe. All she can hear is the rushing of blood in her ears. Her fingers and feet feel like they’re made from shards of ice.

Damned, is the darkness her own personal hell.

—

“You knew this is a dream, yet you save them,” a deep voice speaks, a warm grumble underlying each syllable.

Laris is floating. Around her are swirls of space, vibrant and magical like the posters that decorate science classrooms. Much more beautiful than what the naked eye can see.

She twists around, manipulating weightlessness that feels like a sleepy impression of the Jungle Floor’s zero gravity. The man, the Wizard, from the office stands before her. He’s awake, not sleeping, and smiling.

“I almost woke up from the commotion, so noisy it set off my defense magic,” he says, pulling out a teapot from the threads of space and pouring steaming liquid into delicate teacups that hover on matching saucers. “I was just able to slip into your dreams and remain asleep.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Laris says, “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“Ha! Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to wake up, but I’m afraid that I can’t just yet,” he says. “You though, you’ll wake up soon, and I have a gift to send you off with.”

“Is it… about how to save my teammates?” she asks, hope dancing in her heart.

“Plenty of people have traveled into my house before, seeking riches and power. I bet those types of folks are still invading my home, huh? I’d never part with my hoard; it’s not in my nature, but knowledge… knowledge is special,” the dragon says. He hands Laris a cup of tea, and suddenly she feels more grounded. She sits down, expecting a chair, and the chair exists purely because she thinks it ought to.

The dragon continues, “Knowledge is precious. It can’t be truly taken, only given, shared, multiplied. Even between dreams and the waking world, it can be kept.”

“Why can’t you wake yet?” Laris asks.

“This,” he says and gestures widely. Then, beneath them, is the Wizard’s Wife floating in space. “is my love. She might not look like it to you, not anymore, but if I wake, then my dream-ship – the last remnant I have of my wife – will disappear, and I can’t bear to part with her yet. Not fully, not yet.” His voice breaks as he speaks. The last words are a quiet prayer that Laris isn’t sure she is meant to hear.

She takes the dragon-wizard’s clawed hands in hers, giving them a gentle squeeze saying I’m here, I’m with you. 

“Ha, you wear your heart on the outside, little human.” The dragon laughs and wipes the glistening scales near his eyes. “So quiet, so young, yet so fierce, just like a hatchling. Through that desire is how I can sense your two teammates in the waking world, far from home but not lost.”

The wizard leans forward, and presses his forehead against hers. Through the ceremonial touch, the wizard pushes what he sees: beyond the darkness and how to light a path through it. How to rescue her teammates. More than that though, Laris feels so much. She feels sandy shores, cool ocean waves lapping at her toes. She hears a forest waking up, the morning songs of birds. She sees a single drop of nighttime dew on a blade of grass, like it is its own microscopic universe. Children, on a playground, with shrills of joy and laughter that sounds like music. 

Magic.

Just when Laris thinks her mind might tear itself apart from the simultaneous sensations, the dragon-wizard leans back in his garden chair and cups Laris’s cheek with his hand. “You remind me so much of her,” he says.

—

Laris wakes up slowly. Even the barely-there lights of the office feel too bright on her eyes. Fareena’s face drifts into her vision, with a soft smile and a pointer finger pressed to her lips in a silent request for quietness.

Laris tilts her head, which, while now bandaged, throbs with the movement. She’s laying down, her head resting against Fareena’s thighs. Simon, standing near the desk, is neatly tucking away his medical supplies. Still asleep at the desk is the Wizard.

Laris must look helplessly confused because Fareena gently repositions her to show her a piece of paper. It takes a moment for the scrawlings on it to rearrange into legible words, but then she deciphers a to-do list. At the bottom of the list: “Make sure my dream-ship doesn’t disappear when I wake up,” still unchecked.

Fareena props Laris against her as they slowly stumble back into the bedroom. Simon closes the office door behind them with a barely audible click. Fareena sits Laris down on the bed, which remains unnaturally firm underneath her weight. The robot – Laris never got a name for it, him? – is gone, perhaps off to find and fight one Sazalo Rakuzia.

“How are you feeling, little lady?” Simon asks as he checks Laris’s pupils.

“Not my best,” Laris answers, her voice a touch raspy from the scratchiness in her throat.

“Consider yourself blessed, that you didn’t die before Fareena and I found you,” he says. What an odd pair they make. Fareena, the immodestly dressed magical girl, and Simon O’Cannon, the pious gentleman. Hopefully they’re friends. Laris smiles at the thought.

“I think I’d like to leave the Wizard’s Wife now,” she says, “I have a ship parked in low atmosphere, if either of you would like to join me.”

“I’d love ta hitch a ride with you, but I hadn’t any clue where my home is from here,” Fareena says, letting her magical girl outfit fade away into her slightly more modest school uniform.

“If it’s anywhere in the Peace Officer database, we can find it,” Laris assures.

“I still have some business here, but it can wait until you two ladies are safe,” Simon says.

Despite how little time it’s been since Laris first arrived on the Wizard’s Wife, the retracing of her journey through each floor is both melancholic and nostalgic.