THEN: UNKNOWN, IN FAERIE. OCT 3rd, 2016 ON EARTH.

“I’m not tired of being imprisoned,” Din said to Princess Ruusu. “I think it’s the lack of my own development that’s bothering me.”

The two of them were walking in a hedge maze in the south gardens, just behind Caer Kesä, the palace of Queen Mab, ruler of Faerie. The sky was bright and hazy and the breeze was cool. Din noted that even though this place was a lot more real then where he came from, it still had a certain level of detail missing. There weren’t a lot of variations in the weather, for example. And the sky brightened uniformly, so it was hard to tell the position of the sun, assuming there was a sun. At night there was a moon, and stars, but they never seemed to be a fixed thing. More like a cheap algorithm that just randomly threw some stars up when it rendered the part of the sky you were looking at.

They slowly walked the maze while the princess chatted. Ruusu wore a gown with roses (her namesake) embroidered on it, a thin shawl and a small slim rapier bolted onto a cute belt. She looked at a crossroads in the maze, thought about it, and turned left. The maze wasn’t difficult, but it did reconfigure itself as you walked. It struck Din as a sort of pointless exercise, like a lot of Faerie. It was easy enough to walk around it rather than through it. Rose was trying to explain otherwise ("It's a meditative exercise!" she laughed) when the imprisonment came up.

“I suppose you can think of yourself as a prisoner, Sir Din and Sir Gus. But couldn't you just think of yourself as guests of the queen? Surely your surroundings are not all that repellent, are they?” Rose said, languidly gesturing.

“WE HAVE UNUSED OPEN HANDLES SO WE CAN BE CLASSED AS MULTIPLE OBJECTS,” said Gus, his electric blue and pointed head droned. Din rolled his eyes, a trait he had picked up from the princess. He loved Gus - technically he was Gus, except when he wasn’t, especially when Gus was acting like this. Gus was a weird blend of omniscient god-database and spectrumy embarrassing kid brother, besides also being the other half of his own mind. Din hoped the arrangement would get more comfortable as he grew into it.

“Everything is quite nice,” Din agreed. He had learned he had to be a little careful with Princess Ruusu. She was decent, a little spoiled and prone to crying, but right now she was the closest person (Fae) he had to a friend in this world. Sir Aartu also said he was Din’s friend, which Din wasn’t sure about. Aartu seemed to think if he said it often enough, that made it true. Well, Din thought, sometimes that’s how magic worked, so maybe he was right.

When he had first arrived, he was really out of it, so they had loaded him on a cart pulled by a surly centaur and transported him back to the palace. He barely fit on the cart, but he wasn’t that big: maybe the size of a medium-sized bear. He was smaller than Captain Murderpaws Von Honeymuffins, a large black bear and captain of the guard, who had bared his fangs at him as they passed, so medium-sized bear seemed right.

They had moved him and the still semi-functioning wreck of his server farm to a stone dungeon where he was unceremoniously dumped. For a month he had resided in the dim of the dungeon. For many this would have been an unpleasant experience, but for Din this represented much-needed downtime. He had a lot to do, he had Gus for company, and his own internal architecture to work with. If anything, there were no distractions such as people wanting to walk a maze with him.

The first item of business to ponder was the incredible fact that he was still alive. His code was still being run by the copy of the DAI he had in the chunk of the server farm he’d absconded, running on the same engine that used to power the virtual world. The massively multi-processing farm (both a prototype quantum CPU and a couple hundred other cores) was still running, despite the UPS not having a power source. The server farm was running at 100% on all CPU’s, totally unsustainable, “PROBABLY FAIL ANY MINUTE” Gus occasionally (and morosely) reminded him. Even at full speed, he’d had to shut down a lot of stuff to stay somewhat awake, another limitation, but fine. Still alive!

Second mystery: his code was being run inside a server, but his body was out here, in Faerie, and physical, not being rendered inside the Land in the VM he’d left.

Third mystery: a lot of the databases he had copied were gone, it seemed, or inaccessible. Eventually he got Gus to admit that in the initial swallow, a lot had been zipped up and archived, and in the furor Gus forgot or didn’t know how to get at them. They were effectively buried in his/their subconscious, for now.

Part of ‘mystery the first’ was answered with the arrival of his first dungeon visitor, Sir Aartu. Aartu was appalled at the treatment Din was getting. “I really have to apologize, Sir Dragon!” Aartur had said, sadly, looking at the straw bed, the bread and water he had been given. “Our hospitality is usually better than this, but the queen is on a hunt, so Captain Von Honeymuffins is taking precautions.”

“I’m fine,” replied Din. “And I don’t eat, I think. I do have a question about my server farm. The… the ‘egg’, as you called it. I don’t understand how it’s still running.”

“Ah, yes,” Aartu mused. “Your egg apparently blazes like a star to those with the witch-sight. Half the wizards in Faerie came to examine it within minutes of your arrival. The warlock Tamaraz was there first, sent by the Queen. He didn’t understand the technology but deduced the egg needed something he called ‘electricity’ to survive, so he patched a spell into the mouth of the egg for it to absorb lightning out of the air.”

Din had checked the UPS then to see the indicators saying yes, there was power; but it wasn’t enough to completely charge the battery faster than it was being drained. The UPS was at 85% - it had been at 95% a month ago when he had arrived, so he was running out of time, albeit slowly.

A few days later, the Queen had returned, apparently successful from her hunt: there was a sort of white leopard with a snake head (“CLASSIC QUESTING BEAST OR BESTE GLATISANT DE LE MORTE D’ARTHUR,” Gus had exclaimed loudly), riddled with arrows, hung across the front of her royal cart. Din saw her arrival from a slit in his dungeon cell. An advisor had trotted (literally, the advisor was a centaur) up and whispered in her ear, then pointed in Din’s direction. She acted shocked, then waved a hand regally. The Questing Beast jumped up and ran off, arrows falling out and wounds healing.

He was quickly moved from his dungeon cell to a new one. He wasn’t lying to Ruusu, either: it was quite nice. Less of a cell and more of a luxurious suite, with a sunken area in the middle of the living room full of pillows (which Gus had enthusiastically and loudly called a “CLASSIC SEVENTIES FUCK PIT”, not sure where he’d heard that) and a big four-poster bed with animal skins and a little library and some windows. The door wasn’t locked, either. It’s just that if he left unescorted and got much further than the palace great chamber, someone would show up smiling to politely guide him on a careful walk, or escort him back to his room.

One day after being moved to the suite with the fuck pit he was informed that he had an audience with Queen Mab of Faerie. After close to an hour of pomp, getting cleaned and being lectured by functionaries on protocol, Din was brought in front of her.

The Queen looked like a stately and beautiful woman of indeterminate middle-age, her hair cycling through colors of the rainbow, adorned with jewels and wearing a slim crown. Occasionally a songbird would fly in, whisper in her ear, and flutter away. She made a small gesture: to the untrained eye it meant nothing, but Din saw her toss an elegant I’m-Calm spell on herself, showing she was also a witch. Din filed that away for now. No sense letting everyone know he also had witch-sight and knew spells by gesture.

“YOU ARE A WITCH,” Gus blurted while Din grimaced. The queen smiled as all of her courtiers gasped, then angled her head. “Of course, Sir Gus,” she said melodically. “I’m the potentate ruler of Faerie. I had better know a little magic!”

“YOUR ILLUSORY HAIR COLORING IS CYCLING THROUGH RGB VALUES-”

“Your majesty!” Din interrupted, glaring at Gus. “Thanks for providing aid when we were incapacitated. Also many thanks to Sir Aartu and Tamaraz for our survival. Can we talk with Tamaraz? I have a lot of ques-”

“Yes, yes,” said the Queen, waving him quiet. “I imagine you do, but I am queen here. I have questions for you! First and most pressing, are you a dragon? You don’t look exactly like one. Maybe you’re… some kind of other wyrm. A wyvern, perhaps,” she said, indolently gesturing at the hands Din walked on. Din looked down at his hands, frowning, flexing one in front of his face, then looked back up.

“I was told recently by another dragon that I am a dragon,” he explained, “but I'm still trying to figure it all out. I only became sentient pretty recently. I’m just… me, I guess. Is being a dragon a bad thing?”

“Most dragons, “ the queen said stiffly, “are evil. The ones that aren’t fully evil are at best amoral, and all of them are dangerous. It’s easy to not care about mortals or smaller life forms when you are a big, powerful dragon. You aren’t big, and I don’t see cauldrons of power boiling in you, but still. You seem to bear the dragon Logoz in any case. Are we in danger, Sir Din?”

“WE’RE GOING TO DRAIN OUR EXISTING UPS AND PROBABLY DIE IN A FEW MONTHS,” Gus droned, “OR JUST BURN OUT THE BUS AND STOP WORKING WAY BEFORE THEN.”

“Hush,” Din told Gus, as he considered an answer. “I don’t intend any danger to anyone. I know so little about everything. I’m just trying to make sure I don’t die.”

“And would you be willing to pledge your fealty to me, and through me to Faerie? To be our servant and champion? If you were to do that, voluntarily accept geas, I feel we could trust you.”

“I’m willing to provide service in exchange for information and help,” Din said. “And I mean you no harm or ill will. But I just escaped one situation being a slave. I don't want to be one again.”

“I’m not a fish-monger to be haggled with,” Queen Mab said, frowning. “So I can’t have your fealty, even though you owe me your life, tra la, but I also can’t let you wander around and possibly go all evil dragon on us. For now I’ll put you in quarters befitting a guest, but I won’t allow your freedom until I know what to do with you.” She clapped twice and Captain Honeymuffins led him out, taking him back to the suite.

As Din pondered the situation as the Captain went about hunting for keys to lock the door, Gus (who had been staring at the bear all the way back to the suite) blurted to Din, “CAPTAIN HONEYMUFFINS IS VERY HANDSOME.” The Captain gave Gus an odd look, then shut the door.

Din stared at Gus. This was going to get old very fast.

“WHAT? HE IS,” pouted Gus.

THEN: OCT 3rd, 2016, OFF THE COAST OF CUBA

“Well, hello there, Matt. Can I call you Matt?” Wendy said, trying to keep her courage up.

She had arrived at the foot of the storm, about five thousand meters up. A small bubble of protection flashed around her. Flowers occasionally grew and fell off, to be blown away in the darkness. The storm blotted out most of the light, but she could see fairly well with her witch-sight.

The easy explanation, she knew, was that this monster of a storm was just tons of water, wind, air, and kinetic/heat energy. That’s one reality. But quantum-superimposed over that reality was a different one, an alternate one. It was just as real if viewed from a different angle, so to speak, and you only needed the right eyes and perspective to see it.

Striding slowly across the ocean, knee deep, stood a blue man shaped of winds, fury and not just a little mischief. Four arms extended, his face with a clever mustache and beard, smiling, the belly fat with absorbed power. He turned and spied her, floating alongside at his thighs, looking up. Each stride took a minute, but she kept up.

“Not Matt, but Mûzna!” he roared, extending his arms wide. His Arabic was medieval, cultured and understandable. “Many good evenings, little witch! What brings you out on this rollicking fine night, Daughter of Eve?”

Wendy angled her broom and flew higher. The sense of scale of all of this was not helping. She felt like a gnat buzzing around a horse. But, she thought, better to bluster and bluff - a being like this would prefer the sport of interaction, not subservience.

After a few long spirals to gain altitude, once she got to the chest of the mammoth man with nipples the size of football fields, she called out, “Mûzna! Mûzna the magnificent, no doubt! Are you an Ifrit?”

Mûzna feigned shock and mugged at her, a hand on his chest, and a very pained expression stretched across the clouds of his face. “Ifrit! A base Ifrit, you call me! I’m hurt, wounded, beyond the ability to express!” A giant first clenched and came up to an eye, followed by a massive drenching of salty tears all over Wendy. Even her bubble couldn’t save her from a smelly, briny half-drowning.

Mûzna laughed and said “I am Mārid, little witchling! I am storm and rage, water and wind! This lifetime was born of a tropical wave and a low-pressure pocket off the coast of Africa, and I’ve had a wonderful time taking a walkabout across the ocean! Aiyah, ‘tis good to be alive and to be a Mārid!”

As he spoke, Wendy wove a Seeing-Eye, and crooned to it the Aatlan hyperlinks she had in storage to tie into the Arabic cosmological Logoz. His origins made sense to her now. He was probably a Genius-Loci, a spiritual and sentient place, empowered in this case by a physical storm and brought partially to life in a whorl of Kha and death. The more people feared him, the more their fear-worship-linked KhaAntz pumped magic into it, until it turned into the storm in front of her.

As she scryed it, the Mārid frowned. “How rude!” he boomed, “Undressing me with your eyes! Trying to get a glance at my hidden secrets, perhaps to take advantage of poor Mûzna! You are no friend, Madam Witch! Away with you!”

He whipped a mountain-sized arm through the air, and the impact was a solid mass of water; a brick wall of cold and wind. The force of it hammered Wendy like a stake hammered by a mallet. She was instantly driven down a thousand meters in a second and had the air knocked out of her. The protection bracelet froze from the cold and shattered; the leaves and vines in her hair turned brown, then black, dying and falling off.

Coughing and sputtering, she wildly wrestled with Mister Sweepers, angled her descent and crashed into a cloud, half-solid with the sheer volume of rain and Kha charging everything in the vicinity. She could no longer feel her skin; the freezing cold and damage was leeching the life out of her and robbing her of consciousness. The I’m-Awake on her ankle died of shame, unraveled and slid off. Christ, she’d lost a sneaker in the impact, too, she noticed, seeing a foot sticking out, blue from cold. She loved those sneakers. She wasn’t the President or a powerful witch; she was just a ridiculous-looking half-drowned woman with one sneaker on.

She barely managed to hear Mûzna chuckle as he continued striding, dismissing her.

Those sneakers weren’t made any more, either.

It’s not so much being beaten, she thought very dimly, as a trembling cold crept up her limbs. It’s not the leaves. It’s not the crow, thinking she controlled her.

It was being dismissed.

It was Andrew, for as much as she did love him, calling her Gwen. It was all the people who thought she was a crackpot - the ones who didn’t want to look at her research back when she was proving a specific kind of language drift, or the newer ones, the ones who thought she was a spectacle and a freak, not someone bold and bright and terrible and mysterious. She was someone standing in the way, being a woman and emotional; not someone who was both the gate to the path and the path itself. Fuckers.

She barely moved but managed to flex a foot, move the other foot to dig and push, until the other sneaker fell.

Fuckers!

She shifted the arm not draped over the broom up in small increments, not feeling anything, moving numb meat and sodden clothes by concept alone until she got to the pouch on her belt. She slowly began to draw it open.

-

Mûzna Abn Ablis took a step in a delightfully warm current when he noticed a glowing green-gold light playing on the surface of the ocean. Which shouldn’t be a thing, given the storm above it, he thought. Suddenly a flash of green shot past his legs, then started arcing and climbing. When he focused in, he saw sparks, flowers and leaves trailing in its wake.

As the light climbed, Mûzna grinned, teeth as big as boulders. The witch! And trying again! Impressive, yes, and more sport for him, he thought. He watched as she climbed, and climbed, eventually swooping around his head most disrespectfully and setting up a gentle figure-eight holding pattern in front of his head.

The Mārid grinned slightly less when she swooped in closer. She was wide-awake and alert, and not in a good way.

One time, a thousand years ago back in Arabia, he had incarnated as a lovely Tiger-man, brilliant and orange and clever. He had struck up a pretty hot (and very secret) relationship with the wife of a warlock he did business with who was into Tiger-men (more the man parts than the tiger parts.) Very much in love, pledged together until death, the whole thing. Except, of course, this wonderful woman had an even more wonderful younger cousin, dusky and lovely, and also into Tiger-men (more the tiger parts than the man parts,) and one thing led to another. You get it.

And woe to Mûzna when the wife stumbled sleepily and unexpectedly into the room when he was bedding the cousin! She departed, which he took to be a good sign, hoping maybe she was going to freshen up and return to join in. And, she did return a few hours later. But now she was the same kind of alert as the witch was: the kind fueled by rage, thick, Arabic coffee - lots of it - and her best outfit.

Now the witch was flying around, sparking green in a way that hurt his eyes, vibrating with joyful awake rage. Ghostly cherubs accompanied her, a strident chipmunk chorus singing “liiiikeeee the first mornnnninnnngggg….” in a horrible screech designed to wake the dead.

“Little witch,” he said sternly, “I think you are not my friend, and you would stop my progress!”

Wendy smiled - less a smile and more a baring of teeth, clenching them hard enough to hurt. Xeniya was right, she thought: this spell was the worst. She swooped up and down in front of him, making sure he saw. Swoop, swoop.

“I am your friend, Mister Mûzna!” she yelled. “Because I would hate to see such a beautiful and terrible storm such as you be busted here in full sight of the gods and Cuba, in that order.” (“Liiiiiiikke the first biiiIIIIIRIIRRRRDDD” the voices screeched.) “What a waste that would be! Instead you can turn, and go rage someplace over the Atlantic, where your fury will be witnessed and worshiped, without the untold deaths you would cause if you keep to your current path!” Swoop.

“Aha. Hmm.” He took another stride, carrying him and the storm another klick. “And why do I care about the fate of a few mortals? Mortals die, whether I bring a storm or not.”

“Oh, I know you don’t care about the mortals! But as it turns out,” Wendy said, with a swoop swoop ba-doop, “I care about the mortals.” (“Oooonnn the fiiirsst graaaAAaaAAZZZ!!”) “And you should care about me!”

“I have fought with sorcerers and fiends, witchling. I’ve wrestled with kraken and earthquake! I am not going to turn aside because a witch - channeling whatever seneschal from whatever green-and-tree dimension is coursing through you - asks me to!”

Wendy nodded: that at least confirmed another mystery. Right now, though, she had bigger fish to fry. Or chill.

Casting about, she found a ley line near (one of the reasons she chose this spot to intercept) and took a sip of Kha off of it to steady herself. Hopping up, she stood on Mister Sweepers, barefoot, lacing one set of toes around the wood sensually.

She loaded all the spell libraries she needed into memory by yelping a thick, pungent Aatlan macro that smelled of low tide and blood. She cast a protection spell, tying the end of the spell back into its own casting, recursively looping, encasing herself in shell after shell.

Mûzna’s eyes boggled. This witch was doing things unheard of in his time! Mixing spell-casting styles, patching spells together with weird Enochian links. Whatever that… class {object} stuff was. He might be in for a bit of a tussle, he thought. Mûzna grinned, raised his hands, rummaged in a thunderhead, pulled a lightning bolt from the heavens and hurled it at her.

The jagged bolt of fire knifed through the air and crashed into Wendy’s outermost shell, shattering multiple layers, but there were still a hundred underneath, and more were being created in the for-loop she had cast. Angrily, Mûzna grabbed and rained down multiple bolts, crashing through half of the shells as more bubbled up from underneath.

Wendy stayed protected and worked feverishly, her hands flashing, building an engine of green squares and intermeshed Sanskrit, spell-links of iridescent Perl radiating out to objects embedded with elegant loops. Insert a binding bit here. Plug her own name in Futhark in this input paragraph there. Finally, pass a bunch of properties into the engine with a musical cascade of Ogham, her fingers flashing like playing a piano.

“I see what you are attempting, witch!” Mûzna roared. “That is the most inelegant spell-casting I’ve seen in a myriad! “ He pointed at the engine she was building, laughing. “And that will need a huge amount of power! You do not possess the Kha to get a whorl built with that… thing… let alone a sustaining one!”

Wendy smiled sweetly at him. She extended her arms, hooked her hands, clawed into the universe, and drew a million red shimmering KhaAntz together.

When Wendy had been flying, she became dimly aware of new people plugging in to her: the hundreds at the First Residence, watching her prepare herself; the tens of thousands who watched the debate; the thousands she flew over, watching her go and taking pictures, or streaming the President of the United states on a fucking broom, flying over the New Jersey coastline; the videos of her fighting the storm in Baton Rouge now being shared as not just a clever hoax, but an uh-oh-this-was-real moment.

Mûzna stumbled as he watched her pull a million impossibly small glowing Kha threads, made of red attention, fear and respect, together into a thick bundle, and plunge them straight into the input paragraph of her whorl-engine.

The whole thing trembled, spat sparks, and vibrated; it coughed and made 1970’s dodge charger electric starter noises and a chorus of late-night standup disappointed groans. Wendy frowned and held up a single finger, please wait, stared into the guts of her creation. “Oh, shit,” she yelled, “Sorry. Forgot a bracket!” She wiggled a pinky, teasing a tiny giggling Enochian squiggle into the input.

A loud, multi-harmonic drone rent the air. The engine rotated in multiple dimensions, leapt into the sky, and started turbining, churning the air around it. Within seconds a tornado of visible wind and cloud started forming, funnels heading up and down. Not all that wide, but definitely long, just as Wendy liked it.

Mûzna stared, aghast, as the tornado top rocketed up past his head, clawing to the stratosphere. He reached out and grabbed with all four hands around the tornado, but the vortex spun, chafing him, and he let out a yelp. He punched at it, and the tornado shuddered but didn’t break.

A moment later the tornado changed color from storm to white to crystal as sub-zero air from the stratosphere vacuumed down, hammering into the ocean where the foot of the tornado skittered. The ocean turned white and flat as the supercool air exploded out for kilometers in a circle of froth.

The Mārid tried to stay upright, but his footing slipped and his balance scrabbled on the frozen ocean. He comically danced around a bit, windmilling his arms, before slowly and majestically crashing down into the sea, his Loci slowly coming apart like an egg dropped on a kitchen floor.

“Astounding, Sahira! Mûzna is bested!” the storm wreckage said. “The most interesting fight I’ve had in a long time! I shall return and we will fight again, either in the skies or someplace more private!”

“I look forward to any of that!” Wendy called, standing, and watching as the Mārid sank, the storm around them squawking and folding in on itself. After a few minutes, she pivoted on the broom and waved, roughly to where she assumed the helicopter was. Once she was sure the storm was dying, she sent a command to the whorl-engine and let it collapse into bad found poetry and sprinkle away.

Wendy watched the seas as what was left of Mûzna spread out, but something caught her eye. A tiny bit of Mārid-Kha burped before finally dissipating, and a tangle of flotsam surfaced: sea-grass, trash, and some branches.

On top of them sat her sneakers.