I was sure of it now. Katrine hadn’t fully understood it, the others hadn’t particularly cared, but I knew I’d stepped into the fae realm, physically. I didn’t know how, but last time I’d been out of my mind in more ways than one, so that was as good a place as any to start. I shuffled the various plastic baggies around and tried to keep them still in the breeze. Ketamine, weed and MDMA; if it hadn’t been the alcohol, if it had been some weird function of my brain, this was sure to imitate that by pulling my consciousness out in ten different ways. Maybe that was all drugs were, windows into the fae realm. I wouldn’t know, this would be my first time with MDMA and I couldn’t remember anything of the other two.

Addie would call this a Bacchanal, the process of deliberately losing my mind to see other worlds. Or was it a Bacchae? Was I the Bacchae, committing a Bacchanal? If human thought created the fae world, did that mean that every god existed somewhere, like some fucked up Percy Jackson book? There were always too many implications, I hadn't even considered religion and its effects. Would I run into Jesus somewhere on the road? Would I want to? I shook my head and kept walking in the direction of the bar.

I eventually got to the place I’d spent that night, hopefully, the location helped in some way, some weakness in the fabric of reality, or whatever it was that had brought me over the first time. Should I have brought a notebook? This could be useful information for Katrine. Oh well. I felt at my necklace to make sure it was still there, then poured the ket into the MDMA, crushed it in the baggie, poured it into my whiskey flask and knocked it back. If I was still lucid in five minutes I’d start on the weed, but when the feathers started growing out of my hand I knew I wouldn’t need it.

I opened my eyes and got up. I didn’t remember going to sleep or sitting down, but I must have. I looked around, It wasn’t different, only more. It wasn’t more of anything, just… more, My brain went fuzzy and I sensed myself going to my knees. They started to sink through the cobbles, but before I was far enough in to realise I grabbed for my necklace, for the miniature version of the Component I’d made out of wire, and thought with every scrap of consciousness

Inebriation

Inebriation

Inebriation

I inhaled for the first time in over a minute as the drugs all burned away in my system, not that I’d needed the air. But it was refreshing, and it cleared my vision enough to see the ground begrudgingly loosening its hold on me, the stones bending back to their original positions. For the first time, I looked at the Fae land, the Other World, whatever it was called, with vision unobstructed.

The sky was white with stars and the spiral of the milky way, and I was hyper aware that every single one of them was a real entity that existed in the same plane of existence as I did. Everything was like it was in the real world, but more so, like an old memory, stretched and squashed into only the most memorable parts. Lamp posts stretched into the sky and gave off the faintest dots of light, falling in clear cones on cobbles, slicked to a mirror sheen by puddles from rain that hung in the air as if it were frozen.

I was alone on the street, which was dark even with the lights. My head was swimming, but I could stand without issue, so I started walking. One in ten or twelve of the shops were what they were in the real world, the rest were like pictures out of a postcard advertising barbershops, butchers, haberdasheries; all with a strange, old but timeless look about them. It all looked like a facade, like none of the shops had any substance behind them, but I tried the door on what I was pretty sure matched up to the bar I’d been in and the door swung open to a scene straight from a western.

The countertop was unfinished wood, the tables were haphazard and the chairs looked like they’d collapse under a strong breeze. A few people were sitting at one of the tables and a man was behind the bar, wiping it down. The man was red in the face and round, bulbous, with a thick moustache and a waistcoat. He looked like an extra in a period piece, and the patrons weren’t much better, playing some card game in the corner. The man, the barkeep, looked at me, and pulled a few grimy, unlabelled bottles up from under the counter.

“Not often we get one of you lot.” he said in the thickest and worst parody of cockney I’d ever heard, “I’ve got BrewDog, and I’ve got Exhaustion, that’s something you can take, isn’t it?” I didn’t talk for a second. Was this a fae creature? He didn’t seem fair in any way. “Oh wait,” he continued, “Your lot don’t drink dog, is it? Them’s creatures. Exhaustion it is.” and he poured out a glass of one of the bottles and slid it over.

“I- Where am I?” I asked, sitting up at the bar.

“No idea. Your lot are always different places, can’t stick to one spot.” He went back to cleaning his countertop.

“Can’t stick to one side either, apparently.” One of the other patrons jeered from behind me, in their booth.

“Aye, that they can’t. Drink up then, and be off with you, it’s been a while but not long enough.” He gestured at the drink. I raised it up, but stopped before it touched my lips. Smelling it made my muscles ache and my brain sag as if it’d pulled two all-nighters, and I’d heard what happened when you ate food in the fae realm.

“I’ll pass, but thank you.”

“Bah, go ahead then. Bloody pathbearers.” he looked annoyed, which probably meant I’d made the right decision.

“Now now, be nice to the stranger,” I heard another voice from the table behind me, “She’s new, don’t want to send her home with bad memories.” a figure sat beside me and picked up the drink. She was tall, and jet black with gold rings on her arms and large, curved tusks that didn’t inhibit her speech. “Although if you do want some bad memories, I know a very good vendor. Reasonable prices, unless you seem gullible. Then he’ll trade you out of that before you know what’s happened. Very high in demand these days, gullibility.” She punctuated her sentence by taking a long drink, and her eyes fluttered with fatigue. “I’m Saghir, among the Jinn. You’re a witch. Shall we make a deal?”

I took a second to process what this woman had said. Memories, concepts, trading, and some Jinn that knew me.

“I'm Efrit, actually. Among the Jinn, but not strictly of them.” At this point I wasn’t even phased by her reading my mind

“Good, that makes things much easier,” she replied, “It’s always strange when your folk expect your thoughts to remain in your heads. You have ears, and eyes, and mouths, and noses, your thoughts leak constantly.”

“Okay. Hello Saghir,” I replied, “Where am I?”

“Many places. A bit of you is everywhere, that’s what happens when a creature isn’t just one creature. You’re thousands of individuals, in thousands of places. It’s disconcerting trying to talk to them all. Most of you is not far from here, in your world, where you ought to be. The bit of you that makes sense to me is a little distance to my left, very cleverly not telling anyone her name or drinking anything offered to her,” she continued, “And a sizeable amount of you is in various sewage dumps in your world, although I expect that isn’t strictly you, is it? Not according to your slightly arbitrary rulings on the self.

“Anyway,” She continued, “We’re approaching your time limit, if you stay much longer in this form your mind will never return” She began to slide off a ring from her finger

“I’m sorry, I’ll what?”

“I believe you’d see it as dying, although it isn’t exactly that. More like… eternal damnation.”

My ears felt hot. How long did I have before I was stuck? Why hadn’t I known this?

“That I don’t know, it’s a well-recorded fact that people who are neither dead nor alive walk both realms” She replied. “But take this ring. It will allow you to come to our world physically, so that you may stay a while longer without becoming a… ah what is it. Zombie? Ghost? Gnome, maybe.”

She handed it to me. It wasn’t not-hot in the way that magic was, but I could feel its weight in my mind

“Ah no, it’s not magic. No, magic is far too contrived. It simply opens a gate between worlds. Here, take it.”

She pressed it into my hands and then pushed me off the chair.

I fell backwards for a few seconds before my head hit the pavement, and I looked up into the rain of a hot morning as bystanders pretended not to notice me.

I got my phone out and keyed in Katrine’s number, by the time she picked up I’d realised that my hand was one ring heavier than it used to be.