Courne Supremacy

In the village of Ninkara on the eastern shore of Maedrelladaen, a young girl was born like so many others. Her skin was fair, and her hair dark. As a child, her parents taught her to cherish all things from the natural world, and so, the young girl tended to flowers and treated animals with love. On one afternoon, as she happened to be picking flowers for her mother, she heard a small clap of thunder. Having never heard such a noise before her curiosity overcame her fear and she ran towards the sound. When she arrived, a fawn with a hole in its neck was lying on the ground. What she did not know was that a bullet fired from a gun had killed the fawn — the scientists in the great capital of Aeterall had discovered gun power and busily employed its use in all matters of activity from hunting animals to killing other men for the King.

Saddened by the fawn’s dying, the young girl knelt over the creature and wept. Her tears dripped upon the fawn’s blood matted coat. The tears that fell onto the blood mingled with it and the blood disappeared. The tears that fell into the bullet hole repaired the damage inside and made the bullet hole disappear. The fawn awoke again and shakily stood on its legs. The girl hugged it with glee and it darted into the forest, but she was none the wiser as to how it miraculously sprung to life again.

Years before the girl was born there was a decrepit, dark wizard seeking eternal life and he had gone to a master of divination and learned this prophecy:

“The Age of Magic’s twilight she is here borne
By cast of tears will she then heal the forlorn
With drop of blood will the dead awaken,
And A seed of Immortality when she is taken.”

Excited by the quatrain the wicked wizard pressed the Diviner on for more on the girl. “Tell me, how do I find this girl? Tell me!” The Diviner would say no more because he knew that the intentions of the wizard were most fowl and for his silence the dark wizard killed him and tore from the Diviner’s home in a fury of anger and excitement. He sent for his spies — the raven and crows — and told them to keep looking for a girl that could heal the sick and raise the dead. He let the birds go.

Ten years later did the birds return and cawed and crowed about a girl in the east of Maedrelladaen who saved a fawn. The misanthropic magician set out on his horse and rode fast and hard across the border of Maedrelladaen following a formation of his wicked spies. The wizard entered the small town of Ninkara. The residents were suspicious of the new arrival to their small village and they ignored him but cast him a cautious eye no matter where he went. The wizard, who had lived as a hermit for most of his life, decided that he could not live in the town as he was and fled to the outskirts. There he built himself a house and disguised himself as a younger man with blazing blue eyes and flax colored hair and dashing good looks. He faked his smiles and warm greetings, but the disposition of the people were much more favorable to a younger, handsome man.

The girl had now grown into the most beautiful maiden in the entire town. Her presence radiated goodness and warmth to all the people. She helped them with their every chore, errand, and task. She treated all people, even newcomers to their village, with love and kindness. The disguised wizard fell in love at first sight with the maiden not knowing who she was. He shadowed her where she went and helped her any time he could. He had never done a day’s worth of labor, but being with her didn’t make the work burdensome at all. In the evenings, when he was back in his decrepit and hunched body he thought of how he would take the girl. Despite all of his education and magical abilities, he knew nothing of charming women.

As the maiden and young man spent their days together, she came to trust him with her deepest secrets. She told him of the fawn she had saved as a girl, and of other animals she had miraculously healed with just her tears. The wizard was amazed; this was the girl he sought all along. He decided to test her to ensure that she was the right one.

One afternoon, the wizard told the maiden that he had some other chores to attend to and would not accompany her. This saddened her, but she understood and occupied herself with her tasks. The wizard followed her staying out of sight. As the girl approached a forest to gather wild fruit, the boy hurried through the trees along the forest path and hid high in a tree. There he spotted a deer chewing grass and with a bolt of lighting he struck it dead. Silently he watched from the treetops as the girl entered the forest. She immediately saw the deer and ran to it.

She sobbed over the dead deer but her tears would not heal its wounds. The girl stopped crying, but knelt by the dead creature and carefully glanced all about her. She pulled a small knife from her apron and pressed it to her finger. “If not my tears, then my blood…” she said and pinched forth a few droplets of blood over the carcass of the dead animal. The wizard’s eyes widened upon seeing the animal’s charred skin renew. The wounds closed up, the hair grew back, and the beast rose on all four legs, nuzzled the girl, and hurried off into the depths of the woods.

The wizard saw his chance and leapt from the tree and landed near the girl, but she recognized him only as the boy she had fallen in love with. He glared at her, frustrated, how would he take her and receive her seed of immortality for himself? Frightened the girl rose onto her feet and ran into the forest. The wizard set off after her not wanting to lose the one chance he had. As soon as he was close to her, he bound her feet and hands with magical chains and set upon groping and fondling her.

“How do I receive the seed of immortality?” He blurted out in anger.

Still sobbing the girl replied, “If you unbind me, I’ll show you.”

“If you trick me, I’ll–”

“This is no trick.”

The frustrated and impatient wizard unbound her from his magical chains and the girl ran over and hugged the handsome boy and wept and wept. She rubbed his tears into his skin and the boy burned. “What’s happening?” He cried. He tried to break her embrace, but she proved impossible to tear away. The wizard’s hands went from the smooth, youthful hands of the boy to his natural decrepit and bony fingers with yellowed fingernails. He lost the disguise entirely and his entire body burned and ached as she girl wept upon him. Once the burning ended, the girl let him go. The wizard was amazed; he had never felt so wonderful in his entire life. His yellowed fingernails were now pink again, the hunch that plagued him for most of his life was repaired and he stood normally once more. His skin had smoothed and in a puddle of water he had found himself entirely transformed from the decrepit wizard into the handsome young man. The sense of darkness that weighted in his heart evaporated.

From that day forward the wizard felt only the goodness of the world, and when she came of age, the young maiden and the handsome wizard married and lived their lives together.

The wizard knew what the maiden really was: a witch. Magical powers coursed through her body, but she had lived her life without the need of magic, and he too forgot his magical teachings as the years went on. Together they had a child, but neither ever taught the young child of the blood that ran in his veins. Generation after generation the blood was passed down but its mystical properties forgotten in the ages beyond magic.

Even now there are people living in the modern age of the land once called Maedrelladaen that have the blood of wizards and witches flowing in them, but they will never know how to use it for good or ill, but the memory of that era will remain immortal passed from child to child and so the wizard and the witch will never be forgotten.

In the sleepy village of Catheire a hundred miles away from the castles of Aeterall in the great country Maedrelladaen, during the Age of Magic, lived a young boy, his mother, father, and his three siblings. The young boy’s name was Quin and his siblings ruthlessly picked on him for being the youngest. His mother favored him with the largest plate at dinner because he was the smallest, and he got the lightest work to do because he was the weakest. Of course, being the youngest, smallest, or weakest meant little to him because he still pitched in with the hardest tasks, never over-ate, and had a big heart.

One day, a traveling merchant arrived in Catheire riding atop of a covered wagon pulled by two mules. The locals knew him well because he came twice a year. He bore news of the outside world from his travels, gifts for friends, and much merchandise to sell the town’s folk. Children loved to hear his tales of far away lands, great battles, and the discovery of lost and hidden treasure. He performed magic tricks for the children as well — many people thought he was a wizard, but the traveler never acknowledged nor denied the fact. He didn’t dress as a wizard either.

When he arrived in town Quin and his siblings greeted the traveling merchant. They had been saving their coins for the entire half-year in the hopes that they might be able to purchase exotic toys and trinkets from the merchant. Quin’s sister fawned over a small doll and handed over her coins to purchase it.

“Ah yes,” said the merchant. “That doll I procured from a far away land called the Kingdom of Lorentia. A slave girl I befriended gave it to me.” Quin’s sister paid and took it gleefully back to the house.

Quin’s elder brothers found a package of seeds. “A very good purchase, if indeed you were to make it!” exclaimed the merchant. “These are Heaven Sprouts. Plant them, water them, and let them grow and they could bring riches beyond belief to you and your family!” The elder siblings eagerly paid and hurried off to plant their new Heaven Sprouts.

Quin lingered back and studied all of the merchandise. “And what is it that you desire?” The traveling merchant asked Quin, who above all was his favorite friend in the entire world.

“I don’t have much money, but I wish for something to help my family,” Quin explained. He held out his hand and jingled the few coins he had in his hand. Both his sister and his brothers had borrowed money from him over the year and failed to return it back to him, despite their promises.

“Ah,” the merchant said after some deliberation. He pulled out a roll of parchment and handed it to Quin. “Draw upon this and your creations will manifest true.” Quin unrolled the parchment and studied the blank surface. It was all he could afford and paid for it. “Quin, be careful how you use the parchment for both good and ill can come of it, and be wary of your siblings and their new possessions. Though they bring great joy, they can also spell certain doom.”

Quin returned home with his roll of parchment. His siblings laughed at him for such a wasteful purchase, but Quin ignored them and stowed the roll away in his small cubbyhole. That day his elder brothers planted the seeds, his sister played with the doll and forgot all of her chores – she said the doll talked and they had become fast friends. Once Quin completed his chores and ate his dinner he sat down alone with the parchment. Using his quill and ink from school, he drew a line on the parchment. After a moment the line soaked into the parchment and disappeared. In the same room his parents were despairing over the loss of a calf, and Quin knew that it would mean less food at the table for the entire family. Morosely, he drew a cow on the parchment, but it faded into the parchment as if it were blotted out bit by bit. Tired, Quin rolled his new possession away and tucked it into his cubbyhole.

The next day, an excited, jubilant cry woke him from his slumber. He found his mother standing by the pen with his father and siblings. Neighbors arrived to look inside the pen. Everyone looked happy. Quin joined them to find a new, healthy cow chewing grass in the pen with the other animals. From then on whenever Quin heard his parents argue over things that the household needed, he would draw them on his parchment, and the next day it would become real. The Lord was really shining upon them, exclaimed his unknowing mother.

Meanwhile, Quin’s brothers tended to their Heaven Sprouts. They watered it every day and it grew fast and tall into the heavens just as the name suggested. It was so tall that they could no longer see where the end of the stalk was. Once it finished growing the elder brothers decided to climb the stalk and see where it would take them. Up and up they climbed until they were no longer visible. Days and nights passed by and the duo finally returned. They each returned with a sack of gold nuggets and told amazing stories of the world above the clouds. They spoke of seeing entire continents and they even glimpsed of a city hovering over the clouds with wooden buildings, arched roofs, and crisscrossing bridges moving by the winds with the help of sails. When they found the end of the stalk, there stood a castle, and on the ground were nuggets of gold. Unable to resist the boys plucked the gold. Or so their story went.

A day had not passed when the clouds above Catheire trembled and ballooned. A scream like the sound of thunder crackled across the lands, the angered voice said, “My gold! My gold! Little filthy creatures have stolen my gold!” From the Heaven Sprout, Quin and his siblings could see a tiny dot emerge in the upward distance. The dot soon became the size of a man at full height even though the man was still high up on the vine. He was a giant and his thunderous screams of rage canvassed the land. Animals ran away, people prayed and hid in their homes. The brothers tried to chop then saw the stalk down, but their ax could not chip away the flesh of the vine and the saw’s teeth were filed off from the thick skin of the heavenward plant.

“We’re doomed!” The brothers of Quin cried.

Quin ran back to his cubbyhole, unrolled his parchment and sat at the table. He drew the tall stalk outside of their house as if it had collapsed and fallen against the Earth. As more wails of doom reached Quin’s ears, the parchment soaked in the image. A thunderous cry came from outside.

Quin thought: But now this giant man is falling to his death! I must do something! He dipped his quill in the ink and drew the giant falling and underneath of it he drew the largest pillow he could muster. The image was absorbed into the parchment. A distant explosion and earthquake announced that the giant had fallen into the Earth. Quin hurried outside and found the Heavenly Sprout lying along the length of the ground crushing all in its path and splintering a mountain in half. A giant puff of dirt and ash mushroomed skyward. A day later cotton balls started to float down from the heavens. The people of Catheire and Quin’s siblings praised the ancient gods for their good fortune. They collected the cotton and sold it for profit. Quin did not tell them that he had done all of this, nor did he show anyone the parchment.

The King of Aeterall saw the mushroom cloud of dirt and soot rising into the air. He set off with is best knights and crossed the valleys and through the newly splintered mountains and found a crater where the dazed giant now sat. The giant attacked the King and his men, and though they fired hundreds of arrows and pinched him with even more spears, the giant did not fall and only grew angrier. He began to roam the land committing violence amongst the towns and villages that stood before him. Once the giant was off of Maedrelladaen’s borders, the King no longer pursed the beast and only sent a knight or two to give the neighboring sovereignties warning of its coming. The King followed the long stalk of the Heavenly Sprout and followed it back to the Village of Catheire.

As all this occurred far away from Quin’s humble and now wealthy village of Catheire, a neighboring village that existed across the border in the nation of Cephrenti was becoming envious of Catheire’s new found fortune. A knight from the neighboring nation of Cephrenti stationed in a fortress notified his Lordship of Maedrelladaen’s fortunes. The Cephrentian King was a noble man and would not fall into the trap of envy and ruin the thousand year truce he had with Maedrelladaen.

The Cephrentian King though had a new wizard in his employ as a court advisor. This wizard had come from a very far away land called Lorentia. In his old land he bewitched the Queen to enslave the poorest of people and stole all the riches from under her nose. The only reason he had left was because a magical talisman in which he had stored his immortal soul into was stolen from his bedchamber. He traveled the land frantically searching for it. At times he could feel the power of his talisman, but it would continue to move. Eventually the wizard ran out of the wealth he pilfered from the Queen and decided to take residence in the Cephrentian Court. The power from the talisman no longer moved and he felt that he could very well rebuild his fortune and search for his soul from the safety of the castle.

When he found the notice concerning Catheire’s fortune, he bewitched the King to form an army and lead it across the border. It would allow him to enter Maedrelladaen and possibly reclaim his talisman. The Cephrentian Army crossed into Maedrelladaen heading north for Catheire just as the King of Maedrelladaen approached from the east. As they both reached the borders of the village, the King found his land being invaded by the Cephrentian Army.

The villagers found themselves besieged by the two armies. Cries of despair and misfortune overtook the people and they found that even with all their wealth, it would not comfort them in this time of hardship. Quin thought very quickly to save his village. Should he kill the soldiers? No, they were people with families as well, Quin thought. He needed to protect the people of his village from the outsiders. He unrolled his parchment and pulled out a map of the village. He drew the map on the parchment as fast and carefully as he could. Around the town he drew a circle and called it a stone wall and said that the wall was twenty feet tall. The ground trembled; Quin ran out of his cottage and saw a wall rising out of the ground to seal off the village.

The evil Cephrentian wizard blasted apart a section of the wall with ease and the Cephrentian Army burst through into the village. Quin watched from his window as the soldiers cut down people he knew. Quin quickly drew a picture of a Cephrentian soldier. As it faded into the parchment, Quin put a great, broad slash through it and let a tear out. Outside a great number of screams echoed in the air. Quin peered out to see a sea of blood and headless and shoulderless bodies dropping off of horses here and there.

The door to Quin’s house flung open and the wizard entered. He immediately went for Quin’s sister screaming, “Give me back that doll or I shall kill you!”

To save his sister, Quin drew the doll falling into his pocket. When the drawing was consumed by the ink-hungry parchment, he glanced up to find that his sister was no longer holding the doll. Quin pulled a lumpy mass of stuffing from his pocket and held the small stuffed animal in his hand. “Is this what you’re looking for?” He cried.

The wizard encroached upon him, his eyes narrow as slits and his teeth clenched. The staff he carried began to glow a bright red. Quin was trapped now behind his desk. His life was about to be expired and it frightened him. Consumed by fear and with no one to comfort him, Quin squeezed the stuffed animal with all his might. To his surprise the wizard began to choke. He sputtered, “My soul! My soul!” His bony arm reached for the doll in Quin’s hand. Quin wrapped his fingers over the doll’s arm and tore it from the socket and the wizard cried as his arm was rent from his body. The wizard prepared to fire his staff, but Quin pulled the other arm out of the doll. Still the wizard crawled forward. “Boy, I am powerful wizard, give me back that talisman and I will give you all the riches and power in the world, whatever you desire!” Quin huddled in the corner of his cottage. He saw the death and despair outside that all the magic had caused; his fellow villagers were slain and so were the soldiers of the Cephrenti Army. Was this doll worth all those lives?

Quin twisted the head off the doll. The wizard’s head spun around and flew off his body.

Quin had heard a story from the traveling merchant once that the blood of a wizard, whether good or bad, held incredible magical powers. Quin dipped his quill into the dead wizards blood and he drew a Cephrenti soldier with his head and shoulders back on. Outside the blood and gore vanished and in its stead the soldiers reappeared. Quin drew the villages that he saw dead and they too became whole again. Things that were destroyed, Quin put back together with his drawings.

The spell cast over the King of Cephrenti was undone and he told the King of Maedrelladaen the story of the wizard and his greed. He and his army left and the truce remained unbroken. The King of Maedrelladaen approached Quin and congratulated him on destroying the evil wizard and he learned of the magical parchment, the doll, and the Heavenly Sprouts. The King wasn’t angry but he asked that the gold be returned to the giant, and he rewarded Quin for being the bravest artist the world could have ever known.

Even before being delivered from the womb, Alicia dreamt of flight. She soared over the tops of snow-capped mountains, across the vast oceans of the world, and circled the towering thunderheads that marched ceaselessly across the earth, blown by the ever-moving wind. She perched with her brethren atop castle towers, chimneys, and the roofs of common cottages. When the weather grew cold she would take flight for the south. She loved her wings and the freedom it gave her.

When Alicia was old enough to be aware of herself, she found that her pretty wings had been replaced with stubby jointed, featherless, bony arms. At the end of them were five digits and when she flapped her arms she could not fly. When Alicia’s mother began to home-school her, Alicia asked her: “Can we fly like the birds? I want to soar up in the sky!”

Her mother smiled politely and said: “Humans cannot fly.”

Undeterred, Alicia’s games often had her trying to go higher and higher off the ground. There was a swing her father had put up for her on a thick branch of an oak tree. Alicia would swing herself as high as she could go and jump with her arms out. To her dismay (and her parents) her flights never lasted very long and caused her a great deal of pain and eventually her father dismantled the swing for fear of further injuries.

Alicia’s other love was to draw on parchment with wax sticks. As a toddler she drew birds that she saw perching upon the clothesline outside, but her renditions were mostly shapeless blobs. She also drew jumbles of squares and lines that neither of her parents could make heads or tails of, but loved all the same. As she grew older, the squares and lines became cottages, city walls, and castle towers as seen from high above. Her birds became more than shapeless blobs. They had gorgeous beaks and feathers. She went from drawing them from the clothesline to depicting them as she recalled them in her memories: her brethren would be flanking her and she could, from the corner of her bird-eye’s view, see one of her own cruising next to her with his wings spread.

At ten, Alicia knew everything there could be to know about birds. She was gentle enough that wild birds would perch on her finger and they would not peck or bite at her. She had friends amongst the bluejays, nightingales, ravens, and any other bird that would fly down to greet her. Often times she was surrounded by them and watched them fly circles above her as she laid in a grassy hill by her home. Between her daily chores, she ran along the fields, her arms outstretched, and she pretended to be high above the ground with them. When the leaves fell off the trees, the birds all bid her farewell. Sadly, she waited for her friends to return in the spring.

Unable to go outside most of the winter, Alicia spent her time studying, doing household chores, and daydreaming about flying. Her father allowed her access to his small library of books in his trunk. There she found one about the history of the world. As she paged through it, she came across some very familiar places. She easily recognized the drawings of the castle towers at Aeterall, because she had sat upon them a lifetime ago. That city, according to the book was south of their village and it was the capital of their great country, Maedrellaedan. In fact, Alicia found her old drawings, and compared them to those of the book. Her renditions were lacking in details, but the buildings and shapes were exactly the same. She compared other drawings with those of the book, and found that she knew most of the places of the known world.

And, through her drawings, she knew of the places of the unknown world as well. On a sheet of parchment she had inked the shapes of buildings that sat atop clouds and towered high into the blue sky. Sometimes the city drifted over oceans and sometimes over land. The buildings had circular wooden window frames, the houses had arched roofs, and many bridges crisscrossed between the clouds. People packed the streets and wore colorful clothing and greeted one another with smiles and grace. If she had more colors she would have painted the city in shades of gold and red like the rising and setting of the sun. It was a favorite place for birds because there was much to see and do and the city was always moving through the sky.

She told her mother these reoccurring dreams, and asked, “Do you think a city flying in the sky can exist?”

Her mother smiled politely. “No, I don’t believe that such a city exists.”

When Alicia was fifteen, she had learned much about the world through books. She had even gone to see Aeterall with her own eyes. The city, according to her father, was a dangerous place to go, filled with thieves and crooks and too much hustling-and-bustling, but Alicia begged him to go. Begrudgingly, he prepared a horse for her. As they traveled, they came to the gleaming city of Aeterall and she stood upon a hill and basked in its glory. She could see the white towers of the King’s castle just as she remembered them.

Together she and her father entered the city’s outer wall. He was off to take care of some much needed business. Alicia was never to be apart from him, but she managed to tear her father away from his list of duties to see the city. At the University she saw all her hopes and dreams come true. From a high tower overlooking a field, a man jumped from a window holding in his hands a bar attached to a large triangular cloth sheet strapped over a frame of wooden rods. He soared through the air, making a circle, and then crashed into the ground. His friends whooped and cheered as they closed in on him. The man stood up, he was alright.

“What was that?” cried Alicia.

A man next to her said reproachfully, “A waste of the King’s money. These so called scientists do this all day. A load of rubbish, I say.”

From that day henceforth Alicia was determined to study there if it would allow her to fly again. To her dismay her parents could find no way to finance it. The amount of gold that would be needed was more than they could make and everything they produced went to keeping the family alive.

At nineteen, she parted ways with her parents. If they could not provide her the means to go, then she would have to find her own way. Tearfully, her mother and father hugged her one final time before she rode off on her horse for the city of Aeterall. Her plan was to find a benefactor that would allow her to study at the prestigious university. For more than an entire year, she could find no one to sponsor her, and learned that the university had stringent requirements before they would accept her – she would have to pass a battery of tests before they would admit her onto their hallowed grounds. The library in the city gave her access to more books then she could imagine, and at night she consumed book after book on varied subjects from art history to the sciences, and during the day, she worked in the tavern below waiting tables and tending to the kitchen.

In the spring of her twenty-first year, several very fortunate things happened: Alicia passed the entrance exams and Professor Elana Bellafore agreed to sponsor her studies into mechanical sciences. The third came as a technological marvel. The school was the first to invent a piston engine that relied on a new form of power: steam.

Alicia spent the next four years of her life devouring everything she could get her hands on concerning science, engineering, and mathematics. She studied biology to understand how birds, bats, insects all flew. By Professor Bellafore’s urges the school skipped her beyond basic physical sciences so that by her second year she was learning how the steam powered engine worked. Even after she graduated from all of her classes, Professor Bellafore kept her on as a researcher. One evening, while helping to clean out several old labs, she came across the triangular piece of cloth attached to wooden rods that she had seen as a child. The cloth was moth-eaten and the rods moldy. The inventors of the contraption called it an “air sail” and it laid in the corner forgotten for all these years.

At age twenty-six, Alicia fashioned her own air sail in between her work on the steam powered engine. Alicia perched on a plank sticking out of an attic window overlooking the courtyard of the university below. Her friends waved to her. Without fear, she held tight to the bar of her glider and jumped off the plank. By luck, a gust of wind carried her sail upwards. She stiffened her body into a straight line and her artificial wings carried her over the fence of the university and over the streets of the city. She was high above all of the people and the buildings. This was the feeling she had been missing for her entire life, but she lacked the words to describe it. When she touched down, she was greeted with stares and wonderment from all those around her.

Flight after flight, she became better at controlling her air sail. She felt the movement of the air around her and guided her sail to pick up up-drafts and send herself into turns and dives. She kept notes on her flights and built new sails each time. She traveled higher and further, but she could never go as high as the birds, and she could not go as far as it would take her to find that city drifting in the sky.

Through her study of birds, and her own gliders, she came to understand the principles of flight intimately. She left her study of steam engines and pursued and built the first of its kind a solid wing made out of the lightest wood material she could find. She tested it in miniature uncertain if she should jump out the fourth story attic window with a piece of wood strapped onto her back – it just didn’t seem very prudent. The miniature winged things flew, but not without its flaws. She learned that a vertical wing placed on the tail of the wing’s body could help it stay steady. The more she added to allow the wing to move stably, the more she realized that it was no longer something she could strap to her back. She devised a seat sitting low within the wing, similar to the row boats she saw university students racing on a sunny afternoon. Even with her careful plans for the vehicle, there would be no way that she could push the beast fast enough to make it soar into the air, but the steam engine could. Within a decade’s time she built the first of its kind, an airplane.

At thirty-seven years of age, Alicia tested her mechanical bird. The plane failed to lift off for the first test, and the second, and the ones after that, but each time she was undeterred by failure. She refined the structure of the wings, lightened it further and tried again. A year later the machine she had so lovingly built took off into the sky.

In the next five years to follow, she helped the university refine plans for the mechanical bird so that they could find a means to reproduce her work. Alicia flew home to see her parents, and found only her father waiting for her. She had not been home for so long, that she hardly remembered it, but in the backyard was the swing she had used when she was six years old. She found the grassy hills that she used to lay upon when she was ten years old. She located the old books that had taught her that her dreams were transcendent when she was fifteen years old, and she had found her mother buried in the earth and talked to her about all the things she wished she could show her.

In her room she found the drawing of the city drifting in the sky that she had drawn so long ago. She loaded up her mechanical bird and went to her father.

“You always did want to be amongst the clouds,” he told her tearfully. “Go as far as you can go.”

She threw her arms around him one final time, seated herself into the plane she had built to do the very thing her body was incapable of, and took off into the heavens. As the sun set below the horizon, she could see birds flanking either side of her just as she remembered from a lifetime ago and they sailed majestically by her side. For nights and days she had traveled over the land and her friends landed and took off with her. She passed over the snow-capped mountains to the south and knew that she had gone beyond Maedrellaedan. As she refueled and traveled further, the land where her home lied disappeared behind her and a blue ocean sprawled once again before her. She circled thunderheads and marveled at their great strength. On the dawn of the seventh day, the red and gold of the rising sun shimmered against the clouds, and sitting on them she could see circular windows, arched roofs, and crisscrossing bridges.

I’ll start with a girl. Alice is her name. Alice has shoulder length brown hair and brown, doleful eyes. She’s five foot, five inches tall. She’s dressed in a pink sweater and crumpled and worn jeans. Under the sweater she is wearing a t-shirt. Usually T-Shirts have witty or subversive designs and text written across them, but her shirt does not have anything imprinted on it. Right now Alice is floating in space, so we should give her a frame of reference in which we can further understand her.

She is in a room now. The carpet is gray. The walls are white. Some of the paint is chipped off here and there. There’s a bookshelf to one corner of the room in front of Alice. It is lined with rows of worn paperback novels, so many novels that they are overflowing from her shelf and laying about all over the carpet. Next to the bookshelf is a door. To Alice’s right there is a modest, old wooden desk. There is an old computer monitor on it, a keyboard, mouse, alarm clock, a stuffed rabbit, a clunky old printer, various knick-knacks and little toys that she’s accumulated (presumably) over the years of her existence — although, she has only come into existence now, making the previous statement contradictory. There are more books — I guess she likes books a lot. Behind Alice is a bed. It has three drawers under it and a head board. There is a window on the wall behind Alice overlooking an emptiness — I haven’t yet described what is out there, so it’s safe to assume that there is nothing beyond the walls and the window is a portal to nothing. There is a door back and to the left of Alice (remember she’s standing face forward towards at the book shelf). Currently this door leads nowhere. There are some portraits of herself as a younger child on the walls, and one of her parents, but we won’t discuss them here.

This so far is a decent portrait of Alice. It’s not messy. She’s not attached to anyone or anything yet. She hasn’t done anything yet that could hurt her reputation or enhance it. There is no conflict in which she’s involved with. Nobody remembers her, there are no other people in her world and time isn’t even moving yet. If this were a video game, like the Sims, I haven’t unpaused the game yet.

Let’s do that now and see what happened.

Alice, unfrozen, goes about her business. She goes first to her bookshelf. It’s as if the bookshelf has been there always and she’s always loved books, even though technically she’s existed now on this page for 450 words (not including the title and by-line) that may or may not describe her as well as I would intend too.

Alice opens the book to read it, but she looks dismayed. She throws the book aside and pulls another one of the shelf and flips through it. It too is thrown aside. She tries another and another and throws them aside. Looking over her shoulder, we can see the problem: there are no words on the pages. I certainly don’t have the clarity and patience to formulate what each of these books are.

Unable to read anything, Alice tries her computer. She turns it on. Nothing happens. We can take a glimpse into Alice’s thoughts from our vantage point. She’s thinking that maybe the power cable isn’t plugged in. She follows the line from the back of her computer to the wall. But even with a cord from her computer to the outlet, there is no electricity, because there is nothing beyond that wall.

Alice is getting frustrated. Nothing in this small world is working according to the human intelligence and common sense I bestowed upon her by allowing her to enact linear, sequential, cause-and-effect thoughts. There is a disconnect with what she believes to be how things work and the limitations in which I place upon her by not describing her world down to the most minute detail.

Bored again, Alice looks out the window. Looking, though, seems to be a problem, as with seeing, staring, glaring, and viewing, and other verbs that invoke the idea of a connection between a human being and the external world through the sense of vision. Even though Alice can see, there is no light in this world. Her eyes, though, do see, because I tell you what she sees, and out the window, she sees nothing. I tend to think of nothingness as a blank, overwhelming whiteness, but nothingness is even the absence of a blank, overwhelming whiteness. It’s just nothing. As Alice stares out the window, she sees just that: An indescribable nothingness (which I tried to describe, but you get the picture).

Should she go outside? That’s the very thought she’s mulling over now. Windows are usually not things one goes out of unless it’s an emergency. She tries the door by her bookshelf instead. The door opens, as doors do, but it leads nowhere. Just for fun though, the door next to the bookshelf leads to the door next to her bed. Opening the door by her bookshelf opens the door by her bed. Alice, with the vision I gave her, can see the foot of her bed and her desk. Alice cranes her neck around the corner of the door and peeks through and she can see herself peeking around the corner of her own door.

It would be quite useful if the doors opened up to other places. Like China, then she could go to China. Or maybe it opened up into a fantasy land. Then she could go there. Instead though, the doors aren’t very useful since the shortcut of crossing her room when she can do so with a handful of steps doesn’t make it advantageous.

The window. Alice is “looking” out the window. Angry and frustrated, Alice climbs over the window sill and into nothingness. This is problematic from a writing standpoint. Nothingness has no dimensionality. So there’s really no way to step into nothingness. We should constrain this. Alice can “look” out of her window and view nothingness, because she is in a defined four-dimensional space. Time is the fourth dimension! She’s able to move through three dimensions after all. She should be able to “look” upon spaces of lesser dimensions. But let’s say she’s not able to move into a zero-dimensional space. How could she? I guess she could become nothing, but nothing is even the absence of becoming nothing, so that’s not possible. Furthermore, we defined six walls for her, but let’s say all of these walls are one-sided — you can’t see the other side of the wall anyway, since there’s nothing out there! If the walls are one-sided, and you try to step over that wall onto the other side of that wall, you’ll still just be on the same side of the wall. Whether that makes sense or not, Alice steps through the window into nothingness only to step back to the same-side of the wall that she left, and she is back in the room. We could make it like a Moebius strip and have everything mirrored, but let’s not do that.

Thoroughly trapped now, Alice lays on her bed. I’ll make it soft, just for her.

As I said, outside there is an absence of time, imaginary-time, and all other forms of time. Inside the room, there is time, since there needs to be a way to describe her forward movement. If she walks across the room, there needs to be an interpolation of that movement across time to fully realize it.

This becomes problematic too. Time versus the Human Consciousness. Alice, because we gave her human intelligence, has a consciousness, and perhaps that was the motivation for trying to escape her circumstances. To her, it feels like she is trapped for an eternity because there is nowhere to go and time is moving at an excruciatingly slow pace because she has nothing to do or nothing she can do except focus on escaping.

Alice sits up. She has an idea. She moves her mouth but no words come out. For her to speak, there would need to be air. Presumably, she should be dead (whatever), but let’s give her air now.

“Thought!” She screams. “That’s it!”

But there’s no one there to “hear” her, except me, and you. Unfortunately, for you, you can’t really talk to her and ask her to relate further what she means by “Thought! That’s it!” I’m terribly sorry about that, but the relationship is primarily between me and Alice, while you’re a third-party. You can’t also be in on all of her thoughts either, only I can, since I make them up. I could ask her, but I shouldn’t talk to her either. At that point, I would be considered borderline insane or clever, it’s a fine line.

Alice jumped off the bed. She talks (to no one, but she’s thinking, whoever is inventing this could hear me): “If I exist, that means someone or something had to create me. If I’m saying this, then that means time is passing, that means someone is taking the time to invent what I say next, and what I do next, and even…what I’m thinking next!” I suppose I could end the story right here and whatever thoughts she had would be hanging here for an eternity, but I’ll let her play this one through. Alice walks to the door. “I’m thinking that beyond this door, is a hallway, the hallway leads to a staircase, the stairs, go down to another room.”

Alice opened the door by her bookshelf and entered the hallway. “Just as I thought,” Alice said (a clever double-entandre, I thought).

Alice walked across the hallway to the stairs, down the stairs, and into the other room there. “I thought there was a door here.”

And there certainly was.

Alice walked over to that door. “This door, is a door to all the other doors that whomever created me has ever created. I’ll have access to all the rooms he’s made, all of the thoughts he’s had, all of the means in which he created all of those rooms and things he’s made. I’ll enter his Thoughtspace.”

She opened the door and walked through.

This I would think is incredibly problematic, mostly for me, because now I can’t find Alice. She’s in all my thoughts, memories, and experiences, and all of the things I’ve created from those resources. She’s met the people that I’ve met, though she’s only met the version of the person I hold in my mind. She knows where I work, what I’m working on, and even how I do it, my experiences become her own.

Although, at this point, who can tell if it’s me relating my experiences, or Alice relating my experiences through me.

“The Shell Game”

10,9,8, Isn’t humanity great? The glistening metal rocket stands on her launch pad facing the heavens. Shards of light are sputtering from the underbelly and smoke swirls about the rockets. It is a bullet to pierce the perfectly tranquil sky.

7,6,5, The onboard crew feels alive! A revolution is about to begin! A milestone for the growth of mankind! They will be the first humans into the great beyond. They were going to touch heaven and find their gods.

4,3,2, Our dreams about to come true! The sputter turns into a full burst of fire, roaring and heaving the metal mass up, up, up into space.

One. A beam of light arcs through the night sky leaving a trail of man made clouds.

People on the ground, around the world, and in mission control burst into rounds of applause and joyful celebration. The rocket is away, the rocket is away. It’s ascending beyond the ionosphere. The blue sky gives way to blackness.

We encroach on the moon and in one gravimetric push we slingshot off of it! Go forth! Go forth! Into the great unknown. Go to Mars and places beyond. The rocket passes the red dead sands of Mars. Or did it? Mars seems kind of,flat?

The Captain of the astronaut crew is baffled as he floats amidst his comrades. The blackness of space after the moon is no more and—is that a theatre light? A star is hanging on a black pole?

CRUNCH! The small spaceship hits a wall. The Captain and his crew swim to the porthole of their tiny cockpit. Their mouths agape. Their eyes fixed with astonishment. Was it all a lie? Were years of scientific posturing, debates over planetary bodies, and mountains of data on stars that they couldn’t see with their eyes for naught?

This is what they saw: Spread before them, flat and black was a gigantic surface. On it were lights to represent stars. Looking through another window at the rear of their cockpit they could see the moon and the Earth orbiting around each other and the sun off in the distance. They could also see Mars,at least apart of it, a sprawling sea of red painted on the black surface. This wall,it defied everything that the scientific community ever strung together as a theory of their place in the world. Then the ancients were right, they were in the center of it all.

“What does this mean?” one of the astronauts asked.

Discouragement and failure permeated the groupthink.

The captain put on his bravest face. “It means we explore.” They all put on their space suits and opened the door. The Captain made his first bold step onto the surface of the large black thing. It had a gravity of all its own and made it fairly easy to walk. The trio of men journeyed across the surface, and found an airlock. With the push of a button, they opened the airlock and stepped inside. There they found the atmosphere breathable and took off their space suits.

Inside the wall, there was a labyrinth of corridors, running this way and that. The first thing the intrepid explorers ran into was a computer terminal. The Captain sat down at it. There was no keyboard or mouse. In frustration he poked the screen and the terminal lit up. A diagram appeared and in English it was written: “You are here.” With an arrow.

The three explorers were pleased and investigated the map looking for things of interest that might guide them on their journey. A marker labeled “command center” was a fine example of where they could begin to ask questions. The men went there. The corridors had automatic doors that hissed and zipped apart when they were close enough. Even the door to the command center did that.

The command center was an amphitheater with a gigantic dome enclosing it. The dome itself was a television screen and partitioned into 232 screens. Astronaut #2 investigated the wall of the command center. He noted that when his eyes met one of the small partitions it automatically bulged and pushed aside the other screens. It was aware that it was being looked at. Each screen displayed a person. One screen showed an elderly man waiting for a bus. Another showed a couple picnicking. Still another showed starving people in a part of the country where no one on Earth cared to look; it was amazing that whoever these people are did not ignore it all the same.

In the center of the amphitheater was a globe on a pedestal. It read “environmental controls” underneath. The trio of adventurers crowded around and studied the globe. Astronaut #1 poked it with his finger and the globe spun. He breathed on the simulated Earth and the clouds parted. It surprised him. He blew harder and the clouds blew away and curled together forming little swirls along the surface of the planet. He poked other parts of the planet. “That is an incredible simulation.”

Astronaut #2 was busy looking at the 232 screens around them and noticed that the tiny people there were in an uproar. People ran for their lives. Some people just died. Buildings in the background were crumbling to the ground. Tornadoes and hurricanes were brewing and tearing apart cities. “Hey! Wait! Stop doing that!”

Astronaut #1 stopped and stared at the screen that Astronaut #2 pointed too. “Oh shit! Undo! Undo!” Every breath he made created more turbulence. The Captain finally dragged him away. They all moved away from the environmental controls and tread softly.

“We could be gods here!” Astronaut #1 exclaimed. “We could right all the wrongs of the world.”

“Like how you created all those natural disasters?” Astronaut #2 replied.

“Let’s keep going,” the Captain said to break up the bickering amongst his men. “There must be someone here who can help us.”

The trio of brave men left the command center and walked through the endless maze of corridors stopping every so often to consult a map. Food and water were of no concern when they ran out of their own. There were bathrooms and even snack machines. No matter where they went, they found no one. Other doors led to other rooms and yet no people. The found empty crews quarters. They found diaries and read them to try and learn who the people were.

One entry went like this: “The people are discontent with living in the Sphere. The walls are gray and boring. Life here is listless and they call our civilization advanced. We have, according to all our literature, seen and done it all, and now we are just bored and playing a game with the blue and green thing we made in the middle.”

Another entry went: “Goodbye gray world. We are going to Earth. I would rather live in the game than observe it.”

Unfettered by this new disappointment, the Captain moved forward on their expedition. He first checked another terminal and brought up a map of the place and asked the terminal to zoom the map out as far as it could go. A sphere emerged from the outward zooming. “A Dyson Sphere,” he said.

The astronauts lived in the Dyson Sphere for a few days. They explored the rooms and the walked the endless corridors. They made some calculations and concluded that the sphere was huge, billions of miles in diameter just to contain one planet, one that they synthesized to alleviate their boredom.

Being the explorer he was, the Captain then asked his men: “Why did they build this shell? What’s beyond it?”

The trek began again. They got their bearings and headed away from the side closest to Earth and went towards the outermost part of the shell. There they found some windows, and outside found a space unlike anything they had ever seen before. It was aquamarine and swirled and flowed like a gelatinous mass. Shadows of things swam in the liquid.

“We were supposed to keep going beyond the limits that humankind has gone and find our creators. I say we cross this gulf too,” the Captain said. The other two men agreed and they were on their way to find a means to escape the Dyson Sphere and enter into “jellospace,” as they dubbed it.

There were ships docked on the outermost edge of the Dyson Sphere. The daring crew entered one and set sail through the jellospace. The most prevalent sound they could hear while traveling through the jellospace was the constant sucking noise the vessel made as it darted through the thick goop. Onboard the small ship, the crew had living quarters, food and water supplies. Along the way they saw many varied and interesting sights. There were other Dyson Sphere’s for one thing. It amazed them that there could be things billions of miles in diameter that were trillions of miles apart. There were huge reptilian and whale-like animals that swam to-and-fro. They witnessed the birth and death of these creatures as they crossed the great abyss in their quest to fulfill humanity’s destiny. They faced electrical storms: the jellospace was filled with electrical pulses and strange branches that networked and webbed for billions of miles in all directions. The substance, as Astronaut #2 put it, was brain-like not jello-like.

Thirty-four years past and the astronauts reached the end of the jellospace. Here there was another wall and another door. The men, now in their sixties, docked the ship and clambered out of the porthole door. Again they explored the new space. Again they found no one, just trillion of miles filled of empty buildings. They did find another control center and learned the map of the jellospace. It was a bubbling, boiling, seething mass much like a water droplet suspended in zero-gravity. From this vantage point they could control the entire jellospace much like they could control Earth from the environmental controls in the Dyson Sphere.

Again the Captain asked himself, “what lies beyond?” Their journey propelled them forward to find the outer edge of the shell of this Super Dyson Sphere (for lack of a better name). For a month the men journeyed. They found diaries along the way.

An entry read like this: We have created spaces of our own. Within those spaces we have created creatures that inhabit them, and those creatures have become sentient and intelligent enough to create creatures of their own. We have truly reproduced the very stuff of life and that life will continue to reproduce in this way while we can no longer. We have always thought of ourselves as the shell. We created the white fluid and at the yoke there was new life being conceived by our machinations. Now, I wonder if we are not just another yoke, and that beyond us lays a vast fluid leading to yet another shell. We leave life to reproduce on its own and go in search of our own creators.”

After a month the men stopped at a window staring out into a vast ocean of a substance none of them could describe. The Captain dropped to his knees tired and despondent. It was as far as humanity could go. He extrapolated in his mind: If they crossed this open space what would they find? Another shell? The man who had written the diary entry hoped to find his originators there, but in truth, his gods would have finished their work and gone searching for their gods. So on and so forth.