Three Pillars: Second Chance

A Californian Euthi in Queen Spider's Court

"Crossing over" is not a journey to be taken lightly at any time: whether piercing the barrier of death or the gauntlet separating the mundane from the ephemeral, each visit can lead to things better left forgotten. Damon Rothchild believes himself a master of such passages: true of false, it is not for this narrator to tell.

The feeling is one of cold knives pricking the skin, a sensation that Damon occasionally muses might be similar to that of the final passage from life to death. His intricate puzzle-box in hand, Damon cuts an imposing figure on the Other landscape: dark boy, dark box, dark hole in his soul.

For Damon, this side of the Other appears to a mesh of rigid patterns of silvery ice; they stretch from the shadows of buildings, across the grey sky until sight losses meaning. There is a buzz, a silent chitter-chatter barely perceptible to his ears, a signal of the activity of the strange inhabitants of this side. He has spoken with them before, has made his introductions. These creatures of wheel and machine hold no secrets from the inscrutable Damon Rothchild. For now they are ignored.

Damon studies the currents of pattern swirling in air, about the cage of wires that surrounds him. He searches for something greater than the chittering around him, for the Court of Spirits which must oversee such a large place as Portland. Such is the way of things from a Rothchild perspective: as there must be those who oversee in the material realm, so there must be in this Other. As a member of the former, he seeks an audience with the later. An audience with equals.

The ebbs and eddies in the patterns flow through fingers manipulating the puzzle box. Half in a trance, the boy's feet move without conscious direction. He chases after what he believes will be the home of the Court. He does notice the precarious perch he has on one of the ephemeral cables, or the time thousands of his reflections call to him from shattered, mirrored snowflakes as he walks by, or the changing of the never-ending conversation at the periphery of sense. The landscape of Umbral Portland is ignored for the task. Fingers flicker, feet follow.

Damon is perhaps far where he started, or perhaps next door. The place is unknown nevertheless, and there is a low level of concern at the unfamiliarity. He stands on a silver monolith, suspended in void by a matrix of those familiar silvery strands of order. The chittering is tense now and curious; out of the corner of his eye, the boy can see their fluid forms skittering here and there as quick streams of light. The ambient light comes only from these creatures---as bright as it is, there must be an almost uncountable number of them present. This is a nexus of power. But is it what he seeks?

A Rothchild faces every situation forcefully, in command, and without fear. "I am Damon Rothchild. I request an audience with the Court of this place." A simple statement. And direct.

Beyond the chitter, silence.

A slight frown. "Again, I request an audience with the Court. I am Damon Rothchild." There may have been a slight emphasis on that last.

A chittering nothingness.

Rothchild's do not get flummoxed. They do not get annoyed. Perhaps irritated. Damon was feeling one of those things, but none of it showed. Fingers began to flicker, patterns began to eddy...

Damon may be a talker to spirits, a walker of the Other, an agent for the Dead, but he does not hear all things, travel all paths, or work with all those beyond. He knows something is there, but it is just beyond his capabilities. He begins to open his mouth again when he realizes a familiar resonance of his surroundings---just like a spider's web. And where there is a web...

As Damon looks down to the monolith beneath him, he begins to see the finer distinctions within its surface. As they become clear, legs begin to separate from the silvery pylon, and a great, chitinous form, far greater then the original pillar, begins to separate from it. The great Queen Spider clutches the web directly underneath the Rothchild; the creature both strangely familiar and distant.. Damon has the distinct feeling that he is the one hanging in the wrong direction.

...Rothchild, Damon. United States Social Security Number 609-43-8904. Current Address: West Heights Condominiums, Suite 341, telephone +1...

The voice is the sound of a dot matrix printer somehow seamlessly mixed with automatic gunfire. Emotion, context, or bias are all impossible to distinguish. The statements simply are.

Damon realizes the address has stopped. After his statistical data, the last words were "Query conditional: Court. Court of Portland is obsolete reference. Please specify."

"I seek the Court of Portland's Umbra, great Queen, to properly present myself and offer services, as I did with you. Is there..."

Court of Portland extinct. Occurrence recorded: Gregorian Calendar, June 18, 1886; Chinese Calendar...

Damon pondered upon what he was hearing as the dates in more calendars than he had heard of rolled by on the tones of a modem dial-up and channel static. The strong sense of... pattern that filled Portland. It could have been created by many sources, but he suspected the largest was underneath (above?) him now.

...34834. Recognize contract template: exchange of services rendered. Previous offer tended. Under consideration.

It occurs to Damon: what would such a creature of sounded like before the invention of modern technology? Did it "evolve" to sound like some cacophonic blend? Or, perhaps more disturbingly, did it sound that way only to Damon, because of his life's preconditioning?

"Consideration, my Queen? Have I not proven by ability by being able to come here? Have I not shown my respect for you and your servants by my first contact? Are these not signs of worth?" Rothchild's know the words of convincing from their mother's milk.

Damon's mother's milk was tainted by wasting disease.

Sufficient proof of power: 95% accepted. Sufficient proof of respect: 79% accepted. Estimated acceptance level: Some confidence. Status: Probationary conditional approval of continued activity. Damon could not recognize the sounds which surrounded him this time; his upbringing never exposed him to a gas power generator or electric chair.

Perhaps that was the closest he could get to a "yes". For now. But perhaps some leniencies could be made. "O, Queen, I accept your decision. Can I, in your discretion, ask for a minor boon? A contact? An agent?" A tool.

The... creature... said nothing, but from the matrix of light swarming about a speck separates. Unlike the others Damon had seen, this one was different. Not a spidery mass of quicksilver, but something less familiar. It seemed to be a mini-matrix of light itself, a stream of light and darkness forming a snaking path in front of him. There was an odd sense of deja-vu.

We return your child that We have adopted. Its will be the bridge between us.

Return? To ask of it would be a sign of weakness, the worse of Rothchild taboos. No, he had the servant he required. Everything else would come later.

Damon prepares to say another word, when the shards return, a cascading rain of myriad reflections. They feel cold against his skin, but do not tear. But when they clear, he has returned to the material side of things. It is the "cyber-cafe" he and Ivy visited a few nights before. A strange location to return to.

"Now where is the bus?"

Even Death must die.