Chapter 258: Running up that hill

The deafening cheers cut off abruptly when the tear in the Realm’s membrane closes behind us.

The transition from a crowded plaza to an endless star-filled void is... jarring. The sudden silence is broken only by the gentle crack of Kirri’s sail and the river of light lapping against wood.

Sitting on the front of the barge, I let my bare feet hang overboard, enjoying the feeling of the silver stardust flowing between my toes.

“Wow,” Kaitlynn sighs almost reverently, before she glances back at me from behind Kirri’s wheel. “Do you always travel through the Realmvoid like this, Emma?”

“From the start. Though I guess I’ve refined the scenery a bit over time. I take it you approve?”

She nods. “It’s beautiful. Most of the metaphors used by my cuties didn’t provide much of a view. Sal, for example, swam us up a river of lava through a cave. That was pretty in a way, but mostly just kind of scary.”

Right. Unlike me, Kaitlynn and Suri were ferried by a different being each time they moved on to a new Realm.

Behind me, Sal whines softly. Judging from the way he’s shrinking back from the edge of the barge and leaning into Shelly, the overgrown red salamander seems to be of the exact opposite opinion about our respective metaphors.

Pssh, what’s so scary about an endless void?

Okay, I guess I can see what would be scary about that, actually.

“Ah, ah, what metaphors did the rest of your cuties use?” Koko squeaks interestedly from up front.

Lacking eyes herself, Koko always loves hearing descriptions of what things look like. She claims to be capable of imagining colours even, though I wonder about that.

“Ehm... Well, Woolly floated us up through this endless purple sky,” Kaitlynn starts, brushing some unruly locks of blue hair behind her ear. “We did have a view there, obviously, but it was kind of empty, kind of... lonely. Whiskers stalked across these connecting tree branches surrounded by dense foliage. And... I didn’t quite understand Spikes’ metaphor, to be honest.”

“I believe it was meant to be the inside of a hollow tree made of some kind of metallic substance,” Suri chimes unexpectedly from behind me, her voice kinda muffled through the lockbox.

I glance back at her without much concern. She’s not going anywhere.

“Is that what it was?” Kaitlynn muses. “Well, anyway, Shelly simply lumbered across a meadow of flowers, and Yuna...”

“She made a bridge of multi-coloured light, I presume?” I ask when she trails off.

Kaitlynn nods. “Over an icy waste. That one was beautiful as well.”

“Quite,” Suri chimes, somehow managing to lay a kind of haughty indignation in that single word.

Considering she’s just had to leave the azure fox behind, I let it slide.

Perhaps she really is lonely, like Kaitlynn suspects...

Well, sucks to be her. I was ready to be her friend at the end of all the shit that went down in the Trials, and she spat on it.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that simple... I suppose it wouldn’t have been too easy to go against the grain right after she ascended to an entirely new status within her society. Still, for all her talk of knowing what’s best for me, she seemed to act primarily out of self-interest.

Anyway, if she wants to earn my trust—let alone my friendship—she’ll have to come up with some more impressive promises first.

Our journey proceeds mostly in silence. Kaitlynn’s cuties are surprisingly well-behaved—perhaps they’re smarter than I give them credit for. Even Koko is uncharacteristically quiet, only occasionally opening her mouth to ask Kaitlynn or me about something.

Slowly, the lonely ball of white light up ahead grows larger.

“Hey, Emma,” Kirri eventually creaks, bringing me out of quiet contemplation. “Is it true that in the Realm of Imagination, the trees and flowers will sing to greet you?”

“What?!” I exclaim, a shiver running down my spine as my mind flashes back to the horrors of the Realm of Creepy Carrots. “No! Who even told you that?”

“Ah ah,” Koko squeaks. “I heard it from Vekhza! She said she’d heard it from Yexl, who’d heard it from—”

“Emma!” Kaitlynn calls out in alarm as she lifts an arm to point at something over the starboard railing. “What’s that?!”

My face falls as I spot what she’s looking at.

In the distance, a massive storm cloud is spreading across the void at an alarming rate, obscuring more and more of the twinkling stars.

I face the intimidating sight calmly. Internally, however, I let out some choice, heartfelt curse words. “That’s a chaos storm! Don’t worry, though, it’s not my first run-in with one of those,” I reply, before raising my voice. “Everybody hold on to your hats, we’re about to get some wind!”

No sooner have I spoken the words, than a stiff breeze blows in from starboard. Kirri’s planks creak as she tilts a little to port side.

At the same time, pellets of frozen rain start hammering down on us, collectively sounding like a roar as they hit the tough wood of our two vessels.

“Everybody stay calm,” I shout over the noise, ducking my head to avoid the worst of the hail. “We just have to hold out until it passes!”

“So, is this what chaos storms normally look like?” Kaitlynn calls back.

“It’s only visible in the first place because it’s getting integrated into my metaphor. It’s not really a storm; that’s just a close analogue!”

“Okay, but is it normal that it looks like that?!”

I glance over my shoulder at the storm front, but a flash of blinding light forces me to shield my eyes, right before the thunderous, bone-rattling crack that follows.

When my vision clears, I’m met with the sight of a massive twister, coming straight for us.

Oh, crap. “Ehm... No, that’s new! Hold on tight, everybody, this is going to get choppy!”

In the blink of an eye, the spreading clouds cover the sky, and the moment they reach us, a shudder passes through the river of silver light. Then it suddenly bunches up in front of us, bulges forming all along its length which come rolling our way.

I quickly pull my feet out, anchoring myself to the barge with my tendrils right as the first wave hits Kirri. The ropes and chains connecting her to the barge creak and strain as she crests the first swell, but manage to hold.

As she plunges down into the trough on the other side, however, the barge surges after her and slams into her rear.

Shit!

My tendrils immediately see some use as my momentum threatens to launch me forward, off the barge. Kaitlynn holds on to the steering wheel with a white-knuckled grip, preventing her from falling backwards in turn, and in fact, most everyone manages to maintain their grip.

Except for Spikes, who loses his balance and is forced to take several stumbling steps forward. For a split second, he teeters on the edge of the barge, but then several of Shelly’s vines reach out and pull him back.

“Ouch!” Kirri exclaims over the roar of the winds and hail. “That hurt!”

“Stay the course!” I yell back. “I’ll take care of it!”

Even as I yell it, I’m stretching out more tendrils towards Kirri. As she hits the next trough, I use them to push. While the barge comes perilously close to Kirri again, I’m able to prevent another collision.

We sail on. Despite the winds ripping at our clothes and hair, despite the hail pelting our skin, despite the waves, we keep going. But the storm only gets worse.

“You know,” Suri chimes behind me, her muffled voice somehow carrying over all the noise, “for some reason, I had expected my death to be more... ironic. What a waste, for it to end like this.”

I roll my eyes, not dignifying her sudden melancholy with a response.

“Emma, she’s right!” Kaitlynn shouts.

“What?!” I reply, confused. “You also expected her to die more ironically?”

“No! I mean—this is getting out of hand, these waves are only growing bigger! What do we do?”

“We just have to weather it a little longer!” I yell back. “As long as the metaphor remains intact we’ll stay on course!”

“Does your metaphor include us being transported to the Land of Oz?!” she retorts. “Look at that thing, it’s going to kill us!”

I glance in the direction she’s pointing. My blood freezes in my veins as I see how close the twister has gotten. “Shit! I-I don’t think I can keep that at bay! It’s taking everything I have to maintain the river right now!”

“Then how can we help you?!”

My first instinct is to tell her they can’t, to just hunker down, but... Actually, there’s gotta be something we can do with all the power on this barge, right? After all, collectively, Kaitlynn's cuties are far stronger than I am.

My eyes widen when it hits me. “Yes, you can help, you can all help! Kaitlynn, get over here, Kirri, stay the course!”

To her credit, Kaitlynn barely hesitates before she lets go of the steering wheel and jumps over to the barge.

I catch her with a combination of tendrils and hands, and rattle off instructions as fast and clearly as I can. Even if I had the mental bandwidth to spare to try and wrangle a bunch of former Apexes, I’d never be as good at it as Kaitlynn.

I tune her out as she starts dealing out orders, pouring my full focus into maintaining the metaphor, repairing the cracks that had already started to form on the edges in my distraction.

My world narrows to the river of stars that traverses the infinite void until I barely register the repetitive up-and-down motion of the barge as we brave the towering waves.

Even the hail hardly bothers me anymore after a while. No wait, actually... the hail is gone!

I glance up and find both Kirri and the barge encased in a large, shimmering bubble, formed by the collective Imagination of no fewer than five former Apexes.

She did it!

And not a moment too soon, for right after that, the twister finally reaches us.

Author's note:

I think you can guess what I was listening to when I wrote this. ;)

(Hint: it was the official Stranger Things remix from the season finale.)

Hope you liked it, and as always, thanks for reading! ^^