Hop, Skip, Jump

by Kielle

In the darkness, under the stars, she danced.

The courtyard was a crumbling ruin, a vast echoing expanse of rotted cobbles, dead grass sticking up between the stones in dusty tufts.  One wall of the court gleamed a sickly green, its molecular structure warped by a passing shift in reality, and in another corner a pool of acid hissed as if alive...but the stars still shone, and so she danced.

Once the courtyard had hosted cheering thousands, a roaring throng at the foot of an elegant ivory tower, magic and muscle jostling jovially shoulder-to-shoulder as the multiverse paid willing homage.  All remained now of that majestic tower was a jagged pale stump, a broken tooth in the mouth of a skeletal dragon.  The magic of Merlin and Roma, the magic which had once warmed the heart of reality, was dead.

And here, alone, she danced.

She was mad.  She knew this.  She'd known this for a long time and she was comfortable with this knowledge, a fact as simple as her hands or her hair.  She was mad because she'd been made that way.  With insanity as her guide she'd effortlessly spun the magic of chaos, her feet nimbly flying down the twisted paths that lay between realities.  The only true insanity, after all, was reality itself -- the staid, unchanging, unrelenting reality that lay in thin iron-cold bars across the weft of spacetime.  Separated by and separating the wildness between -- so many little lives scuttling about, secure in Order, secure that their next day would be the same as the last, confident that their reality was the Real One.

How could any one reality be the "right" one when there were so many?

It was this knowledge which had destroyed her former mind, when her eyes had been forced open to gaze upon the marvelous madness that lay just under the skin of what she'd thought was reality.  She still loathed the creature that had destroyed the woman she'd been before; however, she didn't truly miss her sanity.  There was so very, very much to appreciate when you were mad enough to stare straight into the abyss without screaming.  So many pretty little realities, close enough to skip across like stones over a brook...

No matter now.  None of that mattered any more.  Something had happened, something wonderful, and finally the universe was starting to make sense.

Another shift was coming.  She could have turned her head to look, she could have seen it with her magic-attuned eyes, but she didn't need to...she could feel it prickling down the hairs on the back of her neck, wending its way down her spine like a dollop of cold syrup.  She did not pause in her whirling dance, but she tilted her head slightly as she considered whether she liked this shift.

She decided that she did not.

And yet still she danced, carelessly, pirouetting faster and faster as the deadly rip in reality bore down on her, twirling her nonchalance in its inexorable face like a red cape.  The courtyard wall groaned and melted like butter and the sky above glowed a fiery crimson as the shift thrust closer, closer, the knife's-edge brunt of another shattered reality invisible yet apparent where the cobbles bubbled at the forefront of an advancing wave of death...

An instant before the dimensional rift struck, she laughed and spun aside from its goring horns, her graceful hands flaring out in a perfect bell around her as she slid effortlessly into a kinder shift only feet away.  It swallowed her like a swift river over a diver and she was gone, riding the sliding reality far from the ruined court of Otherworld with nimble feet that had once danced the Wildways alone.

Now that the entire universe was Wild, she was a goddess.

...however, no godhood can last forever.

One misstep.  That was all it had taken.  Otherworld's ruined dignity had been many shifts behind her -- she had a universe to see, a kaleidoscope as fractured as her own mind to explore.  It wasn't that she'd grown careless; every step was known, every sway and leap and whirl in tune with the dancing shards of reality that slithered over and under and through each other in this beautiful new world.

It was, as always, Him.

Or perhaps it hadn't been.  But for a moment, in transition between shifts, she'd glimpsed something out of the corner of her eye.  Something?  Someone.  Blond in leather, no helpless creature caught in the swirling tides of unreality but another traveller like herself.  Yet she'd sensed no magic to rival her own.

And it had suddenly occurred to her, for the first time, that perhaps her own brew of magic and madness was not the only force that could allow a living being to travel safely between the restless planes.

Perhaps luck would serve just as well.

This thought startled her -- briefly, fleetingly, but long enough for a moment of distraction, and a single missed step.  In one thoughtless moment her feet landed ever-so-slightly wrong, her body swayed just the tiniest bit in the wrong direction...and the dancer, the Lady of the Wildways, whirled into the wrong shift.

To tell the truth, her mistake could have been immediately deadly.  If anyone was lucky that day, it was her.  The transition drove her to her knees in a blaze of agony hot enough to smash her momentarily senseless, but when she was able to gasp for breath and open her eyes the pain was already fading.  Better yet, the temperature was reasonable and the air in her lungs was not attempting to melt its way back out.  She'd had the good fortune to fall into a fairly peaceable shift.

Then what had caused the pain...?

Before that thought had faded, she knew the answer.

Slowly, she rose to her feet, swaying with the effort of keeping her balance.  She had no eyes for wherever she had fallen, no care for the green grass and the crystalline trees.  She only had eyes for her hands...eyes that no longer saw the shifting colors of jostling chaos.  The hair which fell into her line of sight was now black, and her hands -- all two of them -- no longer held the power to bend reality to her will.

This shift was safe enough, but it was in her past.  Somehow, she'd been taken back...back before the madness, back before the magic.

Before Him.

Before the dance.

Though lovely, this reality was small, unstable, already fragmenting.  She didn't need her lost abilities to tell, to see -- already the grass was freezing solid in a swift line, blades crackling under the weight of its new reality.  The approaching shift enveloped one tree, then another; she could see them shatter into new shapes under new laws of physics, but she could not hear the transformation.

She did not cast wildly about for a way to escape.  She did not cry, or scream, or run.  She stared thoughtfully into her oncoming death...and she smiled.  She might be powerless, she might now be merely human once more, but she had not lost her memories nor her understanding of this wonderful new multireality.

Whatever happened here, what happened to her, didn't matter.  All realities, after all, were now one.  All possibililities now existed.

There were other Spirals.

And with that thought, Ricochet Rita began to dance.

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