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Portal open, entrance made; in darkness softly dance a onetime jig. Sternly, now! Command feet to still. He's out there somewhere - hiding as he always will before he makes his presence known in flash of chaos and of flame. Energies lying long asleep will wake, here, now in both our hands. Conjured forth from outside the lane the quantum fabric warps with great resistance to the touch, leaving here and now a flare of lighted space - the lightest bend which I can make (leaving danger death and madness out of it) and so, I see the place.
The door through which I've stepped is closed. I hear the sounds outside, of cars and buses people planes and time itself gone quick; in here all is still save a sudden glimmer near my hands, the candle of the Universe burning with my soul as wick to light the walls.
Breathing.
He's here, still, then.
Move away from the door, into the shuttered ruined space (a bar, some part of lost gone me notes with regret) while feeling forward with my toes. A portion of this volumetric place is occupied, somewhere; even here, at the door, I can feel the pulsing touch of person breathing, changing volumes in the air and sending ripples through the floor.
"One two, one two, and THROUGH AND THROUGH!" A challenge comes, ripped out from underneath my breast. I cannot tell what pulled it forth, but pant slightly as the words leave me into the soup of atmosphere. Beating at my forehead and my wrist, a pulse that has grown a second peak; an echo realized one millisec behind the times as the actinic bow of gammashine blooms out from the shadows across the room, a streak of damaged is torn from anchors far below, down there, where live the ones that Lovecraft feared (although he got it wrong).
dodge
A sudden creak and crash, a chair gone in an instant to fine and clinging ash, but not me (O not me) for I'm already on the move. Feet tucked up and under while I roll, the world rotating around my head in lazy grace as I extend my legs to land - but there is nothing there, where there just was, but empty space and scorch marks. Stumble in the play, time to realize how badly I've fucked up, and looking out from sudden unbalanced crouch of recovered poise - the flashing eyes, the floating hair. I have no play to make, and so I stand, his outstretched arm arresting me with the danger in the plane of flattened hand from whence more gammashine might come - this time too close to dodge the lightspeed wall, too near to risk a sudden slightest touch in order that I might reach out to him. No; this close the smallest dose of damaged space and I will vanish, here, now, and forever; a hole will be cut in this lane and time and place, and there I'll never be, not now nor ever, until the end. A broken line.
His smile is familiar.
I realize in shock that that is because it's mine.
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