Warlock

How to Fix the World

The alleyway that should not exist stretched into infinity. The darkness they had seen before was barely visible from the street, but Loch knew it would close in quickly once they started walking again.

Loch glanced back at Skye, but the naiad refused to meet his gaze. He had maintained an uncomfortably large distance from Loch since they had left the apartment building. Great. Just great. Loch faced the alleyway again, trying to focus on the task at hand rather than his own personal misery.

"You'll have to act fast when we get there. I don't want to lose any more of my people, and if I let too many draconem die we'll probably lose their support again." Trinity seemed to have already brushed of her traumatic experience.

"How kind of you to care about their lives instead of your politics." Loch stepped into the alley. "So what was your buddy Vivian talking about back there? What did you do to her?"

The pixie stiffened, increasing her pace. "I don't know what you're talking about. I never did anything to her?"

Loch wanted to laugh, but he remembered Skye was watching. No more laughing at others' pain, not when Skye was around at least. He forced himself to adopt a kind tone. "Vivian mentioned that she had been planning your kidnapping for a long time. She hasn't been terrorizing the city for long, so you must have met her before. Don't worry; I won't use it against you. I'm just curious." He desperately wanted to use her connection to Vivian against her, but alas, he was in the process of earning back Skye's heart. Afterward, he would crush the pixie.

The darkness began to descend, coating everything in the fog of shadows. Loch could no longer see Trinity's face, but he knew she was nervous by her unsteady breath. At last, she responded, "About forty years ago, I met Vivian on the street. The draconem had kicked her out because she disgusted them, and I was beginning my latest campaign. She turned to me for help, asking me to take her into the Other society. The rift between the rest of the Others and the draconem was beginning to show at that time, and every politician loves campaigning for unity, so... I mean, if I had helped her it would have made our relations with the draconem even worse, and I would have lost a lot of voters. She clearly remembered me..." Her voice trailed off when they finally reached absolute darkness. "Grab hold of each other so we don't get lost."

Loch felt a small pixie hand wrap around his wrist, but Skye merely pinched his sleeve. The walk through the darkness felt endless, but eventually, he spotted movement. An elbow jerked upwards, a sword sliced through flesh. The following screech was demonic, and others quickly followed. They had reached the battlefield, but where was the tear? The fact that so much darkness surrounded it meant it was a big one.

He turned in Trinity's general direction. "Are we on the right side of it?"

"What do you mean? Wouldn't it look the same from all angles?" Trinity had clearly not visited the battlefield until now. Loch was shocked that she was even willing to come to the edge of it. From his experience, generals rarely placed themselves in harm's way.

"No..." Loch crept through the darkness, dragging Trinity and Skye along with him. He could barely see, but from the infrequency of the demon shrieks, the Others were not winning. He whispered his explanation to Trinity. "Tears are two-dimensional, and they're only visible from the front. The back is closed. Unless it's a really bad one, of course, but you generally have to do worse than what Vivian's been doing to do that."

A growl came out of the darkness ahead of them. Incoming demons: he should have started whispering earlier. They could not see through the darkness, either, but their hearing worked well enough to locate prey.

Loch shot a bundle of electricity into the darkness, causing a series of shrieks. The demons had been close enough to each other to transmit the sparks. Lucky shot. He normally would have found such a fight exciting, but Skye's fingers pinching his sleeve reminded him to hide his joy. For now, he had to assume that killing or hurting anything, no matter how evil, would be a sin in Skye's book.

He found what he was looking for just a few steps later; a light split through the dark, absorbing the light from the world around it like a shining black hole. It stood at least two stories tall, and just wide enough for demons to squeeze through. Each incoming demon widened the tear a few centimeters more, allowing more creatures to clamber through with each new demon.

"So how do you close it?" Trinity elbowed him.

"With great difficulty." He pried her hand free from his wrist and grabbed Skye's hand. "Listen, when people say ancient warlocks can only die from suicide, they mean... Well, overuse of power counts as suicide in this definition. This is a four-warlock job at least, so... I don't want you to be afraid of me. I promise I would never hurt you, and I swear I have been trying to match your goody-two-shoe-ness, but you're a bit tough to live up to. But I am trying, and I will keep trying. I... I love you." Loch stepped back and collected himself. It was time.

World tears are peculiar things. They are a visual representation of a tear in the cloth separating the demons from the in-betweens from the angels, so the only way to fix them is to sew them back together with threads of the universe then hit them with a wad of magical superglue to prevent the reopening of the world's wound before it healed. Supergluing it was the easy part, collecting threads was not. Each thread took an immense quantity of power to collect, which did not include the power it took to keep the demons at bay.

The fifth thread brought the brightness into his head along with a piercing pain, but there were only two left. Then one. Then darkness. But without the tear taking the light the world should have reverted to its normal state. Never mind, it was not the same darkness. Loch felt his skull hit the ground, and the darkness became absolute.

~

Ring. Ring. RING...... RING RING!

Noise. Why was there noise? There shouldn't be noise. He thought he had disabled that intercom after the werewolf's interruption. Perhaps not. Loch tried to get up, but a splitting headache pinned his head to the cushion below it.

"Turn that off! Where do you live? The cave times? Every normal person keeps their phone on vibrate." Ah, so he had disabled the intercom. But someone was in his room, and their whispering voice sounded familiar. "Wait, did you just see his eyes move? Loch? Loch are you okay?" A hand grabbed his.

"It's so nice to know that some of my rudeness has rubbed off on you." Loch opened his eyes to Skye's ecstatic grin. The room was painfully bright, but he forced himself to glance around nevertheless. A woman with wavy black hair stood in the corner, her head brushing the ceiling and her fingers tapping at her phone. "And you were being rude to Lola, of all people. I'm so proud." Every word brought another throb of pain. "You don't happen to have Tylenol, do you?"

Skye shook his head, turning his face into a confusing blur. Loch shut his eyes again. "Wake me up when the world ends."