cinder cloud and the house

2021-09-20

I was flying around the beach looking at all the pretty sights.

There was this one especially beautiful rocky cove that I was swooping around when I noticed an enormous cloud that looked as dark and solid as asphalt hovering over the bay right over the water.

I swooped down to warn the people hanging out on the beach and to help them out of the way. The steep cliff walls of the cove mean that there’s pretty much just one way in and one way out: a steep staircase that climbs up the cliff side. But then the bottom fell out of the cloud and it poured into the water like it was raining cinder blocks. But it wasn’t rain. The cloud itself was some solid object that was pouring itself into the bay.

I went down to the shore, and the cinder cloud was creating some kind of a vacuum. It was sucking the water away from the shoreline, and also creating a wind that was ripping people from the ground and pulling them in. I fought the pull, clawing at the ground, but it was all sand that dissolved at my touch.

I tumbled down, half in the water now, and continued to try to pull myself out. The sand here was thicker, solid, and tattooed with line drawings of small human faces in thick black strokes, all of which looked at me. It still crumbled and fell away when I grabbed for it, and every place the ground fell away, the ground beneath it still had the same face tattooed on it as though the faces continued through to the center of the earth, sometimes with a slightly different expression, like the eyes shifted to the side and the corner of a mouth curled up.

I ultimately got sucked into the water and to the bottom of a pool. A nude woman with a very strong swimmer’s body covered in tattoos — bold abstract pieces in reds, oranges, and yellows — picked me up from the bottom of the water and pulled me to the surface inside The House, which is what the cinder cloud became after it poured itself into the water: a large dark gray structure standing in the middle of the water.

The woman pulled some clothes on and scolded me for almost drowning. Now dressed, I got a better look at her and recognized her as the Life Guard.

When I asked, she explained that The House was able to manifest here the way it did because of me. When I was flying around, I was leaking sharp little needles of magic that punctured the barrier and allowed The House to come through.

The House wasn’t dangerous exactly. Well, it was. But it was also only a house. You could easily avoid it by just not going inside.

I couldn’t get rid of it now that it’s already here. The real danger is that I’d continue to leak magic needles unless I got myself fixed and sewn up, and if I wanted to do that, I needed to go find the Physical Heat Creature and get it to help me.

There were two of me now, one already bored and flying around again, leaking magic. And the other carefully listening to the Life Guard and worrying about whether I would be able to get the more reckless me to listen and work together.