“I think I’ve spent enough time in space,” Nebuchad said. “I’m gonna ride out my service in the corps in New Triusia and when I retire, I’m never leaving Earth again.”
“Yeah right,” Kevin said with a laugh. The two were on stools at a bar in Ellerson, North Carolina, Kevin’s hometown. It was early evening and the bar was quiet compared to what it would be later.
“I mean it,” Nebuchad said. “I want to find a nice woman to settle down with, enjoy a simple life, maybe have some kids. How do you like it?”
“Like what?” Kevin asked with genuine confusion.
“Being settled down,” Nebuchad said. “I went to your place before I came ‘cause I thought I’d ride with you so I could drink without worrying about driving. I’m happy for you and Desperation. Still weird finding out you’re gay, but I’m happy for you.,”
“Danny is only staying at my place while he figures out what he’s doing,” Kevin said. “And I’m not really gay, neither is Danny.”
“Did you guys have sex today?” Nebuchad asked between sips of his beer.
“Yeah, but …”
“Did you like it?” Nebuchad continued.
“It’s not like we do it to make babies,” Kevin said.
“Definition of gay,” Nebuchad insisted.
“Yeah, but I still love Alia, and Danny used to see a girl in Monroe. We’re both attracted to women, but since he made amends with Clay and Ivan, I don’t know, we realized that we enjoyed hanging out. We’re not getting gay married or anything.”
“Sorry, I guess you’re both bi, not gay, but you can still settle down together,” Nebuchad said. “I’m sure you were never as happy with Alia as you are with Desperation, based on the stories you’ve told me anyway.”
Kevin looked at Nebuchad for a moment and then cleared his throat nervously. “I don’t think I’m bi, Neb. I just don’t want to say I’m gay ‘cause I think it’ll freak Danny out. I talked to Ivan and Clay about it and they say I need to stop pretending for Danny.”
“Maybe you are bi and you just can’t see it while you’re crushing on a guy. I bet if Alia showed up now, you’d get some feelings in your pants.”
Kevin shook his head slowly. “I’ve been hiding parts of myself since I first started making my imagination real. I’ve always known I was gay, I had a crush on Ivan but I never said anything ‘cause I was already weird enough without being gay too. I’ve been with women because that’s what I was supposed to do, and I do love Alia with all of myself, but our romance was never gonna work. I was doing what I was supposed to, not what I wanted to do. It wasn’t uncomfortable or unnatural with Alia, and we looked awesome together, but neither of our hearts was really in it. Then I went to space and had a lot of experiences that were just gay. When I met Danny at Clay’s house, I was definitely into him, but he’s so rough and thuggish, and he really disrespected Clay back then before they reconciled for real. I just wanted him to see me for who I was and not judge me ‘cause I thought he was hot.”
“So you’re gay, but Danny’s not?” Nebuchad asked. “Or maybe he’s lying too? I’m glad you’re honest with me. I’ll never judge you, unless you’re fucking a weirdo.”
“At least I’m fucking,” Kevin joked.
“I did a lot of that before I got put out to pasture,” Nebuchad said, referring to the period of his life when he had lost control of his body and his mind was elsewhere. “I’m glad that I’m not in these streets like that no more, it’s been good figuring out what I want. And I think I want to teach people about the universe we live in, the parts of it that I’ve seen. I want to train some Kazi.”
“You’d be good at it,” Kevin nodded in agreement. “I didn’t really understand any of that Kazi stuff until you broke it down for me. It seems so simple until you try to do it. Holding all these thoughts and sensations in your mind, it is easy to mess up, and you do it well enough to teach.”
“I like how physical it is,” Nebuchad said. “It starts in the mind, but it’s perfected in the body, letting the mind freely dictate what’s necessary in a given moment. I like letting go like that. It’s crazy that I was out of my mind for so long and it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. It changed the way I see everything. Meeting Alia in the mental realm when she was searching for the rainbow road was such a pivotal moment, I didn’t even realize how lost I was, but she helped me get back to myself. Seeing things that way changes everything.”
Nebuchad was lost in his memories then, and Kevin looked at him. He smiled, grateful for a friend like him who didn’t judge him or make him feel strange even though he was approaching mid-life and only in that moment was comfortable to admit his feelings. Kevin knew that he was gay, it was just very difficult to be a gay man because he felt that it diminished his public profile, something that he had come to rely on as a protector of the community. Despite the openness of the time when they loved, when stories about gay people were more prevalent, and more public figures were out and proud, Kevin had grown up in a part of the country that viewed homosexuality as a character flaw, as mortal sin, and even though he thought he didn’t believe that, he was reluctant to attach it to his public persona. But Nebuchad had talked with him like it was nothing, and Nebuchad had become his closest friend aside from Alia, Clay, and Ivan, and Nebuchad hadn’t thought any less of him. Kevin was resolved to be more open, though it would take a long time for him to be truly comfortable. His relationship with Desperation accelerated the pace of that openness.
Currently, Uneb is raging across a dark section of the cosmos. Even though there are no sentient lifeforms in the area to fall victim to her rampage, Uneb is disturbing spacetime itself the longer she rages. And a wall of darkness has begun to advance behind Uneb.
“It will be our doom,” Kazi Lograt says. He doesn’t mean to say it aloud, but it escapes him as he finally sees what he had been sensing.
“It is a terrible wonder,” the Queen Ravelith says. “But we will not lose hope.”
Kazi Lograt pilots the ship they navigate to the wall of darkness and from a distance they can see it encroaching. Ravelith sits next to him and her eyes are wide, the gray pigmentation of her skin moves excitedly around her face.
Kevin stands between their chairs and Nebuchad stands next to him.
“Uneb is becoming more of a problem the closer that wall comes,” Kevin says, “like it’s giving her more power. I was hoping we could let her tire herself out, but she’s starting to warp reality around her. We have to figure out the right magic to stop this. Alia was sure it would take magic. She said yellow, green, and purple specifically, but no one seems to know what the hell that means. So we have to use the magic we do know.”
“We should have brought more Kazi,” Lograt says. “We can have more rendezvous here as quickly as possible. I can’t imagine the spell required to stop this.”
Lograt sends a message over the communication systems of the ship to rally as many Kazi as are available to their position.
“What are you thinking?” Kevin asks Nebuchad. He has a long bandage on his neck and up to his ear, an injury he had sustained earlier, and Kevin winces at it.
“I have a feeling Kevin,” Nebuchad says thoughtfully, his eyes never leaving the view of the advancing wall of darkness in the distance. “I don’t understand the whole color thing Alia was talking about, but the Kazi magic in me, it is itching for an encounter with that power. Just like with Uneb, my magic is not intimated, even if we underestimated it a bit and I got hurt. Don’t you feel it, Kazi Lograt? Whatever this is isn’t invincible, our magic can stop it. And maybe we can’t imagine the spells to stop it, but we need to figure them out. I think it’s just a matter of scale. How do you cast a spell to halt the momentum of something rapidly approaching?”
“Hold the sensation of smashing into something solid, the moment of hard impact, with the anticipation of waiting for a designated time period to end, and while those feelings mingle, think of grabbing someone by the hand to help them stand.” Kazi Lograt recites the recipe of sensations involved and there is a faint glow of yellow around him as he continues. “Against something so big, it might be helpful to imagine arriving at an unfamiliar location and realizing that you are alone and no one you know will arrive to guide you, and the feeling of successfully using an unfamiliar tool without guidance or prompting.”
As he says this, Lograt’s eyes glow yellow and he extends a furry hand that he presses against the front window of the ship, and a beam of yellow energy that is charged with electricity, zips out of the front of the ship and smashes into the advancing wall of darkness. There is an explosion, then a ripple, a disturbance across the wall from the spot of impact and the wall stops its advancement long enough to absorb the blow. It continues at a slower pace and the spot where Lograt’s magic had impacted is still visible.
“That looked like yellow magic to me,” Kevin says. “Talk us through it again, Lograt. Ravelith, broadcast it to every Kazi that is meeting us here. We need to learn this as quickly as possible.”
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