Fan Fic: The Wonder Worlock

By Byron Brewer, Creator/CBN M.E.

PRE-GAME

Wonder Worlock vs. Nomad

White fire crackles around the slight arm of the young man, the corona of light around his body heightening. On his visible wrist is a blood wound that has been extant for well over 2,000 years.

The pattern of color and consciousness in front of the robed man is there one moment, and then …

Then, nothing. Literally nothing.

A cold wind blows on the witness to this act, causing that ebony figure chills down his spine. Under his cloak, his heart beats a thunderous beat.

“Why?” he finally asks. “WHY? WHY?!”

“Because,” answers the robed youth, “I am Se-Jus.”

PART THE FIRST

There are worlds within worlds, worlds beside worlds and worlds made up of the worlds we know or think we know. They are not mere theory; they are as real as a newborn’s first cry or a murderer’s bullet.

Feel the presence of one such world. Feel the heat of its sun on the life forms below as they go about their workaday realities. Feel the chill of its twin moons along the face of that world, regular cyclical eclipses as predictable as those lives themselves. Feel then the return of warmth. Feel the joy and angst and worry and depression and pride and anger and loyalty and protectiveness and parental instinct of a world, a real world.

Its name, its location? Those facts do not matter. Its reality does.

See now the smile of precious times, of child’s play and mother’s love. See the young one chase crystalline insects across the blue grass of a commune park common, beneath the azure skies, pink clouds and dual crescent moons of a particular day. See the pardonable pride of a father as he orders a Fiznik-cone for his daughter, the light of his love reflected in the eyes of his nearby spouse as she aids their only daughter in the collection of j’kalief flies; they will keep the girl’s room lit for three solar units. See the smile of precious times, of child’s play and parents’ love.

But then, the pink clouds in the sky evaporate as the planet’s surface rumbles beneath their feet. The flies dissolve as twin satellites explode in the daytime sky. The purple stream running quietly through the park literally leaps into the sky and disappears.

“Aloka! Allie!” comes a husband’s cry, a father’s anguish. It is the last words of his all-too-short life. His daughter says nothing at all. His wife is nowhere to be seen.

The planet’s core becomes an ember, cracking down its center. The population on the world’s night side dies blissfully in their slumber.

The violet world folds in on itself in a blaze of glory and then is literally somewhere else, a lifeless rock swirling in a chalky emptiness. Whole again, but lifeless.

No more Fiznik-cones.

*****

Light reflects on the window of a tiny space craft as it aimlessly spirals like a goldfish flushed down a toilet in the vacuum where once a world existed, a world of azure skies, pink clouds and purple streams, a world now missing from the quadrant its space-faring populace once inhabited … this planet they once called Homeworld.

Oh, some of the missing planet’s population still survives: cousins thrice removed pioneering colonization among the marbles of that solar system, great-grandsons and great-granddaughters on worlds orbiting the lights twinkling in the blackness around the craft, beings who regard Homeworld as a religion – or perhaps a myth.

The woman in the ship cries a widow’s tears, a mother’s anguish. “Jackovich. Allie.”

A primal scream then, in the soundless vastness of space, a scream only another mother would understand. Prayers to Almighty Se-Jus follow swiftly, passionately and sincerely said in a well-practiced ancient tongue. Prayers for her dear husband, for her only daughter, for her mother and favorite uncle, for her church, her community, her world.

“What … what has happened? Allie? Allie? AAALLL-EEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!”

Aloka Jackovich is an anomaly among her people. She is an involuntary teleporter, with an innate ability to protect herself by momentarily bypassing time and space. She first learned of this – what? power? talent? – in Prime 3 when that boy Shazbot pulled her hair. She was about to vomit in fear of the older boy when, all of a sudden, she was sitting in her grandmother’s lap, safe and sound. No one but immediate and trusted family ever knew of the woman’s capabilities for fear of a science-prone society’s curiosity. Not even Jackovich knew, nor her daughter.

Oh, after the union ceremony, she had planned to tell Jackovich … her mother practically insisted! But a comfortable calm descended upon Aloka after she united with her spouse; she had never felt safer. She hasn’t teleported in cycles, her abnormality almost forgotten. When Allie was born, she intended to tell both Jackovich and their daughter when the latter arrived at the age of ascension.

Now she never would. No more Allie. No more Jackovich.

No more Fiznik-cones.

*****

Aloka’s craft, traveling a willy-nilly course, is not alone in the huge space where Homeworld once existed. Drawn into the vacuum is a small icy body that suddenly becomes visible to the survivor as its tail shimmers brightly in the solar winds. A comet, called by the former populous of Homeworld “Klaatu Barada Nikto,” bends its eons-long trajectory toward the vehicle that is sanctuary and sanity for the still-stunned Aloka.

The space craft in which her talent has placed her before the disappearance of her world, ironically named Sanctuary, was her plaything as a teen. Capable of interstellar travel, residents of Homeworld rarely if ever ventured out of their native solar system in Aloka’s lifetime. Still, an innate scientific curiosity – that same need-to-know of her people that caused Aloka to keep her secret even from her spouse – was forever flourishing on Homeworld until its death – or, more rightly, its relocation and the death of its people. So yes, there were interstellar crafts and other niceties of advanced civilization. And no, seldom were they used for that purpose. More play toys for the aimless teen years on Homeworld. At least, before this very afternoon.

No weapons on Sanctuary; no photon torpedoes, phasers, disintegrators or even tractor beams! It was, after all, a toy, in the eyes of most. There was hyper-drive that allowed the craft to enter hyperspace, but when, to the widow of Jackovich’s horror, Klaatu Barada Nikto appears in her view screen, the recent shock of losing her family, her world numbs the woman from any action whatsoever.

Then suddenly, that innate nature all humanoid species share for survival kicks in – again! For Aloka, that means the damaged area of space in which her craft sails on solar breezes bends anew, as does the dimensions of time, and quicker than smoke through a keyhole Aloka is out of the ship and in her nice, soft bed at home – or at least the area of space where her bed had once been. Now, there is nothing but icy blackness, no atmosphere and, in space, no one can hear you scream.

And yet Aloka’s soundless scream is heard.

So as the passing comet incinerates Sanctuary and its environs before being thrown out into interstellar space along hyperbolic trajectories, a cool windstorm suddenly wafts through the fragment of space containing the body of Homeworld’s last present-day resident. The wind dampens the solar radiation, literally bends the black stuff of space around Aloka as if a protective cocoon and, harnessing her own special gift, time and space turn inside-out – again -- as the dying (dead?) woman appears on a nearby asteroid with a thin, fuzzy, temporary (albeit breathable) atmosphere. Before she feels her soul slipping away, the dim eyes of this girl with the questionable past, secret talent, happy union and loving child see herself lying at the black boot of a cosmic legend.

His only name is … the Wonder Worlock!

INTERLUDE

At the heart of the universe, where initiated the Big Bang, something is wrong. Terribly wrong.

Even since the stars went out and then came their light again, the stuff of creation has been churning, the universe expanding and the multiverse diversifying. Worlds are created out of the bodies of their exploding parents with some reaching differing vibrational planes, creating dimensions. Dimensional apertures open, collapse and reopen, and a certain harmony is reached. Thus, what flows from the core is a continuing feeder tube, a celestial umbilical cord that has existed as long – or longer – than the stars themselves. Thus are there worlds within worlds, worlds beside worlds, worlds made up of the worlds we know or think we know.

But something is wrong. Terribly wrong.

As one dimensional aperture opens, it is struck by wave after wave of crimson cosmic energy. There is a bolt of celestial lightning from a nearby ageless nebula that has failed to follow its fellows into the expanding blackness. And slowly, inexorably, the nebula is drawn into the energized rip in space/time. Suddenly, an explosion – or implosion – of a billion years’ duration slings the aperture through the flotsam and jetsam of the drift.

Sentience!

END INTERLUDE

*****

“Wond…warlock … war … Worlock!” It is a tough pronunciation for this Homeworlder, made even more difficult by the fact that the words are spoken on a desolate rock with an atmosphere as thin as Mount Everest. And, of course, also considering they are her dying words.

An unknown energy pours from the right hand of the being above her, the one clad all in ebony with a collared cloak that threatens to seemingly engulf the light of the surrounding stars themselves. Tongues of flames which do not burn lift the teleported body of the once-Aloka Jackovich above the head of the being with an outstretched hand. A mage? A wizard? One of the many lone cosmic champions that forge a legend about their existence among the space-faring peoples of the cosmos?

His only name is the Wonder Worlock.

“You said my name, girl, and share with me a talent I thought was mine alone,” he says. “And of course you realize with my act of surrounding you now with the Eternal Fingers of Flame, your death and the life you once led are now my responsibility.”

“... The life you once led.” The Wonder Worlock takes time to ponder these words as he hears, several light years away, a star going nova. Flames intensify, crackling in the void of space like the fires that once burned in the deep inhabited caves of Homeworld, when that world’s primate ancestors finally stood on two feet and pointed to the dotted tapestry in the skies around them.

“Forgive me, girl … ah, Aloka! … but you must return from the Afterlife Realm of your people to this plane, and may your … may your Almighty Se-Jus forgive me this soulless act, this cosmic crime.”

Slowly at first, then in a heated rush, the tendrils of fire burn the mask of death from the young girl. Life – at least of a sort – has been renewed and both Aloka and yes, the Wonder Worlock himself, stand in shame of the act. It is as if both are now naked to the eyes of the universe!

“You bastard! I sought your protection. I thought you were a man of magic, a wise one who could bend the stuff of creation to the point that your story, your legend is ridiculed by those believers of great Se-Jus … believers like my father, my father’s father, like me! Was it fate that brought you and I together? The Ultimatim says, ‘You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me.’

“Did you kill my little Allie? Did your foul existence somehow kill my husband, my world? We of the Enlightenment have shunned those aspects of belief in our religion that give root to false idols. We know there are wonders in the Great Everwhen for us yet to discover and, like a light bulb to a primitive, there are many godlike beings who are not gods.

“I am in hopes you will hear my story, save my little Allie – or at least whatever may be left of our world. But please, please … forthwith following, please, please!  Let my soul fly free to Almighty Se-Jus’ welcoming gentle embrace.”

“Your plea chills my own soul, woman, and if I can bring you peace, it is my responsibility to give it,” he says. “But first, and before you return to the Hereafter, tell me of this vacuum which pulled even me here. Tell me what plagues this solar system, what cosmic wrong has been done? What has happened to your world?”

A wordless glance between mystic and mortal, between what is and what was, is all the answer he needs.

“Zootalaris! Fie ‘pon me for forcing this soul to return, for now I see no mere patchwork will solve the problem I have taken the responsibility to cure. The problem is one spreading throughout the cosmos, and from the heart of Creativity itself. It is a plague attempting to transform via teleportation this section of space into a barren wasteland, a Sargasso quadrant as lifeless as the ‘remains’ of the worlds it eats on, the fear that drives the beast and attracts it, like a moth to the flame.

“Your world was not the first to die this way, your people … nor will it be the last. Unless I am successful. Unless I am able to someway alter the path of this … this ‘nomad.’”

A gesture of his right hand and Aloka’s form is engulfed in the mystic flame. As her image fades, the Homeworlder has a smile on her face. Her lips seem to mouth some ancient praise native to her clime on her vanished world. Ah-mon, perhaps?

A cool windstorm then wafts through the asteroid where once the Wonder Worlock stood. A faint trace of smoke and scent of burning brimstone are all that now remain. Even the coma – the thin, fuzzy, temporary atmosphere – has dissipated.

A cosmic legend is headed into battle, as usual, with the unknown!

TO BE CONTINUED …