53.

  "What's in this?" I asked, hesitating with the blue potion at my lips.

  The Pigeon King cocked his head at me and rolled his eyes.

  "I couldn't even begin to describe all the ingredients, and half of them would make little to no sense to you. But if you think it's poisoned, I shall sup from it first.”

  The Pigeon King flapped down, opened his beak, and guzzled from the vial, drinking just about half of it. He clacked his beak and shook his feathers, then sat himself in the circle in front of me and indicated for me to do the same. I sighed and downed the rest. It tasted of nothing, really. It was kind of earthy, reminding me of grass with a bitter sting at the end. I shuddered as the potion worked through me, then blinked wetly.

  "Now, mageling, listen to me carefully," the Pigeon King said. "Place your palm on the ground just beside you as naturally and comfortably as you can, and imagine yourself adhering to it, not just your body, but your mind linked in the stone. This connection is your lifeline back to reality. If that connection breaks, you and I shall never return from this nightmare realm. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, already feeling drowsy. I blinked heavily twice, looked at my bloody palm, and then touched it to the stone beneath me. The stone was cold and soothed my aching hand. I pressed it closer, imagining my skin melting and becoming a part of the stone, joining together at the Rune and forming an unbreakable bond. I felt a heat emanating from my palm and knew the Rune had activated. Shuddering, I settled down as sleep began to wash over me. My eyelids became heavy, and my head drooped.

  "Good," the Pigeon King cooed, and I saw him settling down.

  "Let me enter," a voice said, but it didn't sound like the Pigeon King.

  *

  I awoke with a start… that wasn't right. It didn't feel like waking up. It felt more like a physical movement, like I was rising from some sort of depths. For a moment, I saw absolutely nothing, even though I was sure my eyes were open. I blinked, and there was still nothing but darkness. I reached up to rub my eyes, but I had no hands. I could sense my hands, but nothing touched my face. Did I even have a face to touch?

  The sudden sensory deprivation gave me a lurching feeling somewhere where I thought my gut should be.

  "Mageling," I heard the disembodied voice of the Pigeon King say. "Mageling, this is your mind. Whatever you believe to be real shall be real. So please, turn the lights on.”

  "Turn the lights on," I thought, or said, I wasn't sure.

  Did I have a mouth to speak with? I definitely had a brain. I could hear my own thoughts, couldn't I? I focused, closing my maybe imaginary, maybe not imaginary eyes again, and I pictured my body as I remembered it.

  This time, I opened my eyes, and I could see my hands, which was a strange relief that I never thought I'd have. Quickly, I turned my hand over, and I saw the Rune etched on to my palm. Then the world burst into life, and "burst" was the exact word for it. It was as if a bubble of darkness had popped, and suddenly a whole universe appeared in front of me. It was my world, but not really. The contrast of colour was too high, the hues and tones too vivid and bright. Everything had a fleshy, organic appeal to it.

  Where was I? The Mulberry Estate, of course, but again, not quite. The buildings were larger, looming high out of sight. They wiggled and moved, and there was insane chaos to the layout. Buildings appeared and disappeared, roads led to nowhere, and as I looked up, I saw yellow brick flats growing from the sky. Then I realised that the sky was purplish red, and that too had a strange fleshiness to it. Buildings sprouted left and right, shop fronts that I half recognised, parks that I might have played in. My school floated above my head, rotating around and around.

  There were no people on this reimagined Mulberry Estate, just emptiness stretching and stretching, and the more I thought about the stretching distance, the further and further it seemed to go, as if on some elastic band being pulled by the hand of a giant.

  "Mageling!" A sharp voice snapped to my left.

  I turned around, and suddenly the world settled for a moment. There was the Pigeon King. Not the hawk-like Pigeon King as he was in reality, but the small, fluffy pigeon I first met, with the haughty expression and the soft grey wings and the normal-sized feet and beak appropriate to a nondescript London pigeon.

  "What is going on?" I asked him.

  "We are in your mind," he said to me.

  "We are?”

  "Yes, well, we're in part of your mind," the Pigeon King explained. "This is your processing centre. This is where all new information comes in and is sorted before being sent to the depths of your brain.”

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  "My processing centre is the Mulberry Estate?" I asked him.

  "No, of course, it's not," the Pigeon King sighed and rolled his eyes. "This is just simply what your mind was thinking about. Look," the Pigeon King said, flapping a wing.

  I turned around and the Mulberry Estate was gone. We were now in some sort of giant factory, all gleaming metal and smoking chimney pipes and conveyors going wildly fast.

  "Honestly, little mage," the Pigeon King said. "You heard the word 'processor' and thought of a factory? Really, the lack of imagination is astounding."

  "So whatever I think of appears?" I said.

  "In a way," the Pigeon King replied. "Young minds are far more elastic and reactive," he said. "The last time I did something like this was with a wizard of some 400 years. His mind was far more static and less noisy." The Pigeon King cast a disapproving look around my brain. "You see, information comes into your mind and is processed and sorted. With your lack of years, even your processor isn't certain of itself. In a mind older and more experienced, this processor would be some figment of organisation and sorting. The wizard's processor, for example, was an elderly wizard himself, an old man sitting behind a desk carefully writing things down and filing them away to be zipped off into his cavernous library of a mind. Yours, on the other hand," the Pigeon King cast a withering look at my mind. “Doesn't seem to be able to focus on a single thing for longer than a few seconds.”

  I followed his eyes, and now I saw 100 different versions of an old man sitting behind a desk, including one that was sitting on a toilet.

  "I don't know if I like this," I murmured.

  "Do not worry. We simply have to pass through the processor. Come now." The Pigeon King took flight and flapped lazily in front of me.

  I followed him, walking down a weirdly spongy pathway, looking left and right like a fascinated tourist at a zoo or a museum. Although the exhibits in this museum weren’t stolen artifacts and paintings, they were the last 24 hours of my life, repeating in strange ways in front of my eyes. I saw something that looked like Sherbert trundling around, pushing a shopping cart filled with drugs and cash. I saw scalpels and bleeding hands, wait, those were my hands. They floated listlessly by, revolving around in a lazy circle, dripping blood while salt was thrown at them. My own hand twitched as I watched. Something flickered in the corner of my vision. It skittered past, and I turned to look at it, but no matter how much I turned, the image always seemed to stay at the corners of my eyes. It was dark and gave me a chilling sensation.

  "Don't.” The Pigeon King warned.

  "What?" I replied, turning around.

  "Those are the things that your conscious mind would rather not acknowledge," he said. "It is better for you and your sanity that you take heed.”

  "My own brain is hiding things from me?" I said.

  "Of course it is," the Pigeon King replied. "The mortal mind is an immensely ponderous thing and often works against itself, mostly to protect the fragile human consciousness from truths and pains that it would rather not endure day to day. Certain things should be left alone, mageling. Now, please pay attention. We've been going around in circles.”

  I looked at him in surprise and realized that we had been. My mind had formed some sort of strange carousel that we were going round and round, looking at all the images of the last 24 hours, with that thing in the corner of my vision just lurking there, waiting to disappear as soon as I tried to look at it.

  "What am I supposed to do?" I asked him.

  "I really miss Dorphus," The Pigeon King sighed.

  "Who's Dorphus?" I asked.

  "The wizard," he replied. "His brain was so much more organized and slower. He had far better mastery over himself than you do," the Pigeon King said.

  “Give me a couple hundred more years,” I muttered and the Pigeon King rolled his eyes.

  "I want you to picture a place you know the best. A place where you feel safe and secure, a place where you could know almost every inch of it with your eyes shut. Picture that now for me, mageling.”

  I closed my eyes, which was more perfunctory than anything, and I knew immediately what to picture: my bedroom. Perhaps the only safe haven in my entire life was that little box room. I pictured the bed, the desk, the overflowing cupboard, and the pile of clothes in the corner that never ever seemed to shrink or get bigger.

  I opened my eyes and suddenly we were there. The Pigeon King clacked his beak.

  "Oh how mundane," the Pigeon King said, sighing in disappointment. "Go on mageling, open the door.”

  I walked towards it and pulled the door open. And as I stepped through without thinking, I imagined I was walking into the passageway of my flat. Instead, I fell. I tried to scream, but no sound came out, and I tumbled down into deep darkness. Suddenly, I stopped. I was just no longer falling. I hadn't touched any surface, I hadn't touched anything; I was simply no longer moving. I looked around and took a breath, then realized there was no breath to be had. I wasn't breathing. I hadn't noticed it, but I don't think I'd been breathing the entire time.

  "Pigeon King?" I called.

  "Yes," the Pigeon King's voice answered from directly next to my ear.

  I jumped and looked at him.

  "Where are we?"

  "We have arrived at you," he said.

  “At me?” I replied.

  "Yes, this is who you really are.”

  I looked around at the nothingness and then back at him.

  "I'm really boring," I said.

  The Pigeon King chuckled.

  "No, boy, you are just fascinatingly undiscovered."

  He too looked around in the darkness, and I realized, as my eyes adjusted, or maybe just as my brain caught up with me, that there were shapes, mountainous shapes in the darkness. There were buildings I vaguely recognized and silhouettes of people that I might know. I took a step forward, and the Pigeon King thrust his wing out.

  "Be careful now, mageling," he said. "We are quite literally entering the unknown. We do not know what lurks in the inner recesses of your mind, and nor are we interested in finding out. This is not some therapy session. We are simply trying to access Somnix's kingdom through your mind."

  “So Somnix lives in my brain?”

  "No,” The Pigeon King said, and I knew he was rolling his eyes again. “We must traverse through your subconscious. After all, that is what sleep is: the human brain retreating into itself, and here, in the darkness, we will find the door to Somnix's kingdom. But be very wary. You would not be the first mortal to become lost in his own mind and never able to find his way out again.”

  I swallowed and looked at the cavernous dark in front of me. This didn't feel like a place I ever wanted to be lost in.

  “Come mageling,” the Pigeon King said. “Onwards into the darkest corners of your mind!”

  I wondered if the Pigeon King knew how truly dark those corners were.