Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📗

It should have been impossible for the pink-haired woman to clamber from the back of the sleigh to where I was at the front, but here she was.

“Don’t mind me,” Leah said dreamily. “I just saw you conjure up this lovely snuggly coat, and I thought that I’d come and take advantage of some extra warmth before we head into the wormhole.”

“Into the what?” I asked.

“Into that,” Leah said casually. She popped a piece of bubblegum into her mouth and began to chew languidly, nodding her head to indicate something in front of us.

There was a wormhole ahead. An honest to Betsy wormhole sitting in the middle of a vacuum of cloud free sky, into which we had just emerged. It was like a psychedelic black hole, bending air and light about its streaming, eye-watering rings.

“I’ve never been sucked into a wormhole before,” Leah said next to me, in a conversational tone. “We don’t usually travel to the ranch by sleigh.”

“Yeah,” I heard myself saying, my voice sounding weirdly calm in my own ears, “I’d have to say that I’m popping my wormhole cherry too.”

In the rear of the hurtling sleigh, Igor was laughing madly to himself—though at what could be anyone’s guess. Mort was chuckling politely along with him, although I doubt he had a clue as to what might be considered humorous about the situation.

There was nothing funny about it as far as I could see.

As we pelted toward the polychromatic wormhole, Leah reached up and grabbed my face. With a strength that belied her willowy model-esque build, she wrenched my head around and kissed me full on the mouth. It was a long, hard, passionate kiss with just a hint of flicking tongue. One hand slipped down from my face and dropped into my crotch to give my cock a firm squeeze.

“What. . . what was that for?” I asked, feeling slightly like I had just been clubbed over the head with a cosh.

Leah shrugged. “Well, you know what my cousin is like,” she said, indicating Reginald who was still standing in front of us and apparently conducting music that only he could hear, “we might all be quantum goo in a second, treacle-nips.”

There was something squishy in my mouth. Reaching between my lips I pulled something bright pink and sticky from off between my teeth.

It was Leah’s bubblegum.

At the head of the sleigh, Reginald now took up the words to the music that only he could hear—although I was put instantly in mind of Dean Martin’s “Let It Snow.”

And with the word ‘go’ stretching out all the way to the edges of the universe and back, the bulls, sleigh, and all its passengers were sucked into the gaping maw of the wormhole.

* * *

I had always imagined that being sucked into a wormhole would be like being, well, sucked down some enormous, mathematically charged plughole in the air. If I had thought about it, a luxury which I didn’t really have time for at that moment, I might have imagined being stretched into four different dimensions simultaneously or else being taken apart and put back together again in the blink of an eye.

What actually happened was far less dramatic than that. We simply entered a blackness that was so total, so complete and so still that, just for a moment, I thought that I must be dead.

“Excuse me for saying so,” Mortimer said from the row behind me, “but this is rather eerie.”

He was right. It was rather uncanny. What was uncannier still was the way that his words took shape in the air and started gamboling around us like a bunch of cartoon kittens, the letters forming out of the surrounding bottomless night so that we could actually see them.

We hung in that void for a handful of seconds. It was a mischievous handful of seconds though. A string of harmless little seconds that, nonetheless, could quite easily have turned out to have got together and allowed ten years to pass.

I’d seen Interstellar. I’d seen it twice. So I knew enough about quantum physics to know that I knew absolutely zero about quantum physics. However, what I’d taken away from that bit of film-making mastery was that space-time could be a wily son of a bitch.

An uncertain amount of time passed, while the bulls’ legs slowed to an apathetic walk. Back in the slow, the massive beasts appeared as deep dark as sable velvet. But here, in the endless, perfect inky void? They looked to be more gray than black.

And then, there was light!

A great swirling, kaleidoscope of light.

An immeasurable horizontal slit opened up ahead of us, ripping through the pristine nothingness like a world blooming out of the empty cosmos. It was like we had been flying toward a galaxy-sized monster that had lain completely camouflaged in the vast chasm of space. Now that monster had abruptly opened its jaws to swallow us. We could see the inside of its mouth and all the way down its infinitely long throat, as many-hued as an explosion in a paint factory.

“By the gods,” I heard Mallory say next to me, “it’s beautiful.”

And that final word extended and bent and distorted, as we all found ourselves going through the mildly uncomfortable sensation of briefly being squeezed and compressed into the size of postage stamps and then hammered out flat and thin enough to cover a football field.

Next thing I knew, the sleigh was hurtling along at breakneck speed and the world was an impenetrable dirty white.

All of us, bar Reginald Chaosbane at the helm, were thrown backward in our seat as the sleigh punched out from the cloud bank and into a quite normal-looking sky beyond. My stomach felt like