The Known/Unknown Quantity

Chapter 182: Wicked Water

Chapter 182: Wicked Water

Aziraphale had his own door to contend with.

                It oozed hatred toward him. It towered with invisible eyeballs and teeth: as unwelcoming as a vulture dragging a corpse.

                The angel stood before it, a strange determination in his eyes.

                There was no hesitation. He put out a hand and shoved it opened.

                It shouldn't have let him pass. But his new powers, lighting him up with righteous indignation, setting the embers within him to flame high over Crowley's safety, afforded him a kind of key to this realm.

                The kind of key that is more like a battering ram through tissue paper to any who would oppose him.

The estate put aside for Crowley didn't curl with the Barrow Tunnel, thank god or satan, or someone!

                But it was odd in its own way. At least it was flat.

                Flattish.

Another heaven is the way Crowley would have described it. With Eden thrown in, sans the apples.

It was breathtaking and vast. Mountains and valleys and waves of wildflowers, pockets of old growth forest. And here and there, small stone villages just waiting to be populated.

And when Crowley peered closer into these places, the strange aspect of his country emerged.

                The land itself formed like a set of fractals: further up and further in. The more inward you went the vaster it became, and yet he just knew that all it took to get anywhere in the space was a hike of a block or two with effort and intent, to quickly get to your destination.

                "And the buildings just form themselves?"

                The Unseelie Queen nodded sagely, looking about the vast countryside. "After a fashion. Whatever they need will be provided by this land."

                Crowley turn to her. "Why was this made for me?" he asked with foreboding.

The queen turned her head away, and back, her terrible thin mouth widening. Laughing like a chime, she glided down into the sage covered hills and he stumbled after her, popped eyed. "This was our payment to you, for your help," she explained in a lyrical, bored tone. "We did send you notification."

                "You think I'd be living in a cave of an apartment had I known I had 40 acres and a mule in the bloody fairy country!"

                The queen gave him such an ancient look it could have seen dinosaurs in its time.

                "Whoal, olright, I do prefer the flat to all this..." he hissed, "upkeep. But if I eve' received a letter saying 'Hey! Rich Uncle died and left you the mansion,' don't you think I would have followed up out of sheer curiosity?"

                "Return to sender, 200 times over 6000 years."

                "I did move around a lot!"

                "We tagged you."

                "Eh, creepy, invasive, but I guess I can't argue with that. Um, by chance, whot form did the notifications take?"

                "Dreams."

                "Ah, there's the problem. My whole existence here been battling dreams. And I try to forget a lot."