Mother of Magic

Reverend Mother

Le did the first logical thing he could think of when food service floats your way. He lifted and looked under the warm plate. He was not sure what he was looking for exactly. Cancer patient / physics major turned batting coach turned star player? Nothing like doing magic ever came up. Not having done stage magic before, so he was not sure how such tricks were performed. Wires were out. This close in he would have seen and felt them. Drone-style blades he thought he would have heard. Compressed gas escaping at enough velocity to make a plate hover would also have been audible. The plate was just a plate. Other than its ability to self-propel without obvious external means.

Stephanie, seeing and feeling no devices under her plate, looked up to the sky. Wires could have been released. There were no attachment points on the plates and there was nothing in the air. There was not a zipline invisibly traversing the fire circle. No wires. No infrastructure of any kind.

No drones. A drone big enough to carry a plate full of food they would have heard. There were none. There were no cranes or dollies. No trained birds. Not one large one or a flock of smaller ones.

The woman enjoyed their reaction. "In this realm, magic is. In your realm, and while this is hard for me to imagine, and with a very brief exception, magic is not possible. To have magic in your realm requires bringing it from this one. Or possibly some other realm that has it, I suppose. I have only been here and in your world, but to get to your world I became aware of many others along the way. There are more places without magic than have it, it turns out. Until I went to your world I did not know about any of that. Thankfully, here in this realm, magic is."

"This realm? You keep saying that." Stephanie pointed out.

"Yes." The woman inhaled the crisp air and looked about them with a beatific smile. "Look around you. The sky. The trees. The snow. I have been to your world. Here looks like the kind of natural things that can occur in your realm. From what I saw and felt while I was there, all you see around you here are there too. Do not be deceived by the trees and the snow. The mountains and the birds singing in the trees. The familiar things you already know. What you see? All of it? This is not your realm. This. Everything you see and feel around you. This is my world."

She paused. Frowned. "I am not explaining this well. By that I mean I am from here and you are not from here. In your world, there is no magic. There is no Mother there because there cannot be. Her existence there, in your world, would be against the natural course of things. It is how your world was made. Many realms are like that. Fewer are like here. Magic is here, and that is because the Mother is here. The mother is here because she can be. Magic is here too, but none you can see right now. You don't know how yet."

The woman shook her head in frustration. "I do not have the right words. Before I came to retrieve you? I have never left this world. I did not even know of all of the other places until The Mother showed me."

She sighed and made a pushing-down gesture with her hands. "Sit. Eat. I will explain the best I can. I hope you like bacon and eggs. I am not a cook. I am limited in my skills in outdoor cooking, to say the least. But: I know how to make that. The bread comes from a bakery in Collins. I did not make it."

"Collins? Fort Collins?" Stephanie asked.

"No. Just Collins. A town a few miles down the slope that way." The woman indicated where the road would be if this was their home.

Stephanie sat down cross-legged and held the plate in her lap. She was starving. After being so sick during the night she was empty. No trace of the sickness remained. It was replaced by hunger. Stephanie held up the fork in front of her eyes and examined it closely. It was odd looking. There was no doubt what it was. Four tines and a long handle. The two outer tines were thicker than the inner tines, and the handle was what looked like twisted-together silver that terminated in an ornate know of silver that was carved in appearance to seem like a face. The fork felt odd in her hand. The balance was off. It was heavy and overly complicated. Designed, but not practical.

The eating implement did not match the current outdoor setting at all. It seemed more like silver stolen from a silversmith who had a penchant for making simple things complicated. A smith that preferred appearance over function. For all of that, it was workable to eat with. Food speared with the tines stayed on the fork. Perhaps that is all that mattered for a fork.

"First of all, an introduction is in order. " She placed the flat of her hand formally over her heart. Stephanie half expected a head bow to go with the gesture. "I am the Reverend Mother Ava DiMorna. Formerly of the First Church of the Mothers light of Seattle. Most call me simply Reverend Mother still. I have left that congregation, and in theory, that means I have left my office as well. Others view it as a level of skill attained, and continue using the title. That is the heart of this story."

Her fingertips came away from her chest to indicate the couple with a slight slashing motion. "May I inquire as to your names?"

"You abducted us and you do not even know our names?" Stephanie asked, aghast. "Just random abductees are we?"

"No my dear. Nothing of the sort. The Mother? When she appeared to me and gave me my mission? Few have even seen her, more or less interacted with her as I did. You need to understand: The Mother does not speak. Not in words. I only knew your aspect. She created the vestment I needed to travel between worlds. With that donned, she showed me the way of travel between. How to know when I reached your world. Where in your world to find you. She left the impression of your aura. No words. Images and pure knowledge."

Here, she paused. Frowned. "The Mother gave me your aura. She did not give me the impression of there being two of you." Ava closed her eyes and looked between them with her eyes closed. It prickled Stephanie's backbone because she felt like she was still being observed. "It is the oddest thing. I cannot tell your auras apart. You are like the same person when I look at you this way."

Ava opened her eyes. "Maybe that is why The Mother only gave me this one impression. Maybe that is why she wanted me to get you from your world. I have never met your like. Not even magically gifted twins have the same aura. Yet you are not twins. You are a man and a woman even. Yet your auras are identical. You are like two halves of the same being, except your power is not halved but doubled. It must be why she sent me to retrieve you from there to here."

Le frowned "Some day what you talk about will start making sense, I am sure, Ava. In the meantime, I'm Le. She's Stephanie. There: Your abductees have names now."

Ava gave him a tip of the head. "Thank you, Le."

"So this mother person who can't talk told you to grab up Le and me from our home ... why?" Stephanie asked.

"That is the start of a long story. Settle in. Coffee? I forgot to ask if you wanted any."

"That would be good." Le agreed, and the mention of the beverage made him lean forward eager to have some. All his life, coffee had been a guilty pleasure. A thing that made him feel a little better when he was down. When the chemo was eating him alive.

Two cups made their way over to the pot, which poured the black liquid into each of them. They then repeated the journey over the circle of fire rocks and placed themselves beside Le and Stephanie. Neither of them bothered to look to see how the cups managed that. It was not that the weird was already commonplace. It is that the weird had reached a point where new weirdness was becoming more than they could take in. They had a story of how they came to be here to go yet.

"This will take a minute, Settle in. I know your world has no magic so I will try to take that into account. I imagine that is as odd to you as a world without it is to me."

Stephanie jabbed the tines of the heavy fork in Ava's direction. She was going to be Ava because Stephanie was not going to call her Reverend ... anything. That required reverence, which she did not feel. "We'll eat. You talk."