Christmas in NeverEarth
©2011 by Sylvan Scott
Heavy snow melted into growing pools in Anthony’s wake. Their path led from where he stood at the window, across his spartan living room, through the door, down the hall, past the resident assistant’s lobby desk, and out into the blizzard where his taxi was pulling away for safer harbors. He’d made it fourteen blocks before the airport was declared closed. In the hour it took for the driver to get him back to Anderson Hall word was that it would be at least a day, maybe two, before air travel resumed. Monstrous snowflakes fell ponderously behind his reflection in his dorm room window. The clichéd line from too many holiday specials floated through his mind.
“Christmas is cancelled.”
He sighed. He should phone them; tell them he wasn’t coming but he couldn’t. All he could do was stare out the window, lost in his thoughts.
At first, the knocking went unnoticed. Only the third, most frantic, rapping caught his attention. But it wasn’t its increasing rapidity that drew his notice as much as its source. The knocking came from neither the hall door nor the entrance to his tiny, darkened bedroom. Rather, it echoed from the closed, closet door next to his stacked, damp luggage. He scowled. Not in the mood for visitors or pranks, he crossed the room and jerked the door open. Ready to lay into whoever had broken into his room and hidden in his closet, he stopped, mouth agape.
Cold, snowy air swirled into his room from a dark forest that should not—could not—exist. Icicles hung from evergreen branches aside willowy birch trees. They stood like white sentinels in deep drifts of snow. Before them, hand raised in a knocking position, stood the most impossible element of the tableau: a satyr.
As if stepped from the pages of a book on Greek myth, he was a goat from the waist down standing on digitigrade legs ending in cloven hooves. His upper body appeared human, lean, and sported a curling, pointed beard on his chin. Two large horns, like those of a ram, curved from his forehead back over his pointed, animal ears. He wore a dark brown tunic, belted at the waist above a woolen kilt, and had a snow-covered, green cloak across his shoulders. About a foot shorter than Anthony, he smiled as he looked up, eyes sparkling.
“Tony! By all that’s holy: I had started to give up hope! Do you know how many doors I had to knock on before I found you?”
Anthony stared, mouth trying to find words. “What?” His mind tried to processes what he was seeing. He blinked, stammered again, and tried once more. “Who—?”
“Tony—gods, please don’t have completely forgotten. It’s me: Wiste Callerbach!” His voice lowered. “Please tell me you remember.”
Anthony slowly shook his head. He started to answer despite the impossible nature of the scene before him. He began to say “No” but as he tried, he found that, strangely, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. There was a pressure, suddenly there; a pressure that swelled in his mind pressing inwards from his temples. He stepped back and stood in the center of the room. His attention was focused; the cold wind wafted through the closet door making him shiver. He was perfectly awake and hadn’t been drinking or smoking pot; he’d not had the time since he got back to the dorm.
This was real.
As he stared, patches of emptiness in his mind—like swaths of darkness on the surface of his memory—began to crack and fracture. Beyond them there was a sense of familiarity. His mouth moved from hanging open to ponder the name “Wiste” upon his lips.
He was amazed even as he said it. “I … I think we’ve met.”
“I should say so,” Wiste said. He stepped over the threshold from the nighttime forest into the dorm room. He shook the snow from his shoulders and smiled a bit ruefully. “I should have expected this, though. Willful ignorance on my part, I regret to say. I’m sorry, Tony; memories can be tricky things. I just thought our time together would have helped.”
“Our time?”
At the satyr’s forlorn look Anthony felt a pang of regret. He should remember this strange, horned man; he knew it. He knew he should have years of memories about him.
“We knew each other ... when I was a kid?” The cracks in his mind widened. A singular fact filtered through. “You’re from … from another world.”
“Yes; yes, that’s right. You remember?” Wiste asked. Hope breathed back into his voice. “It’s been so long. You remember what you called it: my home?”
More blocks between he and his memories melted away in the wake of the satyr’s insistence. An image broke through: the satyr’s face beneath a sunny sky hiking across a rolling plain. Anthony blinked, recalling. More memories followed and each was more complete than the last. In one, the satyr—Wiste—led the way up a narrow, winding mountain path towards a black castle. In another the two of them explored a cave by torch-light to escape the lair of a titanic dragon. In another...
Anthony’s breathed short and shallow in the wake of returning memory. He tried to swallow his nerves. The name; the name he gave Wiste’s world...
And, abruptly, there it was.
“NeverEarth...”
His whisper trailed off but in its wake came more memories. He staggered from the weight of them.
Wiste practically yelped in glee. “You asked if Kellen was like a mix between Neverland and Middle Earth,” the satyr said. “Of course, I had no idea what you were talking about. You had to tell me. But even afterwards, you always referred to it as ‘NeverEarth’. Even good King Alimonde called it that once in a while.”
It was true; he remembered it. In the wake of his returning memory, all his troubles with the taxi to the airport, his abortive trip home, the blizzard outside: they all evaporated.
“My God, Wiste,” he said at last, “how could I—?” More memories rolled in like the tide. His mind flitted from one to the next. His voice had dropped and become quieter. “After all we did... My memory: it just—”
“Faded?” The satyr shrugged, more melting snow falling from his cloak. “It happens to all people from your world, really. They say it becomes permanent sometime between their twelfth and fourteenth years.” He shook his head and smiled thinly. “I guess I just thought you’d be different where I was concerned, y’know? Foolish old faun.”
Anthony blinked. “All people from my world?”
Wiste nodded. “You met several of them over the years; made friendships in NeverEarth that you couldn’t recall once you got home. As near as I can tell most mortals in your world have slipped between the barriers of here and there at one point or another. Your world has some pretty confounding laws. You mortals: your minds can’t seem to access those memories you’ve gained while you’re away. In short, after returning for a few days, you forget the other world until you encounter a piece of it again. When you were young, at each visit, all it took was a glance and you remembered it all; it was like you’d never left.”
Anthony walked to his desk, pulled out its chair, and sat down. The memories were back: dusty and disused, but there they were. He remembered them: the pirates of Therasy Bay, the Sorcerer of Burning Rock, his quest into Echo Wood, the threat of the Umbral Knight: nearly a dozen adventures over what seemed like dozens of years from age eight to … to... He wasn’t exactly certain.
“I’d hoped to invite you to Midwinter’s Night,” Wiste said. “But, uh, it looks like I’d underestimated just how much time had passed in your land. Thirty-to-one?”
“Three to one,” Anthony muttered, absently doing the math. He looked up. “Wait, it’s been—”
“Twenty three years.” The satyr shrugged. “For me. Not that long, really, I guess. Satyrs live a long while.”
Anthony was nineteen; nineteen and with more weight on his shoulders than he’d ever had during his adventures in NeverEarth. H
is sophomore year’s fall semester had just ended. A stressful holiday with the family back home had just been avoided thanks to bad weather. Now: Wiste.
“Midwinter’s Night?” he asked.
Wiste nodded. “I, well, I was a bit lonely, really; thought it would be nice to see an old friend.”
Anthony attempted a smile. “You mean you got drunk again and made your way through the World Labyrinth to find me.”
The satyr smiled with embarrassment. “See? You do remember.”
Anthony offered Wiste a seat on the ratty couch by the window and after a few false starts, the two slipped into a long-overdue reminiscence. They spoke about their adventures; of how they’d first met by the base of Thunderwater Falls in Epsilon Wood. They reminisced about how the tyrannical Dragon King had decreed any child of Earth be executed lest an ancient prophesy foretelling his downfall at human hands come true. Wiste had hidden young Anthony beneath the falls for days. Eventually Anthony had helped the satyr overcome his fears and help him mount an expedition back through the Labyrinth to get home. On the way, they dodged the Dragon King’s minions, had adventures, and forged their friendship. Anthony had gone home and the Dragon King been turned to stone when the tyrant broke an oath given to Anthony of his own free will. The spell that had been intended for the mortal boy, to petrify any betrayer of the throne, turned on its creator when the dragon tried to use the kidnapped Wiste to coerce Anthony to join his dark court. As Anthony had learned, the magic of NeverEarth enforced magical bargains.
Outside, the campus clock chimed midnight. He looked up at the still-falling snow.
“Mid-winter, eh? As it is, I’m going nowhere.” He gestured at the mounting snowfall. “I had plans to go home for Christmas but with this weather...” He trailed off, a shadow of his mood coming home to roost.
Wiste nodded, brow furrowed in thought. A moment later, a long, sly grin spread across his face.
“You have until tomorrow morning, right? To get home and see your parents, I mean.”
“More or less, but with all the planes grounded—”
“I don’t know about planes,” Wiste interrupted, “but I do know the Labyrinth.” He nodded towards the now-shut closet door. “With the right guide, I’m betting you could get there through NeverEarth.”
Anthony blinked. “Is that … possible?” Realization dawned. It was possible; he knew it was. “I could use NeverEarth as a short-cut...”
“I don’t see why not,” Wiste said. “We followed your heartstrings the first time we met and got you home before anyone noticed you were gone. Why not follow them, now, through the Labyrinth to your parents’ house? Do they still live in the same place?”
Anthony nodded.
“And with your family still close to your heart, the way should be easy!”
Anthony blushed slightly but let Wiste continue.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Wiste leaped to his hooves. He strode to the closet door and rapped on it three times before turning the knob the wrong way. It opened onto the wintry wood.
Anthony balked.
“Wiste, I don’t know; there are things—”
“Pish and fiddle,” the satyr exclaimed. “Getting cold feet? We’ve yet to step into the snow! What happened to the boy who faced down the Umbral Knight single-handed?”
Anthony considered all the reasons he shouldn’t; one—the most difficult—stood out as the most insurmountable. He steeled himself, stood, and walked over to Wiste. He put a hand on the satyr’s shoulder and answered.
“He got a few years older and found out he was gay.”
It was the first time he’d said it to family. Even after all the years apart, Wiste was the closest thing to a brother he had. Looking at Wiste’s innocent face, he realized the satyr probably had no idea what the colloquialism meant. He was about to clarify what “gay” meant when Wiste raised a hand.
“My dear boy: I am a satyr. You think this matters to me?” He clearly had gotten the meaning. “All that really matters is the pleasure we share and love that we feel.”
Anthony shook his head.
“It’s not about you, Wiste; it’s my parents.”
“They do not approve?”
“They don’t know.”
Wiste paused in thought. “You were going to tell them during your visit but the storm’s given you a reprieve.”
Anthony nodded as Wiste blew a long breath through his nostrils.
“Wish I knew whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.”
“Well,” he said after a moment, “I can see how my offer has complicated things but, really, isn’t it best to face this fear of yours head-on?”
“This isn’t a childhood story, Wiste; the answers aren’t always so simple.”
He looked confused. “Why not?”
The question, as direct and clear as Wiste always was, annoyed him with its simplicity. He’d been ready to face his parents before, so why not now? He closed his eyes. Where was the boy who’d bested the Umbral Knight?
He knew the answer as he said it.
He smiled, remembering how it felt to wield a sword against the enemies of goodness and light.
“Y’know something? The Champion Knight of NeverEarth hasn’t gone anywhere,” he said. “I think he was just on an extended vacation.”