The Scepter / Matthew Dougherty

She had been walking for an unknown length of time. Only after making a sharp right turn in the labyrinth did she snap out of her daze and realize herself. She stopped for a moment to take in her surroundings. 

The first thing she noticed was the sheet of cool black obsidian beneath her feet, the chill of its polished surface crawled up her legs. About ten feet from her left and right were red brick walls, they hummed with the glowing crimson energy they were constructed from. Her neck craned back and she looked to the sky; a dark blue expanse sparkled overhead with ancient stars in constellations she didn’t recognize. Two stars stood out to her, she felt as though they were looking down on her, she was filled with a sense of safety knowing they were watching. She brought her gaze down, and saw what must have been her goal, a towering black obelisk peeking over the height of the crimson maze around her. 

The obelisk held her attention, she squinted and noticed it was covered with rows of glowing white sigils. She could feel the monument’s grounding presence through the stone beneath her, as though it was buried deep within the ground and was the one pin holding all the threads of this reality together. 

Where was she? Who was she? She looked down into her hands and saw they were transparent; an astral blue skin, and beneath that only swirling glittering purple smoke. These hands were not flesh, the wrongness of that fact filled her with an existential panic. This flash of fear jolted her, and everything came flooding back: she was Megan; she had sent forth her Ka to the reality behind reality in search of the Scepter of Power the Initiates of Kem had written about. This was her Will, this was her choice. 

Megan’s heart jumped, she felt invisible astral currents shift and blow by her like watery wind. Megan whipped her head back and saw nothing, but she knew. She wasn’t alone here. In this vast, dead, empty plane, there were only two living beings, herself and… the Pursuer. The thing which would bring an end to her, the creature that only existed to counter her, it lived to hunt her. It hated her, it wanted to kill her. Megan’s heart – her Ab – told her this, and that it was near. 

Thoughts could be perceived here, Megan had gone from peacefully drifting through the current – invisible – to thrashing around in it with her sudden awareness. Now her fear was tainting the space around her like blood in water that would draw the hunting Pursuer. 

In an instant, Megan began to run. She was powered by the dread of mortal peril, and now that she finally had her wits about her, the pursuer would be able to tell, and it began running too, searching for her in this maze. 

With icy anxiety coursing through her, Megan came to a crossroads within the labyrinth and impulsively went left. Then right. She used the tower as her guide. Left. Straight. Right. Left. 

Somehow, Megan was getting further away from the obelisk. She stopped and ran her hands through her ethereal hair while she tried to think. 
It was then that she heard several loud, pointed clanks rapidly approaching her. Megan looked behind her and screamed in terror. 

The thing was a horror unlike anything the corporeal reality could produce, its composition was alien to all the logic she understood, a true native to this place she wasn’t supposed to be in. Climbing high above the walls of the maze on eight towering legs, an unstable jittering roiling mass of shiny blackness was approaching her. Blinding shapes made of red light jumping into existence and vanished like mini lightning strikes. Four red eyes that burned like fire projected illumination like spotlights that all focused on her. A fanged mouth full of magma hung agape. It lowered itself and crashed center of its body into the path of the maze behind her. 

It came at Megan with a speed that outstripped her ability to break from her fear, and before she knew it, the thing crashed into her and was on top of her. Megan was thrown onto her back, black limbs burst from its body tipped with claws and  they pinned her in place. She looked up at its thorax and saw it was made of some kind of tangible void. 

Megan felt her instincts become influenced by the monster, it told her to give up, that its horror was insurmountable, that if she didn’t fight it this would be over soon, and she’d feel the eternal peace of death. She just had to lay still and die willingly. 

But there was something at the monster’s core, something solid and red. Megan pushed through her instincts and willed herself into action. Megan forced her arm up and plunged it into the creature. Her arm moved through the monster like it was jelly, it gave a shrill screech and roared fire into her face. Megan grasped the object; it fit nicely into the palm of her hand.  

She roared back at the beast and wrenched her arm back, dragging the object out with it. 

The creature recoiled back off her, black sludge poured out of its wound. Megan stood back to her feet and looked at what she had grabbed. It was a rod, a staff with a forked bottom, and some kind of animal head at its tip. It hummed from the infinite energy contained within. 

Megan pointed its head towards the monster. She felt the staff resonate with her, felt it obey her will and grant her command over this place. Through the staff she could comprehend the monster’s vibrational structure, and through a nonverbal order, she made the beast explode. 

The back of Megan’s wrist came up to shield her face from the wave of black muck, and when it came away she saw that the pursuer was no more. Megan took a long, slow breath. Finally, she was alone. 

The staff warmed in Megan’s hand, she looked down at it then at her surroundings. Through the staff, she could feel the architecture of reality around her like it was an extension of her. These red walls were inconvenient, so Megan waved the staff. At once the entire maze turned to dust and blew away into nothing. 

Megan was left standing in a barren flat obsidian plane, where the sky met the distant horizons of the floor evenly around her like she was in the middle of the ocean. There was just one object around her, the obelisk. She approached it. 

The glowing white sigils on the obelisk were of a primordial language that could only be understood intuitively through direct apprehension, no words could ever achieve the monumental task of translating such profound messages. Megan’s breathing became heavy as she understood what the sigils meant. 

Once they were ingested, the ground shook, and the obelisk rose from the ground, revealing itself to be several times larger than what she saw, but before she could grasp any of the newly appeared sigils, it left the ground entirely. The obsidian plane vanished beneath her and she fell into starry infinity. 

Megan fell peacefully downwards, gravity pulled her down and she knew her descent would bring her to where she was meant to be. 

Megan found herself sitting cross-legged. She opened her eyes and saw the moon, then lowered her gaze to look around, only to discover that she was in the grassy space of her backyard. She sat within the center of a pentagram drawn in salt pointed towards the full moon, at each point burned incense of myrrh. She looked at her hands and saw flesh. 

“Phew…” Megan exhaled and felt herself get woozy. She grounded herself by putting her hands in the cool grass. She rubbed the sweat off her forehead. It felt good to be in a body again, supported by a world made of matter that followed predictable laws. 

Megan closed her eyes and calmed herself. It was only after she found how easy it was to settle down that she discovered something was different within her now. 

In her chest, she felt something firm, vibrant and unyielding. Megan felt as though she could tell the moon to come down from the sky, command the leaves to fall from the trees, the grass to grow up from the ground. 

The old words of Kem’s initiates came to her lips:  
“Those who understand the Principle of Vibration, have grasped the scepter of power.” She spoke, then a wide thin smile grew on her face. 

Megan stood tall and felt the cool summer breeze on her skin. She had found the scepter. 

 

…