A rather confused cupboard.
The Four Orders Series - Part 5
“TIME!” SPACE cried.
“Already with you my dear.” TIME grasped her hand and they each clicked their fingers.
A hundred or so metres away, surrounded by tall itchy grass, on a knotty clump of earth, DEATH held off the mead-drunk, blood-thirsty Bjorn Bearskin. The giant Viking raised his axe above his head, before disappearing with a small fizzing sound; the echos of a giggling Bjorn Bearskin bounced between the distant mountains.
Even for cosmic masters, wormholes through space and time are not things to be thrown around lightly. They usually take a millennia or so of detailed APS (Astro-Plane Surveys), and endless decades of committee work to agree and sign off any knock on impacts of folding space-time that are acceptable. However, in this instance, SPACE and TIME did not have a few millennia to waste and therefore they just threw something together ‘al dente’.
Incidentally, Bjorn Bearskin landed, still giggling (travelling through a wormhole is very tickley, it’s the fabric of space that does that) in a rather swanky corporate boardroom of the Netflix organisation in the year 2018. This explains why we have so many bloody Viking shows on TV now.
DEATH, clutching the shaft of his scythe with both hands, lifted himself off the ground in a manner that would have been at least in the same postcode as menacing, were it not for the whimper as his knee shifted back towards its regular configuration.
The remaining contingent of the Viking hoard ceased their violent advance, collectively reaching the only obvious conclusion; not only was the figure cloaked in black a figment of Bjorn Bearskin’s blissed out imaginings, but Bjorn Bearskin had never actually existed at all. He still did exist of course, just at that moment he was almost one-thousand years in the future, on a different continent, setting out on a highly successful career as a content producer.
The charging Vikings retreated back to their revelry, putting this down as the sort of stuff of which myths are made.
LIFE reached DEATH first, throwing her arms around him. Her halo shimmered as she hugged his waist.
“Are you ok?” She mumbled, mouse-like into his robe.
“What do you think?” He threw his voice down at her, but eyeballed TIME and SPACE, who had now caught up.
“You are most welcome old man.” TIME wore a smile across his face that you only ever see on a group of public school boys in a spot of minor trouble.
“All got a shade hairy there for a moment, didn’t it?”
“Fucking great help you lot were! Next time there is a Inter-Universal War, remind me not to stand next to you bastards!”
“It’s over now, you’re safe.” SPACE placed her hand on DEATH’s wrist, gave a gentle squeeze and smiled warmly.
“Fuck. I don’t, I just can’t understand it. For fucks sake. I am literally a Goddess for these beardy fucks. Why would they…”
“Chaos.” SPACE gave his wrist another squeeze.
DEATH lowered his cloak slowly, keeping a heavy grip on his scythe and leaning into LIFE more than he would confess. The long drawn bone of his skull glinted in the twin lights of the high moon and raging pyres. Soft blue embers gloamed in his eye sockets. The moth landed nonchalantly on his shoulder.
“Welcome back you little bastard.”
“Canwegonow?” LIFE’s voice struggled out of DEATH’s robe.
“Already gone.” SPACE answered. Before LIFE could look around she felt a rush of air, her ears filled with the familiar roar of TIME and SPACE shifting around her. LIFE removed her head from the folds of DEATH’s robe and was relieved to see the inside of a black hole, with a simple wooden table and four matching chairs.
Each of our four companions took their seat around the table. They sat together in quiet contemplation for a few short moments until LIFE eventually broke the silence a mere century later with a question.
“What’s in the cupboard?”
“Cupboard, my dear?” SPACE asked pouring cups of tea for each of them into an old china set that had appeared just when needed. Tea being one of the three constants across all Universes and Ages - it always sets things back in order (the other two constants being that nature is unconditionally restorative and that the harder you try not to drop something, the more certain you are to drop it).
“The cupboard. There. It wasn’t there before was it?” LIFE pointed over SPACE’s shoulder where a very tall, quite cheap looking cupboard now stood- like a scarecrow in the middle of an oil rig (or a Viking in the middle of boardroom for that matter). The white veneer dimmed by virtue of it being in a black hole and because it was rather confused to find itself there. It was large enough to fit two grown humans inside it, a concept neatly proved by the fact that it currently had two grown humans inside it.
“Oh come off it. Haven’t we had enough bloody surprises!” DEATH said as he rose to his feet, braced for something bearded and screaming. He took a few tentative steps forward but got no closer.
At that moment, out of the cupboard, entwined passionately within each others arms, collapsed Dame Boudica Goodridge and her illicit lover Estoban Montief (trainee chef).
Entropy, gotta love it. I'd say that time and space are borked.
And two more people show up in the black hole.
Hilarious as ever. This part had much a slower pace (obviously anything following a runaway car/murderous Vikings on hallucinogens is going to slow down by its very nature, or Substack itself might explode). Who in the F is the couple falling out of the cupboard? lol