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Against chaos must stand order. Against the Dark must stand the Light.
Order demands that there be rules and boundaries; protection against evil. The Light sets up barriers between the worlds, to keep them distinct from each other. To keep them safe from each other.
Chaos demands that barriers be broken. The Dark swallows boundaries up. Two worlds may fuse together when the limit that marks them both is gone. Destroy the barrier and you destroy the order. Remove the limit and chaos may reign.
The Dark awaits its chance.
*
"Give it back, Robert! Give it to me!"
Two boys stood facing each other in a narrow garden. The taller of the two clutched an old yellow jotter in his fist, mangling the paper cover. His face, bony and sharp as a sparrow's, wore an ugly sneer, and his light brown eyes glinted with spite. The other, younger boy stood with his shoulders hunched and his legs apart, defensively, panting through his nose and making a terrible snuffling sound. His pale blue eyes couldn't seem to rest on anything; they jumped about, from the tall boy's face to the jotter to the ground, over the hedge at the road running past, over the tall boy's shoulder at the low-bent trees which lined the garden. His statement changed with each shift: anger, embarrassment, anxiety, fear, indecision.
"Give me the book, Rob, it's mine!" Glenn yelled at his elder brother.
"Shan't!" Robert replied, sticking out his tongue. Glenn made a sudden, clumsy lunge, trying to snatch the jotter from his grasp, but Robert was taller and quicker. He jerked it back over his head. Glenn jumped after it; Robert twisted and jammed his back between the book and Glenn.
"C'mon!" Robert teased, waving the book just within Glenn's reach. "Why don't you try and get it?" Glenn shot Robert a black look.
"I'm gonna tell mummy on you, if you don't give it back," he hissed.
"Must be somethin' special," Robert sneered. "Lessee what you've been writin' at."
"Leave it alone, Rob!" Glenn yelled again. Something was wrong with his vision; the world kept melting around him, colours and shapes smearing into each other. He swiped at his eyes and was surprised by the wetness on his hands. "That's - that's private, and you give it BACK!" He made a flying tackle at his brother but Robert was braced for it, and despite being pushed back a few steps, he still held the scrunched jotter up over his head. And now, craning his neck back to see, he was flicking at random through the pages. Glenn lept wildly, trying to use Robert to boost himself up. Once more, Robert jerked the book out of his reach.
"'Once upon a time, there was a boy called Jack,'" Robert read out loud. "Ooooo, it's a story."
"Please, Robert!" Glenn decided to try begging. "Lemme have it back now, please?"
"Glenn writes stor-ies, Glenn writes stor-ies!" Robert chanted. Glenn made another wild lunge after the jotter. Robert whirled away and began half-jogging round the garden, in and out of the trees, still reading aloud, as Glenn chased him frantically. "'Jack lived in a big, white house up a lane, with his mummy, his daddy and his bad, bad brother.' He-ey." Robert stopped and narrowed his eyes at Glenn, who stood puffing, clutching his stomach. "This is about me, ain't it? Is this about me?"
"Jus' give it back, Robert!" Glenn shouted. A hot-buzzy feeling, which had started in the pit of his stomach, had now passed up into his head and was making him dizzy. "Please, Rob, please give me my book back."
Robert seemed to consider this for a while, but maybe it was all just part of the torture. The next thing Glenn knew was the whipping, ripping noise of pages whirled through the air, and Robert, panting and red, with one arm stretched out as if to grasp an invisible reaching hand, and his eyes turned up towards the sky. The book was no longer in his hand.
With a crash and shiver of leaves, it lodged among the highest branches of an old beech-tree.
Robert whooped and ran off, leaving Glenn to stare up at where his story-book had gone.
All the way up there. Glenn shivered. He didn't like high things. Too easy to fall from. And his mummy would never let him climb this tree.
"It's rotten," she told him. "The branches could give way under you and you'd break your neck. Promise me you won't go up it." And he had promised her, him and Robert both.
Maybe he should get Daddy to get the ladder out and climb up and get it. But then, he'd have to tell him how the book got up in the tree, and Robert would tell them about his story...
The first bit was the hardest. The beech-tree didn't seem to understand the necessity of growing lower branches for small boys to climb up. Glenn stretched up as far as he could go and scraped at the ridged and jagged trunk with the toes of his trainers, searching for any kind of foothold. Almost accidently, his fingertips brushed the underside of a bough which bent down in the middle. Glenn felt a little more hopeful. Perhaps, if he made a jump for it...?
He moved a little away from the trunk and tried making great springs at that bent down branch. Once, he nearly got it, felt the rough edges of the wrinkled bark against the flat of his palms; but he couldn't make the grab and he came down, stumbling clumsily over his ankles. He decided to try something different. Moving back closer to the trunk, he crouched again, and sprang; but this time, he got one foot jammed against the tree and pushed, getting a little extra boost. His hands clamped, firm and tight, around the bough, close to the tree's main body. Briefly, it moaned; leaves trembled and the wind hissed through them. But it held, and scrambling his feet against the trunk, Glenn hoisted himself up on top of it. He was up.
He clambered on; there were more branches now, a rustling, shivering tangle of forks and crooks and stumps and holes. Leaves, flat and fan-like, bobbed around him, gleaming a pale, translucent green, sometimes letting laser-beams of dust-infested sunlight shoot into Glenn's eyes. As he worked his way higher, Glenn began to pant again. He hadn't realised what hard work climbing trees could be. He paused, one foot behind him, jammed against a short stump sprouting from a bough, the other lodged in a three-way fork higher up, with his knee bent up close against his chest. He was more or less in the centre of the tree. Looking down, he saw the spreading tangle of grey, ridged branches, lacing into each other to make holes through which he could see the lawn below. Above him, there was the canopy, boughs dividing endlessy into boughs, getting finer and finer, till they burst into paper-thin leaves, green and whispering. And beyond that, when the wind was blowing right, and those higher, thinner branches swayed, Glenn caught flashes of open sky, burning white with harsh sunbeams.
Glenn scoured the maze over his head, but he couldn't see his book anywhere. Where could it have landed? He climbed on, working his way out from the centre. Crawling with his hands and toes, he made his way along a branch which stuck out from the tree like a twisted and bent-up finger. He thought that maybe he could look back from there, to inside the tree, maybe spot a bit of jotter-yellow among the grey and green. But the bough gave a sudden moan, and Glenn stopped sharply, bringing his head up, eyes turned out towards the sky.
A ripple. That was the first thing he saw. Then a flash of colour, zipping across the sky, too quick and too misty to tell what colour it was. The air warped into a spiral, bulged out towards Glenn, then shifted at once, soaring away up to the left. Two more flares of colour, and this time, Glenn could recognize them: orange and yellow, he was certain. More ripples now were racing across the sky, criss-crossing and countering each other, and colours shot through them: violet, red and green, blue, orange, vivid yellow. The bulge in the air writhed and wriggled, growing and stretching, as if someone were blowing up a living balloon behind the sky. Glenn almost wanted to cover his ears, waiting for it to burst.
Then it did.
There was no noise; maybe just a faint pop, like depressurizing your eardrums on the take-off of a plane. The sky did not rip exactly; instead, it just seemed to - part. It drew back like a curtain, to show what lay, struggling, beneath.
A rainbow. But it was bigger and brighter, and more solid than any rainbow Glenn had ever seen. And it was alive. Glenn knew that instantly and absolutely, for it jumped and it twisted, and went into curls and loops as if tying itself in knots. And besides, Glenn could hear it singing. A high, endless note, sounding somewhere just beyond physical hearing, but vibrating inside his skull as clear as a bell ringing. The rainbow bulged up against the tree, then sprang back, dived for the ground, then swept up into the air again, the note following it, swooping in pitch and tone with each change of direction.
It's fighing, Glenn knew suddenly. Something's wrong, it's sick or hurt. And he understood why the note in his skull was so high and why it made his brain hum like some half-gone memory. It was the pain. The rainbow was crying in pain.
Suddenly, it froze in a still arch across the sky, just like a normal rainbow. Something in Glenn's stomach sank like a ball of lead. "Don't stop," he whispered, without realising he spoke out loud. "Don't stop fighting. Don't."
Too late. He saw them then, the reason for the rainbow's pain. Racing across its surface, snaking over the arch, came a web of thin, dark lines, fusing and intersecting. The rainbow was cracking. The note in Glenn's skull jumped suddenly to a full-out scream, stunning him so that he almost missed the first black beams that broke out through those fine cracks; almost missed the rainbow's pieces being swallowed by the wave of darkness that burst forth. Silence, roaring, swept through Glenn's head, drowning out everything: sight, sensation, sound, the rainbow's squeal vanished into the boom of absolute quiet.
Which is why Glenn didn't hear the branch give way beneath him.
He knew it had happened only because his stomach jerked upwards sickenly. The silence of the rainbow's death still dazed him, and he could feel no rush of air as he fell.
But something just seemed wrong.
Shouldn't he have been falling the other way?
Shouldn't he have been falling -
down?
*
And then he was on the ground, only it wasn't the ground of his back garden. It was a hard ground, a dusty ground, strewn with broken things which dug into his ribs. And the air wasn't as clear and easy to breathe as in his garden; it was thick and scratched the inside of his throat and smelled.
And the sound -
"Kid!"
Someone called to him. Glenn blinked heavily. The air stung his eyes too.
"You there! Hey! Get up! GET up!"
He realised with a jerk that what he was breathing wasn't air, but smoke. And that sound, that crackle and distant rumbling - was fire.
"Hel-lp," he croaked, scrabbling blindly against the dust. "I'm here!" But he couldn't hear himself above the noise of the fire and he gained a new sensation: heat. Fierce and prickly, like thirsty needles into his skin, sucking any dampness out of him. The smoke enclosed him completely, solid black, like the stuff which had swallowed the rainbow. Glenn panicked for a moment. Had that darkness engulfed him too?
Something sharp and solid dug into his shoulder; biting teeth. He almost shouted out in pain, but the smoke and the heat choked his voice, and besides, the teeth did not bite long. Instead they threw him. Up and backwards, tumbling head over heels. High enough, that the smoke thinned a little and he sucked in good air, proper air, and caught a glimpse of jumbled greys and blacks misted with red; before falling for the second time that day.
"Oofph!" The noise didn't come from Glenn; it came from the thing he landed on. Flesh, bone and fine, soft hair. Glenn instinctively gripped round it with his legs and seized the hair in his hands, scrunching it up so that it poked between his fingers in tufts.
"Who -?" he gasped.
"No time! Gotta get out!" His rescuer ran; round, hard muscles pulsed between Glenn's legs, and its bones jarred violently against his. Smoke and heat began racing down his throat with the wind.
"No!" he tried to choke. "Wrong way! Running into the fire!" Before he got to "into", the forward lurch of his stomach, and the fresh rush of air on his face, told him that the creature had jumped. Glancing down, Glenn felt upon his face a blanket of heat, the fiercest blast from the fire below, then he felt the crash of bone and flesh as they hit the ground again. He jerked forward with a yelp, but a column of flesh rose before him, covered with shorter, coarse hair with a rod of bone up the middle. It caught him and tilted him upright. Glenn grabbed for the soft hair again, pulling it sharply, and the creature screamed.
"Sorry!" Glenn gasped. "Sorry! Did I hurt you?"
"Just try to stay upright, kid, and don't grab like that," the thing replied. It was still running, and instinctively Glenn leaned forward, trying to press himself down flat. He felt the column of bone again. A neck, he realised, that's what it was. He must be on the back of - whatever it was that had saved him.
This was the first time he had consciously realised what was going on. It was such a shock to have his brain back in working order that he almost sat bolt upright again. And in that same instant, he saw the way out.
"A door!" he called, but the creature had already seen it. It was actually only a doorway, but neither Glenn nor the thing carrying him were in the mood to quibble about such matters. They plunged out through the gap; Glenn saw wood beams, warped and blackened and pocked with tiny holes, and then he was sucking clean air into his lungs again.
The creature ran on a few more steps, then halted. Glenn felt its sides heaving in and out between his legs, heard the air wheezing and snorting through its nostrils. He glanced down, hoping to see for the first time who or what had rescued him.
Between his fingers poked tangled bunches of scarlet hair, with a few stray orange strands, all bent and crushed by Glenn's grip. An arched neck before him, white, topped by two pricked ears, white, and beyond that, a long, sloped head, white. Underneath him, straddled by his legs, a back, rounded flanks and beneath them, a belly, all white. Two long white legs in front; behind, another two. And when Glenn turned round to look, a scarlet tail swept round and brushed soot from a white rump, marked with an image of a dove.
"We should leave here," said the pony quietly, tensely.
Glenn looked up suddenly at "here". There was the place he had been in: a spindly house he'd never seen before. Its windows had no glass in them; the walls were crumbling, grimed with dark stains and with chunks missing. Smoke belched steadily from the empty windows and through a phantom of consumed beams, where the roof had once been. Occasionally he glimpsed a flare of dull red through the blackness.
The area around was completely destroyed.
The pony was already cantering away as fast as she could, so Glenn only caught confused impressions of the rest as he was jolted about on her back. Tumbled piles of reeking stones; a mess of thin, grey wires; broken poles; shards of blue-edged glass; more smoke and fire. The air was black-grey, with fog or smoke or simple darkness, Glenn could not tell. Noises came out of the blackness: the gobbling roar of flames, shrieks, cries and shouts, moans of pain and loss. Then there were the creatures.
They came from everywhere. There were people, clumsy, coughing, eyes wide and shining, in that odd blind way that fear has. Dogs flashed past, yelping, first in ones and twos, then in packs of five or six. Cats sprang out of nowhere in panic. Birds came, beaks open, gasping for air. And ponies too appeared in the grey-blackness, like the one he rode, ponies of every colour, shape and size. Some had spiral horns growing from their foreheads; others came out of the sky, with wings on their backs, feathered like birds', transparant like dragonflies', patterned like butterflies'. They burst from the darkness, shouting or screaming; but mostly just running, their heavy, rasping breathing the only sound they made.
There were monsters too, moving on the edges of Glenn's vision. A pack of human-like creatures, with white, demonized faces and long teeth, ganged up on a knot of people, while a German Shepherd barked frantically in their midst. Things, scaly and leather-winged, drifted over their heads, undulating lazily in the smoggy air. Out of the corners of his eyes, Glenn spotted misshapen shadows, the gleam of claws, eyes watching.
"What's going on?" he yelled into the pony's ear. "Where am I?"
"I don't know anymore," the pony panted back. Then, after a pause, she asked, "How did you get here?"
"I fell up a tree."
"Up?"
Glenn felt a little stupid. "Yeah. I - I saw a rainbow die, and then I fell up a tree."
The pony skidded to a halt, almost unseating Glenn. "The Rainbow's dead?" she exclaimed. The note in her voice made Glenn's bones shiver. "They've destroyed it?"
Suddenly, with a cackling whoop, a band of twisted, stunted beasts, with sloping brows and eyes of mauve, ambushed them from a half-ruined building, clutching knobbled clubs in long, spindly, dirty fingers. The creatures sprang at Glenn's legs, clubs raised in one hand, slashing wildly in front with the other. Pain sliced through Glenn's ankles as he realised in shock that what he took for fingers were actually half-claw.
"Goblins!" he heard the pony shriek, then felt himself sliding off as she reared and cried out. A goblin, pig-nosed with skin like blistered leather, was clinging to her face, howling gleefully as it gouged its claws into the pony's eyes. The rest garbled in celebration, and started swinging wild blows at her legs.
Rage is a strange thing. Glenn did not know how he knew to grab the pony's mane tight and push with his knees against her back, nor how he knew that goblins were sensitive to biting. He just remembered being stretched across the pony's neck, his teeth sunk into flesh, tasting stinking blood and hearing the goblin scream; and feeling absolutely, calmly powerful. He wrenched, and tore off a chunk of goblin ear. The scream sailed to a new pitch.
"Pft-too!" Glenn spat the piece of ear away and made a face. The blood in his mouth tasted foul. The goblin had grabbed hold of the wound and was dancing about in pain. The pony took advantage. With an angry whicker, she gave a violent toss of her head, and the goblin, caught off balance, sailed away with a squeal.
So too did Glenn.
His shoulder struck the ground with a crack and he slid, scattering dust and small stones around him. Something flat and hard slammed into his back. Winded, Glenn opened his eyes. A wall. They must have moved inside the ruin from which they'd been ambushed.
Dust began to crumble down on him with a faint hiss.
"Look out!" he heard the pony shout, then felt a hoof strike him, kick him out of the way. Glenn rolled over and over, swallowing dust as he went. The grind of shifting stones caught his attention. He raised his head; saw the pony through a pale shower of dust, her red and orange mane plastered to her neck with sweat, looking up, mouth open but mute. Then she vanished in a tumbling storm of bricks and plaster.
"NOOOO!!!" Glenn heard his own cry as if at a distance.
A creak sounded as a second wall fell. Glenn glanced up and stared dazedly at the lumps of stone spinning down through the sky towards him. He barely felt the first rock glance off his forehead.
Then the blackness engulfed everything.
*
Glenn was lucky. The bricks and beams fell in such a way that they formed a small space around where he lay, blind and half-unconscious, but alive. Slowly, he noticed, the squeals and roaring, and the noises which had filled the outside grew quiet, and were gone.
Then a rock shifted and sudden light burst in upon him. Glenn screwed up his eyes. He couldn't remember light being so dull and coloured green. Then a hand, wonderfully, reassuringly human, reached down through the hole.
"C'mon kid, let's get you outta there."
These people were not his family. But then, Glenn had already realised that he was unlikely to see ever again anyone he recognised from before.
"There's a pony - " he began as they pulled him out.
"Shhh!" whispered a woman, wrapping him up in a blanket that smelled faintly of smoke. Her pale face was smudged with ash and dirt, and her long mahogany hair peppered with grey-white dust. Her gaze jumped about nervously. "Don't talk here, 'sdangerous, the walls could fall, hush now!"
"What's he talking about?" asked the man who had hauled Glenn free. He was tall, with limbs too long and lean for the rest of him, making him look like a puppet with cut strings. Eyes which seemed chipped into his long, slightly paunchy face glittered suspiciously at Glenn.
"Nothing, just babbling," the woman replied quickly. "He's had a nasty blow to the head, we'd better get him to Doctor Henry."
Glenn said nothing more, and let them lift him and place him on a makeshift stretcher. But his eyes stayed fixed on the heap of rubble where the white pony lay buried. Wooden joists, their splintered ends rearing against a sky which glowered an angry tone of jade, stuck up from the smashed bricks like black bones from a grey corpse. Dust swirled nervously about in little scudding eddies.
"Please move," he whispered under his breath. "Please move, please."
But the mute heap made no movement as Glenn was carried out of sight.
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