(words: 2,06 cool

So, Eli had magic powers now. That was unexpected.

It was, for certain, the secret fantasy of some parents to have magic powers. The world was a dangerous place, full of people and things that could potentially want to hurt your children — and the notion of having powers beyond most people to be able to avert those threats was a very alluring one.

The tradeoff didn’t seem to be worthwhile, though.

In full reality, while Eli seemed to have gained magical powers, and that was a pleasant prospect when faced with other people on the road driving dangerously, or creeps hanging out outside the club harrassing customers, it offered him only minimal recourse against the real danger — the city was literally full of monsters.

These monsters wanted to eat shy young women at bus stops. These monsters would probably prey on children playing on swingsets. Obviously, this was no good for a man with two kids.

So Eli was a monster hunter now. Also unexpected.

Even with that one year he’d taken kickboxing lessons in high school, Eli was still fundamentally not a fighting champion. He’d used his phys. ed. requirement in college to take a yoga class. It was useful in his current career, and he knew he was certainly in great physical shape (at least superficially) — but fighting monsters was hard work. They didn’t do street brawls and they didn’t have boxing stances. He came home, these days, with bruises and cuts. He was lucky to be friends with someone who didn’t ask him why he needed so much antiseptic, and friends with another someone who had EMT training and was willing to stitch him up a few times with minimal questions asked.

The injuries were bad for his career — but what couldn’t be easily hidden with makeup could usually be covered over with creative placement of costume pieces.

Sometimes, though, he wished there were more to this superhero business than just hitting and being hit.

And he really, really wished he had any idea what was with the pinecone stick.

It was literally a pinecone on a stick.

Why.

Eli wished he understood more about anything.

* * * *

I pledge my life and loyalty to the Cosmos, and to Dionysia.
I humbly request your aid, so that in return I may give you mine.

He’d dreamt those words a few times now. In his dreams, the sky was painted pale blue with atmosphere, marbled with a few small, scudding clouds here and there, too faint for rain. At the top of the sky, the blue opened up into black and starlight — and there was a tower. There was always a tower. His dreams, when they weren’t nightmares portending imminent doom, were soft and strange.

Perhaps, though, they were part of the larger mystery. Dionysia Page stood in his living room, holding his pinecone stick balanced across his open hands, staring blankly at his flatscreen TV and home entertainment center. Someday he was going to have to decide whether or not he was telling the girls’ mom about this superheroing business. Someday when he figured out how to not get taken to court and get his parental custody rights revoked.

“I pledge my life and loyalty to the Cosmos, and to Dionysia,” he recited. “I humbly request your aid, so that in return I may give you mine.”

At first, nothing happened. On TV, the Steelers and the Chargers continued to grapple over a third down. But then, just when Dionysia was starting to zone out, he felt momentarily woozy — and the world melted away.

* * * *

The island was small. It rose up in the middle, like the peak of a mountain that had been ripped clean off the earth and cast into space. All round, pale cobblestone roads rose up the mountainside in long, lazy spirals, flanked on either side by densely packed buildings.

Some of the buildings, all worn with the signs of hopeless age, appeared to be storefronts. Others were, he supposed, residences. In his mind’s eye, Dionysia looked around and sometimes thought he saw glimmers of people in the streets — running, dancing, doing cartwheels — but these fancies disappeared almost as quickly as he’d conjured them. He’d come to a strange place — but he knew it, at least a little. This was Dionysia, the place that had given him its name to share. He could tell that much.

At the bottom of the hillside, the buildings all flatted out into open land. It looked like it had been some sort of farmland, once — the standing structures propping the landscape looked something like they might’ve been a vineyard, he supposed — but it was hard to tell, after what seemed to have been centuries. Time had leeched most of the color from the vivid cloth banners that fluttered raggedly everywhere in the breeze. In this state, how could he really know for sure what anything was?

Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was one thing he knew for sure: out past the small stretches of farmland, the island fell away entirely — into empty space.

Stars shimmered around and below. Out in the far distance, the sky held a few bright circles, each as large as his upheld thumb. Planets — but not any he knew. Not like the Hubble photos you saw of Jupiter and Saturn. This was very Star Trekky. This was somewhere strange in deep space. It was funny to be able to take something like that in stride.

Dionysia wandered a while. His explorations took him in and out of a few buildings, poking through the old remains of some long-dead strangers’ lives, and down to the lovingly carved stone railings that ringed the bottom edge of the island, discouraging jumpers. He traced the perimeter, stopping a few times to rest, peering out and downward, where the faint blue sky dissipated again and the fullness of the stars all yawned to the fore. If there was a scientific explanation for this, he didn’t know what it was.

The roads grew steeper as they climbed.

Nearer the top of the hill, suddenly it became apparent that the roads no longer completed circles — they split into sections, where the hillside itself was parted open into several tall, cliffside leaves. On the outsides of each of these leaves, buildings and ground continued as normal. Within them, though — accessible through pathways where each leaf parted from the next — was an inner core of pure white. The pale stone crossed the open area at the base, then rose smoothly up the insides of each leaf, all one single, natural cut of rock. The white stone glowed with a soft, refreshing light.

At the center of the lit space was a huge white column, rising far up into the sky, topped with some unseen platform. The prospect of so many stairs, carved in a long spiral into the column’s face, was disgustingly intimidating — but he had dreamed of this place, this tower. He wanted to see.

* * * *

Dionysia was glad his magical outfit didn’t come with a watch. For once, this minor impracticality was welcomed — he didn’t want to know how long the ascent had taken.

Arriving at the top of the platform, he discovered that the stairs peaked next to a long door along the column itself. Upon inspection, it revealed itself to be some kind of an elevator — but, sparing him insult to go with the injury that was the climb, it at least seemed not to be in working order.

If I’d taken the stairs all this way when there was a working elevator available, I think I would consider jumping off this platform right now.

His legs felt like so much wobbly oatmeal. Dionysia lay on the ground for what had to have been at least fifteen minutes or more, observing his surroundings from a visual frame of ‘sideways, on the floor.’ It was like being drunk, but probably with more positive health benefits.

When he was finally moved to bestir himself, he made a better study of things. The top of the tower seemed to be a great temple, its structure unfurling liked a carved lotus, or maybe the abstract idea of a pinecone. It seemed to be both a place of contemplation as well as someone’s — his? — living area. Dionysia didn’t think he’d mind living here, maybe, to be honest — but only if the elevator worked.

The edge of the temple platform ran with crenelated stone. It offered a mesmerizing view into space, and Dionysia went to the edge to look out.

That was when he saw her, standing there. The young girl.

It wasn’t his imagination this time. She had shimmering, frost-pale hair in a thick braid down her back, quiet golden eyes, and an ill-fitting robe of many colors over top of a grubby brown shirt and pants. Her feet were bare. She was looking out over the crenelated parapet, and this time when Dionysia peered out, he could just see the faint image of a planet that almost seemed to be below them.

“How can you really be a knight, if you’re going to just abandon a planet like this?” she asked. He remembered her now: the new initiate. The stowaway. “You saw us and turned away.”

He saw himself standing next to her, eyes cast down to the planet below. “We can’t save everyone,” he said slowly, sounding a little tired. “Having great power isn’t the same as having all power. I can kill a man and still not have the power to overthrow a government. All the knights of the galaxy could probably, with combined strength, conquer a planet and establish something better — but we still wouldn’t have the power to conquer every planet, child.” He clasped his hands together, looking over at her. “It is my great regret to tell you that the galaxy has many planets like yours, or worse. As a knight of the Cosmos, I visit them each — but our place is not to intervene. And because we don’t, such places still open their doors to us — and so we can observe. I take all I learn back to my brethren . . . and with luck, someday the Great Courts may intercede on your people’s behalf.

“It’s a hard thing, choosing which battles much be fought. It’s bitter mathematics, I fear. I can spirit away one young girl and still not save a downtrodden people — but nothing is without consequence. Even when we move forward pretending not to see a crossroads, we still choose. Life is nothing easy.”

The girl looked down at her hands. “Do you think my family will resent me? For running away and leaving them behind?”

“Life is nothing easy,” he said again.

It was an odd moment — a few sentences snatched through the air of his memory, given form and substance in this place. He wondered at it. The sad little girl, the tale of her abandoned planet — what was all this to him? Or this place . . . what was it to his life back in Destiny City, fighting monsters and carrying a stick with a pinecone on it?

Who were his brethren? Were there others, like him, fighting this new monster menace? Why hadn’t he seen them? Why hadn’t anyone heard about them on the news?

Everything was senshi and terrorists — he didn’t understand any of it. But if there wasn’t any terrorism, if that was all monster attacks, and maybe other people like him, superheroes fighting them off . . . why was the government covering it up?

Dionysia pressed his hands to his temples and wracked his brain, trying to conjure up another snippet of memory like the one he’d just seen. It hadn’t told him anything. It barely made sense.

Faced with the dual prospects of either standing here, getting a depressed headache trying to make sense of all these unanswered questions or else climbing back down all those stairs, Dionysia wished for nothing so much as to be back home in his living room, cooking dinner and watching TMZ before The Voice came on. And just like that — blessedly — there he was.

The tower was far, far behind.