Across World Bubbles - Pt 2

Read Part 1

The sun scorced the desert sands and the barren hills baked in the midday heat. A desert iguana, not unlike many another desert iguana in many another desert in many another world (yet somehow strangely different and unique), rested in the shade of a smallish boulder. It swivelled one of its eyes around to gaze in longing at a nearby cave which seemed to promise blessed coolth and dampness. At the same time, its other eye peered at a peculiar disturbance of the air beyond its shade-rock.

It was not quite a shimmering, though certainly it shimmered, or even really a shining, though bursts of light occassional shone through it. It was more a quivering of the air, a charged surging of potentialities, a throbbing, paper-thin aneurism upon the very membrane of space-time-reality. Suddenly, it exploded with howling gusts of wind, booming bowls thunder, stabbing spears of rain, and a small, screaming figure who dashed across the desert sand, up the hill, and into the cave without stopping. The rupture in space vanished with a pop like a cork from a bottle and all that remained to show that it had ever been was a wet patch of sand (already beginning to dry), a trail of smoke (already beginning to disperse), and the blackened, lightning-blasted corpse of the iguana (already being eyed by a circling vulture).

Tasslehoff Burrfoot, kender of Krynn, dropped his warped copper pole upon the stone floor of the dark cave. It took several minutes for his vision to clear, but finally he was able to see his hand before his face. And as interesting as that might have been at another time, there was before him and all around him a wonderful new cave, so he stood up, squeezed the water from his topknot, and chose a passage (of which there were dozens) to explore.

Soon he was hopelessly lost and infinitely happy. Everywhere he went, tiny glowing eyes peered at him from fissures in the floors, cracks in the walls, and recesses in the ceiling. All the while he heard an incessant series of skitterings and chitterings, shufflings and snufflings, and even an occassional flappering that brushed his pointed ears. Yet he never saw the source of these noises or the bodies of those whose eyes glowed so uncannily in the dark.

He tried to speak to them, but his voice would echo back to him from the strangest directions, and more than once he thought someone behind him had said, "I say, hello there!" only to realize it was his own voice returning like a gnomish rangaboom. In any case, whenever he spoke the eyes would only disappear, so he eventually stopped trying to communicate with them, despite the ten hundred questions banging around between his ears.

Even if he couldn't see the creatures of the cave, having them around made the place feel a little less lonely. It wasn't that he was scared, but he had begun to feel slightly uncomfortable, as though the floor had suddenly become too hot to walk on. So he began to trot, just to break the monotony of walking, not to mention warming his chilled, soaked limbs. He chose passages at random, turning this way and that, and soon his trot became a run and then his run a dash, until finally he fetched up with a headlong crash into a low-hanging stalactite that some careless person had left hanging in the way.



read part 3