“This really is shorter?” Beren asked as he trudged along behind Calliope. The strange path flowed by on both sides, often changing wildly every few hundred meters. Narrow strips of alpine forest, with snow dusted pines, butted up against salt desert or tropical jungle. One section they carefully crossed appeared to be ocean that poured endlessly into the void, the road laid atop a bed of crushed coral. Where the road bowed out slightly there were sometimes structures or ruins of structures, twisted towers, strange castles, or just filthy burned out lean-tos.

 

“Yes,” Calliope replied.

“But we have been walking for days,” Beren complained.

“Why would I lie to you?” Calliope asked. Beren gave her a suspicious look.

“Wasn’t one of your names ‘The Mother of Lies’,” he accused.

“No,” Calliope replied, her lips twitching into a slight smile at the irony.

“It feels like we have covered a lot of distance,” Beren continued doggedly.


“Yes,” Calliope replied. Beren was silent for long moments, merely trudging along. Calliope sighed and her clothing seemed to ripple from dark steel armor into a long, black, high collared dress robe. Beren recognized it as a distant ancestor of philosopher’s garb, familiar from statues and temple frescos, though few philosophers he had ever met filled it out quite the way she did.

 

“Your logic is correct but based upon a faulty assumption,” Calliope said pedantically. Beren swatted at a mosquito the size of his hand as it darted in to try to drain him of his blood. He let out a sign.

“Then by all means enlighten me,” he told her. Calliope’s ability to speak his tongue had not made her talkative.

“You are laboring under the misapprehension, that time passes at the same rate here as it does in your…our world,” she explained.

 

“Time passes more slowly here?” he asked. Calliope nodded.

“But for us it appears the same?” he pressed.

“To an extent, you can spend subjective years in here and you will never age, nor will you grow hungry or thirsty,” she explained and Beren realized that she was right, they had not paused to eat or drink in what felt like an entire day, nor did he feel tired.

 

“Immortality?” he asked. Calliope laughed and her garment shifted again, taking on the aspect of a ritual gown of deep midnight blue. Oddly it seemed darker than the starlit sky all around them.

“Of a sort,” she gestured at a ruined tower that looked like it might once have been made of fine porcelain, “why do you think there are so many structures, would be magi who tried to make the between their home and cheat death.”

 

“But it doesn’t work?” Beren asked, thinking of the countless ruins that dotted the insane landscape.

 

“I suppose there might be a first time for everything,” Calliope replied noncomittaly.

 

“What happens to them?” Beren asked, crossing to the side of the road to peer at a white object concealed beneath a bush. Closer inspection revealed a bleached skull.

 

“They happen to themselves, magi fight, the summon things they cant control,” she shrugged her shoulders, “and in the Between there are things that don’t belong in our world, other gates that lead to places we can’t go.”

“Like that beast I fought?” Beren inquired shrewdly.

 

“That is one such creature,” Calliope admitted, “better not to think about it, it may attract them.”

“Nothing is ever simple with you, I bet…” Calliope thrust her hand out and blocked Beren from stepping further. He flinched back and dropped into a defensive crouch but no threat presented itself.

“We are here,” Calliope announced and stepped off the road into the void.

 

Water was all around them. Calliope was momentarily shocked to find herself beneath salt water. She hadn’t survived as long as she had by allowing panic to rule her and she spoke a word of Aklo, forbidding the water to touch her. A sudden pressure against her ear drums vanished and she dropped six inches to the sandy bottom, the water fleeing from the silt around her feet until it was dry as death. A large silvery fish flopped around on the sand. Calliope booted it into the wall of water a few feet from her, out of disgust than mercy. Beren splashed into the bubble spraying water at her, but it peeled  around her like rain being blown onto clear glass, refusing to make contact.

 

“Wha…” Beren spluttered, looking around a little wide eyed. Calliope’s clothing had altered again, waving in long silken strands as though she was the center of a kelp forest. There was light to see by, though it was dim, the surface was shimmering perhaps fifty feet above them.   Behind them stood a stone archway, caked with barnacles and seaweed and beyond that a shipwreck through which colorful fish darted.

 

“We are on the bottom of the ocean?” Neil (or whatever his name was) demanded incredulously.

“Truly my master, your powers of perception are razor sharp,” Calliope responded dryly, in more ways than one.

 

“The world has changed since my time it seems,” she said with commendable understatement.

 

“We should be a mile or two from the where you said the city was located,” she made a gesture in a westerly direction. The sand sloped upwards, slowly but noticeably towards a beach.

“Shall we continue our walk?”