The Fitful Past

[Ammie]

Amaryllis dreamt fitfully as the still unfamiliar Manhattan everlight played its musical shadow-theater across the scrim of the apartment's silk curtains. She pitched like a ship at storm, muttering the near-language of the dreamer.

~~~

Across the world, in another time, a sweet faced twenty-something sat motionless on a threadbare carpet staring into the large, flat bowl in front of her. The tears of her wrist had filled it, and created a smooth, crimson mirror - and the girl's heart fluttered as she locked eyes with the stranger reflected there.
A moment of objective clarity took the girl back to her raw self, and her eyes drifted with disbelief over the thick eyeliner, black lipstick, facial jewelry, and chaotic hair work that all suddenly seemed like so much pointless escape from pain.

The Woman Behind Her, with voice like velvet and moonlight, spoke up. "You need to hurry. Speak while you can. The ambulance will be here soon."

The girl mustered her courage, and forced her breath into words for the first time since her recent self-referential call to 999. "Is he alive?"

The Woman's laughter always reminded the girl of a windchime. "Yes, of course. He's alive, and he misses you."

The girl smiled a little at the stranger in the blood, and the stranger favored her with an uncomfortable smirk.

"Will I be strong enough to bring him back home when I find him?"

A new voice, the Man In The Dark Corner, spoke up in his raspy, dangerous reverberation. "You can to do whatever you want to do. Like the guy always said - do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

The girl struggled against turning to confront the Man, but she prevailed and kept her eyes fixed on the face in the blood. "I don't like you. You killed Amanda. Don't talk to me anymore."

The Man's chortle was like the sound of a great slab of stone being pulled across gravel, brought to her through radio static. He laughed, but he dutifully spoke no more.

The girl was getting light-headed. The amateurish tourniquet around her left wrist may have bought her minutes, but she would need to work on how deeply she cut for the next time. If there was a next time. The blood had to be fresh, and there needed to be enough of it to surface the bowl. it was a difficult and deadly juggling act.
She could hear the sirens of the 999 medical response vehicle now.

She probably had one more question before they either arrived, or she slipped into the black.
She had performed the ritual to divine her path. She'd collected enough information to know that her best bets lay in either the state of Maine, or in the mountains of Romania. There was more evidence that pointed to Romania, but she only had the resources for one trip. She'd wanted to ask. But in her heart she knew that Maine was the answer. Overcome by the emotion and fear of a life on the edge of its end, she reached out with her heart and asked one of the forbidden questions. It was a short list, but if she was going to die, it was the one she wanted an answer to.

"Am I doomed to destroy or chase away everyone I cherish?"

The stranger in the mirror looked bored with the question, the bitch was pretending to fall asleep.

The Woman tried to answer, but her voice faded away as the girl's eyes closed and broke their contact with the reflection in the bowl of blood.

"No, not all, my dear child. Most. But one day you will find......."

The girl collapsed sideways, her knee sending the bowl flipping through the air in a sanguine rainbow of forensic overtime.
EMTs burst through the door moments later, their words and actions a blur of noise and light and motion. The girl smiled as she felt the cold creeping in. She knew she was going to live. Long enough, at least, to fulfill the Woman's prophecy. Whatever it was.

~~~

An ambulance roared by the apartment's window, cutting through New York's night song and wresting Ammie from her dream. She sat up screaming, and pulled the sheets up around her.
Everything was suddenly so quiet. The TV was still on from the movie she'd fallen asleep watching. Its screen saver filled the room with a soft blue glow, broken by the long revolving shadows of the ceiling fan as it hummed cool air onto her bare shoulders and chilled the sweat on her forehead. Her eyes stared ahead, seeing nothing, as her brain swam in the hazy borderline of dreams, trying desperately to remember what the dream was about and why it felt so damned important.

She unconsciously rubbed an old scar on her left wrist - a relic from her life before leaving the U.K. to search for Teddy - and wondered why she suddenly felt so.....happy.

[Ammie]

Ægir security officer Jim Gordon, chosen by Seanne from a short list of worthy security officers because his name was Jim Gordon, now lived outside the CEO's apartment's door. He glanced up from reading Carl Weaver's The Fog of New England as Ammie stepped into the hallway, and she smilingly presented him with coffee, and the type of pink grapefruit that the man held most dear.

A brief exchange of pleasantries later, Ammie crept into the apartment to find a very comfortably-dressed Ms. Rystaad snoring the sleep of the utterly exhausted, stretched out with all limbs to cover as much of the surface of the living room couch as possible, kitten comfortably nestled on top of her right ear.

Chuck Norris and Christy Brinkley filled the room with their wee-hours promises of fitness as Ammie doffed her boots and padded to the kitchen, putting away the bottle of champagne she'd brought home and pouring herself a glass of milk. It had been one hell of a weekend.

The third-story Greenwich Village loft had a pleasent view of the streets below, where by day the trendy and affluent sipped their complicated coffees in the shade of non-indigenous trees, while comparing the cases they'd chosen for the latest Anansi gadget they'd had their PA's stand in line for. It was a source of humor for Ammie that bordered on any TV show.
Tonight as she leaned against the glass pane with her milk, there was no such entertainment. The streets still glistened with a recent rain, and the yuppie hoards were home in bed, preparing for their Monday morning teleconferences with the office next door.

So much had changed in the twenty-five years she'd missed. The world had taken such a leap forward into computer technology that movies like Tron, Wargames, and Blade Runner (recent releases to her) seemed both oddly prophetic and outdated. When she woke in 2012, it had taken months to get used to things which the public took for granted. She looked for flying cars and replicants., and was a little disappointed when she found none.

She finished the milk and slipped into the bedroom, grabbing a quick shower and climbing directly into bed, her mind still reeling with thoughts of the past. Just before sleep took her, she remembered an image from 1987, just before she made her leap through time. A doorway in the middle of a room, wreathed in blue and orange flame.

~~~

The girl was older now. Wiser. Confidant. A traveler who had crossed the ocean, and stood toe-to-toe with the specter of death. She pulled her old faded denim backpack onto her shoulder, and tipped the cabbie. Her ride from Kingsmouth to the Overlook Motel had been a pleasant one, full of the charms and boats and lighthouses she'd been promised in the postcards of coastal Maine, set to Michael Jackson's radio address, explaining to the world that 'bad' had been forever redefined.

She'd never stayed at a place so charming and yet so run-down, but she had been assured that her brother was here, shut up by himself, showing his face in town about once a week to purchase odd things. For the price she'd paid in blood, and they deals she'd made to find him, she hoped so. She had little left to trade to follow another leg of his journey.

A brief inquiry in the office revealed that a strange man with an English accent had indeed been staying in room 13, and Ammie knocked to no reply. The windows were covered from the inside, and she listened at the door for noises but heard nothing. She plopped down on the walkway and sighed, staring across the parking lot and wondering what to do next. She lit a cigarette and watched it burn, and chanted a couplet that was supposed to make smoke dance. It worked every time.

"Amaryllis?"

The voice came from behind her - firm, familiar, but as distant as home. She turned around and saw nothing there, but rose and once more knocked on the door. No answer.

She drew a deep breath and turned the handle. The door swung inwards, unlocked. The room was empty, and darker that it should have been, but she saw her brother's distinctive suitcase open against the wall, and let herself in, closing the door behind her.

[Ammie]

Ammie woke closer to noon than what could be called a proper morning, and padded into the living room with the grunting noise which announced that her coffee hunting had commenced. There was a half-pot already brewed, next to a folded note in Shay's handwriting that said. "You're a lazy bum. <3" She smiled at it and extracted the go-juice from its glass prison, piling on four spoonfuls of sugar.

Mid-day was when the Bohemians came out. Ammie walked to the window and looked down at the denizens of the street, marveling at how prohibitively expensive it must be to keep up with being poor in this part of town. The fashionable thrift-store type of custom labels. Jeans pre-faded and floppy hemp hats that somehow had the effect of both a beret and a marijuana-leaf t-shirt without bowing to the stereotypes and corporate soullessness of either...maaaaan.

She plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV, flipping through the seemingly infinite channels until she came across The Goonies. She smiled at the familiar feelings it stirred in the midst of the still sometimes so alien age, and seeing it through the impossibly advanced, crystal-clear television was like looking out the window of a starship as it flies over your childhood neighborhood.

She fell asleep again like the lazy bum she'd been told to be, coffee only half-finished and One-eyed Willy's "rich stuff" only half recovered.

~~~

The darkness of the room was thicker than just the absence of light. The light came from the ambient air and illuminated only what it chose to. Just enough to see by, but far from adequate.

The girl stepped lightly across the carpet towards her brother's suitcase, stopping almost immediately as she felt the air thicken around her. There was something here...in the same space...just out of sync with the world. She backed up and quickly set to work, bringing occult talismans and supplies out of her bag and arranging them on the floor. From a lacquered wooden box she produced her treasured atheme - its razor sharp blade forged from meteoric iron and hand-decorated with the infernal characters most commonly used in her brother's work - and drew it across her palm.

Her blood fell into a small bone dish, and she dipped her first two fingers into it, covering them in red. She held them forward, searching, chanting under her breath as she waited expectantly for them to contact the thick place in the air. When it happened, it sent a deep shiver through her body, and she stopped to breathe. Her fingertips told her that she was touching a grained wooden surface, invisible to her eyes. Summoning her will, she quickly moved her hand to the right, streaking the air with a floating line of blood.

"Think, Ammie, think..." she muttered, her mind reeling with theory upon theory from the library in her brain. The nerves seize as the mind second-guesses. Her experience till now was almost entirely theoretical, basing her knowledge on the work of her brother and the very few glimpses into the Secret World which she had happened upon. Her rational mind screamed at her to back off, go study, do research, do it right. But her impulsive mind, ever the stronger orator, compelled her to continue forward lest she miss her chance.

"Please. Help me. Help me through this."

Suddenly her mind was clear. From a codex of possibilities, a single page from an obscure text became clear. She pronounced its words by reflex, as if reading aloud, and a ghostly door burned through the fabric of reality, wreathed in blue and orange flames. It opened onto a pyroclastic landscape from a primordial earth. Flesh stripping wind blew across cracked and broken plains, and acid-laced air burned her nose. She entered by compulsion, and never noticed when the entrance to earth vanished behind her.
She choked and gagged on the environment, falling to her knees almost instantly, and cutting them on the glass-like rocks. She tried to look around her but the air sliced her eyeballs and the heat robbed her of tears to assuage them. She fell powerless and blinding, mere steps into Hell, and her heart cried out through her voice in despair, unable to sort the order of her crumbling dreams into proper lamentation.

Before her sight was stripped away, she saw two forms approaching, traversing the terrain as if it were a sunny meadow. She wrapped herself in her arms and sobbed, writhing in physical, emotional, and psychological pain.

"Oh, Amaryllis. You always did have to be part of the project."

The voice was Teddy. She'd recognize it anywhere. She attempted to call to him, but only screams would come out.

"Saccarissa, tend to these vultures. I'll need some time to send her back." Said Wicker, very near to her now.
She felt hands touch her shoulders, and a sudden blessed numbness spread over her body - the absence of pain as healing as any medicine.
"Listen, my sister. I'm going to surround you with Anima, and transfer you through Agartha. I cannot be picky when or where you'll emerge, but you will live. When you emerge, you must n...r...t...to th...less you.....ember....."

His words were obscured by a deafening roar, and his presence withdrew from her side briefly.
"Remember, Ammie. And hold on to your mind. This will not be painless."

Brilliant pain tore her apart. Seconds that took hours saw her human form eradicated and rebuilt as Anima, which was rejected from Hell as unnatural and ejected into Agartha to meet her new fate some twenty-five years into her future.

The man and his succubus remained, strolling towards their own in a realm outside of time.

[Ammie]

The light of the fading day slipped past the elevated New York horizon as Ammie chewed the end of her ball-point into a nervous oblivion while scheming the final stages of her party.
The floor of the apartment had been converted (in Shay's absence) into a convoluted web of paper scraps reminiscent of paranoid schizophrenia, which Ammie danced between barefoot, snagging one up to make a note, and moving it across the arrangement to tape it to another. She hopped up on the couch and gazed across the chaos, mentally tracing the lines of logistics and timing necessary to pull everything off.

A flash of movement tore across the living space as Lilly unleashed her kitten-fury, snatching the list of pizza delivery times, and running away towards the ethereal dimension where cats hide objects like it was the enemy team's flag. Which it was.

"Agh! Drop it, you bloody menace!" she screamed, leaping from the couch across the field of preparations and stumbling to all fours before regaining her balance and re-directing towards the thief. Lilly escaped into the closet where she realized that she'd been caught, dropping the note and climbing Ammie's trenchcoat to the top shelf. Ammie glared at Lilly as she picked up the schedule, blowing her hair out of her eyes with an exasperated puff. The kitten glared back in a way that said "Yeah, that's right. And your -mother-, too."

Ammie closed the door on the kitten, immediately eliciting a series of annoyed meowlings which made her victory complete until she returned to the living area to see her system scattered by the force of her chase.

She tossed the pizza schedule randomly into the mix and stomped to the kitchen to refill her glass of merlot. Thirty minutes later she was asleep on the couch, pillow over her eyes, dreaming and mumbling and falling through time.

~~~

Hellfire exploded like a warhead against the golden air, as seventy percent of Amaryllis Wicker's soul burst through the walls of reality into Agartha, beginning its long fall into the infinite spaces of that hollow world, only given form by the scraps of memory still left to her and the powerful magicks her brother had woven.

Agartha's ambient Anima set to work immediately, doing its best to restore her to normal, given the incomplete toolset it was forced to work with. Largely empty at this time, Agartha's custodians gazed with automated interest at the newcomer as it fell past them again and again, each time a little more whole.

In the realm of her birth, time wore on and on. The Berlin Wall fell. The Iron Lady fell. The Princess fell. The Towers fell. The Pope fell.

And then Tokyo fell. And Amaryllis stopped falling.

From inside Agartha, the Tokyo incident ripped through the status quo like an atomic blast, and Yggdrasil groaned and quaked with the might of its force. Branches of reality ripped free, severing possible pasts and futures as Gaia squared her feet and braced for another blow. Anima flooded the space like antibodies, stripping scabbed-over thin spots and bleeding forth into the world. Vast clouds of Her bees swarmed the cracks in reality, working feverishly to rebuild the Tree's defenses before the Dreamers' agents could get through.

The surge of raw Anima tore through Amaryllis' recovering form like lightning, forcing her soul to become whole again by grafting in patches of raw life force (blank canvases which would fill later, to grave consequence.) She was expelled from the realm with the first waves of bees, as they began to recruit lifeforms across the globe to fight against the hunger of the Dreamers.

She awoke in the summer of 2012, in a computerized world which had no place for her. Her memories of everything after leaving England for Maine were gone. Hazy at best, surrounded by the most horrible buzzing, and near-physical stabs of electric pain. She wandered street after street of an unknown Asian land, shunned and alone, never hungry, cold, or tired, but desperately wanting to be - if just to cling to something familiar.

On the edge of sanity, she was taken in by a group of monks. They fed her and clothed her, and taught her about her new world and new powers. Through constant training, they promised, her path would become clear. They could show her the pathways to her destiny. To understanding what she'd lost.

But through all she'd forgotten, she already remembered what she'd lost. She'd lost her brother. And she was going to find him, and bring him home.

[Ammie]

((It's been a long time coming, but this will be the last chapter of Ammie's backstory, and leads right up to the events of the Hell runs. Please tell me what you think so far - I haven't received any feedback at all, so I don't know if I'm on the right track here, but I was feeling inspired by all the great work everyone's been doing, and decided that the story needed an ending.

For those of you who took the time to read it, thank you. It's been a labor of love.))

~~~~~~~~~~

It had been several weeks since her last bout of nightmares. To be fair, there was a lot going on. Engagement, new job, rescue, other rescue...who had time to sleep well enough to dream?

The apartment smelled strongly of a spice-scented candle that Shay had purchased on a whim, and Ammie had put on an Amethystium album and sworn to clean up the messes. She kept her oath for at least forty feet, cutting a path of straightened, cleaned area all the way from the door to the bookcase where she discovered her copy of an old translated Tibetan text which she seemed to recall having information that might be useful in Beryl's search for Shamballah. She sat on the couch for "just a moment", and fell asleep reading.

~~~~

The girl lived for the moments of contact. The scrambling, clawing sex that brought her so close to having feelings, by way of the pulse of someone else's heart inside her. The biting, the scratches across her back - being slammed against a wall was so intimate and raw.
She was a seeker, now. Enough control over her new powers to walk in the world without sudden inadvertent bursts of lightning, but still sophomoric enough to use Gaia's blessings for selfish and unproductive reasons. She drifted from city to city, always moving, always lost. Fleeing the strange and horrible post 9-11 world of mobile phones and computers and everything unfamiliar, and looking for anything she recognized.

Once, there was a goal. Find her brother. Bring him home. But she didn't even remember his name some days, when she woke up in a pile of bodies, covered in sticky fluids and perhaps a scrap of clothing. When she woke up in the alleyway of a cold European city in someone else's coat. When she woke up as the sole survivor of a cult's mass-suicide, laughed at the other kool-aid drinkers and mocked their silly faith as she took their wallets and left the door open on exit.

She wandered some months, so empty, seeking companionship, but finding only herself as reliable. And it was during this time that she had a reunion with her childhood friends, the Woman and the Man. Maybe they were scapegoats once. Maybe they were demons, whispering through the walls. Maybe they were the result of whatever had taken her parents, or a reaction to what happened to Amanda. After months on the road, the Woman Behind Her wasn't even whispering anymore, she was chatting. "Fuck that guy, he looks rich, and I bet he's got good blow." The girl knew it was her own idea, but a person can only be so alone for so long before their internal monologue becomes their only constant friend.

The Man in the Dark Corner was not as welcome as his sister. But he was not there to be wanted. He was needed. He was needed in Seoul when he made a would-be rapist's cock explode through a use of blood magick that the girl would have never imagined. He was needed in a German forest when the weak and petty girl, though starving, was too squeamish to eat the good meat in front of her. He'd had to take the memory to protect her. She needed so much protecting.

One day, the girl wandered back into London. Hit the rave scene. Fell in with a crew of local punks. Slept with them, filled her veins with them, got into a car with them, and walked away from the crash scene alone.
Somehow, she wandered enough streets to find Ealdwic, and the light of her past began to burn away the haze like daybreak. The quest. Her brother. How had she forgotten?

Her heart surged with a real feeling for the first time since she'd come to this insane, computerized world. It hit her like a gunshot, ripping a river of tears from her eyes and a single scream of abject pain rang like the church bell of her fractured soul.

She spent a week collecting herself and re-organizing her old search data. She frequented the bars and nightclubs of Ealdwic, looking for someone who might know something about Teddy - or at least who was competent enough to help her look.

One night in a pub called the Horned God, a handsome man named Carl Weaver bought her a drink, and took the time to listen to the girl's story. He introduced her to his co-workers, and suggested that they might be able to help.

And they did, in more ways than she could have imagined.

[sersi]

((its been a fun story and happy we got to be a part of it, and the surprising ways its turned out XD))

[caonedh]

((I thought it was great; it's nice to know more about what made Ammie Ammie. I'm also glad that I've got to see what her character has become since Carl bought her that drink; it's like we've been able to see the girl become Ammie, and the process continues ))

[kovergirl]

(( I enjoyed the read very much! You have a way with description that's very dense without ever being verbose. I like it!

On the other hand, this makes me wish that I had found TSW and Aegir a lot sooner than I did, but I suppose that isn't a bad thing! ^_^ ))

[caonedh]

((All of us newcomers have felt that way at one time or another, Kover ))

[sersi]

((I liked TSW before it was cool. *puts on hipster glasses*))