Chapter 18: In a Cloud, with Friends

     Heathcliff gathered her feet up under her and without taking her eyes off Vermilla and the look on her face was concussed and pallid, and she precariously brought herself to a standing position, her loose control of the broom over the swells of air gradually tightening.
     “Do you think if,” she asked Endor, “if I get use close, you can tag her with the hand of glory?”
     Endor shrugged, and that seemed to be good enough for Heathcliff who began the ascent up through the stalled ranks of witches who turned and watched the blood-soaked wretches build height in the tented heavens.
     Endor pulled herself up to a standing position next to Heathcliff and grabbed her by the waist. This favorable setup seemed to urge the broom on to an even greater speed, and soon they were within distance to witness the shift in Vermilla’s demeanor, her face darkened, and she pulled back into the clouds behind her.
     Endor and Heathcliff shot into the cloudcover and looped around inside it, tailing the ragged cloth of the dark mistress who disappeared further within. The air was thick with ozone and sharp, clean water. They circled and looped around, gradually pulling to a stop, waiting and listening in the murmuring bosom. In the instant, the cloud charged with electricity and within they saw the flaring tentacles of vermilla who snatched up Heathcliff and left Endor failing with the broom as it jerked around on some uncertain path. She held fast with her hands and hugged it between her legs as it shot back around to Heathcliff’s location and rammed directly into Vermilla’s back, sending them all careening in a tumult where Heath was able to grab onto Endor, who pushed the hand into Vermilla’s evil heart, giving way to the flashing worlds within, drawing Heathcliff in after her, who wrenched herself free from Vermilla’s grip, losing a handful of hair in the process. The mood inside was uncharacteristically still. They sat a while, adjusting to the strange fields of abstractions and artifice. Nothing of Heathcliff’s inner tapestry of sensory experience and emotion, her core experience as bizarre and wonderful as it was, was present within Vermilla, and instead there ran, in the technicolor hallucinations of the mind, a world of constructs. A world of sigils, complex beyond her understanding, threads representing thousands of years of effort, working together in machinic complexity.
     Vermilla’s voice ripped through, like a flock of attacking birds, calling Heathcliff’s name, and the trembling globes of her sight swept the outer world searching for the missing persons.
     Endor and Heathcliff sailed deeper into the neon architecture, quietly assessing its gates and arches, its lively patterns, its vaulted cathedrals.
     “She’s altered herself,” Endor whispered, “from inside,” and the space crazed around her as Vermilla looked within and found them in the seat of her spirit.
     “Ah,” Vermilla’s vocal fry was drawn out over the fishbones patterns of her mind, “you’ve made quite the discovery, little witch. It was centuries before I discovered this secret, and centuries more before I knew what to do with it.”
     The lights and patterns buzzed and faded into a sparkling black static, and a pair of velvet hands descended, drooping down from the extradimensional fabric, and grabbed hold of Heathcliff’s by the neck. Endor leapt up to try and release her, but the hands showed no frailty, being born entirely of the mind, and the off hand slipped its fingers down Heathcliff’s throat, forcing them past her uvula, down her panicked neck and into the core of her being.
     But they shot back just as quickly, receding up into the void, and so returned the electric machinery, and Heathcliff and Endor floated in Vermilla’s mentis as she came under attack, at first by the pink lace Debbies, but soon followed by all the covens of Lith.