The Unwinding Void appearing in a small town isn’t a surprise to me, not really. It is one to the town and people in it as there is a distant lone police car and the early morning staff diving back into shops and closing doors as the Unwinding Void is simply there. It has weight and height and other things and no things, a pulsing imposition on the normal world.
The wanting in it is for destruction, something so fundamental it is not even hunger.
Most of the people are too numb to be properly afraid, which is for the best.
I walk across the road, checking for cars out of a reflex never lost from childhood.
The doors to the coffee shop are shut, two staff and four customers huddled away from the door two stores down from me.
My phone beeps with a text. I glance down and text that I have this to the wandering magician. He doesn’t get to sleep in often.
“Hello,” I say, and the Unwinding Void understands me by virtue of having entered the universe via the correct channels. Awareness shifts toward me. “My name is Charlie.”
/Minor light. Not thing. Flee./
“I am a god-eater by nature, and you are not a god. Nor something I should try to eat, I imagine.” The police car is getting closer, which isn’t going to help matters. I smile, or something like it. “I am friends with a boy from Outside the universe and the wandering magician of this era, and I am a Charlie who has not had coffee. You are why the coffee shop is closed.”
There is a pause that isn’t. Awareness shifts. Spreads.
A noise comes from the Unwinding Void like a dream being deflated. /Terrify. Danger./
“I do terrify Jay. Especially before I’ve had coffee. Do you want to find out why?”
The world ripples. Patterns appear and shift and the Unwinding Void isn’t a moment later, moving to some other place or time far from here.
I am not a wandering magician, but the door to the coffee shop does open as I walk up to it. I order a large coffee, cream, two sugars, and the staff snap to it, shaking themselves back into reality.
I tip well and leave, sipping coffee as I walk back to the motel. My hand shakes only a little, and stills as I glare at it. Some day that bluff won’t work, but Jay is afraid of me and other entities from Outside sense that. That he’s also a solid friend they might not understand, but Jay is nothing if not far more complex than he thinks he is.
Jay appears beside me, all eleven and human to every sense. “I hugged a Void so it wound all up and is happy now,” he says with a huge grin.
I ruffle his hair. “I am not surprised. And Honcho?”
I pause at the uhm. “Kiddo?”
“You know how you kinda wanted him to sleep on and he’s not sleeping in and I think there’s an oops cuz he’s sleeping extra well?”
I walk around the street corner. The motel is covered in thorns and vines. The police car has stopped in front of it and the officer has the dazed look of someone who has walked out of the world they know. I’m all too familiar with it.
I close my eyes. Have another gulp of coffee. It’s going to be one of those mornings.
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