His Experience

"Tell and show us everything." My smooth voice flowed out of me as I built a bubble of essence around us changing the rules of space and time. We could see everything in minutes, one hundred and twenty years later the bubble broke like glass and water around us and we saw every story our brother had collected during his time in the land of illusions. We were full of foods of all kinds, one meal we would need again in hours but the other was a feast enough for a generation.

It turns out we had a history with these Gnomes, over a thousand years ago one of the grandparents had been ill. It was a magical illness that had slowly been taking their life slowly over a century. Robbie being the head of the healers guild was better informed and able to deal with all known and several unknown illnesses. It was a hard case, even for the healers guild. There was no known history of it in the family, no evidence of a curse or other magical infection, and no evidence of it having come from any foods or insects. They were simply sick with some kind of wasting illness slowly eating away at their magical life force. We knew of course that magical illnesses were slow to kill and even slower when infecting others but as it had already been a couple of centuries by the point that Robbie had been contacted the worry was that it had or would spread soon. So most of the family was put into a magical quarantine to prevent whatever this was from spreading past the family.

Most magical quarantines are pretty basic really, I hadn't been part of one but I've seen them happen over the last few thousand years. There was a realm where we kept a house, a large house with rooms that could be like any place the magical being is naturally from, so Gnomes being partial to forests and living in stomps and under mounds get grassy fields with stomps and streams, ponds and lakes, mushrooms and toadstools. The quatrain isn't really very different from our home. House, of course, has a life all its own, it feels, thinks, and has even produced other living rooms and buildings, how, we don't know and we had never really wanted to think about it. This place, way in the mountains of the Elvish realms, was given an essence crystal as its keystone set in its fireplace mantle with an ever-present fire burning it its hearth. The essence stone gave the quarantine house the ability to change and grow, it was programmed with a simple set of rules, rules that took input from scrying stones set around the building and grounds, as it witnessed the goings on within the building and surrounding area it changed according to its programming. A couple of gremlins kept the maintenance up on the building and the house itself. Gremlins were the first of Fey's kind to adopt and use modern technologies and were better versed than most humans on the subject. Its problem is the longer lives of gremlins compared to humans. They may be small but are pretty much immortal unless they were killed of course but they don't have any natural enemies. Thankfully they didn't reproduce at a very fast rate or on their own so the number stayed down even after millennia.

At first, the Gnomish family was placed in one of the rooms at the quarantine house but as more time passed without treatment for the grandparents fear grew, fear that the illness would spread. So a seal was put around the room and more of the family was moved into the zone. Thankfully the rooms could grow as big as a glen or as small as a box depending on what's needed by the inhabitants. It was a nice place, the Gnomes didn't mind being there, still, it couldn't have been nice for them, no matter how much it looked like home it still wasn't real.

Finally, after 2 years and after so much was tried, Robbie found a combination of the essence of herbs and roots that lifted the illness from the eldest of the family along with a test that would show signs of the illness in any creature plagued by it. After working so long with the family and being among the only beings that couldn't catch the illness, some of the family had grown close to the Underhill family. Karen and Robbie were the closest and knew them all very well. Steven and the rest of us knew them but only from researching the illness but still, we all knew them in one sense or another. So when Steven came on them in this illusion, this prison it was a shock. It was even more of a shock for the rest of us as we hadn't spent the last one hundred and twenty years in an illusion with them.

"What are they all doing in there?" I asked as the bubble of time broke around us, returning us to the natural flow and streams of time here in the human realm. Though we were able to watch the entire memory from his stone it came without sound. The gist of what was happening was apparent, whoever or whatever did this to them needed a workforce, and whatever they were mining and refining was unlike anything any of us had ever seen. "They were mining something called kinder fuel." Steven told us "It seems to be used to power something older than our family and more powerful than all of us combined but I couldn't ask anyone about it while I was there." Steven finished, of course, we understood why he couldn't ask anyone in there about it. Even standing directly in front of anyone affected by the spell they would pass right through you as if you were a ghost. "I put my memory stone on a stump and tried to interact with them in every way, I stomped on them and stood in front of them. I yelled and screamed for hours, I tried to pick things up and throw them but I couldn't touch anything, I couldn't eat anything or drink anything." He told us a matter of fact as if he had just resigned to it. He went on to tell us that anything that had a normal shadow and light pattern he could touch, hold, and feel. If it was the reverse it seemed to just pass through him as if it was nothing. "I was only able to eat anything I brought in with me and drink only what I had on me." Steven was reflecting on his time there as he spoke with a distant look in his eyes as if he was still there. "Which means for over a hundred years I hardly ate or drank anything, when I went there I wasn't planning a long expedition of any kind so I only had what I stored in my pouch." As he spoke we could hear the memory in his voice, speaking absently as if he was accustomed to speaking to no one. I hadn't thought about it while watching his stone but he had no one to talk to, no hugging, no kissing, no physical contact of any kind the entire time he was gone.

"Why didn't you leave and come get us to back you up, or at least get supplies to last you a few months?" David asked Steven, he looked full of dread. He and Mathew had never been without one another for more than a day so for him, the idea for him would have been unbearable. As David finished his thought he and Mathew looked at one another across the table the both seemed to suddenly wish they were side by side, scheming and planning some horrible trick on the rest of us. "I tried, trust me I tried to leave but the spell created a vortex of a kind, the inside of the tunnel was affected by the spell and I couldn't touch it once I was in there and none of my spells worked to contact you or anyone." His voice was full of terror and panic. "I tried for over a hundred years, spacing the food I had out in bits and pieces. I had to ration my stored-up essence from the stories I've collected over the years." Steven indicated that he couldn't even exploit the story he saw unfold in front of him from the Gnomes. It's as if nothing translated into anything real from this world unless you were affected by the spell that had created the land. It seemed to go past just the shadows, the light, and the inability to touch anything. If the lives of others couldn't produce essence for us then it had to be a deeper and darker spell than anything we had come up against but what couldn't be explained was the lack of communication." Why couldn't you contact us, Steven? Our ability to connect with one another has never required us to even use essence before so why didn't you reach out to us?" I wondered out loud to him, I was so full of thought that I all but whispered my question. David and Mathew had moved off to a corner, Karen not far away from them, Larry, Robbie, and I sat in front of the fireplace now. Steven alone still sat at the table, he watched as the world projected past the windows turned into deeper portions of the night, the moon searching for its place in the midnight sky. Then we all decided that we had seen and healed enough for the night. The horror of not seeing, touching, or speaking to anyone for over a hundred years was painful for us, who have never been more than a thought away from one another for more than three thousand years. It was frightening to most of us, to me it sounded like a blessed vacation, at least a few days of peace then it would become a horror.

I love my family, I love the work we do, and the help that we give to the communities we are a part of. I'm even happy being a leader, at first it was hard to lead not just our family or our village but to be a leader among the entire magical community while helping to heal the human world as well as a lot for me to deal with during the first couple of centuries, a couple of years away and not being able to be contacted would be a blessing for me. I know that after maybe 5 years would have broken me down. I would have missed not just interacting but helping people.

Steven, lost in his thoughts about his time in the trap, had summoned his favorite expression. A small bone Uluu, Upa, our grandfather made years and years ago. It's a simple expression, it could cut through anything it came against even splitting air or water creating a vacuum or a walkway, it has cut down boulders the size of a house and separated flame from a roaring fire putting it out. Now he was just holding it in his hand, rocking it back and forth on the pant leg over his knee. He wasn't using any force or essence to activate its ability so there was no cutting, after thousands of years it was dull and blunt without essence to push it into the magical weapon it could be. It was an absent minded thing he has done all our lives.

"It's not like I didn't try everything to leave that place, after a few days in the darkness of that place I became a bit desperate." Steven said, still looking at his Uluu. Memory still in his long away voice. I again started to think about it again, what it would be like after the first few days, maybe a week the need to escape and get back to the realms we walk regularly would become desperate. From what Steven said he couldn't even breach the dirt of the tunnel from his side. I'm sure he would have even used his Uluu to help him open a portal. Thankfully our expressions sat in a pocket in our satchels that existed in a space and time all its own. The bags weren't expressions, it turns out you can join expressions together and change them but we tried to store expressions within expressions with disastrous results, long before we learned how to create interdimensional spaces with rules of time and space all their own. They used to look like rook sacks when we were younger and still living on tribe lands but it would have stuck out too much in the modern human world so we created the bags at our waists to hold them and a linking spell that allowed us to summon them without having to dig around or open the bags. It looked more fitting and we drew less attention to ourselves. Which we have always needed in this realm, looking normal and fitting in. We went so far as to make the satchels into fanny-packs in the nineteen eighties. It was tragic, It looked ridiculous, especially when we were in the mystic realms. The Fey realms, the Gnome realms, Avalon, The circle realm which wasn't as funny as it sounds. Our fanny-packs just looked crazy out in the realms and oddly drew more attention in the realms then our satchels did in the human world so we changed them back and just came off as odd. "What was the name of the realm you were stuck in?" As David and Matt asked, it dawned on all of us as they asked here at dinner or in the bubble of space/time that I created, we never found out. I don't remember seeing it anywhere or seeing anyone speaking it.In order to create a world, it first needs a name. Giving something a name, whether an expression or a spell or a world giving it a name creates the bonds that are needed for anything to take hold in all the realms. Also the person that names it has a special connection to it, it can also tell a lot about the being that created it. "I never saw it written down, or carved into anything, or hear anyone speak it the entire time I was there." Steven answered. Robbie spoke next, his rich deep, smooth voice rolled over the now sitting room House had created around us. "How is the realm locked in place? Everyone knows that a world becomes more permanent the more it was spoken about, the more writing, the more evidence given that the world exists, the more it and everything about it was anchored into place." Robbie was as surprised as he was now intrigued. The tangerine shade of his orange robes grew deeper and darker as he walked further into the room and closer to Steven.