1. Hamatsin
He is now somewhere else.
He is cloaked, and fuzzy. Like in a dream, like in an endless sea of clouds. His internal voice is choked, only whispers and hums and tiny fragments. Verbal shrapnel of a conversation he may have been in, or something he was thinking just before. But he cannot think now, he cannot know anything. He cannot process, he is a pipeline. As he begins to feel it all simply passes through him, second by second. His mind can’t seem to stick. Thoughts and senses are trace, and quickly sputter out.
Hamatsin is in the space between things. Maybe he is deep in the woods, stuck under the moss on a stone. Maybe he is inside the walls of some old forgotten building. Maybe he is in a lightswitch, caught in the space between on and off. Maybe he is slipping through the scales of a lizard, darting under roots and leaves, too fast for anything to catch up to it. Regardless, he is somewhere undisturbed, unchecked, silent and dark.
An oval forms, surrounded by wisps of grass. Trees lumber up around him. Heavy black wind blows, aurally pitched down and twisted. He becomes anxious, his mind skips like a record player and loops on this one tiny grain of panic. Whatever reality he’s in is slowly taking shape, it all warbles and undulates over and over like thick liquid tilted back and forth.
Something clicks in his head. He has been here many times before, he is in the space between things. He is able to retain this, chanting internally. A calm falls over Hamatsin Djinn. The meaning quickly slips away, then the chant follows, but his calm holds. Steady, even.
Someone else is here. Little flecks of shadow slink up out of space and hover. The wind, once freezing, warms and slows. There’s now a pulsing, a rhythm. Hamatsin cannot place it to a particular sense but he is aware of it on some level. It deepens, it darkens until black and all encompassing. He senses a new presence, different, significant. Dark. It fades out quickly.
There’s huge pressure on all sides. Hamatsin feels compacted into a box, then squished down into a sardine-tin and sealed. Tight, heavy, squeezed beyond physical limit into one tiny cell. There is a brassy, tinny warble, so loud it distorts itself. Again and again he is blasted with this sensation. He is outside of time, it continues, but it all flows through him. There’s nothing for his mind to latch on to, no grip. So he flows with the sensation, thoughtless, on and on, over and over. Churning and lurching and turning inside out and over and in with the warble, flowing with it. All water in a circular stream.
Hamatsin’s cell begins to vibrate. It grows more violent and more violent, the constant pressure builds stronger and stronger, the warble careens through every physical input as he shakes and shrinks further. He feels as tiny as an atom, completely folded down. A single, indivisible, point. So small, he’s nothing.
“Pop!”
He blinks. Hamatsin Djinn is back where he was. He sees the street through his window, feels the weight of his armor on his back, hears birds and busy people.
You never get used to it. Never. The only piece of it he carries with him is that one. It’s all gone in an instant. More fleeting than even those tiny panel glimpses of dreams when you first wake. It doesn’t really feel like waking though, more of an unpausing. Or an instant snap back to normal playback speed from it slowed down to the max. Ghosts of sensations linger for an instant, thin as hair, clear as glass. No point in attempting they stick, they always go. Forcing it hurts anyway, wherever it is they all go feels so ugly, even in the tiniest murmurs it leaves on his skin, less than seconds long.
It’s gone. He feels as though he never even left, and by most metrics, he hadn’t.
Composure now fully restored, Hamatsin notices that his palm is clasped. So, what’ll it be this time. Been a minute, hasn’t it? He raises his fist and parts a sliver to blow in as he shakes. It rattles, blunt against his red-plated hand. He opens.
Sapphire. The little blue crystal shimmers even by just the low morning light from the window. For a moment, he’s caught in its beauty. Hamatsin holds it up, angles it through the dim daylight in brief admiration.
Sapphire. He pales instantly. It must be happening again. Things are stirring far below him. Deep under the ground it’s all coming alive. It must be this. Always a little calm before the storm. The volcano is open. Just the thought, chills of anticipation. A crooked grin stretches out over his face, his dark eyes narrow. He sees tectonic shifting, great subterranean continents of quartz, rock, iron, clashing, colliding, scraping between one another. Total geologic war. He can almost hear them. Hear the thunder from within, hear the gods of the underworld as they clash, slow, immovable, by total force of the planet. He can almost taste the smoke, full and sharp with heat. Feel the soot on his face, the flame lapping close, dancing between his fingers. That serpentine distortion of sight near something hot as magma.
What secrets lie in the earth? In the depths of her molten seas, in the black corners of her infinite labyrinth of caves, where stalactites drip and fires rage? Her pitfalls and lush ravines. Her rich, glimmering cities of gem, locked out by mountains of stone, thick all the way through.
Something is calling him back, not just his orders. He can feel it. The earth is coming alive again, all the way inside, way deep down.
The volcano is open.
Hamatsin Djinn has work to do.
