LXIV
Delavega bowed half his body, formal and old‑world, before sending me off at the airport. Paulo's orange truck was already rumbling away, crates of citrus stacked high for his delivery route. And then I was alone, strapped into a narrow seat as the tiny plane clawed its way over the Mediterranean.
The hat man, now in his cat form, lounged inside the carrier like a smug little demon.
He meowed once fear making his small voice quiver as the plane dipped.
I pressed a hand to my stomach trying to manually settle it down. It didn't work well as I worked to swallow down stomach contents by gulping air.
His voice arrogantly mocked through the mirror tucked beside him.
"My darling… you chose this pathetic contraption."
Another dip. A hard one.
My stomach lurched into my throat. I gasped, gripping the armrest as the carrier rocked. The cat slid sideways, yowling in theatrical outrage.
The overhead lights flickered.
A few passengers cried out.
Someone crossed themselves and muttered rapid Spanish prayers.
The intercom crackled, the pilot's voice strained.
"Por favor, mantengan sus cinturones abrochados"
Then, in clipped English:
"Please keep your seatbelts on passengers, we are experiencing turbulence over the Mediterranean."
The plane shuddered again, metal groaning.
I squeezed my eyes shut against dizziness. The hat man's cat form pressed against the carrier bars, tail flicking.
"You're going to faint, pet. How adorable."
"Shut up," I whispered, swallowing hard.
Another jolt. Someone screamed.
The lights flickered again then steadied in a glaring orange-red emergency.
The hat man's tone shifted, just slightly.
"This is not normal turbulence."
I opened my eyes. The cabin was dim.
The air felt too cold.
The shadows between the seats seemed… thicker.
The hat man's pupils narrowed to slits.
"Something is following us."
The plane dropped sharply. I screeched as the plane dipped in an abrupt, stomach‑wrenching fall that made every passenger cry out.
I grabbed the carrier, heart pounding.
The Mediterranean stretched dark and endless below us.
And somewhere in the turbulence, something moved.
The turbulence wasn't just turbulence.
The moment the lights flickered again, longer this time, dimming to a dull orange-red glow. The hat man's cat form went rigid inside the carrier. His fur bristled, ears flattening, pupils narrowing to slits.
"Pet… look outside."
I didn't want to, but I did.
A long, slithering shape rolled out of the ink‑dark heavens, its movement fluid and impossibly slow, like a serpent swimming through space itself. Its body was made of rings of slick black, each segment shifting like oil, interspersed with pinpricks of light—tiny stars embedded in its skin, glowing like a drifting galaxy.
It wasn't flying. It was coiling.
The creature's length was impossible to determine, its body blended into the darkness, disappearing into the horizon. It could have been a mile long. Ten. A hundred. The scale was wrong, too big for the sky, too big for the world.
Then its maw like a black hole tearing itself wide.
Light bent toward it. The stars around it warped.
The plane's cabin lights flickered again, sucked toward that impossible void.
Rows of undulating teeth in spirals, rings, shifting patterns. It moved like a living vortex, pulling in everything around it.
A woman two rows ahead screamed. Someone else sobbed.
The pilot shouted something in Spanish far too fast for me to catch, then again in English:
"Passengers—seatbelts—turbulence—please remain—"
His voice cut out.
The creature drifted closer, its star‑speckled skin shimmering like a night sky stretched over something ancient and hungry. It could have swallowed a small asteroid without noticing.
The small plane dipped violently, metal groaning, wings shuddering.
I clutched the carrier, heart hammering.
The hat man's voice, still in that deceptively tiny cat body, was low, sharp, and utterly serious.
"That is not of this world."
Another drop. The cabin shook violently. Another scream.
The creature's maw widened.
"Pet… brace yourself."
The plane lurched sideways as the star‑skinned leviathan rolled closer, its gravity pulling us toward its impossible mouth.
The cabin lights flickered several times then steadied in a sickly dim glow. Everyone else was too panicked to look outside. They clutched armrests, prayed under their breath, cried, shouted for the flight attendants. The plane shuddered like it was being dragged by invisible hands.
The hat man was currently still in the fluffy body of a tuxedo cat with a too‑smug face and a white bib. He stood on his hind legs on top of the carrier, which had broken open in the turbulence, tiny paws pressed to the porthole.
His pupils blew wide.
His tail puffed.
His voice, when it came, was a horrified whisper.
"This… this is impossible. It's a void worm. A baby void worm."
I stared at the cosmic serpent rolling through the sky, its star‑speckled body coiling like a galaxy come alive, its maw a black hole swallowing light.
"A baby?" I yelled, gripping the seat as the plane dropped hard enough to make my teeth clack. "That thing's a BABY? How the fuck do you know!"
The fuselage groaned. The overhead bins rattled.
Someone screamed behind me.
The hat man's cat form flattened against the carrier bars as another violent dip sent my stomach into my throat.
"Yes, pet," he hissed. "A baby. The adults are… larger. One of the people I…uh…absorbed, encountered a larger version once, he ended up digested into the mirror universe as a spirit."
The plane lurched sideways, metal shrieking.
The void worm rolled closer, its rings shimmering with embedded stars, its maw widening into a spiraling vortex of teeth and darkness. The turbulence was caused by the fluctuations of gravity, the pull of something that shouldn't exist in this dimension.
The pilot's voice crackled over the intercom, strained and terrified.
"Passengers…seatbelts…please…remain—"
Static swallowed the rest.
The hat man's voice sharpened, losing all humor.
"It's drawn to magic. To you. And to me."
The worm's body slid past the window—an impossible length, a cosmic leviathan drifting through the Mediterranean night.
The plane dropped again, violently.
I clutched the carrier, breath ragged.
The hat man's tiny cat claws dug into the plastic.
"Pet… brace yourself. It's about to notice us."
The void worm's maw tilted toward the plane. The puddle‑jumper rattled like a tin toy in a child's fist before disappearing into an abyss.
And in the Mediterranean sky tore open, the juvenile void worm swallowing the plane and all its passengers. Some of us wept as we sank into a living universe.
The void worm's maw opened wider. I witnessed an impossible, horizon‑sized bloom of darkness, and the world bent toward it like gravity. Light stretched. Sound warped. The plane's metal skin groaned like it was being peeled apart by gravity itself.
And then the worm fed like a cosmic grinder. Inside the worm's mouth, everything was ground into chunks and dust.
Huge things, pieces of atmosphere, stray meteors, drifting debris and other things, were pulled into the swirling vortex of undulating teeth and reduced to glittering particles that joined the dust of galaxies. The worm didn't eat in any biological sense. It converted matter into stardust, adding it to the shimmering nebula embedded in its skin.
The puddle‑jumper airplane was nothing to it.
A snack, like a metal potato chip, a small gumball.
We were barely a taste compared to the dwarf stars and wandering asteroids it normally consumed.
The fuselage tore open like paper. Seats ripped free.
Passengers vanished into the vortex. Metal dissolved into shimmering dust.
And yet, I remained intact, because of the mirror.
Because of the hat man's spirit magic, drawn directly from my own soul.
It wrapped around me like a layer of iridescent bubble. It's membrane thin, shimmering, and impossibly strong. A sphere about twelve feet across, centered on my body, held the cabin in place. The air inside stayed breathable. The seat beneath me stayed solid. The carrier with the cat‑shaped hat man stayed anchored.
Everything outside that bubble, beyond those few feet, was sucked into the void worm's maw and ground into digestible cosmic dust.
I watched the world dissolve. The aisle collapsed into glitter.
The overhead bins folded inward like melting wax.
The wings tore free and vanished into the swirling teeth.
Passengers were pulled away in a blur of motion, their screams cut off as they became starlight.
The worm's gravity tugged at the bubble, but the magic held. Barely.
The hat man, still in his tiny cat body, pressed himself against my chest, claws digging into my shirt, eyes wide with terror.
"Pet… do not panic. Do not move. Do not think loudly."
The bubble flickered.
The worm's maw rolled. It writhed as if something upset it, and then it vomited. We were thrown back into the normal, non-hungry, world. I was suspended above a blue-green planet below.