The Wyrms of &alon

Time erodes all our yesterdays. You can pull a pebble of your past from the riverbed of memory and hold the remnants of departed years in your hands, but the fringes will be worn smooth. You can run your fingers along the surface and trace familiar contours, but the gap will never close. What was once another time is transfigured into another life altogether. We become strangers to ourselves, yet, somehow, the memories still glow with the light of other days; a dying light, but a light all the some.

There was one memory I’d worn threadbare. Day after day, I’d caress it in a silent mantra, drinking in its golden light—

“—Daddy?—”

—And the warmth cradled between my arms.

I still wonder if they’d forgive me: Rayph, once he understood he was a do-over; Rale, were his soul to ever learn we’d had the audacity to try a do-over, and—worse—that we’d had the audacity to succeed.

“C’mon, let’s start the next one,” he implored.

Rale cuddled up beside me, to my left, among the plush pillows and fuzzy linens of his bold blue race-car bed. He was a pale smile, crowned in gold. What the Sun itself wouldn’t have given if it could have shined even half as brightly!

“It’s getting kinda late,” I answered.

“But that’s not fair!” Jules said.

Having had the pleasure of seeing photos of my wife as a kid, I was proud to say that our daughter was the spitting image of her mother, only with longer—and, just overall better—hair. In her state of repose at my right, she made for an excellent peanut gallery.

“It’s double chapter night,” Jules said, “that’s the rule!”

With Rale, Jules was intent on having it both ways. She was the big sister; nearly as big as Dana was for me. But, at the same time, despite her airs, she still wanted to be babied, and was far too unscrupulous to keep from asking outright.

Laying her head on my left shoulder, Jules ran her fingers through her bangs.

“Besides, you said the next one was your favorite.”

That was true. It was unanswerably true.

I’d meticulously planned it out in detail. You couldn’t just dunk someone into Catamander Brave—well, that’s how I experienced it, but I wanted my kids to fare better than I. The point is: it was a thing to be approached in stages. An ascent to a mountaintop. To that end, it had been several months since I’d begun reading Sina and the Wind to Jules and Rale. As luck had had it, of all the days of the week it could have happened, the day we reached the final chapter of the final volume of Sina and the Wind was the last day of the school week, and, as per the great unspoken contractual agreement of parenthood, it was my sacred obligation to read two chapters to the little tyrants before bed, instead of the usual one.

Fidgeting against my right arm, Rale buried his head deeper into the pillows on his overcrowded red-sports-car bed. With both of my kids bearing down on me, there was no way I could have escaped, and I wasn’t stupid enough to try. I had no interest in bringing the house down on top of me. Unfortunately for me, pressing onward was just as risky: it was exceedingly difficult to read just one chapter of Catamander Brave.

“Be careful what you wish for, Rale and Julette Howle,” I said. I reached for the volume I’d placed atop the night-stand. “You can never be sure of exactly what will happen if your wish comes true.”

I set the graphic novel in my lap, and the kiddos ogled at it like it was a mythic treasure of ancient days.

Kosuke Himichi was, and is, my favorite storyteller. More than that, he was my idol; my god—and one I had no trouble believing in. He was my god of wonder, the god of imagination; he was the god of passion and suffering; he was the weaver of my dreams. At the practical level, Mr. Himichi’s claim to fame was that, almost single-handedly, he had (re)invented the modern graphic novel. In his hands, what might have otherwise been mere pulp fiction was elevated to art of the highest sort: ageless, from the very first page.

Sina and the Wind was one of his earlier works, full of sweetness and charm. It was the tale of a fisherman’s daughter who, by a mix of chance, saintly patience, good luck, and a cheery disposition had found herself the chosen playmate of the Prince of Winds, the unruly young son of the God of the Sea. It was Sina’s responsibility to help the Prince learn to behave himself. It ended with the Prince sacrificing his immortality to help Sina overthrow his father and save the world from being drowned beneath the waves.

Compared to Catamander Brave, though, it was barely an hors d’oeuvre.

Like every other volume in the series, the front cover of Volume One of Catamander Brave seemed like it had been plucked from a dream. The cover showed a rocket-ship pointed skyward, ready to launch. Dawn cracked through where the rising sun had just peeked over the sea, vaulting colors upward. Cerulean melted into bronze that faded to maroon escaped through violet as it passed into the Night’s vast darkness. But it did not stop there. What should have been featureless black was riddled with openings like pieces missing from a jigsaw puzzle and gave view to the phantasmagoria that lurked beyond.

From a perch atop a mountaintop, a crystal palace overlooked a silver sea with a princess’ silhouette shadowing the window of its tallest tower—Princess Mnemony.

Trees of bone rattled beneath a green, amoebic sky. Spectral owls perched among the ossified branches with eyes glowing red.

Flying mesas drifted across an endless gold horizon. Reticulated cities of pipes and steam encrusted the cliffs, and airships wandered in between.

And through them all, the wyrms: serpent-things, luminous and blue that threaded in and out of the windows in the sky like streams of boiling fog.

“Whoa…” gasped. I could hear his fingertips squeak as he ran them down the book’s glossy cover.

Jules poked me in the shoulder. I turned to face her. “What’s it about?” she asked.

“Anything and everything,” I answered, “though, mostly, it’s about a boy.”

I pointed at the topmost of the rocket-ship’s three round windows. The silhouette of a young boy’s head stuck out like a pupil against the white inner light.

“The one and only Catamander Brave.”

I flipped over to the back of the book and read the blurb aloud.

“To the world, Dr. Eliline Brave was its greatest scientist,” I read, “but to Catamander Brave, she’s just mom. One day, when helping his mother test her latest experimental rocket, something goes awry, and young Cat finds himself stranded in the Worlds Beyond the Night. Lost in a place beyond imagination, with no way home, Cat has to start from scratch. He’ll make friends out of monsters and machines out of forgotten magic, and learn from the Wyrms that guard the Walls of the Worlds. Will Cat ever find his way back home? Or will the mysteries of the Worlds Beyond swallow him first?”

“You have to read it.” Both my children spoke at the same time, their words tripping over one another.

That was the correct response.

“Ahem,” I said, making a big show of clearing my throat. I made an even bigger show of flipping open to the first page.

I began with the Prologue—where else?—and read through it with gusto. Page after page, my children learned of Dr. Eliline Brave and her mechanical marvels. But, most of all, they learned about her son, Catamander (“Cat”)—her most trusted helper.

“You might think it odd that Dr. Brave would let her one and only child help her with her dangerous experiments,” I said, reading the narration, “But what else was she to do? When Cat was little, he’d cry like a baby every time Eliline went up in her rocket. He was afraid she would get hurt, or worse, that she might never come back.”

“Let me do it, Mama!” he’d said. “I’ll work my hardest!”

I did not try to do voices. I’d already learned that lesson the hard way.

“And work he did,” my narration continued. “He studied so much, he didn’t have time for friends, or games, or school. He learned how to do multiplication in ways no one but his mother had ever heard of before. But if you asked him he would say it was worth it. He’d say it with a smile. Because of his hard work, he got to be the first kid to walk on the Moon, and it made everyone jealous, except for his mother, who couldn’t have been prouder of him.”

I turned the page.

“Chapter 1 - The Hole in the Sky.”

Like all good stories, it began with something different. One day, while gazing up at the dark, seeing subtleties no other being could know, Dr. Brave spotted something extraordinary: a hole in the sky. She observed and measured and took down data; she stayed up late, and checked her work twice, but the result was always the same. The hole was real. It was no trick of the light.

And it was slowly growing.

She asked him not to go, but Cat was insistent.

“It can’t be you, Mom. What if something happens? Who will be here to fix it?”

Dr. Brave could have built a robot, or even cloned her son once or twice, but it wouldn’t feel right, and Cat would have still persisted.

“I can do it!” he said.

And do it, he did. He snapped on his flight-suit: a plastic bubble head atop lustrous, glinting blue. He slicked his hair back against his head so it wouldn’t get messed up by the dome of the helmet.

Cat pressed his head as close to the window as he could manage, watching the world shrink below. The sky rumbled and roared as the rocket blasted nightward, though the ship’s Inertial Rejiggerer stilled the violent motions and transformed them into power. The rocket moved faster than sound, but when Cat closed his eyes, he might as well have been on the ground, standing still.

“Cat, get to your seat,” Dr. Brave said. “You’re getting close to the anomaly. You can’t be certain of what will happen next!”

With a nod, Cat took his seat. He strapped himself into the captain’s chair with a fine seatbelt clicked. Up on the dashboard, the Anomalarm blared, flashing bright red.

“Anomaly! Anomaly!”

Through the windshield, the hole loomed. For an instant, a great shape flit across the hole, and then a mighty sound shook the ship and the surrounding darkness.

Not just a sound, Cat thought, a roar of pain.

Something terrible was happening.

Glistening clouds streamed past the ship. Light danced across the windshield, and then with a heavy, wet slap, something dark smacked against the reinforced glass, obscuring the view.

The feed from his mother’s laboratory flickered in and out.

“Cat! What’s happening!?” she yelled. “Cat—”

—But then it cut out.

“Mom!”

But there was no response.

Cat dashed over to the round cockpit window.

The next page was one of Wen’s trademark full-page scenes, the kind of picture that really was worth a thousand words.

Both my kids muttered in awe.

The picture showed a vast sky, filled with worlds like scattered marbles. In between the world-orbs, a creature floated in the vastness. Its body bristled with power. It had scales the size of mountains. Its mane was mist and lightning. Its claws could rip through the very weave of time.

No, not a body: a carcass.

The body was cut in half. Drops of blood drifted through the void, enough to fill ten thousand oceans. And where the body split in two, the ragged edges glowed like embers.

And then it exploded.

The next panels showed the great corpse coming apart at the seams. A wave of power rushed out of it. Blinding light flooded through the little round windows, and Cat screamed. The rocket shook and spun. And it kept going—going and going, further than anything had ever gone before, until, at last—with a crash—the panels came to a screeching halt and cut to black.

“Was that a giant snake?” Rale asked.

“Snakes don’t have arms,” Jules corrected.

“No,” I said, correcting both of them, “it’s a wyrm.”

“What’s a wyrm?” they asked.

I smiled. “You’ll see.” I nodded. “You’ll see.”

And with time, they would. Himichi kept the exposition of his world-building coming forward on a constant drip. Long story short—spoiler alert!—the Wyrms were living manifestations of Fate itself who served as the guardians of the Worlds Beyond the Night. Their duty was to see to the construction, protection, and upkeep of the walls of darkness that kept dangerous worlds locked away. For one to have died was an unthinkable tragedy. But for one to have been killed… that meant something truly awful was afoot.

But all that still lay ahead of us. For now, Cat had to face his first adventure: repairing his ship and getting the Wyrm giblets off the cockpit window, and braving the Haunted Forest that lay before him in order to get the tools—and friend—he needed to do it.

My kids were spellbound.

I’d fallen in love with Kosuke Himichi’s graphic novels in my troubled teenage years. To this day, my collections of stand-alone drawings, pristine first-editions, and unpublished concept-art were among my most prized possessions. The stories meant the world to me; they were filled to the brim with the most wonderful thoughts: beauty, humor, terror, and the sublime. To share them and all the wonder they brought me with the people closest to me… that was priceless beyond measure.

“Did Cat ever make it home?”

The words came from a voice that had no business being in my memories. They triggered a chain reaction in me, and, suddenly, I was aware of just how uncanny everything was.

Whatever this was, it was far more than just a memory.

I could feel the pillows piled against my back. The touch of my children’s breathing bodies weighing on me at either side was as solid as anything I’d ever touched. All the reading had made my mouth go dry. I saw all that I saw as if it was happening right in front of me. As if it was real all over again.

It was only then I noticed that my children had stopped moving. My memory was a video stuck mid-pause. Then, when I raised my head to look around, I saw it. I saw her.

The girl.

The little girl in the nightgown, with hair as blue as the sky, and eyes as blue as the sea. She stood across the room in the corner by the door.

Staring at me.

Andalon.

I stammered. “How—how are—”

—And then the living memory melted away, Andalon and all.