The Empyrean
“That’s a Draw 4 card, so Raegan I dare you to go outside and perform the dance routine from Beyonce’s Sweet Dreams video!” The last dare was switching outfits with the person to the right of you and that’s why I’m sporting Kayla’s ‘barely there’ dress.
“Bree there is a 1/2 inch of snow on the ground!”
Kayla throws her cards down and crosses her arms. “If I had to prank call my economics professor you’re doing this.”
I turn to Danielle, at my left for support and her look says it all. Bree caught her boyfriend cheating with her dorm RA. This Girls Night is all about her. We do whatever she says.
“Ughhh.” I throw on my boots, open the door and descend the slippery front steps toward the dark suburban street. Bree, Kayla and Danielle stand in the doorway with giant smiles, red cups and a bluetooth speaker.
“Stand in the spotlight!” Bree yells.
“It's freezing out here just play the damn song!” They giggle.
The four of us memorized and performed the entire video for our 8th grade talent show. Every time we get drunk the night somehow leads to us performing it.
I wrap my arms around myself in a fruitless effort against the cold, when an intense burning sensation shoots through my head. It disrupts my vision and the pain is so severe that I’m forced to grab onto the light pole for support. My girls are too busy fussing over the defective speaker to notice. These headaches started about 3 months ago. They came once every few weeks, but now I am experiencing them several times a day. I’ve been too busy with school and too broke to get it checked out. The paint shop I work at doesn’t offer health insurance.
“Somebody’s been drinking too much!” yells Bree.
“Don’t think it's going to get you out of the dare!” says Kayla.
“Raegan, are you alright?” Danielle asks.
The pain is so debilitating, I can’t even focus on what they’re saying. But all of a sudden, a weird noise comes from a little patch of trees and the end of the street. The sound of crunching snow and sort of like, a clogged drain, a guttural sound. And with what I saw creeping out of the shadows I just knew I must have passed out and was having a nightmare. That or my headaches are a brain tumor and I’m having a psychotic snap. My heart stops and I’m spiked with energy. And from up on Danielle’s porch an assortment of shouts from the girls.
“Aaaahhhh oh my God!”
“What the fuck!”
“Bitch is that a fucking lion?”
Yes. It was a fucking lion, in the middle of Baltimore County. Kayla stumbles to the ground attempting to run into the house. Danielle is frozen in shock, while Bree moves into a defensive stance, as if that’s going to do anything against the 500 pound predator.
“Raegan, girl, don’t move, you might provoke it. Stay perfectly still and we’ll get help.”
“Bree, who in the hell are we going to call?” Danielle asks.
“I don’t know, my cousin Antwan has a gun. Raegan, oh my god are you ok? Just stay
calm.”
I’m paralyzed watching the powerful and horrifying beast. A fog of breathe puffs out of its large mouth. Huge paws leave tracks in the snow as he makes his way towards me. His sinister eyes pierce into mine. He is calm and focused studying me, calculating his attack. At least if I die I won’t have to worry about paying back my student loans.
Kayla’s screams continue from inside the house as the lion crawls closer to me.
I feel like I’m not in my body, I cannot believe this is happening right now. Should I make a run for the house? One leap and he’d be right on me. I think with big cats you’re supposed to stand your ground and look intimidating. Hopefully his jaw will snap my neck first and it’ll be over in an instant.
He stops 2 feet in front of me. Seeing his sharp golden eyes, huge teeth and taut muscles up close is petrifying. I can’t tell if I’m trembling from the cold or fear. His power is overwhelming. I know that I have no chance against him. In accepting that fate, I relax. After a few beats I begin to notice how beautiful the animal is. Soft mahogany hair, almond eyes and a massive orange mane. It was regal.
Moments pass of the predator sizing me up and I notice something. It doesn’t seem as if he wants to hurt me. In fact, worry passes through his face for a half a second, if a lion is even capable of experiencing that emotion. The feeling of danger dissipates. And in a flash, stark ferocity crosses his face, his gigantic mouth opens and I know this is it. I am about to die at 23 years old.
The brute turns to the direction of Bree, Danielle and Kayla. Their screaming and cursing starts anew. No, not my friends. He lets out a rib shattering roar then the three of them pass out on the porch unconscious. He turns back to me and I’m hoping I can faint before he eats me. The lion lifts himself on his two back legs, I cover my face waiting for the pain of razor teeth. A few moments pass and no pain comes. It's dead quiet. I look up, and what I see jolts me back onto the light pole.
A man. He is standing where the lion was only moments ago. Now I know I must have knocked my head silly. The man is tall, like really tall. At least 6’5. He wears matching loose, emerald green pants and top with gold everywhere, his neck, wrists, fingers, even his teeth. A faint light shines through his brown skin. I’ve never seen anyone like him before. He looks extraterrestrial, ancient and magical, except he appears to be just a human man. An extremely gorgeous man with golden skin, plump lips and sexy lidded eyes. He stares at me with a very familiar expression of worry, then everything goes black.
I open my eyes and find myself in Bree’s living room on the couch. Everything is hazy until big warm hands grab my arms. They feel good, sending a calming buzz through my body. The strange man’s face comes into view.
“Regina Electi.”
I jump away from him.
“Who the hell is Regina and who are you. Where are my friends?”
“You are Regina Electi. The Chosen Queen. You need to come with me.”
Im being sex trafficked, or he’s a serial killer. I grab a glass and smash it over his head
but he isn’t fazed, there’s not even a scratch on him. He stands up looking down on me in annoyance.
“We don’t have time for this. You’ve been chosen as our Queen, I need to bring you back
to Cyrenaica. You will marry King Noman and rule over your people at his side. It's where you belong, your vessel can no longer survive in this dimension, it's dying. You don’t have a choice Queen.”
“Dying? Queen? What?”
“Don't you feel your body rejecting this reality? It either manifests in severe cluster headaches or black outs.”
My headaches. He sees the truth on my face.
“Exactly. Let's go.” He lifts me effortlessly cradling my stringy body in his strong
arms. I feel protected, something I haven’t felt since -- No. I swore I would never think about that night again after the court trial was over.
Anyway, safe is the last thing I should be feeling in this stranger’s arms. I’m bewitched in the warmth and security of him, whenever he touches me I feel alleviated, all my worries float away and I’m flooded with calm. Kind of like when I use CBD but way stronger. I don’t even feel the cold when he carries me outside. He casually steps over Bree, Kayla and Danielle’s unconscious bodies and I snap out of it.
“Let me go!” I scream, kick and yell a variety of curse words until he sets me on my feet.
“Fine Regina.”
“My name is Raegan!”
“I’ll give you two days to process this. But your body will not
survive here any longer. Your destiny has been chosen.”
He disappears just as fast as his lion form did. The girls wake up the instant he does. I don’t think that is a coincidence. They were frantic but I told them the lion ran away and reassured them repeatedly that I was fine all the way up until they fell asleep cuddled next to me on the couch. I didn’t tell them what happened with the mystical man. It wasn’t real after all, or at least that is what I was going to keep telling myself.
I believed it until today. This morning I woke up in a hospital bed with a sizzling migraine. My blood pressure was extremely low and the entire right side of my body numb. The doctors say my organs are failing and cannot explain why. I spent the past half hour crying and hyperventilating when he floated into my hospital room.
He places his hand on my shoulder and instantly I relax.“Are you ready?”
“Why am I dying?”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I’m not supposed to be alive?”
“Alive, yes. At these coordinates, no. Something happened when your soul was being born into the physical world. The projectile was thrown off. You are meant to be on planet earth born in the year you were but in the wrong dimension, you are in the wrong universe.”
“I don’t understand, there is only one universe.”
“No, there are many universes and more are being created as we speak.”
“So why am I just getting sick?”
“When King Noman sought the prophecy to reveal the fate of the kingdom the infinite power pinged you. Your soul is rejecting your space here and is trying to leave your body to get to where you belong.”
Even with mystic man’s consistent touch soothing me I feel torment and shattering despair.
“I don’t care what my soul wants, my heart wants to stay here with my parents, brother and sister back home, and my aunt and my best friends here in Baltimore. I’ll be done with school in 2 years and I have a nursing career waiting for me. I can’t go anywhere!”
“Well you can’t stay here. If you do, you'll die.”
Either fate is an execution. Stay here and die or go to some strange weirdo dimension with scary, sexy, glowy men to marry some old king, be a housewife and leave everything I know and love.
Unless.
“Is there any way to change my destiny, to make my soul stay here? Where you’re from is obviously magical. If I go there right now, is there any way to fix this?”
“No, the laws of the universe are absolute, this is not where you belong and energy finds a way to align one way or another. Fate can be altered but that wouldn’t keep your soul here.”
Something about what he says doesn’t sound definite.“You said everything will align one way or another. What if there was a way to align the universe in a different way. Could that be possible?”
He thinks for a moment, recognition eventually ignites his face.
“There is isn’t there! You have to help me please.”
“Regina, my job is to take you to our King.”
“And you don’t care that you’re dooming a young girl with her whole life ahead of her to be someone's bed buddy.”
“I care about my duty to my king, that is it.”
“Please.” I grappled with his hands. “This is my life. I will do anything.”
“I’m taking you to King Noman. Whatever you want to do after that is none of my concern. But technically yes, there is a way. Take Earth’s gravity for example. We are prisoner to it, it's fixed and nothing can take that away. But, you persuade it to release you when rockets expel fuel forcing the craft off the ground , we sacrifice enough energy. It's a transaction. Our spaceships are similar but not as ancient.”
“Ewww gross are you saying I need to sacrifice a fucking goat or something to your magical Gods?”
“There is only one God, the same as yours. And you’ll wish the price was as minuscule as a goat. You will need to make a considerable sacrifice or harness a Godly amount of power.”
There is hope, and that's all I can perceive now. There’s room for nothing else. I will get out of this hospital bed, save myself, save my life -- the life I have here and I won’t stop until I do.
“Take me.” He helps me get dressed then cradles me in his arms.
“Here.” He places a small photo in my hands. It's a body of water with a city surrounding it. As I’m studying it my body starts to close in on itself. What I feel next is noting and everything all at the same time. It lasts for a few seconds I think, it is hard to sense the time, sort of how a dream feels like years or only a few minutes. I open my eyes to a huge, grey lake exactly like the photo, except its snowing. He did his magic disappear thing out of the hospital room. I thought wherever he poofed me would be a mystical paradise, not a wet snowstorm.
“Where are we?” I ask over the howling snow and wind.
“Lake Michigan.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Our destination is under the water.”
“So you are a serial killer.”
A slight smirk touches his face. The first smile I’ve seen on him. He really is beautiful.
“It's a good time to ask that after I just scanned you 1100 kilometers away. There is a portal down there that will take us to our universe. The journey there will be easy because it is where we both belong. Other than holding your breath you have nothing to worry about.
“Hold my breath. For how long? I can’t swim!”
He gives me a look of disgust.
“What do you mean you can’t swim? Your body just swims. That's like saying you can’t breathe.”
“I never learned.”
“But you are born in water!” He studies me for a second. “Your world is so strange.”
I look down at the grey water. I don’t have time for my fear. I need to realize now there can be no limits on what I will do and I say a silent promise to myself. So, we dive in to meet the King.